It's a deeper problem than simply being in power for too long. They have been in power that long because the alternative offer was worse as you mention.
... the "party line" being decided by the small cabal in charge of making the "party line", usually the ones with the most access to monetary funds.
But the inability to see even 10% of party legislators deviate from party lines in various votes means that not only is rational policy not being well served, regional representation is being undermined since adhering to the party line does not optimize for the policy for their region/district.
And in the US house/senate, the seniority system is another undemocratic institution. Why should changing representatives reduce your effective power in a legislative house? I can't think of a system where codified seniority was a good thing
I think this is the problem: politicians representing the ideology X can afford to be mediocre because they have some room before "voting for mediocre politicians that still agree with what I believe is the best" is worse than "voting for non-mediocre politicians that disagree with what I believe is the best". If a party ends up with mediocre politician, it is its own failure, and the other parties (even if they themselves have bad politicians) are not responsible: the other parties represent other people. If the party that represents your ideology is managing to put forward mediocre politicians, then, it is your failure for letting that happens or accepting this situation.
(I'm not saying that you are incompetent: you may have failed because it was impossible. Still, it's certainly not the responsibility of people who have a different ideology)
In short, in a healthy democracy, there will always be a "worse" party. It cannot take away the responsibility of the party you have voted for for being bad. It's a bit like having giraffes and lions at the zoo, and having the lions saying "the meat is full of maggots and really bad quality, but the alternative is having the vegetables that suits the giraffes, so, it's the giraffes' fault".
So, yes, in the end people may have had issues with the sitting government but they concluded that they were the "least bad" option.
A healthy democracy needs a credible opposition.
That does not make of him a bad politician (he can be, but you keep saying "he is a bad politician because I don't like his ideology and his ideology was not popular enough", which is NOT a criteria to decide if it's a bad politician or not). In a democracy, every ideology must be represented, even if they don't correspond to the majority and are therefore unelectable.
But again, that is not my point: Corbyn was shit, unelectable, whatever, ... And yet, the other party had bad politicians. Corbyn is not the one putting those politicians there. Corbyn supporters neither. Neither Corbyn or his supporters have any say in this, because they have a different ideology and therefore cannot build a good-politician party that defends an ideology they don't agree with.
The fact that the restaurant A serves expired food is not a good excuse for going to the restaurant B, eating slightly less expired food, pay your bill, leave without complaining about restaurant B, and conclude that the main reason is that restaurant A was bad. Restaurant A is bad, and we can, and should, complain about it, but when there is an article about restaurant B explaining that they are failing to serve correct food, you cannot bring in restaurant A as an excuse for the failure of restaurant B. The MAIN REASON restaurant B serves bad food is BECAUSE RESTAURANT B IS FAILING.
You may even be centre-left and chosen Tories for the first time just because you did not like Corbyn. But as soon as you vote Tories, the quality of the politicians in the Tory party is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. If you vote for them, you are part of the process that reward their choice of bad politicians. (I use "you" as the "hypothetical you", not you in particular)
Also, your idea that what matter is the electability is really bad for democracy. Basically, it implies that minorities should never be represented.
> A healthy democracy needs a credible opposition.
If your definition of "credible opposition" is "an opposition that I would have maybe voted for", you are dead wrong.
In a healthy democracy, when you have two main parties, one in power, one in opposition, then, there is one party that you should think is okay, and one party that you should think is shit (it's more complicated than that, but it is to illustrate). If you like all the parties, it just means that you have just one ideology represented.
The 2017 / 2019 Corbyn manifesto were more aligned with the SDP-Liberal alliance manifestos of 1983.
Don't take my word for it, here is one of the members of SDP at the time who split from the Labour party because of Foot.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/11/leaked...
On the one hand, labour seem really similar to the Tories - disunited, dogma over common sense and oddly out of touch.
Their policies _were_ opposite to Tory policies but they are trying to be an opposition so… Yes Corbin was a leftie (corduroy elbow patches and all) but he’s a leader of a left wing party. It’s like complaining that Thatcher was a bit right-wing.
It seems like the core issue is that the voters want something like Tory-lite. Blair did that and no one wants to go back to it. So this is what you’re left with
That's very far left and is opposed by most people including in the Labour Party. Basically, those guys were the Communist Party and unsurprisingly people did prefer to keep the Tories...
It was the same in the 80s when Labour was essentially unelectable. Blair saw that the centre left was politically the best bet, and pragmatically that social policies needed the private economy to produce wealth.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/11/leaked...
> Blair saw that the centre left was politically the best bet, and pragmatically that social policies needed the private economy to produce wealth.
Corbyn was hard left in a distinctly centrist country whose "Left Wing Party" is (despite its roots) very much left-leaning centrist, and who's only ever seen real success while occupying the middle-ground.
> voters want something like Tory-lite. Blair did that and no one wants to go back to it
If nobody wanted to go back to it then we'd have Rebecca Long-Bailey as Leader of His Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition, not another centrist.
There is a large constituency against the status quo in the UK. We have proof of that in the 2016 Brexit referendum, where 17 million people voted strongly against the establishment line and effectively against an economic model that we had had for 40 years. People voted in part to take back control, and what is nationalisation of basic aspects of our lives like water / housing / energy / drug manufacturing / transport etc if not taking back control?
Since the pandemic, the implementation of a chaotic version of Brexit, and the cost of living crisis. The underlying aspects of the 2017 / 2019 Labour policies are even more starkly relevant. Everything has been laid bare, and for some reason the two main parties are now completely devoid of ideas or vision.
There are massive systemic issues in the country. Lack of housing, regional inequality, geographical inequality, falling real terms wages, chronic underfunding of R&D. Basically everything is falling apart. 40 years of financialisation of public services and nearly every aspect of our lives (there's virtually nothing you can do as part of your daily routine that doesn't trigger a transfer of wealth from public or household money to the top). The Brexit vote itself was partially a reaction to these issues.
These things need real solutions and real ideas. Any ideas that even start to address them let alone reverse the issues will look radical, and Labour 2017 / 2019 was barely doing that just offering a mild social democratic platform that would not be out of place in Northern Europe or indeed in the 1983 SDP-Liberal manifesto.
Adding to that we would have had a planned and controlled Brexit, with certain Eu agreements being replaced with equivalent things with different names.
All of this is mostly academic though as the first restrictions in the pandemic would have given the key to removing a Corbyn government by an effective establishment coup.