UK Conservatives tilt left; voters get cynical

The Conservative Party in the UK continue their attempts to outflank New Labour in the political centre by updating their social policy. Greg Clark, a shadow minister and confidant of David Cameron, is calling on the Tories to make poverty and inequality central issues and ditch the party's 'out of date' ideas about welfare. He wants the party to be less influenced by the old ideas of Winston Churchill and listen more to the liberal Guardian newspaper's leader social commentator. Meanwhile, former Tory Chairman and marketing guru, Lord Saatchi, has published a pamphlet entitled In Praise of Ideology, in which he says people are losing faith in politics because there is so little difference between the parties: 'The pragmatism of the centre ground turns politics into a commodity market - because pragmatism leads to opportunism, which leads to cynicism.' He says that the failure of young people to vote is a rational reaction, and we now have a 'super-cynical electorate' precisely because of the search for the centre ground.