Liberal Principles

Nick Clegg was right about Cadbury, Kraft, RBS and the taxpayer. But Gordon Brown was right about everything that Clegg's cut-and-shunt party has come to stand for. Alas, that is also everything that Brown's gutted-and-stuffed party has now come to stand for.

Where is the movement that will give a voice to those whose priorities include civil liberties, local communitarian populism, indefatigable pursuit of single issues, the Nonconformist social conscience, the legacy of Keynes and Beveridge, traditional moral and social values, conservation rather than environmentalism, national sovereignty, a realistic foreign policy, the Commonwealth, the peace activism historically exemplified by Sir Herbert Samuel, redress of economic and political grievances in the countryside, and the needs and concerns of areas remote from the centres of power both in the United Kingdom and in each of its constituent parts?

And where is the movement that will give a voice to those who were never hysterically hostile to the unions that exhibited the greatest need for a broad-based and sane opposition to Thatcherism, who never made themselves dependent on a single donor (as the Tories have now done) who was later made a Minister by Blair without the rate for the job, who never betrayed Gaitskellism over Europe, who never betrayed Christian Socialism and a section of High Toryism (and, lest we forget, Gaitskellism) over nuclear weapons, who never adopted the decadent social libertinism of Roy Jenkins, and who never adopted the comprehensive schools mania of Shirley Williams?

The election of even one such MP this year would light the touchpaper. The election of several would set off the explosion. So, who and where are those candidates?