Norman Tebbit on the change in mainstream party appeal

I'm not a fan of Norman Tebbit's politics, but he can make good points. Here he is in an interview with Total Politics magazine about the difference between 1979 and 2009.

In the 1970s, the two major parties, between them, did appeal to the great mass of the British electorate. That is no longer so. On almost any major problem facing the country, if you ask the electors who they most trust, you'll fi nd on the whole it's about 30 per cent for the Conservatives, about 20 per cent for Labour. But what's really signifi cant is that on almost every issue, a larger percentage say 'none of them'. So what we've got now is a collapse of confidence in the political system.

Tebbit blames "the narrowing of the width of political debate" for this and says that "the voters are saying overwhelmingly that there's very little to choose between the parties, 'it wouldn't make any difference which of them was in government, they're all in it for themselves, they have more in common with each other than us', that the politicians have carved up the system for the insiders...and the emergence of this political class is a very dangerous thing."

The full interview, with James Silver, is well worth a read.