But ultimately

fertieg97

In so far as they constitute themselves as a political force, they will swing behind whoever can articulate their prejudices in a manner that keeps intellectual effort to a minimum.
But ultimately, I am not sure what Daniel Hannan and Simon Heffer are griping about to begin with. Mutatis mutandis, the actually existing Tories seem to be filling the gap in the market quite nicely, thank you.
They are not going to read Marx, Lenin or Trotsky and neither are they going to gen up on Nozick, Rothbard and Hayek. Anything that requires the adoption of a coherent weltanschauung is out for starters.
Sure, the combustible raw material is all there. There are many people plainly disenchanted with what is offer from the political mainstream. The far left would love to reach them, but they are impervious to the appeal of theoretically based creeds.
They are not racists, you understand. But you’ve got to admit that Labour let in too many bleedin’ immigrants,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], right? And they all know a family with eight kids that is just taking the piss from the welfare state.
Yet somehow rightwing activists over here have not been able to tap into the spleen and launch a mass populist grassroots movement on the lines of the one that has emerged with frightening rapidity in the US.
It’s not as if the wingnuts haven’t tried. Twice this year already – once in February and once in September – the birth of the British Tea Party has been declared. Has anyone out there in the real world even noticed?
Perhaps the crucial difference is that the Conservative Party’s flirtation with a US-style primary system has been limited to asking the punters to choose from a list of pre-approved candidates, with our homegrown equivalents of Christine O’Donnell and Rand Paul not allowed to make it to the starting block.
The system militates against the chances of doing a Delaware in Dorset, so the chances of flakey erstwhile witches opposed to masturbation securing a major party nomination are limited.
Angry?middle-aged white blokes with a grudge against politicians of all stripes, measured on a per capita basis, must surely make up a similar proportion of the population of this country as the comparative demographic does in the States.
But as a former Trotskyist, I could have told them for nothing that the tricky bit is not setting yourself up?as a party by self-proclamation, but actually developing an organisation that has some palpable impact in any arena wider than a room above a pub.