Douglas Carswell's Blog

Adapt or die

Nothing lasts forever - and past performance is no guarantee of future success.

A hundred years ago today, Liberal Party MPs could draw comfort from the fact that their party had held political office since, in many cases, those political offices had been invented.  A mere seven years before, they had won a great landslide in the 1906 election.

But they failed to adapt to fundamental change in the political landscape - the rise of organised labour.  So within a decade or so they were largely gone.

In City AM today I have an article about the fundamental change that the internet is starting to bring to politics.  We are seeing the rise not of organised labour, but of the citizen consumer online.  

Political parties, I write, exist to "aggregate votes and opinion".  But we are moving into a "world in which the internet allows people to aggregate ideas and opinion – and increasingly votes – without having to have a well- resourced party machine behind them".

Established parties need to start adapting if they want to retain market share. (See post below for details)

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