I am heavily involved in local government and the civic realm in my area. I know people from across the political parties who are also active.
One thing that is very obvious is that all the really wonderful people on a local level, no matter the party, essentially believe in the same things. They have similar views and pretty much the same opinions on things. Okay, they may differ in what they might prioritise above something else in the great list of priorities, or what makes them rant over a pint, but they pretty much agree with what is most important.
If they are asked whether they want to prioritise a bus service for disabled kids over, say, cutting some verges in a posh area, they will prioritise the bus service every time. If they are asked whether they want to keep a library open in a wealthy area or put more resources into a community centre in a poorer area, they will choose the latter every time.
Yet I look at the other people in their respective parties, and half the time I think "Why the hell are you in Labour? You constantly prioritise elite or business interests above the populace" or "Why are you in the Conservatives? You don't actually want to conserve anything. You are a radical libertarian anarchist."
These days, I tend to divide people in local government based on whether they are selfish twats or not, rather than their political party. It's a remarkably useful gauge.
One problem I think we have in Britain these days is that people decide their political allegiances based on what is "left wing" or "right wing" within their own personal contexts and experience.
So you get an upper-middle class, privately educated graduate who thinks they are "left wing" and votes Labour because, essentially, they have different perspectives on society and the economy to their elderly parents who have always voted Conservative. They, for example, might think the NHS is the cornerstone of a civilised society, compared to their Tory father who thinks it is a bottomless pit that will ultimately bankrupt the country.
But the issue here is that Labour-voting graduate is voting Labour based on the world they inhabit, and that world is a million miles away from the one that is inhabited by hundreds of thousands of people living on sink estates in the North.
So when someone in the Labour party that comes along from that world and says: "We need to sort out law and order and council enforcement" because public parks are riddled with fly-tipping and drug dealers, the schools have been infiltrated by county lines, and there's used syringes everywhere, and one kid has already been knifed, that Labour voting graduate shivers and thinks "that's a bit right-wing" because it's something his father would say, and his father is a Tory. It's this person who then says something like "No, what we really need to solve this problem is not more police and harder sentences, but more investment and support in community-driven social enterprises, and more support for struggling families."
It's the same the other way around. You get Conservative-voting kids of Labour voting parents because they don't identify with the perspectives of their parents, but what those kids think Conservativism is relates entirely to their personal context vis a vis their parents or peers. They are defining themselves politically against a situation that is very specific to them.
So Conservatism for them ends up meaning wanting to buy their own house or have a car or not live on a sink estate or open a stocks and shares ISA (it's quite astonishing how many working-class people in post-industrial areas vote Conservative based on the fact they have invested some of their wages in blue-chip shares). If they go into the army, it means supporting the military structure that is their life.
But that is a million miles away from the Conservatism of the Home Counties or of Tory Peers in the House of Lords or of David Cameron and George Osbourne or the City of London. So when you get bonkers decisions about tax and spend and public services, it's being supported by people voting for a party that is not actually acting in their interests whatsoever.
I guess what I am saying is that the decline of a class-base to political parties has caused utter chaos, which is somewhat of a Marxist rumbling.
But it is also the reason why huge numbers of people on a local level in both Labour and the Conservatives really ought to be in the same party as each other because the Labour woman from the sink estate who doesn't want needles left on the swings is essentially working from the same hymn sheet as the Tory-voter who got out of the sink estate, precisely because of those problems. And neither of them live in the same world as the Labour-voting upper-middle-class graduate or the Tory peer.