Comment Re:This isn't scaremongering. (Score 2) 494
I wonder with 4 million voters who tend to overwhelmingly prefer Labour to Tories gone will Labour eventually cease to be a factor in the UK elections?
Nah. I don't think it'll make much difference in the long run. Labour will simply continue to adopt the policies that make the Tories more popular, and then find other ways to differentiate themselves.
A big part of the reason for the widespread disillusionment with UK politics is that Labour and Conservatives were traditionally very different, with Labour representing the (to use obsolete lingo) proletariat and the Tories being the party of the bourgeoisie. When hard-left economics became totally discredited and abandoned by the mainstream, Labour had to find a new identity. Blair did the most to make the party electable again with his New Labour campaign, but he was only partially successful in his reforms. Once Brown replaced him the party immediately returned to the high spending policies old Labour was traditionally associated with. The public sector increased in size in a fairly short space of time and when the economic crisis hit, Labour couldn't credibly claim they had truly learned the lessons of the 70's. With Scotland's strong preference for voting anything-but-Tory, the result was a (rare, for the UK) coalition government in which the conservatives were left with the rum job of explaining to people why they were paying more to get less.
Ultimately, Labour will complete the reforms started under Blair and old Labour will be consigned to history. If Scotland leaves that process will happen much faster. I don't know what their primary differentiator would be in future but it looks like they might be trying to seize "Higher taxes to pay for the NHS" as their own territory - not a bad strategy, I'd think, although it's one that's easily replicated by other parties too if it proves popular. At any rate, they'll find some way to justify their existence and sometimes that'll be enough to win elections. Then the process will go into reverse and the Tories will struggle to justify why they should replace the incumbents given that their policies are pretty similar.
A lot of people find the new status quo of political parties that mostly agree on things to be somehow indicative of decline or moral decay. I don't really see it that way. I see the politics of the 20th century as utterly dysfunctional - riven with unresolvable ideological divides. Now that Marx has been put behind us, the new politics is about disagreement over relatively small things. This isn't a sign of a society in decline, it's a sign of a society that's largely at peace with itself.