Liberal Democracy After All?

There have been signs for about a year now. After all, if you operate a Neither Of The Above franchise extendable to pretty much anyone depending on the locality, and if you then start to do moderately well, some good people may come through.

Take Mike Hancock, the Lib Dem MP who courageously told The Week In Westminster roughly this time last year that the Lisbon Treaty was unacceptable because his constituents had the right to know that the laws to which they were subject were made by the Parliament of the United Kingdom.

Or take Danny Alexander, who has more than once popped up on Radio Four sounding like a next-generation (or two) Brian Wilson, bemoaning the happening of that which everyone knew would happen, namely the wholesale neglect of the Highlands (among other places) under devolution from a London which largely thinks of the Highlands and Islands when it hears the word "Scotland" to a Central Belt which does not really accept that anywhere beyond that Belt (and, in the SNP's case, the North East) is in Scotland at all.

There are others.

Alas, then, that there was no amendment on the floor of the House of Commons rejecting the Lisbon Treaty without any need for a referendum, because it extended the legislative power of a body which meets in secret and publishes no Official Report (hardly liberal or democratic), and because it fails to abolish the Common Fisheries Policy (a very serious problem in the Lib Dem heartlands of the West Country and rural Scotland). The SNP, whose core vote is almost certainly hostile in the extreme to the EU, could have tabled it. Why didn't they? And what on earth would the Lib Dems, among so many others, have said and done if they had?