B)
The conservative is party is deeply divided – discussion.
The above is hard to question is hard to answer as it is akin to asking the Labour party whether they support My Blair. Whilst many would say that they do not support the Iraq war, they would also be the first ones to say that although they do not see eye to eye on some matters, it does not mean that they disagree on everything. This is true of the conservative party as well. It is of course tore that on some matters the conservative party has differing views an thoughts of certain matters but I would be hesitative to say that this would cause the party to be divided on every matter. The key reason for my reasoning there are the facts that the conservative party are made up already of like-minded individuals who have similar views on political matters. This to me means that although there will be people in the party who disagree with each other, these will be judged on singular matters alone since on the whole if people are members on the same party they must already agree with each on quite a lot of matters. However the conservative party being the conservative party, things cannot be concluded as simply as that because even though people should believe in the same thing, there are 2 sides to the conservative party. Whether this would be called a deep divide is debatable but at the present time, we have 2 types of conservatives. We have Thatcherates who remain true to the type of leadership and the type of politics that Thatcher used back in her day quite successfully. However the other part of this party are the people who believe in being more like new-labour in that the party should veer towards the more middle ground because that is where the voters are these days. However as I said before, I am loathed to call this a split in the party, because it is simply the difference of being far right and not so far right (Tony Blair would be an example of this☺). The fact is that even though people have different views on how the government should be run, they all have the same ideals about what the government should be doing otherwise it would be hard for them to be in the Conservative party. It is just the methods that are used to carry out objectives that cause internal strife; people have different methods of doing things.
There are however some polices in which it would be very fair to say that the conservatives are split. A perfect example of this would be the Euro in which half the party want to go in, whilst the other half don’t and there is really no middle ground on this one. It is a big split and the only reason it is different to the other similar splits in other parties is because Conservative members are both quite vocal about it, whilst the others parties manage to keep their parties on a tight leash because they have leaders that the majority of the party believe in. This is not so for the conservatives which means that on topics where disagreements happen, there is often no one who can mediate it, unlike in the other parties.
However as I have said, I don’t really think that the conservative party has a very deep divide in it. Propel have different views on certain matters and at the moment without a strong leaders these different factions are arguing with one another which creates the allusion of a deep divide. But as I said before, the MP’s in the Conservative party all believe in mostly the same thing and any splits that are evident are only splits in specific bits of policy rather than a big split on everything. Conservatives have different ways of doing things depending on how far right they are but in the end they all believe in most of the same things, sometimes it is just the way things are done in which people argue about.
