Davenport.

You talk about Taxation, and GDP - you ask why no party are ‘truely’ positioned centre-right. The answer, my friend, is that more than 33% of the public seem satisfied paying high taxes, if they get high quality public services in return. I’m not a supported of Labour’s high tax-high spend policies, but the reason they have been successful is that people seem to put public services over taxation. I think it is naive to suggest that Cameron will not lower taxes. It is not in the parties interest to make promises at this time, with the current state of the economy, to lover tax. The economic climate will have been assessed by election time, and if it is viable, Cameron will lower taxes.

The arguement, I re-iterate, is whether parties shape the country’s views, or vice versa. It seems that because people, as a whole, seem content with the way things are, no ‘true’ centre-right party as you put it would ever be successful, and wouldn’t exist. This supports the bottom-up arguement.

The problems with the British political system are manifold. Primarily, Iain is wrong to state that we are centre-right. We’re actually centre-left, as the country seemed very uncomfortable, even with the supposedly ‘low’ 36% of GDP public expenditure that the Tories left them; no government that takes more than one-third of my money can be considered right-wing, and they would only barely scrape into the centre-right.

The most fundamental point to the argument is actually true. We have no legitimist left-wing option, in the form that the old Labour Party presented. That remains so, even if revolutionary lefties won almost 1% of the vote at the 2005 election. Perhaps more importantly, we have a centre-right bloc that doesn’t reflect any political symmetry; we have no party, legitimist or otherwise, that: calls for any further privatisation (or re-privatisation of the railways), argues consistently for low taxes, or demands that we enshrine the legitimacy of the individual above the legitimacy of the collectivist government. Those are the true positions of the centre-right, the true hallmarks of the freedom-lover, and, yet, no party steps forward. I ask, why not?

It’s by no means a modern phenomena. Political parties for a very long time have been making compromises with beliefs they may have once regarded as sacred. The Liberals, for example, in the early 1900s, argubly compromised on their idea of ’self-help’ to establish National Insurance, so as to prevent Labour from stealing their electoral power base.

Even Hitler in the 1920s compromised on ‘core’ party beliefs for the sake of being elected. Whereas once he believed that the German government could only be overthrown by a nationalist revolution, he later had the foresight to tame the Stormtroopers (to a degree) and present the Nazis a ‘democratic’ political movement (although he never denied he would abolish democracy on coming to power).

Even when he and the Nazis did get what they wanted, they obtained power through wholly legitimate and legal means. That’s what the BNP are doing, hence the fact they’re always proclaiming they’re the party of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’, when in reality they are, fundamentally, fascists.

I don’t think that any strong left-wing party will emerge to fill the gap created by the Lib-Dems and the Greens, as you say. Old Maggie herself once said, “State socialism is not in the character of the British people; it has no place in our traditions, it has no hold on our hearts”.

….I wonder if they would be at UCL without the capitalist system… whose taxes pay for their tuition?