Lib Dems must revive Gladstone’s glory days
Moderate voters who are fleeing the Conservatives need a party that bridges the Left/right divide
This is a One Nation Government and this is a One Nation party,” Sajid Javid, the Chancellor, insisted when framing this week’s spending review, which, “grubby electioneering” or not, begins to reverse the penny-pinching “austerity” of the last 10 years.
We live in an age of political mendacity, so the claim to One Nation Toryism at a time when the party is deselecting more than 20 of its centre-right, parliamentary moderates, the Prime Minister’s brother is quitting in despair, and the leader of the Scottish Tories has already flounced out, shouldn’t altogether surprise. The irony seemed entirely lost on Mr Javid.
However tempting as political messaging the One Nation brand might be, its credibility is shot to bits when the likes of Kenneth Clarke, the very embodiment of the One Nation idea, are in the process of being purged from the party. The Tories are
giving up one constituency for another: their moderates for the nationalist priorities of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. Boris Johnson is deluding himself if he thinks that once Brexit is done, he can take the Tory party back to some kind of non-ideological centre ground. Though he may not yet know it, he’s already a captive of the new political order.
In any case, the long-awaited realignment of the British party political system seems at last to be upon us. The biggest benefactors from the schism won’t be Labour, which on its present trajectory is destined eventually to become little more than an irrelevance, but the Lib Dems. To seize this opportunity, they must ditch some of their more overt Left-wing thinking and return to the principles that made the Liberal Party such a commanding political force in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The modern Conservative Party is essentially a marriage of old-fashioned Toryism and laissez-faire liberalism, just as the Liberal Party in its heyday was a mix of free-trade thinking and radical, social reformism. In their decline, the Liberals lost their freemarket wing to the Tories, and with a widened franchise, their socially minded attitude to a rising Labour Party. The Lib Dems now have the chance to reunite these defining elements of the old Liberal Party.
There is no longer any place, it would seem, for the weathered pragmatist, in today’s Conservative Party. There appears, indeed, to be no place either for the 48 per cent who voted Remain, and perhaps even large elements of the considerable majority which polls indicate are opposed to a no-deal Brexit. Many of these voters are essentially disfranchised.
As a financial and business journalist, I admittedly move in quite rarefied, elitist, dare I say “establishment”, circles, so my straw poll cannot in any way be seen as representative. But I have lost count of the number of one-time lifelong Conservative supporters who have of late told me that they can never vote Tory again, so dismayed are they with the direction of the Conservative leadership.
Routinely and ridiculously referred to as the “metropolitan elite” – as if those masquerading as the voice of the people in championing Brexit are not themselves from the elites – these voters require a new home, but it is scarcely likely to be Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.
Some of them will have bought into Johnson’s strategy. I would include in this category the likes of Michael Spencer, the financier and former Tory Party treasurer. He was a Remainer and Cameron supporter, but now he just wants to get Brexit over with, and rightly thinks Boris is the only person capable of getting it done.
Yet it is a brave assumption that normal business will be resumed the moment all this is over, and that the Tories, in the spirit of reconciliation, will simply re-establish their position on the non-ideological centre-right. The wounds are deep and won’t easily heal.
For the political realignment we are seeing is not just about Brexit. The new partisanship is as much a cultural as an economic and social phenomenon. Traditional boundaries between Left and Right are breaking down. One-time fiscal hawks have become magic money tree spendthrifts, with some of the ideas of the Left being incorporated on the Right. It’s all getting mixed up.
We see this perhaps most overtly in the growing influence in Eurosceptic circles of one-time Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) luminaries, including Munira Mirza, head of the Number 10 policy unit, and Claire Fox, a leading light in the Brexit Party. The RCP was a small Trotskyist group that bizarrely transmogrified into a libertarian think tank, an example, if there ever was one, of moving so far to the Left that eventually the Right is met coming in the other direction.
Those of us who cry out for the stability and predictability of the progressively minded centre-right are unlikely to want to throw in our lot with these forces. But a return to the glory days of Gladstone, Asquith and even Lloyd George, when the Liberal Party seemed effortlessly to bridge the Left/right divide – now there’s a thought.
read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion