How bad is this political party? I hear they are going to win parliment in the UK soon. How do they compare with Neocons or the Republican Party in general? Could you call them at least “not as batshit crazy as the Labour Party”, at least on some issues? Does the media in the UK tend to be neutral with political parties (or at least showing "equal favoritism with the choice of major media toutlets o select from). How much genuine libertarian/ classic liberal values exist with the party, and more importantly the average person voter of the party?
That’s a pretty good description of them. The idea I get is that the Conservatives aren’t as “right wing” as those super right wingers - the Republicans. The emerging Liberal Democratic Party claims that Labour and the Tories are getting indistinguishable from one another, presumably becuase of Labour’s righward shift under Tony Blair.
At least that’s what I understand is the situation after living next door in Ireland for a while.
The UK Conservative Party could be considered ‘libertarian leaning’ for a brief spell during that 1980s (it was unabashedly statist before then). The party’s Thatcherite philosophy was derived from classical liberal thought, and Margaret Thatcher considered herself in that mould, but the reality didn’t quite match up. The Conservatives ended up splitting into jostling factions of those who wanted to keep the state ‘as is’ and those whose took the pure libertarian approach.
After the 1997 defeat, the party drifted without any coherent philosophy at all. Then, after September 11 2001, the ‘state as is’ faction dominated the party, becoming an echo chamber for the Labour party and Tony Blair. Today, the Conservatives greatest selling point is that they promise to be slightly less offensive than Gordon Brown’s imploding Labour government. ‘Blue Labour’ is the popular epithet.
Their economic policies used to be much more radical, but they steadily embraced the welfare state after 1997 as ‘great British institutions’, and usually shut up/ignore any Conservative members who advocate the libertarian perspective.
Also, the UK media is unashamedly biased. The Guardian, for instance, is pathologically incapable of attributing anything good towards the free market perspective, or libertarian ideals (it embraces the Harvard study that free-marketers are ‘mentally deranged’ and is proud of it); The Telegraph is the corporatists/banksters/laywers paper; The Times swings eitherway and the tabloids tend towards nationalism/fascism (FOX like, in other words). In the UK, your choice of newspaper usually defines you to others.
Anyhow, Conservative voters are either part of the corporate establishment or aristocracy, and are heavily motivated by moral values. Resistance to authority, or disrupting the status quo is seen as bad and ‘un-British’, and so they don’t understand younger conservative voters who generally champion libertarian ideas.