News from the New Party

The prospects for a new party

The British political system is a hostile environment for new parties. In countries with a proportional representation system new political formations can make at least some impact with limited effort. In Britain, unless your new party has either (a) a strong concentration of support in certain geographical areas, or (b) charismatic and popular leadership and/or candidates, you can be on a hiding to nothing, or at the very least on a very long road indeed.

Most frequently new parties which have had any success at all have emerged from within Parliament itself, from within splits and realignments of the existing parties. The implications of this are stark. If you are going to launch a new party onto the British political scene you need to be very clear about what you are trying to achieve, how you are going to achieve it, and (not least) whether there is any real point in bothering. For the other feature of our political system is that the law of unintended consequences always applies. The best way of ensuring the formation of a government from your most hated political party may well be to split the vote of your least hated political party.

Of course most of the time this doesn't matter. Many new parties are formed by dreamers or hobbyists with no real idea of how to get into government, and even less idea of what they would do if they got there. Others are devotees of a particular point of view which they just want to see raised - running the country might not be the objective at all. Even winning seats in the House of Commons may not be necessary. An opportunity to influence the political debate may be all that is wanted.

Sometimes, however, the stakes are higher. Our liberty and security is threatened on all sides: economically the strangulation of business with red tape, both generated by our own government and also by the EU, the decline of manufacturing industry, the massive level of household debt and the looming potential pensions catastrophe, all mean that we are living on borrowed time.

Public services continue to decay in spite of (or even because of) the vast amount of taxpayers' money that has been thrown at them. The massive investment by this government in the NHS has been squandered in an orgy of bureaucratic stupidity and salary hikes, with the result that many of the doctors and the nurses who are so sorely needed, having finally completed their training, are now likely to find themselves out of work.

The social fabric of our society is coming apart at the seams: the decline of the family, the virtual abolition of fatherhood in large parts of the country, the consequent rise in crime and anti-social behaviour, the encouragement of a pseudo-libertarian approach of granting freedom without responsibility, are all contributing to a general moral malaise, an infantilised culture that demands goodies from the government and for whom self-reliance is a dirty word.

And internationally the fear of terrorism and even the return of the spectre of nuclear war with Iran, or nuclear terrorism elsewhere, blight the world, while at the same time on the home front our civil liberties are compromised on grounds of national security by a government which persists with an insane identity cards programme even as it demonstrates its manifest incompetence in protecting our personal data.

Our main political parties are not up to the task - but if we really need a new party, how do we get one.  Read this article for more information about the rationale behind our new strategy and the Progress network.