Democracy Village: A Parable of the Liberal Democrats?

Several bloggers far more illustrious than I (Iain Dale, Adam Boulton and Ben Brogan, for example) have carried the recent developments surrounding the Parliament Square 'Democracy Village'. Camps - unlike marches - are an attempt to entrench the expression of a given political view (or more commonly, views) in either a public or an inconvenient place (or more commonly, both). Hopefully, we will soon see the end of it.

But these things can be awfully tricky to eradicate if the inhabitants are determined enough. The Greenham Common Peace Camp provides clear examples of some of the defining characteristics of leftist commune-camps:

1) It didn't achieve anything: Britain maintained cruise missiles at RAF Greenham Common until 1991, when they were removed due to a treaty that was the result of what one might call 'grown up' diplomacy. The camp had nothing to do with it.

2) It was damned hard to get rid of: The women were evicted several times, yet they kept on returning days later. Could be troublesome if the 'Democracy Villagers' decide to try something similar: constant police evictions will simply lead to increased coverage.

Of course, the Democracy Village is not identical to the Peace Camp: it lacks not only the hypocritically sexist admission criteria but, more importantly, the clarity of purpose. It began as a demonstration with a clear message and substantial support, but after failing to achieve its aims it has over time lost both support and focus, becoming a little-heeded focus for a staggering array of leftist agit-prop. A sort of tragic parody of the fate of the Liberal Party.

Travelling Light

Just a quick post to explain that this blog may be somewhat light for the next couple of weeks, due to IRL commitments. Normal service should be resumed from June 10th. Thankyou for your patience.

Why even a solo Conservative government would be legitimate in Scotland

To the oft-voiced argument 'Scotland elected one Conservative MP and has a Conservative government - this is WRONG!', my counter is straightforward.

Scotland is part of the United Kingdom. In being part of the United Kingdom, it accepts the terms of that union. In union-wide elections, Scotland has its proportional share of seats, but it obviously does not have casting vote.

The Conservative & Unionist, Liberal Democratic and Labour parties are all unionist - they subscribe to the terms of the union I described above. Thus a vote for the Liberal Democrats or Labour is a vote for a party that subscribes to the legitimacy of the union and thus the legitimacy of a Conservative government that carries the largest number of seats in the Union Parliament.

The party that rejects the legitimacy of the Union, the Scottish National Party, did not get substantially more votes than the Conservatives (who with the SNP and Liberal Democrats were all within the 400,000 - 500,000 mark), and certainly failed to come close to matching the pro-Union vote.

Thus the Conservative government of the United Kingdom derives its mandate for administering non-devolved issues in Scotland from the Union whose legitimacy has been endorsed by the vast majority of the Scottish electorate in the pan-union elections. Simple.

Kennedy and the Coachman

In Sunday's Observer, Charles Kennedy lays out his reasons for abstaining on the vote to ratify the Coalition agreement. It got me reflecting, as I have in the past, on the nature of the Liberal Democrat party and membership, and its ramifications on the current position of the party and its future. The present agonies that sections the party and its supporters are undergoing can be traced several overlapping factors, which I will look at here. These are: the Conservative appropriation of abandoned Liberal political territory; the conflict of identity following the merger and clash of traditions; and the soap-bubble like character of support a perennial third party was always likely to attract.

1) The Encroaching Blues: Divisions within the Liberal Democrats are hardly new. In his article, Kennedy refers to two groups who split from the former Liberal Party: Sir John Simon's National Liberals (presumably he included the latter group too) and Joseph Chamberlain's Liberal Unionists. Liberal Conservatives often have a lot of sympathy with these groups - indeed if this blog had household gods, Joseph Chamberlain would undoubtedly be one of them. It may be significant that the eventual fate of all of these groups has been to align with the Conservatives. Liberal defections to Labour have happened, but never in a big, bulk manner.

This is evidence of what I think has been a long-running issue for the Liberal Democrats and their predecessor party: continual encroachment upon their territory by the Conservative Party. When Margaret Thatcher won her landslides in the Eighties, it was because her brand of economically liberal Conservatism reach out to the apirational lower and middle classes - who might one have been Liberal voters. It was the Conservative appropriation of economic Liberalism that allowed her to pull that off.

It is perhaps a touch ironic that, if the aim of the post-Grimond Liberal leaders has been the eclipse of the Conservatives by a progressive alliance, it has been their adoption of that position that has done so much to sustain the blue foe. By moving leftward, the various leaders of the Liberal Party have abandoned more and more territory to the Conservative Party. Unlike the left, in Britain the Conservatives continue to hold a near-hegemony over right-of-centre representation. With the exception of UKIP in European elections, the Conservative right has nowhere to go. The more ground ceded to the Conservative Party, the broader a church it becomes and the wider its appeal grows. The way to sideline the Cornerstone-style tories would have been to create a viable centre-right Liberal alternative, rather than shifting left and abandoning fertile political territory to the Conservatives.

Kennedy references the leadership of Jo Grimond as the leftward turning point. This was not entirely fair: according to Roy Douglas, in his book Liberals, Grimond desired:

"a great remodelling of politics, in which the Liberal Party, the non-Socialist element of the Labour party, and many 'Liberal-at-heart' Conservatives would come together in a great new radical movement."

- in essence, a distinctive Liberal political position, rooted in but not defined by the centre ground. Whilst this may have been a touch to the left of the Liberal position in the 1950's, it is well to the right of many - including, I think, Mr Kennedy - now. In moving leftwards, the Liberals and Liberal Democrats simply risked moving into crowded electoral territory, shedding votes to the Conservatives and splitting the very 'progressive' vote whose hegemony it seeks to secure. However, this attitude is not consistent across the entire party, which brings us to:

2) Identity Conflict: The Liberal Democrat Party is a product of electoral necessity; a fusion of the old Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party (which brought in, amongst others, Charles Kennedy). However, this merger only exacerbated a dilemma that was present even within the pre-merger Liberals: between what we today call 'Orange Bookers' - or classical liberals (ish) - and their 'weirdie-beardie' bedmates. Although many who would have been natural Liberal recruits in decades past had become the soft wing of the Conservative Party, there remained a body of centre-right Liberals in the party alongside the U.N.D., beard-and-sandles types. Even after the infusion of Social Democrats during the merger, this group survived. Indeed, it is the survival of this group that has allowed the Liberal Democrats to continue pitching to Conservative voters (and they do) and credibly claim to be a party of the centre.

This division was not particularly problematic until the party was confronted with power - and worse, at least the illusion of a choice as to who it shared power with. While the instincts of the majority of the party lie with Labour, there is a substantial minority whose instincts lean the other way - including the leader. Nor can its electorate be claimed clearly for the 'progressive' camp either, although many have undoubtably tried to do just that. In LD/Labour marginals, the Liberal is likely to have come through on the back of Conservative votes, and in the shires too the Liberal Democrat will need to have successfully wooed Tory support.

The identity conflict emerges because this wing is closer to the pre-Grimond heritage of the Liberal Party. When Charles Kennedy writes that last week's events:

"drive a strategic coach and horses through the long-nurtured "realignment of the centre-left" to which leaders in the Liberal tradition, this one included, have all subscribed since the Jo Grimond era"

he is correct: Clegg is (intentionally or not) reconnecting with an older strain of Liberal Party thought and action. The result is increasing discontent on the left (Kennedy and Ashdown being key figures to watch), and a coming to the fore of a long-postponed reckoning between the two wings of a divided party. How this conflict is resolved could have a major impact on the development of British politics in the coming decades.

3) The Soap Bubble of Discontent: Being in opposition as long as they were, it was almost inevitable that the Liberal Democrats would become the vehicle for all kinds of oppositionalism and protest. This fractious support base was never going to survive any brush with power unscathed. No matter how many times Liberal Democrat figures went on television to say 'we hope to hold the balance of power in a hung parliament', it seems that there were sections of the base that simply either did not or would not understand what this meant. You see them a lot in the comments sections of blogs and newspapers - it normally runs something along the lines of "I voted Liberal Democrat to keep the Tories out but Nick sold us out and now I'm never voting for them again!"

The Liberal Democrats never campaigned as 'Labour Lite' and Nick Clegg was forthright in saying he would offer the party with the mandate in terms of seats and votes a mandate. This was always near-certain to be the Conservatives. The message could not have been much clearer, and anyone who genuinely feels 'sold out' by the Liberal Democrats making a deal with the Conservatives should have a long, hard think about whether or not they really want PR. What this evinces is that sections of Liberal Democrat support were based not on stated party policy but on a belief that the party was 'really' whatever that particular elector wished it to be. Distance from power allowed a Liberal Democrat support base to develop that was broad - stretching from libertarians to people who thought Labour were 'too right wing' - but fragile, sustainable only in the fantasy-friendly world of third place. Once the party had to make decisions, this bubble was always going to burst.

The Liberal Democrat leadership has probably thought through the ramifications of gaining power enough to take a three-point fall in their stride. After all, the moment they gained power they were always going to disappoint someone. A spell in government will see some sections of support harden, and others disappear. How the party manages this will decide its course for a long time to come: will coachman Clegg continue the drive towards the Liberal party of old, or will the SDP-ers regain the helm? And can both wings remain in one party for much longer?

Little Englanders at large

Over at ConservativeHome, Tim Montgomerie proposes that the Conservative party north of the border should separate from the UK party. Akin to the pre-1965 Unionist Party, except with some truly terrible suggestions for names.

Personally, I don't think this is a good idea. The old Unionist Party had history this new thing won't, except perhaps if it plays really hard on being a restoration of the old Unionist Party. But if this happens, it plays into the SNP's court as to the vast majority of people who don't remember the pre-merger party, it will look like the SNP have gained such ground as to have justified a "Unionist Party" - just like Northern Ireland! It would be a tragic irony if whilst trying to normalise the Union in Northern Irish politics on the one hand, Cameron de-normalised it in Scotland with the other. It would also in my view be a blow to the credibility and principles of the Conservative & Unionist Party.

But this is not the point of this post. More depressing for me by far than Montgomerie's post are the comments cropping up beneath it that follow the basic formula: "The Union is useless/defeated/oppressive - can we govern England now please!" If there's anything more distasteful than genuine nationalism, it must be nationalism derived from a cocktail of electoral calculation and petulance - a sort of "They won't vote for us? Fine, screw them!" Combined with this is a strange tendency to conflate the Conservative Party's problems with the Union's: the SNP won six seats and not many votes more then the Conservatives in Scotland, and taken together the pro-union vote remains overwhelming. In Wales we're the second party.

There is a strain of English nationalism in the Conservative Party that the result in Scotland is going to encourage (the result in Wales will be overlooked, naturally). Unionists within the party must remain vigilant against it. Thank goodness Cameron is leader.

Update: Tory Bear takes a letter that could have been written by an SNP entrist here, and the unionist-enGnat battle breaks out in the comments section again.

The Conservatives and Europe

The Economist analyses the reasons for the Conservative Party's (and Britain's) relations with Europe. An excellent read.

Armchair Technocrats

A strain of argument that surfaces from time to time is the criticism of politicians' CVs when it comes to cabinet appointments. Charlotte Gore provides an example of the argument, mocking the CVs of Osborne and May.

Now as easy and enjoyable an exercise as this sort of thing undoubtedly is, it is a bit unfair on our politicians. Like it or not, running a country is not like running a business and staffing cannot operate the same way.

There are three things that apply when you are filling a corporate vacany: 1) You have a clear image of what the job entails, 2) you scout around for the best qualified candidate for that job and 3) you pay them the market rate (or above) for their labour in order to induce them in. None of this works in politics.

1) Ideology ruins this. In nearly all departments different parties will want different things from the post. This applies to some roles more than others, but it is this lack of common conception of purpose that lies at the heart of why the technocratic approach doesn't work. Only in a post-political, managerial government could the private sector employment pattern really work for Ministers of State (the overlap between technocracy and undemocratic governments is no accident of history). For as long as political choice remains, different parties will approach the same positions in different ways and fill them accordingly.

2) This means that a candidate must be assessed upon ideological and political criteria beyond the contents of a printed CV for a private sector job application. Whether or not the ideas of a candidate align with those of the government - and whether or not they can work well within government - is rightly central to cabinet appointments, as they have to enact the policies that have gained an electoral mandate. If technical expertise were placed before politics as the principal (but not sole, by any means) criterion for selection, it would create a system wherein individualistic ministers who considered themselves experts in their field might resent 'interference' in their ministry by the government at large. A government that was a loose confederation of independent ministries would lack coherency, accountability and credibility - it would not work.

3) The political scene also serves to depress pay, which narrows recruitment. Ask people if they think that the most important cabinet jobs in the country should be done by the most able people possible, you'll find few to disagree. Put to those same people the wages that would need to be offered to recruit such talent, and you will hear a lot about 'troughing politicians' and them 'being in it for themselves'.

The truth is that for those very clever people who do reach the cabinet (or enter politics at all) it usually entails a sometimes substantial pay cut, not to mention a constant chorus of execration in the press and from 'the public'. So cut Cabinet ministers - and indeed politicians in general - some slack: many could be making an awful lot more money elsewhere.