The opportunity cost of maintaining the existing political structures. V2

Anyone who has studied economics knows that ‘opportunity cost’ is what you don’t get when you do something. The alternative so to speak. The opportunity cost of a car might be the foreign holiday you can’t have because you have the car. In politics we have reached a point where the left and right unite to maintain the existing political system and the opportunity cost is a democracy and a political system that can encompass all shades of British public opinion and manage it with fairness and transparency.

The reason for this is for us quite simple. Both left and right either don’t recognise that our 19th-century political system was based on an evolving class system which has now ceased to exist in any meaningful sense or they want to protect their own party based model. The party model was always based on power groups who managed as an elite and promoted vested interests. This went on right up to the 1940’s when the Labour party created a post-war political settlement which delivered much-needed welfare to the working classes. This 19th-century model has and always will swap power between two opposing parties and even the hard left would rather see this system continue rather than demand its reform. The best anyone can come up with is reform of the electoral system which will leave the power structures intact and protect the rights of the elites of left and right to govern us as they see fit. Along with them, you have the media also deploying the lazy journalism of the ‘reductive polarity’ so as to reflect the interests of their polarised parliamentary collaborators.

It’s incredible but the left wing really doesn’t get that the way power is delivered and managed in this parliamentary structure and the vested interests whether it is media, money or the Trades Unions that underpin the way power is delivered are holding back the social progress that they claim to want so much. It is baffling too, that the right wing says they want small government and lower taxes whilst continuing to promote as a model for 21st-century democracy an increasingly remote, expensive and unrepresentative political system. Some people might conclude from this we are anti-monarchy, we are not!  The Monarch is the only part of this creaking 19th-century system that works and is seen to work by the people. It’s the parliamentary bit that needs change before it goes pop, or the people do!