This was one of the comments on Question Time that I thought was interesting. Not sure it gives any answers though.
Q: Are we seeing the death of centrist politics
Tim Montgomerie: I think if, seven or eight years ago after the global financial crash we had seen a massive reformation of our politics I don’t think any of us would have been surprised. Here was the banking system dragging down the whole of the western world to a huge extent with many people suffering. We didn’t see it because I think at that time people chose sort of stability and people like Angela Merkel and Barrack Obama, David Cameron. I think some people thought, therefore, the crash wasn’t going to have long term implications but actually, you know, a lot of history of revolutions is people don’t rebel when they are starving, they rebel when their immediate hunger has been addressed but the memory of injustice is still very strong in their minds. I think we are now beginning to get to that point. The situation has been stabilised in the world but people are still angry that the problems that occurred and hurt so many people in 2007 and 2008 haven’t been addressed. On top of that, if that wasn’t enough, most economists now agree that we are probably entering a period when economies don’t grow by two and half or three per cent as they did during most of the post war period but perhaps just by one, one and a half percent.
We are seeing a change in our media culture, so that people don’t always necessarily listen to Ritula and Radio 4 for their news, they go to twitter and social media and that often isn’t to the high standard that perhaps the BBC offers, so politics is operating in an incredibly volatile atmosphere. I don’t know where it will lead, but I think it means that politics is going to change because what we had before isn’t addressing the new circumstances. I think the revolt we are seeing in the Labour Party, the revolt that I have been seeing in America with the rise of Trump and Sanders while I have been there reporting for the Times, the splitting of parties across Europe, we are at a fascinating and frightening stage in global politics.