Don't Call Me Shirley

On the day after Leslie Nielsen's death, someone who really is going to have to remain nameless told me that such had been the words of Jesus to the centurion at the foot of the Cross.

Shirley Williams would probably claim that she was too old to change parties again. But she is not dead, she is an active member of the House of Lords, and electoral reform would provide her with no other option. It would kill off all three existing formations, but the Lib Dems would be the first to go. They are hopeless at anything other than First Past The Post; the introduction of their Holy Grail, multimember STV, for local government in Scotland has caused their number of councillors there to go down.

Lady Williams, as doubtless also Lord Rodgers, is in the same position as Lord Owen, waiting for electoral reform to restore a significant parliamentary and wider electoral force as impenetrable by Blairites as by any other sort of Marxists, and therefore capable of delivering social democracy (to employ the term used to us in Durham on Thursday evening by the same Cardinal President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace who told us that the way to keep our seminaries open was to have more children and that the EU Constitution was a betrayal of Europe's Christian identity), even if, at least initially, only by requiring it of any larger coalition partner.

Aren't we all waiting for that, Shirley? But not all of us, not even those of us who are admirers of your opposition to abortion, want that party to re-create your history of opposition to traditional structures and methods of education, and to the necessary controls on immigration by the Labour Governments of which you were a member. And not all of us want that party merely because we wish to die in it.