The new boy on Britain’s political block is a bright chap. To enter parliament
at your first attempt can be luck; to win the party leadership just two
years later suggests ability. But can Nick Clegg, the new Liberal Democrat
leader, break the mould in which his colleagues have been trapped for almost
a century? The answer is probably no.
British Liberals are the most fantasist politicians on the planet. They have
never come near winning power in a general election since universal
franchise was introduced in 1918. Their notional strategy of building a new
strength on the centre ground has failed utterly, even when conditions were
overwhelmingly favourable in the mid1980s.
History’s message could hardly be clearer. The left of British politics
belongs to Labour, as refreshed in the 1990s by Tony Blair; the right to the
Conservatives, as refreshed by David Cameron. There is no room for Liberals
(or Liberal Democrats as they meaninglessly renamed themselves). They are a
protest vote, a dustbin vote, a transient vote, a one-issue vote, a
none-of-the-above vote.
Yet these also-also-rans endure a living death, propped up with public money,
a strong base in local government and Westminster’s culture of fair play. No
debate is complete without a Liberal Democrat present. And they periodically
compel us to review the political map of Britain by electing a new leader.
Clegg appears to be in the long tradition of Jo Grimond, Jeremy Thorpe, David
Steel, Paddy Ashdown and Ming Campbell. Like them he speaks in platitudes.
Like them he has found a few distinctive policies that come easily to those
who know they will not have to implement them, as on identity cards, penal
reform, drugs and local taxes. Although a “new” politician with a young
family, presentable and internationalist, Clegg lacks the key quality of his
ilk, a personal narrative and an idiosyncratic style. His slogan is the
dreadful Blairite cliché, “ambition and change”. He cannot conceal the
impression that he would sit equally happily in a Brown or a Cameron cabinet.
Modern democracies love duopoly. They flirt with third parties and maverick
candidates, but in the out-turn they prefer a clean choice:
Democrat/Republican, Christian Democrat/Social Democrat, left and right.
Britain’s Liberals were supplanted by Labour as soon as the working classes
and women won the vote and have never found a place on the spectrum since
then. They have become a comfortable Westminster club, as in the age of
Walpole and Pitt.
Hence what should be the great Liberal Democrat issue – which of the two other
parties should be supplanted – has become the great dither, a dinner table
chat. It was the one question from which both Clegg and his opponent, Chris
Huhne, fled with horror during their leadership campaign. Neither wanted to
be thought more left wing or more right wing than the other. They grasped in
desperation at such vacuities as progressive, radical, inclusive and
pro-change. Each was more beige than the other. This might work for a big
party seeking to colonise the centre, but not for a centrist party out to
capture a particular fringe.
Instead, Liberal Democrats have again joined in that ruling obsession of
centre parties, what to do in a hung parliament. How might they exert
tangential power through a coalition or parliamentary pact?
Liberal Democrats fondly believe that their support in a hung parliament can
be bartered for proportional representation, in a form that would give them
the long-term balance of power and make them kingmakers in perpetuity, as
they are in much of local government. There is no shred of evidence for this
strategy.
Hung parliaments come to Britain barely once in a political lifetime. The last
was in the 1974 parliament and was disastrous for the country and for the
Liberals. Neither Tory nor Labour leaders are inclined to such a suicidal
barter. It would also spell the death of emphatic election results, one of
the few boons in the British constitution. Blair’s humiliation of Ashdown
after flirting with him in 1997 is merely the most glaring example of this.
Clegg can flit along like his predecessors as a centrist gadfly. He can score
flesh wounds on the government over Northern Rock and Iraq. He can hint at
novelty over local taxes or imprisonment. Labour can be assailed as stingy
over education and health, the Tories as little Englanders over Europe. As
long as Liberal Democrats are indulged at Westminster, Clegg can go on
treating politics as about argument rather than power. He can be the
nation’s comfort blanket.
Parties are no longer clubs. They represent movements, interests, bodies of
opinion. They must choose what they wish to represent. The old divide
between left and right has been eroded by prosperity, reflected in falling
turnouts, declining party membership and whimsical opinion polls. The two
big parties have become centripetal, grabbing at whatever appears to
dominate the mainstream. Liberal Democrat support has been doubling and
halving in response to such raids on their ideas, but its public image has
depended almost entirely on that of its current leader at Westminster.
In reality left and right are not dead. They still carry the baggage of poor
versus rich, central versus local, collective versus individual. If Clegg
really means to be radical, then he must choose which radicalism. He must
become more Labour than Labour or more Conservative than Conservative. In
traditional terms, he must outflank one or other from their wings.
Away from the comfy centre, life gets suddenly nasty. On the right lies a new
and virulent scepticism towards all government. This view is anticentralist,
in favour of small business and averse to Gordon Brown’s authoritarianism.
It wants to keep local post offices, schools and cottage hospitals. It is
chauvinist but also mercantile, like Victorian Liberals. It is sceptical of
Cameron’s progressivism and deplores his inability to find a truly
libertarian narrative.
Clegg’s party might have moved towards the Tories in the 1980s, when the
latter were deeply split by Margaret Thatcher and when a
“Liberal-Conservative” coalition might at least have been a possibility.
Such a prospect was killed stone dead when Labour split and the Social
Democrats seduced the Liberals into a foolish belief that together they
might supplant Labour as the moderate party of the left. Nor can Clegg run
as a plausible champion of this form of right-wing liberalism, given his
lifelong commitment to that most corrupt of centralist regimes, the European
Union.
The left offers more fruitful ground just now. It is a political wasteland of
demoralisation, of Labour’s abandoned allies among trade unions, council
estates and the antiwar movement. In the 2005 election, one in four Liberal
Democrat voters said he or she would have voted Labour but for Iraq. These
antiLabour leftwingers must be held and exploited.
“Lib-Lab” has long been a seductive cry on the left and strategists might
argue that another stab at 1981 might be worth trying. For that, Clegg must
outflank Brown on the left in the most explicit terms. He must promise to
introduce higher redistributive taxes, throw money at social services, end
creeping selection in schools and liberate trade unions.
Liberal Democrats must become the party of national collectivism, promising to
deliver on Brown’s target-driven state better than he has. If Labour is to
be crushed by the Tories at the next election, the Lib Dems must be
strategically placed to become the official party of the new left. They must
present themselves as “real Labour” as from now.
I find neither strategy particularly plausible. But Clegg must choose. He
cannot lead first one way and then another, as if the 20th-century Liberal
experience had taught his party nothing. He must find a message rooted in
one of the two core ideologies that have, if at times imperceptibly,
underpinned British politics. Only then can he lead his troops confidently
into battle.
The trouble is that on the showing of his election campaign, Clegg embodies
neither side of this choice. Nor has his election offered him any guidance.
Like his benighted party, he is gripped by indecision, caught in the mushy
middle, not knowing which way to turn.
