Douglas Carswell's Blog

The future is looking right

Last week, Labour’s Ed Miliband said that it is okay to want to end mass immigration. 

Today, David Cameron outlines more ideas to stop people living off welfare as a life-style choice.

Tomorrow, apparently, Lib Dem David Laws publishes a paper suggesting that the state has lived beyond the tax base for too long, and we need sharper cuts in tax and spending.

I can’t help noticing that these were precisely the sort of things that would once get you labelled by the BBC types and the Guardianistas as “right wing” and “extreme”. Seems that the SW1 people are starting to catch up with what much of the rest of the country has known for years.

Anyone else notice how the centre of political gravity in Britain seems to be shifting?

I suspect that this is in large part thanks to the internet.  

Opinion-forming used to be dominated by an elite clique of media pundits, who would sneer at the sort of opinions mentioned above.  As a consequence, it did not pay for politicians to articulate such views - so they rarely did. 

The internet has started to change all that. On a whole range of issues - including most notably an EU referendum - many professional pundits who had previously got it wrong, have had to quickly revise their views to avoid looking ridiculous.

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