Fairer Votes
Daniel Finkelstein writing in the Times recently set out a clever analysis of the political options facing the Lib Dems - looking forward to the next general election and beyond.
Broadly speaking, I agree that the Lib Dems are even more likely to lose their identity as a distinct political party in a coalition with Labour - because the parties are too similar in too many areas and so the political centre of gravity would almost certainly move to the left.
No bad thing, perhaps - depending on your political point of view - although a missing piece of the jigsaw is the need for a fairer voting system and and end to First Past The Post elections at Westminster.
The Liberal Democrats entered a Coalition Government with Labour in Scotland in 1999 and again in 2003 - but a key plank of the 2003 Coalition agreed Agreement was the introduction of PR (proportional representation) for council elections - which changed Scottish politics for ever.
Now wf the same were to happen at Westminster - for future Westminster elections - I'm not so sure that the Lib Dems would disappear down the political plug hole as Daniel Finkelstein suggests.
If the Lib Dems join Miliband, they’re dead
By Daniel Finkelstein
Contrast with the Tories has benefited the party in coalition, but its policies are too similar to Labour’s
‘I attribute the downfall of the Liberal Party to an oyster.” In the mid-1930s, in a long dinner discussion on the subject of fish, the great Liberal leader David Lloyd George explained the role that he believed that seafood had played in his political demise.
He was confident, he told his guests, that the Liberal Party would not have split in the 1920s, with terrible political consequences, if its formidable pre-war chief whip, Percy Illingworth, had lived. He would have held the party’s big personalities together. But a bad oyster had led to Illingworth’s sudden death in 1915 and the rest was history.
It is certainly a theory. Will you forgive me if I leave it to historians of the left to argue it out with the author of the textbook on the medical consequences of molluscs? All I really need you to take away is that there was an oyster and the Liberal Party downfell or is downfallen or whatever the right word is.
In the two decades after the First World War, the Labour Party took over the left from the Liberals and it is now obvious that it isn’t going to give it back any time soon.
To suggest that the last election was a personal triumph for Gordon Brown is to make an assertion that sounds as odd as Lloyd George’s shellfish theory. Yet in one important, enduring respect I believe that it is true. Gordon Brown’s Labour Party prevented something that in the last few days of the campaign seemed really quite possible — he prevented the Lib Dems from regaining their footing as a major party of the left.
And in doing so he left them with a major and very difficult challenge. In reviving Liberalism after its collapse in the 1920s and 1930s, there were four possible strategies. They could set out to provide a centre party exploiting gaps between the big two; they could remain a protest party, eccentric but hardy; they could set out on the long march to replace Labour as the main party of the left; or they could slowly do what many individual liberals have done, gently merge with Labour, dissolving into that party through pacts and coalitions.
Over the decades the Liberals and Liberal Democrats have bounced around between these strategies, never quite picking and never quite making a proper success of any of them.
Well now, here’s what you are free to regard as either good or bad news. The electorate and political reality has begun to pick for them. With Gordon Brown’s victory, the Liberal Democrats cannot seriously hope to replace Labour as the main party of the left. If this was ever a possibility, it isn’t now. It’s over. It’s dead. And they can’t hope to be a mere protest party. Hung Parliaments will keep forcing them to make choices and to govern. Liberal Democrats are now the people you protest against, not with.
Which leaves only two viable strategies. Either be a centre party or embark upon a slow merger with Labour.
The first of these is Nick Clegg’s choice, supported by Danny Alexander, David Laws and Jeremy Browne. Well, here I am in Glasgow at the party conference and the leadership has won all the votes, so what I am about to write may seem like a surprising conclusion. I am afraid that I think that they are failing.
The Lib Dem team have been highly effective inside the Government. They have modified Conservative policy in many areas, pursuing a clear agenda. It will not be hard for them at the next election to substantiate the claim that they made a real difference. This may not help them much, but their claim that they shifted the Tories will be true and I am old-fashioned enough to think that this still matters.
So why do I assert that Mr Clegg has yet to succeed in creating the centre party that he is after?
Try this thought experiment. Imagine that Labour comes close to winning a majority at the next election but fall just short, as the Tories did in 2010. And the Liberal Democrats agree to take office with them. In what sense would the Lib Dem presence move a Labour-led Government towards the centre?
The Lib Dems would push Labour to the left on foreign policy, strengthening those who wish to cut the plans for Trident and making common cause with those who wish to further European integration. They would make it harder for Ed Miliband to reform welfare — even supposing he could make his mind up to do so. They would resist any shift he thought of making on immigration. They would do something similar on crime policy.
While adhering to the current deficit limits (as Labour has said it also plans to do), the Lib Dems would encourage Labour to do what it would anyway be inclined to do — to move towards higher spending and more taxes. The two parties would compete to increase taxes on the rich. And it is hard to imagine Lib Dems forcing, or even trying to force, Labour to embark on more radical reforms of public services.
My point is not so much that these policies are wrong (though they wouldn’t be my choice). And it is certainly not to argue that the Lib Dems would feel uncomfortable. In fact, quite the opposite. They would feel so comfortable that one would wonder what the point was.
Let me go a little further. On Monday, at the Times fringe meeting here, Paddy Ashdown said that he felt Labour hadn’t begun to understand coalition politics, implying that it might be hard to do a deal with them. Yet I think it would be relatively easy and that the Liberal Democrats’ real problems will begin if they succeed.
It is the contrast with the Conservatives that gives Nick Clegg’s party definition as a centre party. They resist some welfare reform, water down changes to public services, insist on raising taxes on the rich and so on. What is the contrast with Labour? A short-term difference of opinion about deficit targets will not be enough.
In government with Labour, as things now stand, the Lib Dems would quickly lose their identity. They would quickly become fairly pointless. In achieving what many of them would want they might make themselves redundant, leaving slow long-term merger with Labour as the only alternative. They might embark on this while hardly noticing.
This is what I mean by the leadership team failing, just as it begins to feel it is making a success of coalition. At this conference it has persuaded activists to support the leadership. The conference has supported tough choices already made, arising out of economic circumstances and their relationship with the Tories. Despite their reputation, the Lib Dems are actually rather good at political discipline.
Yet the leadership seems to me as far away as ever in persuading activists to adopt a reforming market liberalism that might challenge the Left in the same way their agenda has restrained the Right. They have to do that if the party is to have a reason to exist beyond the next few years. And they haven’t got long.
Contrast with the Tories has benefited the party in coalition, but its policies are too similar to Labour’s
‘I attribute the downfall of the Liberal Party to an oyster.” In the mid-1930s, in a long dinner discussion on the subject of fish, the great Liberal leader David Lloyd George explained the role that he believed that seafood had played in his political demise.
He was confident, he told his guests, that the Liberal Party would not have split in the 1920s, with terrible political consequences, if its formidable pre-war chief whip, Percy Illingworth, had lived. He would have held the party’s big personalities together. But a bad oyster had led to Illingworth’s sudden death in 1915 and the rest was history.
It is certainly a theory. Will you forgive me if I leave it to historians of the left to argue it out with the author of the textbook on the medical consequences of molluscs? All I really need you to take away is that there was an oyster and the Liberal Party downfell or is downfallen or whatever the right word is.
In the two decades after the First World War, the Labour Party took over the left from the Liberals and it is now obvious that it isn’t going to give it back any time soon.
To suggest that the last election was a personal triumph for Gordon Brown is to make an assertion that sounds as odd as Lloyd George’s shellfish theory. Yet in one important, enduring respect I believe that it is true. Gordon Brown’s Labour Party prevented something that in the last few days of the campaign seemed really quite possible — he prevented the Lib Dems from regaining their footing as a major party of the left.
And in doing so he left them with a major and very difficult challenge. In reviving Liberalism after its collapse in the 1920s and 1930s, there were four possible strategies. They could set out to provide a centre party exploiting gaps between the big two; they could remain a protest party, eccentric but hardy; they could set out on the long march to replace Labour as the main party of the left; or they could slowly do what many individual liberals have done, gently merge with Labour, dissolving into that party through pacts and coalitions.
Over the decades the Liberals and Liberal Democrats have bounced around between these strategies, never quite picking and never quite making a proper success of any of them.
Well now, here’s what you are free to regard as either good or bad news. The electorate and political reality has begun to pick for them. With Gordon Brown’s victory, the Liberal Democrats cannot seriously hope to replace Labour as the main party of the left. If this was ever a possibility, it isn’t now. It’s over. It’s dead. And they can’t hope to be a mere protest party. Hung Parliaments will keep forcing them to make choices and to govern. Liberal Democrats are now the people you protest against, not with.
Which leaves only two viable strategies. Either be a centre party or embark upon a slow merger with Labour.
The first of these is Nick Clegg’s choice, supported by Danny Alexander, David Laws and Jeremy Browne. Well, here I am in Glasgow at the party conference and the leadership has won all the votes, so what I am about to write may seem like a surprising conclusion. I am afraid that I think that they are failing.
The Lib Dem team have been highly effective inside the Government. They have modified Conservative policy in many areas, pursuing a clear agenda. It will not be hard for them at the next election to substantiate the claim that they made a real difference. This may not help them much, but their claim that they shifted the Tories will be true and I am old-fashioned enough to think that this still matters.
So why do I assert that Mr Clegg has yet to succeed in creating the centre party that he is after?
Try this thought experiment. Imagine that Labour comes close to winning a majority at the next election but fall just short, as the Tories did in 2010. And the Liberal Democrats agree to take office with them. In what sense would the Lib Dem presence move a Labour-led Government towards the centre?
The Lib Dems would push Labour to the left on foreign policy, strengthening those who wish to cut the plans for Trident and making common cause with those who wish to further European integration. They would make it harder for Ed Miliband to reform welfare — even supposing he could make his mind up to do so. They would resist any shift he thought of making on immigration. They would do something similar on crime policy.
While adhering to the current deficit limits (as Labour has said it also plans to do), the Lib Dems would encourage Labour to do what it would anyway be inclined to do — to move towards higher spending and more taxes. The two parties would compete to increase taxes on the rich. And it is hard to imagine Lib Dems forcing, or even trying to force, Labour to embark on more radical reforms of public services.
My point is not so much that these policies are wrong (though they wouldn’t be my choice). And it is certainly not to argue that the Lib Dems would feel uncomfortable. In fact, quite the opposite. They would feel so comfortable that one would wonder what the point was.
Let me go a little further. On Monday, at the Times fringe meeting here, Paddy Ashdown said that he felt Labour hadn’t begun to understand coalition politics, implying that it might be hard to do a deal with them. Yet I think it would be relatively easy and that the Liberal Democrats’ real problems will begin if they succeed.
It is the contrast with the Conservatives that gives Nick Clegg’s party definition as a centre party. They resist some welfare reform, water down changes to public services, insist on raising taxes on the rich and so on. What is the contrast with Labour? A short-term difference of opinion about deficit targets will not be enough.
In government with Labour, as things now stand, the Lib Dems would quickly lose their identity. They would quickly become fairly pointless. In achieving what many of them would want they might make themselves redundant, leaving slow long-term merger with Labour as the only alternative. They might embark on this while hardly noticing.
This is what I mean by the leadership team failing, just as it begins to feel it is making a success of coalition. At this conference it has persuaded activists to support the leadership. The conference has supported tough choices already made, arising out of economic circumstances and their relationship with the Tories. Despite their reputation, the Lib Dems are actually rather good at political discipline.
Yet the leadership seems to me as far away as ever in persuading activists to adopt a reforming market liberalism that might challenge the Left in the same way their agenda has restrained the Right. They have to do that if the party is to have a reason to exist beyond the next few years. And they haven’t got long.
