One Hundred Years On

Today is the centenary of the rejection by the House of Lords of Lloyd George's People's Budget. But a vote for the Lib Dems today would be as pointless an expression of any Nonconformist social conscience as it would be of any identification with the 1930s peace-mongering of Sir Herbert Samuel (see the Lib Dems' record on Afghanistan, and before that on Yugoslavia), or with Emlyn Hooson's vote against accession to the Treaty of Rome, or with Nick Harvey's vote against Maastricht and Simon Hughes's abstention, or with the unique role of David Alton in British public life, or with the grave doubts about devolution in the Lib Dem strongholds of rural Scotland and rural Wales, mirrored in the high No vote to the regional assembly in the parts of Northumberland and County Durham where they do quite well. For any of that, you are just going to have to look elsewhere.

On last night's Westminster Hour, someone or other called for a "left-of- centre" House of Lords, in which Labour, Lib Dem and Cross Bench peers (the last now with sectarian Left backgrounds far more than you might think) would frustrate a Cameron Government. But why would it want to? That Government would be thoroughly "left-of-centre", or, to use the more usual term, "Centre Left". Which is to say, it will have followed academic Marxism from economic to social, cultural and constitutional means, though with the ends unchanged: the destruction of the family, private property, and the State.

Nothing better illustrates this than the Cameroons' heavy dependence on Demos, the Communist Party continuity organisation whose Director, having given us a Sunday Supplement about Liberalism, will next week be treating us to "the intellectual roots of Labour as a party of the Centre Left". So don't expect any of this. No one must know that such a movement ever existed. If they did, then they might want it back...