Much will be said and written about what happened on the 7th. But we need to think about what happens next now. We have been heavily defeated, and it would be easy to allow that defeat to set the mood and leave us paralysed. We must not let that happen.
The electoral system has delivered a result that bears little resemblance to the popular vote. Our own defeat has been amplified by this – as has been pointed out elsewhere, our parliamentary presence was within 25,000 votes of being wiped out entirely. Imagine, two million votes for no representation at all. We need to work with the others who have been disenfranchised by the electoral system. The Greens, who went home with one seat for one and a half million votes. UKIP, who won the support of almost four million people but who also get but a single seat. The SNP might have benefited hugely from the system, but they are now looking at their seats being rendered powerless by EVEL, and also support reform.
We should be willing to work with these people. All of us must now accept that our views cannot be represented in Parliament as it stands. We should be prepared to set our other priorities to one side, be they strong environmentalism, leaving the European project, even our own historic mission of liberalism, in service of democracy.
Am I suggesting merging with those parties? No! Those who recognise me will recall my less than entirely warm attitude to them and their goals. But we must be prepared to ally to bring about democratic reform. The terms would be simple – a bare bones deal would mean we don’t stand against each other’s incumbents, and we don’t support any government that hasn’t legislated for electoral reform.
Over the coming years and in future elections, we can together forge a blocking minority, an Alliance to Restore Democracy. Then, when our voices are represented in Parliament, let it break apart. Because then, a space for liberalism, for green politics, for all of us, will exist. And if this party is to have a future then being the glue that binds such an alliance together is one worth sticking around for.
* T J Marsden is a member of the Liberal Democrats originally from Peterborough but latterly based in Scotland
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46 Comments
Let’s increase Lib Dems mass base – membership retention and new market penetration. I was a volunteer in the last elections for the Filipino ethnic communities … number matters … multiplication, not subtraction.
just a suggestion – number matters … multiplication not subtraction …
I buy your analysis but am sceptical about your route to reform. Right now the two routes I can see that have even a glimmer of credibility are the Labour Party becoming more enlightened and then finding its way back to power (both huge mountains to climb), or some sort of anti-politics UKIP type surge, perhaps following on the back of another financial crisis. Neither has high probability, but then our own strategy of waiting for balance of power and then using this to achieve change is now a busted flush.
To help it gain traction and marginalise the main argument against it, we need to talk up the benefit of larger multi-member constituencies. Gone are the days when people live and work within the bounds of their present day constituencies. We mostly live sub-regional lives and are affected by what happens in those wider areas. The idea of MPs from different parties working together at local level and, of course, the chance of a, still, local MP that represents your opinions.
I agree with the sentiment of this article. The progressive parties need to come together and find common ground on a new constitutional settlement for the UK, which includes PR and a federal structure. We need to thrash out a common position with the Greens, the SNP, Labour (this is the most important) and maybe even UKIP.
There is absolutely no traction in working with the Tories in any way for the whole of this parliament.
There is nowhere even close to a majority in parliament for electoral reform now. Any pressure for this has to come from outside parliament, in which case it is better done through existing charities and lobbying organisations, of which there are many, rather than a political party. You risk becoming a single or few issue campaigning party on something that the vast majority of voters do not see as a priority. That is not a viable route back to parliament.
Ian @ A lot of people are hoping the Lib Dems become more enlightened to be frank.
There’s a lot of the harmful baggage the now wiped out leadership accrued .
Their support of regressive policies, ones that have harmed people so much over the last five years means nothing ?
The party has been nearly wiped out. It does not have the luxury of high mindedness when looking to the future.
Ian, who says we can’t do both? Labour becoming more minded toward reform would make an alliance more powerful, not less.
An alliance would be a faction formed in the spirit of cooperation, rather than out of fear. It would ve a positive message backed by a clear world view from constituency to constituency. It would combine the resources of all the minor parties.
And the next time a hung parliament looks likely we can say “hell yeah we’re ARD enough.”
@William Hobhouse
“There is absolutely no traction in working with the Tories in any way for the whole of this parliament.”
Thankfully we are now on the opposition benches, which is where I wanted us to be post-May 2015. I just wish there were more of us there.
On that basis I’m wondering why anyone would think we would be working with the Tories in any way in Parliament.
Seriously guys, like you I think electoral reform is important, but it’s not a vote winner, it’s a technical concern indulged in by those lucky enough not to worry about jobs, income or public services.
If all the Lib Dems now stand for is electoral reform and changes to the parliamentary system then you don’t have a party, you have a pressure group.
Yes, this is a new opportunity for electoral reform.
Since the election I have been watching this place, looking out to see if this party starts acting like a liberal party, and here you are doing it.
Never again Labour alone with the country’s money.
Never again the Conservatives dominating the entire UK from just the south east of England.
If a party can get 4 million votes they should get more than the 1 MP. I made this point for the Liberal Democrats at times when their vote share was higher than it is this week, and now I am saying for a party I don’t agree with about much.
Even some enlightened Tories (e.g. Lord Ashcroft) can see that this result is manifestly unjust and FPTP has had its day. So we should look even in the unlikeliest of places for support on this.
I think it’s doable – and I say that as one of those people who declared the matter closed for a generation after the debacle of the AV referendum. When seven and a half million Lib Dem/UKIP/Green voters have only ten MPs to show for their votes, FPTP is indefensible.
Everybody needs to work together on this – which sounds like a rather bland statement, but it’s easier said than done. One of the things that did for the Yes to AV cause was the procedural squabble in Parliament that set the Lib Dems and Labour against each other right from the off. Even four years later, arguments still surface on LDV from time to time about who was to blame for that.
People need to feel rage about the election result and convert that in to positive action. It seems easy enough for people to do that over trivial issues like page 3 girls – we need the same level of ongoing commitment to this.
It’s just a shame that Clegg’s disastrous decision to have an AV referendum rather than the commission Cameron offered in 2010 has now set a precedent for referendums on this issue. That makes it doubly hard, because the Tory media will fight tooth and nail to preserve the status quo – and we’ve just seen how effective they can be at that.
I’m sorry but political reform, at least of the type that we mean by reform, isn’t going to happen…..We are irrelevant to the Labour party (and the SNP) and have (hopefully) too little in common with UKIP, to make any thought of ‘alliances’ a pointless exercise….
We need to set our own house in order, rediscover our values from the grassroots up and start to rebuild the party…..If people can’t see that ‘being in government’ was a poison chalice then I despair…..Before we became ‘a party of government’ we were’ a party of local government’ and, at least to my mind, the loss of many hundreds of councillors (who made a real difference in the day to day running of our services, etc.) was a far bigger disaster than losing many of our MPs….
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I agree with Simon Shaw.
Simon Shaw 9th May ’15 – 9:55am
Well I said as much before the election, we needed to build a bloc of minor parties for political reform, instead we had kamikaze Clegg ruling out working with UKIP, the SNP, The Greens, Plaid, etc etc and warning of the danger of coalition !
The key factor is now the Labour Party, Chuka Umunna a possible leadership contender has spoken of the broken electoral system. In terms of position, Labour is back in 1983, the Tories will now change the boundaries and reduce the number of MPs particularly from Scotland, costing Labour another 20-30 seats. See
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/11593496/New-Commons-boundaries-top-Conservative-government-agenda.html
It took Labour 14 years to get back into Government after 1983, they can either wait that long, or they can undermine the legitimacy of the Tory Government by saying MPs representing 60% of the voters support changing the electoral system.
As Lib Dems we have a huge challenge in the next Euro-elections, we can make progress BUT we must for the first time fight a European election campaign based on real issues and real principles.
Expats – you are right. You can see the Daily Poison Headline “Lib Dems seek new way to weedle their way back into power.” Neither Labour nor the Cons will ever support it and we have lost everything we have built over the last 50 years. Starting again means building strength on the inside, achieving small wins rather than grand failures and being much more understanding with each other. Liberals are naturally diverse. and just because I have come to a different conclusion to you, doesn’t make you a bad liberal, but possibly one in possession of more, different, better or maybe worse information or perhaps one whose judgement is different. Then we have the Democracy bit to decide what to do. The very things that were sadly jettisoned in our attempts to be “grown up in government.”
“All of us must now accept that our views cannot be represented in Parliament as it stands.”
I will choose to parse this as:
“We have niche sectional views that cannot appeal widely enough across the geographic and ideological divide to succeed in our adversarial political society. So rather than make liberalism into a creed that enjoys mass support, we’ll game the system so we can continue to obsess about things that the wider public don’t care about very much.”
Did i more or less capture the essence?
Couple of replies:
Becoming a part of a minor party pact would not preclude standing for liberal values. Our argument would be that we have our values, and want to represent our values, but that we can’t for the same reason that ukip, the greens, and the SNP can’t represent theirs. Immediately, we have a message that targets people in constituencies more aminabke to those views: we retain the support of those who share our values, and gain the likelihood of a hung parliament from seats going UKIP and green. This is tactical voting on a grand strategy scale, not a reform pressure group.
We also gain an objective vision of how we “betray” our electorate for power: last time, the tuition fees pledge was used by labour, the Tories, the NUS, and any other buger with an axe to grind against the lib dems and it stuck. This time, betrayal will be if the SNP, ukip, plaid, the greens, or lib dems go into power without winning proportional representation and a new election in exchange for some Tory or labour promise or other.
This is prohect: unite the protest vote, to be run alongside “vote liberal” where we can afford to win the liberal vote, with the advantage of not being run against by ukip and the greens: in fact, with their active support for a shared protest vote.
This is a national strategy, not a local one. We could still field and fight in council elections, and deploy those resources on behalf of our allies at election time.
“Your lib dem councillor says: vote green party for a say in your future!” A purely attack campaign: no need to defend anyone’s record, just make the big two look incredible, as we know they are.
The weak link is the SNP. They’ve already won their anti Tory objective, so why do anything other than encourage the English to vote labour, who they clearly prefer without needing to compete with?
I agree with this, and have said before that we need to hold our noses and reach out to Ukip and other parties. Labour may come round to this idea now that FPTP has stuffed them in Scotland. Chuka Umunna is pro PR.
But not standing candidates against pro-electoral reform candidates won’t happen. Tactical voting possibly.
To people who say “electoral reform is not a winner” – it’s what we believe in, so why shouldn’t we say it? We’ve moaned about how, under Clegg, we turned into ‘just another Westminster party’, flip-flopping and coming up with gimmicky policies aimed at swing voters, and we’ve seen the votes that Ukip and the SNP accrued from standing by their beliefs. We should be loud and proud about electoral reform – someone needs to be.
This is not very realistic. The closest we have ever got to a bit of electoral reform was the AV referendum and that turned out to be not close at all. Elements from the Conservatives and Labour might deliver a bit of idle chatter here of there, but experience shows that in one way or another they will resist change: as the two big power blocks they do this fairly easily; only stumbling a moment while concocting their specious arguments .
That does not mean that we have to give up, we need to provide a clear standpoint, which, on Lords reform, for what I assume were pragmatic reasons, we did not do. The opportunity is that a clear vision of a democratic government should help our cause and assert our Liberal identity, but we do not need to have to imagine that we are any nearer than we were five years ago.
In fact there is a very real danger that the Tories will go ahead with their plan to diminish democracy by reducing the number of seats, thereby rendering FPTP an even more blunt instrument and less amenable to anything ohter than a two party system.
@Martin
“In fact there is a very real danger that the Tories will go ahead with their plan to diminish democracy by reducing the number of seats, thereby rendering FPTP an even more blunt instrument”
Not quite accurate – that was a Tory/Lib Dem plan. There will be a few bad things happening this Parliament which will still have Lib Dem fingerprints on them.
If you asked the average person on the street is electoral reform is important to them you’d probably get a blank stare! The structural aspect of politics really isn’t of interest to most voters – they just want to know if there lives will be better after an election or not. It’s far too easy for the Tory press to whip up fear over minority governments, ineffective coalitions and an uncertain future. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that the public will want whatever you tell them to want.
The timing might be right. The people who voted UKIP and green are awake to the fact they’ve been denied their say: thevlesders of both parties have made announcements that have dropped the scales from the eyes of their supporters.
The SNP rejecting the English parties raises the question for labour: what constitutes legitimacy? They may settle on stv so that the SNP can’t say they are the voice of Scotland alone.
The Tories won on the back of our old seats. If UKIP, the lib dems, and the greens can take enough seats from the Tories and labour parliament could be made hung again. The compact would then force either labour or the Tories into a minority, or get one if them in to pass a few quick laws ratified by the pact in exchange for electoral reform and a new election. After all, whatever’s passed can soon be repealed.
There are more people and more parties than ever before who support the notion that our representatives are illigitmate, especially among my generation. The Tories are about to make themselves very unpopular, and the benefits might not all go to labour.
We should grab this chance while we have it. Its no good getting seats without getting a say.
jedibeeftrix 9th May ’15 – 10:42am
“All of us must now accept that our views cannot be represented in Parliament as it stands.”
“I will choose to parse this as:
We have niche sectional views that cannot appeal widely enough across the geographic and ideological divide to succeed in our adversarial political society. So rather than make liberalism into a creed that enjoys mass support, we’ll game the system so we can continue to obsess about things that the wider public don’t care about very much.
Did i more or less capture the essence?”
I would be interested to know if the membership does want the Party to be irrelevant to the vast majority of voters and to continue ‘to obsess about things that the wider public don’t care about very much’ or whether they would prefer it lived in the real world.
Given the parlous state of the Party – it seems to me essential that this question is answered asap – so that a clear direction can be taken by the new leader. There are unlikely to be many chances to ‘start again’ if the first choice is not right.
Let’s increase lib dems mass base – membership retention and new market penetration … i am a volunteer in the last elenctionsfrom the ethnic minority (Philippine communities).
@ John Roffey – “I would be interested to know if the membership does want the Party to be irrelevant to the vast majority of voters”
That is an excellent question. While I put my case rather abruptly i don’t mean it unkindly, but the party does now face a choice on where they want liberalism to be looking toward in ten years time:
1. Continueing with 40 seats scattered around the country in those rare places where a majority of odd-bods congregate.
2. The prospect of 160 seats as an aggressive and vibrant left wing party starts eating into the corpse of the labour party.
As I said back in 2012:
https://jedibeeftrix.wordpress.com/2012/09/16/lib-dem-day-of-reckoning-approaches-to-seize-the-rose-or-admire-from-afar/
“Are town council positions enough?
How they (the lib-dems), answer the first question rather depends on their interest in implementing policy in an adversarial electoral system vs acting like a pressure group and clapping politely when opponents occasionally occupy policy positions they hope to see enacted.
Your blogger has seen many lib-dems argue that the traditional left-right axis is irrelevant as politics is in fact much more more complicated than that, and in consequence how it is a mistake to be defined by your opponents. They are both absolutely right, and tragically wrong. Yes, anyone who has looked at the political compass knows there is more than a single axis to politics. This however is utterly irrelevant if your ideas don’t speak to the dilemmas of the age. The previous hundred years have been dominated by the left-right battle between capitalism and socialism………… And the off-tangent lib-dems were quite frankly irrelevant to the great questions of the day. Two poles competing to attract the greatest mass of public opinion, locked in visceral and adversarial conflict with each other. This is the way the British public understand politics, and to ignore that is to become a pressure group. What Labour achieved one hundred years ago was convincing the public that they represented a better pole to oppose capitalism than liberal ideology could provide. By the time this change had occurred union membership had passed seven million, half way to its mid century peak. By the time the next election arrives union membership will have sunk to seven million as it’s ideas seem ever less relevant to 21st century problems. The question is; are the lib-dems determined to convince the public that they, once again, are the most effective polar opposite to the Tories? Worrying about proportionality in the Commons is yesterday’s answer to the party’s marginal relevance in the face of the Labour movement, do you want success or the righteous purity of eternal opposition?
For the Lib-Dem’s the 2015 election is going to be horrible regardless, the parties of austerity government will suffer, and the opposition will naturally increase its support. This is inevitable. But Labour’s bounce won’t be sticky, it won’t be because of their stated positions, so for the Lib-Dem’s the focus must be on 2020”
We may now be looking at 2025 thanks to Coatzee Centrism, but the opportunity remains…
jedibeeftrix 9th May ’15 – 1:12pm
“We may now be looking at 2025 thanks to Coatzee Centrism, but the opportunity remains…”
What is for sure – there is a much greater opportunity for the Party to grow as a left of centre party than anywhere further right. Labour is hamstrung by the unions and other powerful internal groups – they are very vulnerable and are ripe for replacement by another party that has the gumption to see this is so.
With what has happened to Labour in Scotland, even they might now be persuaded of the benefits of PR. Also, I heard Ruth Davidson say that PR would be very good for Conservatives (in Scotland at least). So maybe if at least some members of the two main parties see the merits of change, it may be possible to start making progress.
Thanks everyone for the responses and discussion.
Just to respond to some points – it is true that there isn’t a majority in Parliament for electoral reform. But there are still as many MPs in Britain who aren’t from the Labour and Conservative duopoly – 56 SNPs, 1 UKIP, 1 Green and our 8 man rump. A loose alliance that tries to keep us from destroying what eachother have already built in the interests of securing one of our shared goals, and that critically allows us all to preserve our distinct identities, offers us the chance to build a blocking minority.
It may be that in ten years time however many of us, the Greens, UKIP and a strong Scottish majority of SNP MPs can say to a Labour Party that, yes, one or all of us may support your administration, and we each have things we would like to see. But, Mr Umunna, first we need to see that electoral reform you were enthusing about before. We should all be making that into a single shared red line, more than a shared platform.
If our strategy and reconstruction follows what Jedibeeftrix suggests and does result in a meteoric rise to prominence as the party of the left, that red line will be very easy to deliver on. But in a country where constituency boundaries are increasingly irrelevant to community and interests are shared over greater geographic space than before, any opportunity to improve representation should in my view be taken.
I’m sorry, but proportional representation is a policy designed in aid of the principle that democracy should be based on cooperation and compromise, not opposition and single party dictatorship. This is in aid of improving our whole culture by improving the quality of our politics.
Electoral reform should now happen. However, please try to build consensus on this. STV needs to be explained better than it has. The argument for a “more proportional system” is a compelling one.
Regards
We need to have PR but the ERS and others should stop their obsessing over STV. Unless STV was enacted with more than 5 or 6 MPs per seat it would still prove difficult for parties like the Greens and UKIP to win large numbers of seats under. I suggest the reason why the electoral reform movement has never gained much traction with the British public is because it too often comes across as a leftie ‘love in.’ Electoral reform has to be cause whereby supporters of BOTH ‘left-wing’ AND ‘Right-wing’ parties can feel their parties have a good chance of getting large numbers of MPs into the House of Commons. Otherwise, if a referendum were held on the issue it could fail to be voted for.
I suggest we follow what New Zealand did about this issue ie have a referendum to decide whether we really wish to dump FPTP and then another on what system we wish to have replace it.
Much as I would love to see electoral reform and more proportional representation, I think there is no chance of that now. Going into Coalition, the Lib Dems missed the opportunity to push for more than a referendum on a voting system that nobody really wanted, and in the long-term that might be our greatest regret.
First past the post has given the Tories a majority, and this will be reinforced by completing the boundary reform that Lib Dems in government helped start.
A referendum on EU membership, whatever the outcome, could remove UKIP’s raison d’etre and the injustice that FPTP brought to them will be forgotten as their voters return to the Conservative and Labour parties.
In England Labour will be the only serious alternative to Conservative, and FPTP suits both of them in a 2 party system. Similarly, in Scotland FPTP obviously suits SNP in Westminster elections and might continue to do so if a Labour resurrection makes Scotland a 2 party state.
Only the Greens and the Lib Dems, small in size and geographically spread thinly, will be crying out for PR.
As a Lib Dem supporter, proportional representation always seemed to be something of a holy grail and it appeared to come tantalisingly close in 2010, and amazingly in 2015 even closer right up until the exit poll was published at 10 pm on 7 May. It is sad to think that we can pinpoint so precisely the moment the nail was hammered into the coffin of that particular hope.
One of the beauties of politics is that you always get another go. Well, almost always.
I agree with theme of the article, but not on the process of reform.
Any calls for electoral reform have to be cross party but also be firmly understood and agreed upon outside of an election period. The public have rejected talk of coalitions, and seem to have no appetite for electoral reform. People are more concerned about putting bread on the table then the mechanisms by which the parties share power. However, there is genuine concern that peoples are voting for policies and viewpoints that are being ignored in parliament. That is the axe that needs to be ground.
We need to focus on our liberal values, as that is what will win elections under the current system. However we need to work with the Greens, UKIP, SNP and try and bring Labour round to an agreement on electoral reform in advance of the 2020 election (though that may be a bit optimistic!)
Sadly, the Tories and Labour will never agree to genuine electoral reform so where does that leave this country’s effectively disenfranchised citizens OF MILLIONS? The British Establishment won’t reform willingly. Sadly, perhaps the only way they will see sense is for people to engage in civil disobedience and/ or (sad though I am to say it) violence like the Suffragettes had to do.
Posting on a different thread has made me even more depressed about the failure to secure electoral reform.
In 2015, between them the coalition partners together won 339 seats with 44.8% of the votes. This was down from 363 seats with 59.1% of the votes in 2010. Despite the trumpeted victory of the Tories, essentially the voters rejected the 2010-15 government and ended up with an even worse version of it.
I presume people saw the article in the “Independent” showing what parliamentary seat distribution under PR would have looked like?
http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/heres-how-the-election-results-would-look-under-a-proportional-voting-system–gJenQmaW2gW
Many interesting facts: LDs not that short of what we had (51!), Greens on 24 and the Kippers on 82). What is very interesting, however, is that the overall outcome would not be that different: Conservative/KIpper Coalition with a wafer-thin majority and Cameron dependent on Farage (and it being hard to determine which hates the other more) with Europe of course easily Subject Number One and with the potential to split the Tories like a ripe melon (and with the prospect of that of course being enhanced to the n-th degree by having a Kipper cohort of 82 MPs already in place). Labour’s nose would be rubbed even further in it, however (199 seats versus 232) and so some regrouping of the Centre Left (reformed Labour + LDs + Greens + the Ken Clarkes, Damien Greens etc left among the Tories (as an ever–shrinking minority)) would in my view be inevitable .
If there is any appetite for a Constitutional Convention (doubtful but much better than the English votes nonsense)it might be included. Just don’t expect Lab or Tories to be keen on doing anything.
If we should learn anything from UKIP, it is that it is very possible to drive change without being in power.
If you proclaim what you believe in loud enough and long enough and there is coherence and principle to your argument you can shift the position of the big parties.
“g 9th May ’15 – 9:57am: electoral reform is … not a vote winner, it’s a technical concern ….”
Sure as eggs is eggs, bums on seats not votes is what counts in Parliament. For a minor party, NO electoral reform is a SEAT LOSER. EVERY TIME. NO electoral reform is a non-starter.
“If all the Lib Dems now stand for is electoral reform and changes to the parliamentary system then you don’t have a party, you have a pressure group.”
So what? A political party can be likened to a ‘pressure group’ with several issues, or just the one. For example, the Conservative Party is the party of the rich élite, or those who want to get rich. Everything else, ‘One nation Conservatism’ included is mere spin and decoration.
I’m not a LibDem, and not a supporter of PR either. So dismiss my views a biased if you like. But both you and my party (Labour) can benefit right now from listening to outside voices.
I’m confident the LibDems will be back. It’ll probably take time, though some guesses about that are exaggerated. I think you can get back into the balance of power business before all that long.
But what will not help you is if you just become “the PR party”. Voters for whom PR is a big deal already vote for you, and are the core LibDem vote that even came out for you this time. For most voters, banging on about PR would show you’re an irrelevant Westminster seminar party.
I don’t suggest you give up on PR. I know you believe in it (and, though you may deny this is part of its attraction, it’s also in your interests). But you need to rebuild primarily on the basis of socially relevant policies. When you were the only party wanting to raise taxes for the better off under Charles Kennedy, that worked for you. Opposing Iraq worked for you. Pupil premium was a good policy. Your recent push on mental health has been a good idea. It’s this stuff that might help you get PR, not the other way round.
I don’t think it’s about left versus right for you either. I think you can draw distinctive policies from all parts of your party, and the best thing you can do now is start working on some.
I wrote independently to my local Labour candidate this morning, suggesting that there be a couple of years of competitive campaigning, so that one of the progressive parties might inspire the public’s imagination. In each constituency, there can then be a Primary, whereby all the members of the respective local parties elect a standard bearer to take on the incumbent Tory, who then becomes PPC for his or her party, but supported by all the others. At election, he or she will campaign in his or her own party colours, but with a space to include a different colour reminding passers-by that this is done with other support. Of course, competitive campaigning can and should continue at local level, and the different parties’ positions can be put, even when in support of a rival party’s Parliamentary candidate.
A lot of people misunderstood the mechanics of the Alliance when I was campaigning for it in the 1980s, and eventually conventional thinking forced the merger. I felt it was a backward step, and led to the failure of the independence required within a Coalition, since everyone thought of the Liberal Democrats as just junior Tories. In the light of the SNP landslide in Scotland, and what their leader was saying during the 2015 campaign, it needs to be revisited.
I have explained elsewhere my idea of separating votes for party and candidate, and using the former to set the party’s elected MPs’ Voting Strength in the Commons, whenever there is a whipped division.
Mr Gardner, it is good to see you here. A number of us profited from your blog on the constitution. Pity that we shall never know if your views would have held sway. GOD seemed to deliberately stop one sentence short of agreeing with you and was never asked the follow-up question that might have revealed all.
We should reflect carefully on your advice today.
Might the Lib Dems consider joining forces with UKIP on PR? UKIP are making a big noise about that and people seem to be listening to them for now.
The question is whether we can trust labour: I don’t think we can. They split on AV, a policy they put forward, and vetoed lords reform on the basis that one hundred years wasn’t long enough to consider a measure they themselves have campaigned for since their inception.
Their whole attitude towards liberal democrats is basically one of patronising a younger brother who has some funny ideas. That we’ve taken such a beating for being too pragmatic in our dealings with the Tories means we’ve lost all bargaining power with labour in the event of coalition: we can’t exactly threaten to implode a second time.
Opting out of deals with either party until proportional representation is legislated for is the most principled stand we can take.
A blocking minority of radicals from the right, left, and liberal centre is an insurance policy against labour reneging on their commitment to democracy again.
This is a great time for an alliance: there is room in British politics for two extremes and a centre party in a way there wasn’t for the liberals and SDP. If the big two can be denied a majority, we can force them into legislating for a genuine democracy.