I had this idea about politics just the other day. I'd never heard any one else talk about it so I thought it was all my own. Just today on the Parliament channel an interviewer on a book program came up with the same idea so I guess it's going round. A bit like a disease. It goes like this.

Several hundred years ago there were two political parties. The Tories and the Whigs. The Tories represented the establishment, the powers that be. The Whigs stood for constitutional Monarchy, in it's day a radical position, particularly after the Stuarts. Well the Whigs won that one and kept the Tories out of office for something like 45 years. Of course politics then then was not as democratic as it is now. Political will was the will of land owners and not the common man. By the 19th century Whig radicalism had extended to expanding the electorate. Their reform act of 1832 expanded the franchise and got rid of the 'rotten boroughs', the seats that were owned by landed gentry. Just after that they abolished slavery in the empire and secured Catholic emancipation. All very radical stuff.

After this the Whigs kind of declined and eventually morphed into the Liberal party. By the end of the 19th century the Liberals had formed four governments under Gladstone. They were another radical party and in 1906 they introduced the first measures of what would eventually become the Welfare State. By the end of the 1920s they had more or less been replaced by the Labour party as the radical force in British politics. Labour represented, they said, the working man.

So the Whigs were replaced by the Liberals and the Liberals were replaced by Labour. Each time the Tories were the anti radical party, they wished to 'conserve' the status quo, and each time the status quo changed the Tories were the party who wished to keep things as they were, or rather as they had become, rather than as they were.

So now the unpopular bit. It seems to me that Labour have achieved pretty much all they were expected to achieve. The work place is regulated, safe and fair. The safety net of the Wefare State is pretty firmly established and the National Health Sevice is, despite Labour's scare stories, unlikely to be disassembled any time soon.

Are we about to see the rise of a new radicalism, the like of which we cannot imagine? I suspect that if we are, then it wont be the Labour Party that does it. I'm not sure that UKIP fits the bill either. Any offers?