It is a matter of record that Menzies Campbell had wanted to support the Iraq War, but Charles Kennedy stopped him. Paddy Ashdown supported it, and the Lib Dems had of course pioneered support for neocon wars under him, enthusiastically cheering on the dismemberment of Yugoslavia.
Together with the neoliberal economics that leads to it and which provides its only rationale, neconservative geopolitics is the coming force among the Lib Dems, along with Euroscepticism (jolly good, though incompatible with neoliberal economics or neoconservative geopolitics).
And, I confidently predict, along with opposition to the former Holy Grail of the Single Transferable Vote for multimember constituencies (again, jolly good), as the penny drops about just how ill-served the Lib Dem heartlands of the West Country, the North and South of Scotland, and Mid-Wales would be by such a system.
It is also possible that Highland, Island, Border and Mid-Welsh disaffection with the Central Scottish Parliament and the South Welsh Assembly, as well as the Alliance Party's disaffection with the DUP-Sinn Fein carve-up at Stormont, might turn the Lib Dems into (jolly good) hardline Unionists.
All in all, the Lib Dems as we have known them are finished.
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A matter of record? Interesting. Show us the record!
ReplyDeleteAndrew Neil has consistently failed to get a denial out of any Lib Dem MP, right there on air, when he has presented them with this fact. For fact it is.
ReplyDeleteWhat, you're seriously saying that the future of the Lib Dems is economically neolib, internationally neocon, Eurosceptic and Unionist in a "we don't get a look in from Holyrood/Cardiff/Stormont round here" sort of way?
ReplyDeleteYes, if they have a future at all. And they'd only be half wrong on that platform. But they'd still be wrong enough.
ReplyDeleteHow would "any Lib Dem MP" know for sure what Ming Campbell privately wanted before the war? If they couldn't know it, then a failure to deny it doesn't prove it true.
ReplyDeleteThey do speak to each other in private, you know.
ReplyDeleteLiberal MPs Jo Grimond(Orkney and Shetland), Russell Johnston (with a Highland seat) and David Steel (with a Borders seat) voted against eevolution in the 70s. They said that exactly this sort of neglect would happen. Steel could do with being reminded of this.
ReplyDeleteGrimond also secured opt-outs for Orkney and Shetland if they voted No in the referendum. Shetland's constitutional and cultural relationship with Scotland is complicated. But Orkney's isn't.
So the principle has already been established. If there were to be an independence referendum in Scotland, then, as you have suggested in the past, areas voting No should remain in the United Kingdom. This was pretty much agreed thirty years ago.
Quite so, Martin. Many thanks.
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