Is Choosing a Party somehow missing the point?

[Askyourself]

You here it all the time, I'm a labour/Tory/lib dem/ plaid/snp/whatever voter and always will be. You know the ones, put the relative coloured ribbon on a donkey and they'd still vote for it.

Why?

If you choose a party on a particular political left, mid left , centre, mid right , right basis for example, then you've chosen badly because the main parties fluctuate from far left or right to more middle of the road, dependent on whose incharge and what's politically proving popular.

I consider myself a politically interested voter. At any given time I will look at what's happening or about to happen in the country, look at the parties and leader both to see what they offer or more often than not what they are not telling us. Then make a decision based on what I think is best overall for the country/economy and whose likely to actually deliver it.

Surely that's the point isn't? And not choosing because of some which are you team vampire or team werewolf mentality.

If you ally yourself heart and soul to a party you cease to think objectively and start blindly following a truth from someone's perspective who's actually seeking to manipulate you into a single way of thinking.

There's a million ways of thinking, lots of rights and wrongs, dependant on perspective, so why box yourself in?

A few questions around the same thing I guess.

So Why do people choose a party that limits their ability to think/choose for themselves ?

I vote for whoever shares my own political beliefs
I don't think anyone else does anything differently

Well that's what I think. So maybe my question is actually to those who are a true lab,lib/tory/ etc voter. Not having a go, just asking why ?

Someone I know is life long labour voter, but there views are more inline with the torys or ukip, but they vote labour, never vote for that tory scum. It baffles me, this love or hatred of a particular party. The person I mention is. It rational enough to discuss that with. So I've thrown it up here to see if anyone can explain why they do?

Effectively it's because of a change in electoral law, think it was 1972, after which the party affiliation of the candidate would appear on the ballot paper.

I'm not sure what the rationale for this was, though I might someday look up the debate on Hansard.

Whatever the reasons it has allowed pure paper candidates, who don't campaign at all and merely rely on their party's brand to be elected.

A little before my time but I imagine someone whose name alone was on the ballot paper would get few votes if they didn't get their name and beliefs into the local or public sphere. In other words knocking on doors and making even their party's supporters know who they were.

I guess you are talking about people who are not party members but who always vote the same way regardless of whether it aligns with their outlook?

My parents live in a safe Labour constituency and as with your example above, I'd say many people's views on things like immigration correspond with UKIP, but they vote Labour. I assume that while they are very vocal about certain topics, the issues that matter the most to them are social policy, welfare and concern about who will safeguard working class interests.

I'm more centrist/progressive and feel more drawn to the Lib Dems, but am a swing voter and would vote for whichever party best represents my views at that time. If I really didn't like a sitting MP's voting record, that would influence me, as would a sitting MP from a party I might not normally choose, but who was a great local MP.

UK politics are 'tribal' but there are times when they do shift, but not just because policy wise they don't like the direction a government is taking them, as Thatcher experienced after 'The Winter of Discontent' when the trade unions took on the Labour Party.

The shift after 18-years of Conservatives to Blair was not because the former did much wrong by 1997; in my view after the early 1990s recession in Europe our economy had grown a bit every quarter to 1997, we were the best performing economy in Europe back then - but people got tired with tightish spending, and the Blair/Brown ticket offered something better by splashing the cash.

Blair won a what 170 ish seat majority that at the time was said might destroy the Tory party.

My point being is that in UK politics 'stuff' might not being going too bad, even well relative to other countries, but we are a sucker to orator with a honking big cheque book.

That very tribalism and central message whether splash the cash or not though is not intrinsically how our system was designed to operate.

I'm not arguing that parliament should be chock full of independent candidates, though I think many might support the notion.

It is however clear to me that many MPs are little more than colonial administrators who rarely speak for the own constituency and merely prop up a London centric party system in the hope of personal advancement.