Skip to main content

Curate's Egg... So Far


Well, let's not kid ourselves, it was another pretty gruesome night for the Liberal Democrats. 

 Yet although losses in Kingston, Cambridge, Portsmouth, and Haringey are all painful (with, doubtless more to come, as I write), the fact is that the Lib Dems actually do have a few gleams of comfort amongst the ash. Although these gleams come not so much in the results, but in the implications of the results. 

 The surge in UKIP support this time is creating problems across the board for both Labour and the Conservatives. In fact Labour must be deeply concerned that they are not hitting as many of their targets as they did in the last round of voting. So although a pretty horrible night for so many Lib Dems, the fact is that in relative terms our pain is not so severe as it has been.  So far, based on these results, we can begin to see the floor of Lib Dem support, and that floor may yet allow the party to defy predictions and play king-maker again in 2015. There is still the prospect of a no-overall-control Parliament, and with a bloc of 40+ seats, the party may yet have a decisive role to play- which has certainly not been the view for some time now.

 I firmly believe that a fair minded analysis will reveal that the Liberal Democrats have played a genuinely positive role in government, and do not deserve the vituperation that has come at them from the media and their political opponents. However, we still have to get through the European count before we know the full level of the damage this time round. We are braced for a wipeout, and even a good result would still see the party lose half of its MEPs. I will write further on where the party can go from here, once all the results are finally in on Sunday or Monday.    
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Post Truth and Justice

The past decade has seen the rise of so-called "post truth" politics.  Instead of mere misrepresentation of facts to serve an argument, political figures began to put forward arguments which denied easily provable facts, and then blustered and browbeat those who pointed out the lie.  The political class was able to get away with "post truth" positions because the infrastructure that reported their activity has been suborned directly into the process. In short, the media abandoned long-cherished traditions of objectivity and began a slow slide into undeclared bias and partisanship.  The "fourth estate" was always a key piece of how democratic societies worked, since the press, and later the broadcast media could shape opinion by the way they reported on the political process. As a result there has never been a golden age of objective media, but nevertheless individual reporters acquired better or worse reputations for the quality of their reporting and ...
1 comment
Read more

The Will of the People

Many of the most criminal political minds of the past generations have claimed to be an expression of the "will of the people"... The will of the people, that is, as interpreted by themselves. Most authoritarian rulers: Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, have called referendums in order to claim some spurious popular support for the actions they had already determined upon. The problem with the June 2016 European Union was that the question was actually insufficiently clear. To leave the EU was actually a vast set of choices, not one specific choice. Danial Hannan, once of faces of Vote Leave was quite clear that leaving the EU did NOT mean leaving the Single Market:    “There is a free trade zone stretching all the way from Iceland to the Russian border. We will still be part of it after we Vote Leave.” He declared: “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market.” The problem was that this relatively moderate position was almost immediately ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...
20 comments
Read more