There is, as you would expect, lots of good stuff in Nick Cohen’s article on the Lib Dems in this week’s edition of the magazine (subscribe today!) Among the several notable passages there’s this:
Leaving the disputes between pollsters aside, not even Nick Clegg’s closest friends deny that he is the most hated politician in Britain. At a student demonstration outside Westminster, I saw a ragged man climb a lamppost and urge the protestors to join him in an obscene chant against Clegg. The crowd in Parliament Square roared as one, united in its loathing, and ecstatic at the chance he had given them to crush a man they had once applauded.
As Nick suggests many of the people who now hate Clegg are the same people who hate Blair most vociferously. In a sense, you can see why they’ve turned on Clegg: he’s the politician who leads a party that took an all but shamelessly opportunistic approach to the Iraq War. No politician was ever so precious as a Liberal Democrat preening himself whenever the subject of Iraq arose. Clegg milked this to the maximum even though he knew, deep down, that the Labour voters he might win via this mildly nauseating process could not be counted as much more than temporary allies of convenience.[…] The Liberals have no right to be surprised. Conservative-minded readers may think that the British liberal-left is good for nothing, but, trust me, we are world leaders when it comes to the vituperative art of denouncing sellouts. The Liberals ought to have known it, because they more than anyone else revelled in deploying the wild language of betrayal against Tony Blair. He had taken Britain to an ‘illegal’ war, they claimed, although no court ever said it was unlawful; he was a ‘liar’ who had knowingly sent British troops to their deaths on a false premise. Now, from Islington to Didsbury, from the BBC to the Guardian, the cry of betrayal the Liberals once directed against Blair is directed against them. The only discernible difference is that it took a decade for Blair to go from being the fresh leader of 1994 to the B:Liar of 2004. In the case of Clegg, it is as if someone has thrown compost accelerator over him, speeding up the process of degeneration from hope to has-been from ten years to ten months.
So, yes, he used them. The bien-pensant vote was gulled by Clegg and, now that he’s abandoned them, their fury knows few bounds. The root of the matter is not the u-turn on tuition fees* but the audacity of accepting that there are worse things in the world than a Tory Prime Minister. That’s not the way it was supposed to work, apparently. No, considering themselves martyrs for truth and decency, this metropolitan vote feels betrayed by the revelation that even a Liberal Democrat might just be another politician interested in power. How dare he!
And as Blair-hatred has become a kind of madness, so too has Clegg-hatred. In each case, the haters cannot accept that difficult choices sometimes have to be made and that even though you may disagree with them those choices may actually have been made honestly and in good faith.
Nick predicts doom and annihilation for the Lib Dems and that’s certainly where the smart money is. So let me splash some stupid cash around and suggest that, just perhaps, the future for Nick Clegg’s party is not quite as gloomy as it may appear viewed from North London. In the first place, those voters who are sticking with Clegg are not as stupid as those that have deserted him. That is, they can appreciate that having the opportunity to put a Lib Dem tinge (and sometimes much more than just a tinge) on government policy is better for Lib Dem ideas than remaining in permanent opposition. The Tories and Labour cannot afford to shed great chunks of support but the rules are a little different for smaller parties.
So we’re now in the position that a goodly proportion of Lib Dem voters are now to the right of many of the party’s MPs and members. Furthermore, those areas in which the party is likely to remain strong – south-west England and Scotland, principally – are relatively immune to the dramatic tides at Westminster, not least since the often prize the imagined greater independence provided by a Liberal member of parliament.
Even here, however, there arises a complication, perhaps even a paradox: Orange Book Lib Demmery is the kind of socially liberal, fiscally conservative project that might be thought most likely to appeal to metropolitan elites and that probably can’t win much more than 15% of the vote. And yet the party’s strongholds will be peripheral and rural, places in which this kind of relatively high-faluting liberalism is not a matter of everyday concern or even the kind of liberalism people think they are voting for. There is a disconnect between Orange Bookism and the farming and market town constituencies many Lib Dem MPs will represent.
But then the Lib Dems as currently constructed suffer from a certain slipperyness that is either cute or vexing depending upon your perspective. For many years they have been one thing in one corner of the country and quite another somewhere else. But in the future there may three, not two, strains of Lib Demmery. An FDP-style leadership, traditional independently minded supporters in the countryside and then a slightly confused, more left-wing activist base that’s based in the cities and, on a diminished scale, in university towns. This will be an awkward beast to lead but it’s not impossible, I think, to overcome these difficulties even if, as I say, the smart money now thinks Clegg cannot achieve this.
For more, read David Aaronovitch in the Times today. As he says, distancing themselves from the coalition makes no sense. For doing so distances themselves from anything this government may achieve and leaves the Lib Dems with precisely nothing to sell at the next election. That would be a brave course alright. And thus a bonkers one.
*Another government policy that suffered from an alarming communications breakdown. It needed to be sold along the lines of: We want three things from our university system. An education that is available to many, is free at the point of use and it of high quality. Unfortunately we can only have two of those three things. Mass, Free, Quality: pick any two. This government believes that Mass and Quality are the two most important of these concerns. Which is why we believe we have to move to this new system…
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