"It was the Liberals who sent children up chimneys, it was the Tories who stopped them from doing it, so yah boo sucks with jelly on top [I'm sorry, but I don't really speak Publicschool] to you, Vince Cable."
The first two points are true enough.
However, the Conservative Party is the age-old Tory subculture's organisational absorption of, but ideological absorption by, the Liberal Unionists, the Liberal Imperialists, the National Liberals, and now also the Orange Book Liberal Democrats. The people who sent children up chimneys.
Whereas Cable comes out of that section of the Labour Party which became the SDP, in succession to the Radical Liberals and the Tory populists who became the non-Marxist and then, of necessity, the anti-Marxist mainstream of the Labour Party. (By no means all of them seceded to the SDP, of course; it took New Labour to purge them from the House of Commons.) The people who put a stop to the sending of children up chimneys.
So Cable was right. To its great credit, his party has little or nothing in common with the Whiggish section of nineteenth-century Liberalism. To its great discredit, his detractors' party, which is his partners' party, has little or nothing in common with anything else. Like New Labour, in fact.
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At last, someone else who understands these things. It's like when the American Republicans go on about the Southern segregationists being Democrats. As you would put it, the Republican Party absorbed them organisationally but they absorbed it ideologically.
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