Note to Lib Dem Parliamentarians: We Are Not Stupid. Please stop treating us like we are.

[miss_s_b]

As is my wont on a Saturday morning, I am listening to The Week in Westminster. One of the items they have had on it was about rumblings of discontent in the party that we are not having enough influence on the coalition. Stephen Gilbert, of the whip's office, tried to counter this by listing policies which we have had influence on which are currently being enacted... and the first one he came up with was also a Tory policy.

HOW FUCKING STUPID DO YOU THINK WE ARE?

The thing about being a Lib Dem is that you have to fight tooth and nail for every vote, and the thing about fighting tooth and nail for every vote is that you know the manifestos of your oppponents as well as you know your own. HOW DARE YOU try to hoodwink us? How dare you try to spin doctor those of us who campaigned like hell to get YOU elected?

Sandra Gidley was right, you cannot ignore the rumblings of discontent from within the party, or dismiss it by telling us we are not being grown up. I was one of those who voted enthusiastically for the coalition, I am fully aware that coalition involves compromise, but compromise, to my mind, does NOT involve pretending to be ecstatically happy about a desperate fudge that nobody actually wants (AV), and nor does it involve being an uncritical fawning abused partner in a marriage with very unequal power footings. I've seen where that leads, thank you, and I'm not going to participate enthusiastically in the macro version.

If you keep trying to dismiss and ignore the feelings of the grassroots of the party, you are going to reap a whirlwind in Liverpool, you smug, arrogant, dismissive tosser. And that's a long time before we get wiped out at the next election, which it's looking more and more like we will...

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Comments

[burkesworks]

I'm waiting for the glorious day when the party splits into market-liberal and social-liberal factions, as has happened in the Netherlands. I would give my eye teeth to join a party along the same lines as that country's D66, possibly with Charles Kennedy at the helm, and I dare say there are many LibDems who would cheerfully join me on board.

[andrewhickey.info]

I don't think market-liberal vs social-liberal is necessarily the split we want to see - Mat is more 'market-liberal' for example, but definitely on the 'left'. I want a three-way split, "Liberal Tories", "Liberal Social Democrats" and "Chomsky-type Anarcho-syndicalist sorts". I'd probably join the third, going for the second only if the third in turn splintered into a million pieces.

And of course even AV gives far more chance of that pluralist type of politics happening, which is why I'm more enthusiastic about it than Jennie, even though we *need* to keep pushing for STV if/when we get it...

[scarier.wordpress.com]

I'll be with you in the third party, Andrew. Although if we split three ways, that would leave none of the resulting parties in an especially good position to do anything...

[andrewhickey.info]

If we get a *decent* voting system (or even a half-decent one like AV) we can expect to see all the parties splinter. I would expect that within two elections we'd see something like:
The Right-Wing Headbanging Loony Party (most backbench Tories plus UKIP and some BNPers)
The Liberal Tories (the CameronandClegg party, effectively)
The Libertarians
The Liberal Social Democrats (incorporating most of the activists from the Lib Dems, a handful of the better Labour people like Diane Abbot, and the saner Greens)
The Chomskyites (incorporating another chunk of the Lib Dems and maybe some odd people from some of the Greens, hard left parties, Pirates and so on, the odd buggers, basically)
The Nats
The Hard Left (insane Greens, SWP and fellow travellers)
New Labour wouldn't exist at all, as I don't think there's actually a support base for slightly-right-of-centre economics/incredibly socially authoritarianism.

We could expect at any time to have a coalition consisting of four of those parties in government. My favoured choice would be Chomskyite & Lib Soc Dem working with any other two except right-wing headbangers.

That's what I *think* will happen, anyway.

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, I didn't realise we were playing "Predict The Lay of the Land When The Dust Settles Following A Move To PR". That's one of my favourite speculative games!

In which case, yes, I mostly agree with you, although my general idea of what would happen seems less splintered than yours. I completely agree about the non-existence of a support base for the "New Labour" tendency. I guess my inclination is to try to work from existing parties, since that's what we'd start with, even if they inevitable fell apart shortly afterwards.

My own thoughts run something like this:

Tories see mass defections to UKIP, who turn into a more general purpose swivel-eyed loony right party, as you suggest.
The remaining Tory party is a sort of centre-right, socially liberal, market-driven entity, probably sufficiently zealous in its economic liberalism to attract most Libertarians now the authoritarian wing of the party has gone away.
The Labour party falls apart into Old Labour and New Labour.
The Lib Dems split, with some going off to the remaining Tory party. The rest reform the SDP.
New Labour quickly withers and dies. Some of them join the SDP, some join the remaining Tories.
The Greens still exist, and not much changes with them, but they lose some of their less environmentally motivated members to other parties.
Similar with the Nats.
The BNP continues, almost identical to what it is today.

Where I part company with your list, therefore, is in the existence of separate Libertarian and Chomskyite parties; not because they don't deserve to exist, but because I don't see there being sufficient momentum for those things to come out the other end of the upheaval that our politics would have to go through - I don't see who the natural leaders that they coalesce around are.

My suspicion is therefore that we'd have:

UKIP
Liberal Tories
SDP
Old Labour
Greens
Nats
BNP

With pretty natural left and right governing blocs fairly easy to see from that list.

I hope we get to see who's right one day, and I hope I'm wrong, cuz your version would be much more interesting.

[scarier.wordpress.com]

Oops, that was me above.

[lizw]

I hope we don't split at all. I'm way out on the left of the party according to all the compass-type tests, but I've yet to meet any member with whom I don't have enough common ground to share a party.

[andrewhickey.info]

Oh, I'm the same - I can happily share a party with every Lib Dem I know - but I think the natural size of parties should be a lot smaller than they are now, and work together after election. I'd imagine that if the Lib Dems did split in a post-PR situation, all the constituent parts would work together in a near-permanent voting bloc, but it would allow people to vote for a 'social liberal' or 'economic liberal' or whatever more accurately than they can now...

[matgb]

the party splits into market-liberal and social-liberal factions

But where would that leave those of us that are both?

SRSLY, I really dislike that analysis, I'm a liberal. The whole "market liberal" thing annoys me, liberalism is about competetive markets, it's the only way to drive profits down, break up the monopolists and hurt the capitalists.

Got to remove the barriers to entry, that's the biggest problem.

The real split should be mutualists vs capitalists, there's space for both within liberalism, if we're talking economic liberalism. If you're not a political or social liberal (with social meaning 'personal life' not social democracy) then you should be in the party in the first place. I can handle "not as liberal as me" on that stuff (like Vince), but...

[miss_s_b]

This.