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Originally Posted by Ignitionnet
Also, surely it's more important for parties to try and sell their vision to the electorate, rather than changing that vision in an attempt to get elected? What's the point in having a plurality of parties if the rest are all being blown about by public opinion and have no principles beyond to say whatever they think the electorate want to hear?
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Under FFTP the point of the main parties needs to be to get elected. You can't change anything if you don't win and if that means compromising in order to appeal to a larger electorate then that is better, in my view, than remaining ideologically pure but losing. It's unfair to say they have no principles, they're pragmatic enough to know principles are useless if you're powerless to put them into effect.
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They'd far rather be spoon-fed by a press which, obviously, is going to have a right-wing bias, it's run by people with a right-wing bias.
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Maybe they're right-wing because the public are? The Daily Mail is one of the most popular papers in Britain, as is The Sun but The Mirror less so. Maybe the proprietors are trying to spoon-fed the public or maybe the papers are just trying to pander to their audience. People gravitate to their own biases and then exist in a bubble where their ideas aren't challenged.
The left-wing equivalent of the right-wing press is social media. People on Twitter and Reddit all talking to each other, backing up each others' arguments, posting links to left-wing pieces and vilifying the right until they've become so far detached from reality that they think Scotland will be Independent, Labour will win the election and Corbyn will win the next one. Even this forum has a echo-chamber effect to the point where some members thought UKIP were about to storm the General Election.
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The argument on the left is, sadly, dominated by a regressive group who want to impose their views on everyone else. They have contempt for progressive politics, democracy, and the rights of the individual. If a group were to come to prominence offering liberal social policies, essentially not behaving like the offence police and demanding we all adore the EU, alongside left-wing economics and a genuine respect for democracy close to the point of delivery who knows what'd happen?
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A lot of the left aren't liberals or social democrats unfortunately. They're just 1980s socialists with more progressive, sometimes obsessive, views on identity politics.