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I think IDS is actually quite sincere in his desire to make the Tories the party of the helpless (though I feel we may see in time that his interpretation of what exactly constitutes the helpless may differs from, er, others - deserving and undeserving poor, anyone?)
But what I think this incident shows is that reforming political parties is always fraught with danger - you can either prosecute reform by means of a small, powerful elite who formulate policies without reference to the body of the party/polity (New Labour), or you can try and get the body of the party to reform itself and wait ages for this to happen if indeed it ever does (and has this ever happened, in fact? When I was pondering this I was thinking of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, but of course that analogy is flawed... I suppose it could show that the Bolshevik elite will usually beat the Menshevik mass... pffft). So IDS wants to reform the Tory party along the same lines as New Labour, but he's hampered by the members of the party who have this unfortunate tendency to make appalling racist jokes, or to have fathers who just happen to be BNP activists, and so on... Tony Blair has been much more successful in shedding the embarrassing members of his party but I bet you there are still some trade unionists out there who think women should be barefoot in the kitchen.
Problem exacerbated for IDS by the fact that Tory MPs seem to be much less professional than Labour counterparts (evidently his whip isn't quite as effective as it might be). |
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