The Liberal Arts

Every lazy, cod-Marxist theory about class in British politics is hopelessly wrong, mainly because any attempt to fit the British class system into Marxism is hopelessly wrong.

The Tory forty-five per cent of the old industrial working class may have been (if it always was) simply mistaken about how best to further its own interests, but it was not guilty of class treachery or anything of that nature. There was never anything remotely incongruous about the presence of middle and upper-class people, often with Liberal or Tory backgrounds and in many ways views, at every level of the Labour Party from its inception until its New Labour destruction, when they were very tellingly banished along with the workers. And so on. And on. And on.

So one of the things most worth watching about the sudden return to prominence of the Liberal tradition, at least as primarily manifested in party form, will be the consequences of the fact it very largely survived the twentieth century in areas where, while class distinctions are very pronounced and indeed blindingly obvious, a Marxist analysis of the local society is absolutely impossible even to attempt, mostly the West Country, Mid Wales, and rural Scotland.

Even more than that of Labour, or indeed of the Tories, the history of Liberalism is a standing contradiction of the laughable theories that progress comes through class conflict, that industrialisation and urbanisation are necessarily prior to radicalisation and Radicalism, that religion in general and traditional Christianity in particular are the enemies of those ends, and that much else besides is the case. At least as often as not, these have been and are the opposite of reality. In the first and third cases, invariably so.

So the question arises, now more starkly than ever: how far, if at all, are the Lib Dems an adequate vehicle for this tradition of civil liberties, local communitarian populism, the indefatigable pursuit of single issues, the Nonconformist social conscience, the legacy of Keynes and Beveridge, traditional moral and social values, consumer protection, conservation rather than environmentalism, national sovereignty, a realistic foreign policy, the Commonwealth, the peace activism historically exemplified by Sir Herbert Samuel, redress of economic and political grievances in the countryside, and the needs and concerns of areas remote from the centres of power both in the United Kingdom and in each of its constituent parts?