Cicero's Songs

Tim Farron has, famously, compared the resilience of the Liberal Democrats in the face of discouragement to the supposed indestructibility of cockroaches even after nuclear war. Paddy Ashdown too, often praises the strength of will of the activists of the party. In the face of the worst general election result in more than half a century, the surge in membership applications for the Liberal Democrats is a small sign of optimism after the disaster. Yet the scale of defeat is so large that to rebuild in any conventional way will take many decades. Indeed, with the significant economic, social and demographic changes underway in British society, the grim truth is that a recovery in the fortunes of the Liberal Democrats may not be possible at all. Meanwhile all of us are working through the stages of grief that this defeat has caused us. The lessons of both the coalition and the general election are slowly emerging from the smoke of disaster, and the first lesson is that this defeat, ...

In the course of the mid twentieth century the Liberal Party, that great organ of the Victorian state was destroyed. In his 1935 book, "The Strange Death of Liberal England" , George Dangerfield analysed the course of social and political change that had altered the course of the country and in the process destroyed the Liberal Party. Of course the factors that lead to the Liberal eclipse were both long and short term, and as a work of history the book is a commentary on a whole raft of social and political evolution. From the 1960s onward, the Liberal Party began to recover. It established itself as a party of protest, of practical pavement politics, and from this niche it made steady progress up until the 2005 election. The impact of the vote against the Iraq war moved the party into a new position as a radical conscience, as it had been during the Boer War, which created the conditions for the Liberal landslide of 1906. In 2010, however, the party did not achieve a lands...