We Are The Real Liberals

As the Scottish and Welsh experiences demonstrate, there need only be another “Neither Labour Nor The Tories” option on the ballot paper for there simply to be no point to the Liberal Democrats, who gain support for what they are not rather than for what they are. Nor would anything more than half even of the mere sixteen per cent of eligible voters currently reached by that party have anything to do with it if actually made aware of its policies, something that the BBC, in particular, consistently refuses to do.

Some of us fully intend this prove this point over the next couple of years, offering such an option while exposing those policies, and thus seeing off the Lib Dems as decisively as would the abandonment of the First Past The Post electoral system of which they are wholly a product.

But what of the wider and deeper Liberal tradition in this country? Well, thus came Keynes and Beveridge, of whom we, and certainly not the Lib Dems, are the heirs. Those of us who believe in One Nation politics with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation can but seek to live up to Lloyd George in his heyday, whereas neither in domestic policy nor in foreign policy are the Lib Dems remotely his successors.

And even the more problematical Gladstonian tradition might be redeemable by careful appropriation of Gladstone’s own “Four Doctors”: Aristotle, Augustine, Dante, and Joseph Butler. Hardly among the Lib Dems’ “Doctors”, to say the very least.