this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
17 points (100.0% liked)

United Kingdom

4108 readers
46 users here now

General community for news/discussion in the UK.

Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.

Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] danielquinn@lemmy.ca 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

It's actually rather brilliant.

In an (d)effective 2 party system like ours, running to your extremes has few costs, since the electorate tend to vote parties out rather than vote them in. When the public tires of the ruling party (it helps if you own most of the media) and you do get elected, it's by:

  1. your base that votes for you regardless
  2. new voters from the fringe you've been courting
  3. people who've convinced themselves that you're just pretending to be crazy to court that fringe.

Now you can do whatever you like and if people complain they get shouted down by both sides: "What did you expect? They literally told you they were going to do this."

In short, it's how you drag the Overton Window toward that extreme. If only the Left in this country had figured this out years ago, we wouldn't be saddled with Sir Red Tory.