Chris Huhne risks opening divisions in the Liberal Democrats today by attacking colleagues who accepted jobs advising Gordon Brown.
The former leadership contender and environment spokesman dismisses the four Lib Dems who have agreed to work with Mr Brown as “no longer at the cutting edge”.
Speaking on the eve of the party’s annual conference, Mr Huhne urges them to reconsider their roles and suggests that their efforts will no longer be taken seriously by Mr Brown.
I thought that had all been quietly buried. I tend to agree with Huhne but it seems a strange time to dig all this up again. There may be a smidgen of positioning going on here!
What to make of the Lib Dems as their Conference looms?
ReplyDeleteTheirs is a wholly inadequate vehicle for any of the vitally important traditions from which they derive: of Gladstone, carefully re-appropriated in the light of his own “Four Doctors”, namely Aristotle, Augustine, Dante and Joseph Butler; of Keynes, Beveridge, and the One Nation politician’s One Nation politician, Lloyd George.
Yet the cause of opposition to the neoconservative war agenda is an important one, though not one for which the rising faction among the Lib Dems will continue to fight.
The cause of opposition to the pointless “renewal” of Trident is an important one (and an important reminder that Labour policy towards nuclear weapons had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of the SDP), although the Lib Dems have failed to get their act together properly on this one.
The cause of defending civil liberties is an important one. I have come to see that the causes of an elected second chamber and of changing how MPs are chosen are important ones, although I am profoundly opposed to the specific Lib Dem proposals on these matters.
And the cause of representing systematically marginalised and ignored areas such as the West Country, Mid-Wales, the North and South of Scotland, Northumberland, Merseyside, the more rural parts of Lancashire and County Durham, and parts of London like Southwark and Bermondsey, is an important one.
The people of those and comparable areas, those who want to make our parliamentary system genuinely representative (which must mean all of us), those who want to defend and restore civil liberties (likewise), those who would and do oppose Trident “renewal”, and those who would and do oppose the neoconservative war agenda (and thus neoconservatism itself) are among the many, many, many constituencies now crying for the re-emergence of one or more proper political movements in place of the present hopeless, useless One Party.
The Lib Dems might pretend that they are not part of that One Party, but in fact they are its licensed pretend-dissidents, to keep up the illusion that it faces some sort of opposition.
If you want it to face real opposition that it desperately needs and richly deserves, and not least if you fall into any one or more of the above categories, then what are you doing about it?
Thank you David. If you'll forgive me, I won't try to answer your final question. I got lost at the mention of Augustine.
ReplyDeletePeople do. But they shouldn't, because a cultural and philosophical base is politically indespensible.
ReplyDeleteIt is, I am afraid, the absence of any such base that is preventing the Lib Dems from making better heard in the political system the people of the areas listed and of comparable areas, as well as those who want to make our parliamentary system genuinely representative (which must mean all of us), those who want to defend and restore civil liberties (likewise), those who would and do oppose Trident “renewal”, and those who would and do oppose the neoconservative war agenda (and thus neoconservatism itself).
Because, at the end of the day, what ARE the Lib Dems? Are you the party of Gladstone in the light of his Four Doctors, the party of Lloyd George (the classic One Nation politician with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation), the party of Keynes, and the party of Beveridege?
If so, then you could also be the party of those who constituted the heritage in the SDP: Attlee, Bevin, Bevan, Gaitskell - social democrats precisely because moral and social conservatives, and not least British and Commonwealth patriots.
Britain is crying out for such a party. Where is it?