{"id":1837,"date":"2009-12-09T23:20:54","date_gmt":"2009-12-09T23:20:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.widmann.org.uk\/?p=1837"},"modified":"2009-12-09T23:20:54","modified_gmt":"2009-12-09T23:20:54","slug":"two-tory-parties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/two-tory-parties\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Tory Parties"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;\">\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/80835774@N00\/2331826366\/\" title=\"photo sharing\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2017\/2331826366_209d4c8866_m.jpg\" alt=\"\" style=\"border: solid 2px #000000;\" \/><\/a><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;\"><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/80835774@N00\/2331826366\/\">To Many Cheetahs<\/a><br \/>\nOriginally uploaded by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/people\/80835774@N00\/\">Picture Taker 2<\/a><br \/>\n<\/span>\n<\/div>\n<p>People who oppose proportional representation often imagine that all you&#8217;d get would be hung parliaments consisting of the same parties that we have now, so that the only possibilities for forming a government would be a Labour-LibDem coalition or a Tory-LibDem one.  I can see why that wouldn&#8217;t appeal a lot to supporters of either Labour or the Conservatives.<\/p>\n<p>However, many countries with proportional representation have more parties.<\/p>\n<p>Imagine if that happened here.<\/p>\n<p>The Tories might split into two, the moderate One-Nation Conservative Party, led by Ken Clarke, and the Thatcherite anti-EU Conservative Party, led by William Hague.<\/p>\n<p>Labour might also split up, perhaps into Old Labour and New Labour.<\/p>\n<p>And the LibDems might revert to the days before the Alliance, separating into the Social Democratic Party and the Liberal Party.<\/p>\n<p>Suddenly there would be many more ways to assemble a majority  The One-Nation Party, New Labour, the Social Democrats and the Liberals would all be able to work reasonably well with each other, so depending on electoral fortunes, at least a dozen different governments would be possible.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, it would more often that not give more influence to centrist parties, but that&#8217;s normally a good thing for a country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To Many Cheetahs Originally uploaded by Picture Taker 2 People who oppose proportional representation often imagine that all you&#8217;d get would be hung parliaments consisting of the same parties that we have now, so that the only possibilities for forming a government would be a Labour-LibDem coalition or a Tory-LibDem one. I can see why that wouldn&#8217;t appeal a lot to supporters of either Labour or the Conservatives. However, many countries with proportional representation have more parties. Imagine if that happened here. The Tories might split into [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101,159,130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-election","category-en","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1837\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}