Membership of the Tory party has slumped by nearly 9% in the past year alone, continuing a 30-year trend, while it has shrunk from 253,600 to 134,000 since David Cameron became leader. Yet the Tories are in power and are being as nasty as they've always wanted to be. They have been able to heap abuse on the sick, the unemployed and the disabled with impunity, egged on by a right-wing press that thinks it smells the blood of socialism in the water. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer while the NHS has been pushed to the very edge of privatisation. So what is going wrong? Some might blame the coalition with the Lib Dems, seen as a betrayal of the really nasty tendency in the party. Others might blame UKIP, able to outbid the Tories in the "we despise all foreigners" stakes. Many would point to Cameron's failure to produce the long-promised referendum on Europe and his total failure to stem the "tidal wave" of immigration by Johnny Foreigner. All of these may well be true to a certain extent but it would be nice to think that former supporters of the Tories have finally woken up to the fact that they are really unpleasant people who should not be trusted within a thousand miles of No.10 Downing Street. Put simply what the Tories have been inflicting on the country over the last four years is thoroughly un-British. They have not been moderate, charitable or fair while the rank smell of their greed is beginning to permeate even the middle classes. While Ed Miliband has said that we are better than this, David Cameron has demonstrated that we are, perhaps, not prepared to be a whole lot worse.
Tuesday, 17 June 2014
Why Is Tory Membership Falling?
Membership of the Tory party has slumped by nearly 9% in the past year alone, continuing a 30-year trend, while it has shrunk from 253,600 to 134,000 since David Cameron became leader. Yet the Tories are in power and are being as nasty as they've always wanted to be. They have been able to heap abuse on the sick, the unemployed and the disabled with impunity, egged on by a right-wing press that thinks it smells the blood of socialism in the water. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer while the NHS has been pushed to the very edge of privatisation. So what is going wrong? Some might blame the coalition with the Lib Dems, seen as a betrayal of the really nasty tendency in the party. Others might blame UKIP, able to outbid the Tories in the "we despise all foreigners" stakes. Many would point to Cameron's failure to produce the long-promised referendum on Europe and his total failure to stem the "tidal wave" of immigration by Johnny Foreigner. All of these may well be true to a certain extent but it would be nice to think that former supporters of the Tories have finally woken up to the fact that they are really unpleasant people who should not be trusted within a thousand miles of No.10 Downing Street. Put simply what the Tories have been inflicting on the country over the last four years is thoroughly un-British. They have not been moderate, charitable or fair while the rank smell of their greed is beginning to permeate even the middle classes. While Ed Miliband has said that we are better than this, David Cameron has demonstrated that we are, perhaps, not prepared to be a whole lot worse.
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