What's the point of the Liberal Democrats?
Honest, it is.Confusion still reins over Menzies Campbell's less than impressive speech to the spring conference, with its talk of "five tests" which Gordon Brown has to meet in order for him to have risen to the challenge of believing in "liberal democracy".
The real debate has been over whether the initial briefings, which appeared to suggest that in the event of a hung parliament the Lib Dems would not insist on a form of proportional representation being introduced in return for them forming a coalition with Labour reflected the party's true priorities or not. For the last God knows how long, the two Lib Dem policies which almost anyone could name and knew about were a 50p top rate of tax on those earning more than £100,000 a year, and the electoral system being reformed from the first past the post system to one in which every vote counts. In the past year, the former has been abandoned in favour of "green taxes" and now PR itself has quite possibly been rejected in favour of power for power's sake.
While there were questions over how the 50p top rate would affect key workers, Labour raising the point of nurses in particular, and over whether it would further encourage the rich to squirrel away their earnings in tax havens, it was one of those key redistributive measures which genuinely made the Liberal Democrats different to both Labour and the Tories. Likewise PR, especially when you consider only 22% of the electorate voted for Labour at the last election, yet it still managed to win a majority of over 60 seats. Something is quite clearly rotten, and the electoral system is part of the problem. First past the post is at least one of the reasons why the oxymoron of "radical centrism" is preached by Clarke and Milburn: a voting system which meant there was no such thing as a "wasted vote" or a need to vote tactically would radically alter the political landscape, meaning the parties would no longer have to pander only to the wants of the "aspirational" voters who make up the difference in the "ultra-marginals" which the Blairites have been crowing of. This might be frightening to how both Labour and the Tories have become comfortable in listening only to those who care about no else apart from their self, but it would be liberating for the rest of us.
It's true that Ed Davey, Menzies' chief of staff, stated that PR remained "critically important" to the party, but the woeful lack of any mention of the policy in Ming's speech may well have spoke volumes. When you have a decent, noble and urgently needed policy, you shouldn't be afraid either of mentioning it or preaching about it. If the Lib Dems wanted to gain the support of a substantial part of the population, they'd make perfectly clear that in the event of a hung parliament, they would join a Labour government, but only if PR was introduced in return. While this would be open to the criticism of propping up a Labour government that had run out of steam, it would at least mean that the next election would be fought under completely different conditions, with a new set of policies likely from each party as a result. It would be a significant boon for democracy, and one which the Lib Dems may well be remembered for long after all our brains have turned to mush.
Instead, Campbell's speech to the conference was disheartening at best and woeful at worst. The Liberal Democrats are meant to be the party which comes up with the fairly radical policies which are then pinched without thanks by the Tories and Labour. Ming's five tests, by comparison, weren't potentially bad assessments of how Brown intends to govern, but they were far from being individual to the party itself. The Tories pledge to scrap ID cards, have moved opportunistically but reasonably credibly towards taking on climate change, and have made clear they would advocate a more distant foreign policy from that of Washington, three of the tests which Campbell set out. It's true that the Tories are about as likely to act on poverty, the third test, as Labour is to neuter Murdoch, and we've yet to learn properly about Cameron's views on where the Tories stand on devolving power, but it's not exactly a clean break either, is it?
The whole thing smacks of the Lib Dems drifting rather than leading. Opinion polls have showed there's a large amount of support for scrapping Trident, and while there's at least something prudent about waiting a few more years before making a decision, the decision to do just that instead of setting out now the reasonably compelling arguments for disarmament, in the face of a Labour and Tory axis which means that Blair's replacement plans are going to be passed whatever the Lib Dem policy suggests that Ming may well not be up to making the difficult but important policy stands. We already knew about his hesitation over Charles Kennedy's decision to go on the anti-war march back in 2003, fearing that he/they might be painted as anti-American, but it was instead one of the party's finest hours.
The question for Campbell, with the Tories surging, is just how he justifies the party's continued existence. The country is crying out for a decent centre-left alternative to Labour, and there's plenty out there who'll either never vote for the Tories again after Thatcher/Major or because they don't trust "spliffy" Cameron's Blair impression. At the moment, instead of pushing ahead and challenging the Tories to make clear how far their newly re-found social libertarianism goes, Campbell seems content with coasting. His leadership ethos isn't being discussed yet, but if the current situation continues for a few more months, it certainly will be.
Labels: Liberal Democrats, Ming Campbell, policy, proportional representation
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