
There are two high profile sackings/suspensions this week that arise from Members of Parliament being somewhat controversial. Diane Abbott for her comments about the nature of the abuse that Jews have received over the years and Andrew Bridgen who has lost the Conservative whip after controversial comments which compared the Covid vaccine to the holocaust. Both views are (imho) utterly stupid and, at the very least, worthy of the disciplinary action that has been taken.
One of the interesting aspects of this is that both of these people's overarching political views drifted towards the edges of their own parties, Abbott to the left and Bridgen to the right.
One of the reasons Change from the Centre supports PR is because we believe that it would lead to a growth in the number of political parties, moving away from the system we have today where both of the major parties have members and representatives whose views sit across a huge political spectrum. A wider range of parties would be far more honest - it would mean we could vote for parties whose political ethos was far more intimate with our own, which compares to the current system where our views form just a small part of the our thinking. It means that we are less likely to be forced into voting for parties with members with these ludicrous views and means they are less likely to be put into positions of power.
In most cases (but not all) Government's are likely be formed using coalitions from parties that are on or close to the centre ground of British politics with the voices of those at the edges heard less - experience from European democracies demonstrates this. That will also mean comments like these will be less noticed and less reported. That is a good thing, it pushes the supporters of these people to the political edges where they belong - a place where they have a voice, but where it does not have the same impact.
Comments