Liberal Democracy Deserves Better

What to make of the Lib Dems as their Conference looms? Theirs is a wholly inadequate vehicle for any of the vitally important traditions from which they derive: of Gladstone, carefully re-appropriated in the light of his own “Four Doctors”, namely Aristotle, Augustine, Dante and Joseph Butler; of Keynes, Beveridge, and the One Nation politician’s One Nation politician, Lloyd George.

Yet the cause of opposition to the neoconservative war agenda is an important one, though not one for which the rising faction among the Lib Dems will continue to fight. The cause of opposition to the pointless “renewal” of Trident is an important one (and an important reminder that Labour policy towards nuclear weapons had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of the SDP), although the Lib Dems have failed to get their act together properly on this one.

The cause of defending civil liberties is an important one. I have come to see that the causes of an elected second chamber and of changing how MPs are chosen are important ones, although I am profoundly opposed to the specific Lib Dem proposals on these matters.

And the cause of representing systematically marginalised and ignored areas such as the West Country, Mid-Wales, the North and South of Scotland, Northumberland, Merseyside, the more rural parts of Lancashire and County Durham, and parts of London like Southwark and Bermondsey, is an important one.

The people of those and comparable areas, those who want to make our parliamentary system genuinely representative (which must mean all of us), those who want to defend and restore civil liberties (likewise), those who would and do oppose Trident “renewal”, and those who would and do oppose the neoconservative war agenda (and thus neoconservatism itself) are among the many, many, many constituencies now crying for the re-emergence of one or more proper political movements in place of the present hopeless, useless One Party. The Lib Dems might pretend that they are not part of that One Party, but in fact they are its licensed pretend-dissidents, to keep up the illusion that it faces some sort of opposition.

If you want it to face real opposition that it desperately needs and richly deserves, and not least if you fall into any one or more of the above categories, then what are you doing about it?