Everyone with even a passing interest in politics now seems to have an opinion about what went wrong for Labour. No one bothers to speculate on why the Liberal Democrats crashed so spectacularly. It’s all too obvious. They behaved like arrogant fools, spreading themselves thinly around the top echelons of the government and going on telly to justify the most difficult parts of coalition policy whenever they could.
For that, they thought we’d all be grateful and admiring. But the Lib Dems just looked opportunistic, power-hungry and naive. Every time I saw that ghastly quote the Lib Dems came up with for this election campaign, about giving the Tories a heart and Labour a brain, I winced and thought: you haven’t learned a thing. Can they learn though? Or are they a spent force?
As a former Liberal Democrat member, who left not because of the coalition itself, but because of the manner of the coalition, I’m horrified that what was the UK’s largest unambiguously social democrat party has become a marginal party. The SNP is Britain’s third party now, and its only to be expected that we’ll be hearing a lot more from them now, and a lot less from the Lib Dems.
But, oh, the irony. As more and more people become aware of the need for proportional representation, the UK party that has been arguing for it for decades is all but gone. What’s more, because of their silly agreement to a quick AV referendum, champions of first-past-the-post feel, quite erroneously, feel able to insist that the public has no interest in any kind of electoral reform.
As for the Iraq war, the war the Lib Dems stood against, the war that has made the Middle East into a vast zone of horror, it was in the interests of both the Tories and Labour to not mention it. This was Britain’s Fawlty Towers election. It was quite something, knowing that if there’s one thing in the world that needs to be talked about, it’s world affairs, but that Britain is obsessed only with itself.
Can the Lib Dems still seize some credit for their time in government? Will their positive influence become more clear now that it is absent? Or will we all get as bored with hearing the Lib Dems pointing this out, as we did with hearing them bang on about the pupil premium? The Lib Dems will be thinking as hard as Labour about where they should go and what they should do now. I wish them every success in their endeavours.
