UK Local Elections 2011: Goodbye Compromise
Why did the Lib Dems do so badly yesterday? The short answer is “probably not what you think.”
The commonest evaluation that seems to be floating around currently, the day after the election took place and now the results have become clear, is that, exactly a year after the General Election that brought the Lib Dem/ Tory coalition, the voting population expressed the view that it didn’t like the cuts and other disastrous policies proposed by the coalition. As a result the Labour vote rose; but in addition, the Liberal Democrats took a particular beating while the Conservatives got off more or less scot free (with a slight increase in seats in fact). There seems to be some mystery in many minds as to why the Lib Dems should have borne the brunt of the nation’s displeasure while the Tories remained unscathed.
In my mind, there’s no mystery at all. Imagine a conscientious Labour voter on the Left, perhaps quite far to the Left, who over the period since 1997 (actually before that in fact), saw the party drifting significantly rightwards until it was more centrist than anything else. That was a cause for concern, but even more disturbing was the behaviour of Blair, over Iraq and the imaginary Weapons of Mass Destruction which never were, and of course that many believe he knew all along never were.
The only significant party to oppose the Iraq involvement was the Liberal Democrats. And as time went by, and Labour never repealed the excesses of Thatcherism (just as Clinton never reversed Reagan and Bush senior, incidentally*) never reined in the financial institutions (that were to bring ruin upon us as an inevitable result of the combined efforts of Reagan and Thatcher), never in fact took any moves to the left at all to any great extent while at the same time increasingly threatening civil liberties, kow-towing to big media companies over internet use, media ownership and behaviour, the Lib Dems came to look more and more attractive.
Trouble was, the Lib Dems were by and large from two backgrounds. There were those who were originally Liberals, many of whom were of course quite remarkable and progressive people — my particular favourite being Beveridge, who conceived a model of the Welfare State before the end of the Second World War which, implemented as much as was practical by the 1945 Labour government, worked pretty well on the whole until Thatcher started attacking it.
But the others were formerly members of the Social Democratic Party, a spinoff of what was essentially the right wing of the Labour Party when the latter was rather closer to being (though not actually being) a Socialist party than it was today. They were certainly to the Right of the Labour Party at the time of the Gang of Four, but where they stood with respect to “New Labour’ was possibly a different matter.
Those of us firmly on the Left, dissatisfied and betrayed by the Christian Democrat-style New Labour edifice (whose policies, using techniques learned from Clinton, had been crafted by focus group and market research and not by fervent belief in the need for representation of working people; and who were funded, like the Tories, by big business and others inimical to their needs) wanted somewhere to go. Somewhere where we might actually have a chance of the party we voted for actually winning some seats (ie not Respect or some other fringe Leftist party). The Lib Dems said enough of the right things for us to be interested in supporting them, especially when everyone else in the country seemed to be on the right.
Unfortunately, of course, the Lib Dems were on the right too — or at least part of them was. Many of us were dismayed last year that the Lib Dems formed a coalition with the Tories, even if we knew full well that a partnership with Labour would not have been workable. However we consoled ourselves with the thought that at least “our lads” were making the Tories less toxic than they would otherwise have been. With hindsight, this seems debatable.
What has happened in the past year is that we have seen threats from the Government to many things we hold dear, from Council services to the NHS to the BBC, and cuts that are very evidently ideological rather than fiscally necessary. It’s Thatcherism in a skin. In the meantime the Labour Party under Miliband has sought to distance itself somewhat from New Labour and even appear to move leftwards a little and behave a little more at least like a Social Democrat, rather than a Christian Democrat, party. No doubt many of us would like it to move further to the Left, but we’re also conscious that a right-wing press would persuade the majority that a hard Left party was unelectable and dangerous. It will take a lot of effort to depose the influence of the Right in the media, and modern technology is only part of the answer — one of the most popular web sites in the UK is, I gather, that of the Daily Mail, for example. That’s one reason why the unbiased nature of the BBC , though we may complain about it from time to time, is so important.
So what we did yesterday is we went back home. Tory voters remained Tory voters – and why shouldn’t they. We bolstered the Labour vote, even in areas where only the Tories were in with a chance — like where I live in the East of England. Here, there hasn’t been a Liberal (let alone a Labour) MP for 60 years, and if I wasn’t voting Conservative it didn’t matter one little bit who I voted for, thanks to First Past the Post (which we are now stuck with indefinitely… I wonder if we could propose the Scottish system of FPTP plus Lists to ensure proportionality?). Last time I looked, my vote here was actually worth 0.01 votes in terms of how likely it was to change things. So I voted Labour, and I hope the pundits look at the popular vote, something that was always ignored before the Information Age, and note the numbers well.
We post-Socialists and friends of like enough mind withdrew our support from the Lib Dems, and without us, their vote went, in most places, back to much earlier, primaevally low levels.
We withdrew our support because we disagreed with the statement that “compromise is not betrayal”; because we don’t believe the compromises should be being made. You cannot make acceptable compromises with the Right when the correct answers are to the Left of both your positions — something I wish Obama had grasped in the US, incidentally.
And because we suddenly realised that of those two wings of the Liberal Democrat party, the Centre Right one was very much in control. And we did not come all this way to vote for yet another party of the Right. We had already made our compromises by supporting a party with a known right-leaning tendency, which hitherto had been ameliorated by a small number of Lib Dem figures who shared our views, for example, on the environment.
We didn’t like discovering that we had been supporting a party of the Right for some time. So we went home.
So what happens now? Well, the atrocious behaviour of Cameron with regard to the antics of the No to AV mob – about which I am absolutely certain that absolutely nothing will be done – will no doubt sour relations in the Cabinet. But Blair and Brown hated each other for years and managed to run the country. So there is no reason the coalition should fall apart for that reason. And falling apart now is anyway too soon.
The important thing in my view is to ensure that Tory policies are stopped. My expectation is that as time goes by, Labour support will continue to rise. It’s already jumped in a year: as the cuts bite and public sector workers are turned out of their jobs across the country, that can only increase. At a point in the future, a stand by Lib Dem MPs on some issue they feel passionately about would bring about a vote of no confidence in the Government, or some other route to a collapse of the coalition, and we’ll have a General Election – one that Labour will win.
OK, the Labour Party still needs to demonstrate that it really is a party of the Left, for example a manifesto commitment to re-nationalising the rail network and undoing some of the ravages of Thatcher might be a good start, but hey, we are so used to voting for the “least worst” we can probably live with that as long as it keeps a slide back to Thatcherism off the table.
Image courtesy of secretlondon123 via WikiMedia Commons