Is It Time to Look Away from the Mainstream?

British politics is in the midst of a total upheaval. The Conservatives are moving closer to ousting out their leader and Labour are lacking the cutting edge of a party in opposition. With the Brexit stalemate continuing, British voters could be forgiven for looking elsewhere for answers on how their country should be run.

The Conservative Party have sailed Britain into the rocks in the more recent years of their leadership. If you want to place a date on it, let’s say June 2016 where Prime Minister David Cameron rallied up a referendum to leave the European Union, not get the result he was overly confident on and then throw in the towel and throw Theresa May under the bus. It is arguably the most disorganised Tory government in living memory, but the fact that they are still in power after years of disillusion is proof that the Labour movement is so far away from the strength it once was.

Neither party is in a fit state to run the country. now more than ever it is an opportunity for the smaller political parties to stake their claim and win back the votes of those who have lost faith in the mainstream parties. The Liberal Democrats will soon be led a fresh new face at what seems like an ideal time for the centrist party to take advantage of the failings of both the left and the right. The Green Party are an alternative left-wing party who should surely see a spike in support from Labour voters who feel betrayed, least of all for being a party actively campaigning to remain in the EU and to tackle climate change.

Despite the criticism of the Conservatives and the Labour Parties the fudging, for want of a better word, for Brexit is not purely the fault of a single party. The failure to establish cross-country negotiations in order to fulfill the democratic vote of the people is the true problem.

A vote for a party other than the two major groups in Parliament has often been referred to as a waste of a vote. However, the rise of more niche political parties has been spreading across Europe and it seems only a matter of time before the UK follows suit. For the past 170 years, the Prime Minister of Great Britain has been a member of either the Conservatives, Labour or the Liberals. A move away from these three parties has always been viewed as unrealistic, yet the people of the UK live in a democracy which has a left-wing which is too left wing for wholesale consumption and a right-wing party which grows further out of touch with normal people every day.

Ticking the box of a smaller political party during the next election is becoming less of a bad idea with each passing failure of the majority’s parties in parliament. Whilst the Conservatives and Labour continue to lock horns over how to best navigate the country through one of its most testing times, is it so unusual to think that at some point in the not-so-distant future there could be more sets in parliament going to the smaller parties within the House of Commons?

The hemorrhaging of British politics in the past ten years is effectively the blueprint of how the three major parties in the UK can seize up to a point where nothing can get through parliament. It can be said a General Election at this point in time will achieve nothing and it will continue this way until a party has got its own affairs in order enough to be in a position to lead the country.