Things Are Not As They Were

A thousand people turning up on a Saturday to demonstrate outside the Lib Dems.

Not least, though not only, with Susan Kramer and Evan Harris looking for alternative employment, it should not be too hard for Fleet Street to find the Lib Dem columnists without whom a lack of coverage has always added up to a lack of scrutiny. Scrutiny of schemes to join the euro. Or to grant an amnesty to illegal immigrants. Or to abolish church schools. Or to raise the income tax threshold, but without the wholesale restructuring that would guarantee everyone a tax-free income of at least half national median earnings at the given time. Or to reverse the erosion of civil liberties, but without therefore restoring proper sentencing and proper prison regimes because we could once again have confidence in convictions. Or to give the vote to prisoners. Or to allow 16 and 17-year-olds to appear legally in porn films that would then haunt them on the Internet for the rest of their lives.

Those, remember, are only the things that have managed to become party policy. A Lib Dem columnist would give an insight into the various milieux that produced such policies, into the ideas that circulate around them and provide their context, and thus into the minds and character of the people involved in that process. There should be plenty of them soon enough. And not a moment too soon.

The Conservative Party has been hoovering up Liberals for a very long time: Liberal Unionists, Liberal Imperialists, National Liberals, Alfred Roberts's daughter, those around the Institute of Economic Affairs (although its founders and its founding backer never actually joined), and before long at least the Cleggite faction of the Lib Dems. The Conservative Party is itself therefore two parties in one, which would be entirely separate in many other countries, competing hardly at all for the same votes and co-operating hardly at all on any issue of policy. The next few days may very well be the point at which the metropolitan, urban, capitalist, secular, libertarian, make-the-world-anew party finally defeats and banishes the provincial, rural, protectionist, church-based, conservative, mind-our-own-business party; the point at which the Whigs finally defeat and banish the Tories. But in a context of electoral reform, which would suit the Tories down to the ground.

Meanwhile, those Conservative MPs and activists who are asking where their meeting and their triple lock are, did you not know that your party's Constitution ran, "There shall be a Leader, and he shall do what the hell he likes until the Top People who put him where he is tire of him, whereupon he shall be out on his (or, lest we forget, her) ear"? Come off it, Norman Tebbit. When, exactly, would you and Margaret Thatcher have held an all-member ballot?