For Fox Sake, Call This Politics? That's Scandalous

Neither the idiot-abroad UK defence secretary nor scandal-mongering critics seem able to separate important public issues from personal sleaze.

There are, apparently, still a lot of ‘unanswered questions’ about the precise details of the Fox affair, involving UK defence secretary Liam Fox, his man-friend Adam Werritty and some murky meetings at the ministry and with foreign dignitaries. So, here are a few more to add to the list.










How could an allegedly senior Tory statesman be so unworldly and moronic as to imagine that it would be alright to take his bestest friend along on diplomatic jaunts pretending to be an official adviser, as if they were two little boys playing ministers and aides? And then to imagine, rather like that rugby-playing royal lackey, that if he simply denied it all, the video evidence would just go away?

On the other hand, the question is: how could the Labour opposition be so pathetic as to imagine that the way to criticise the Tory defence secretary is not to attack the international policies he is pursuing, but to trawl through his diary and Google photos for evidence of meetings with his chum at the MoD and elsewhere? Don’t they know there’s a directionless, disastrous war on – in fact two, in Afghanistan and Libya – with Fox as defence secretary in the political frontline? Did it never occur to the spineless Labour Fox-hunters that attacking the conduct of those foreign adventures might be more important than tracking his jollies around the world?

One possible answer for all these questions emerged when Fox, having insisted that he had done nothing wrong, came forward over the weekend to issue a half-hearted apology for, umm, doing nothing wrong but allowing others to imagine that he might have done. The defence secretary’s statement began by acknowledging that he had mistakenly allowed ‘distinctions to be blurred’ between his professional and personal affairs. Or as Conservative prime minister David Cameron put it, in attempting to defend his defence secretary on the TV news yesterday morning, ‘the personal and the political had become too entwined’.

Truer than they imagine, those statements describe not just Fox and his shenanigans with Werritty, but the entire British political class and its conduct today. Across the board, the line has become blurred between the proper public-political sphere and the sphere where things are private and personal, with damaging effects for both. This can help to explain both Fox’s bizarre antics and the opposition’s shrill reactions to them.

Spiked has often commented on the trend for public bodies and authorities to interfere in private matters, most recently through the politics of ‘nudge’. The flipside of this is the way that private and personal concerns have often come to dominate public debate.

As the horizons of political vision and debate have shrunk, public figures have come to stand not on their beliefs, but on their personal behaviour, PR image and ‘character’. Sleaze and scandal have replaced politics, with politicians more likely to be judged on their expense returns and mortgage applications than election manifestoes. The slogan ‘the personal is political’, once the preserve of the feminist fringe, has gone mainstream. All parties and leaders now try to give the personal touch (whether we want it or not) and sell themselves on their alleged integrity rather than their ideas.

The Tories are far from immune from this erosion of the distinction between the public and the private. Even the death of Cameron’s disabled young son in 2009, a personal tragedy, was turned into a public event with political consequences. Parliamentary democracy was suspended for the day, some Tory commentators claimed that this experience would give opposition leader Cameron a special insight into running the health service, and the New Labour government worried over whether the media coverage of his bereavement might boost the Tories.

So perhaps it is not surprising that even somebody like Fox, supposedly a traditional Tory right-winger, should apparently have lost his bearings and all sense of where the public stops and the personal starts. His admitted failure to distinguish between his personal relationships and professional responsibilities is symptomatic of a wider loss of a proper sense of statesmanship in Whitehall, where British leaders these days seem to have trouble understanding that they are supposed to be serving a greater cause than their own advancement.

Of course past statesmen and diplomats have been involved in far bigger scandals than Fox’s mundane meetings with his best man, but they still tended to retain more of a sense of who and where they were in the world. In 1963 John Profumo, the Tory secretary of state for war (the equivalent of Fox’s post today), was infamously forced to resign after he was revealed to have lied about his relationship with a call girl who also had an affair with a Russian attaché. But one cannot quite imagine Profumo thinking it was reasonable to carry on his private liaisons over his desk at the ministry. Yet Fox imagined it would be okay for his chum to drop in at the MoD without security clearance when he liked, and tag along to meetings with foreign dignitaries and businessmen at home and abroad, as if the secretary of state were a parish councillor visiting old dears in draughty church halls.

So Fox looks like an idiot abroad who apparently does not know the difference between a former flatmate and a serving official. However, the way that this less-than-earth-shattering idiocy has been turned into the biggest story in politics is a sign that the opposition has little more idea of the proper relationship between the public and the personal.

Ever since Tony Blair launched New Labour on a crusade against Tory government sleaze in the mid-1990s, scandals and issues of personal probity have become the basic stuff of opposition politics in the UK. Lacking any political alternatives, opposition parties have retreated to personalised scandals. This culminated in the all-consuming scandal over MPs’ expenses, which benefited no party and should have taught them all that democratic politics will be the loser when debate is reduced to the swapping of scandalous and sordid allegations.

Yet here is Labour, having learnt nothing, trying to make allegations of personal sleaze a main plank of its attack on the Lib-Con coalition government. If the left wants to get Fox – widely seen as a standard-bearer for Thatcherism – there is no shortage of weapons to use against the defence secretary. Apart from the mishandling of the defence cuts, there is the small matter of two wars that should be opposed. Afghanistan has been a 10-year disaster, going nowhere slowly. Libya, despite the government’s recent bravado over its ‘triumph’, is a misguided mission that should never have been started and the end result of which remains unclear (see The barbarism of buffoons).

Yet this week, on the tenth anniversary of the launch of the failed US-UK Afghan invasion, Fox was having to dodge questions, not about all of the spurious justifications governments have offered for the war, but about his pal’s bogus business cards.

Of course Afghanistan was New Labour’s war in the first place. And in opposition the party has backed Cameron over Libya, sharing the government’s delusions in the ability of Western intervention to save the world. With a stale consensus on such big issues, political conflict can be reduced to the relatively petty public-personal morass.

Hence for the Fox-hunters, it’s a case of ‘Don’t mention the wars – take aim at his appointment books and wedding photos’.

The end game for Fox remains uncertain, and who cares either way? In proper political terms it does not matter much whether he stays or goes. The more important damage has been done by the elevation of this petty scandal into a national furore, reducing the scope and scale of public debate still further, and further blurring the political line between important public issues and inconsequential personal affairs.

This sort of thing can no longer be seen as a distraction from parliamentary politics. In the absence of anything of more substantial, scandals and scandal-mongering have become the real stuff of British political life. If this is allowed to carry on, the writing is surely on the fake business card for the future of meaningful democratic debate. Shoot the Fox if you want, but haven’t we got bigger wars to fight?

Ed Miliband Has Offered An Alternative – But Will Anyone Vote For It?

Miliband's indisputable leftward shift has put Labour at ease with itself but risks making the party less relevant than ever.












Ed Miliband hopes his vision, that he set out at conference, will connect with 'the country's wider shared values'.

Many years ago, I was walking down a street in London with a rising Labour politician. On a lamppost we caught sight of a poster advertising a SWP meeting. "Is there a socialist alternative to Kinnock?" the poster asked. "Yes, there is a socialist alternative," laughed Gordon Brown. "But the problem is that no one will vote for it."

Ed Miliband is certainly no Trotskyist. But his speech to the Labour conference in Liverpool this week is already raising some of the same questions that the old SWP poster did. For Miliband is gambling that there is an alternative to contemporary orthodoxy. He believes that the experience of financial collapse, public spending cuts and recessionary inequalities requires a resetting of the collective moral and economic compass. Crucially, he believes that the electorate can be persuaded to embrace it.

Miliband chose his words very carefully. Terms like socialism and capitalism do not appear in his speech. But they were implicit in it. Read in conjunction with the recent New Statesman article by Miliband's strategist Stewart Wood, this week's speech adds up to an attempt to reclaim social democracy as Labour's core route-finding principle. Cautious it may be – Wood sees Labour's aim as the creation of "a better capitalism", which won't please everyone in the Labour ranks – but the argument is put with clarity. It is indisputably a leftward shift from the New Labour years. It is also what Miliband has always wanted, which helps, sort of.

The large question now is whether Labour will succeed in shifting the national argument so that his version of social democracy stands at the centre of public debate. Miliband's conviction that it can is central to his entire leadership. It was embodied in the many sections of this week's speech that tried to connect Miliband's own vision with the country's wider shared values. If he succeeds in setting an agenda of market, welfare and community reforms that voters really want to and do believe in, then he may indeed reshape British politics. But if he fails, Labour's slide to the political margins will continue.

Less than three days after the speech, most of the reaction to it has already fallen into one of two camps. These strike me as too crude in both cases. On the one side there are those who welcome Miliband's commitment and think he can succeed – this was the general mood at Liverpool. On the other there are those who dismiss what Miliband said and think his approach is doomed to failure – which is what the Conservatives will undoubtedly say next week in Manchester.

In fact, the impact of Miliband's speech could be less straightforward than that. This is not an argument between a wholly laissez-faire approach and a wholly dirigiste one. In reality it is an argument about shifting the balance within a narrower set of priorities than those who insist on talking about the end of neoliberalism ever admit. Even so, this was one of the few party leader's speeches that may be remembered for longer than a week after it was given. Most of its actual phrases may already have gone down our mental chutes into the waters of oblivion. But it is quite likely that a lot of people will remember this as the moment when Miliband turned the party away from the New Labour orthodoxy that compromise with global markets is inevitable.

But there are turns and turns. To take an obvious example, which Miliband will have to address eventually, there is all the difference in the world between maintaining the coalition's tax and spending levels and committing to raise them. There is also a gulf between attacking economic predators and extolling producers, as Miliband did this week, and putting strict regulations in place to deny the former and promote the latter. And there is a massive difference between being a party of free trade, a principal that the left has always managed to embrace, and being a party of protection.

If he is dumb, Miliband may be tempted to do what the Tories would love him to do and promise to clamp down directly, almost certainly ineffectively and in all probability with unintended consequences, on morally indefensible excessive pay and bonuses. If he is smart, he will use the bully pulpit, as he did on Tuesday, at least as much as the tax system to encourage the better capitalism, and the better companies, to which he aspires.

The idea that there might be a workforce representative on remuneration committees caused outrage in the rightwing press this week, but it ought to be just the start, not to an expanded role for the unions, but for well-argued and flexible new models of workplace co-determination of the kind that have done so much for German companies.

The best news for Labour I heard in Liverpool is that Andrew Adonis is planning to focus on new thinking about industrial policy, a subject riddled with old ideas, especially in the unions, but which is crucial to any long-term reimagining of the UK economy. It does not follow that the left's traditional state-centred responses are the new centre ground just because people are outraged by the bankers and by indefensible wealth.

The experience of the last three years suggests public opinion has moved to the view that government deficits are part of the problem, rather than the solution. Thursday's vote in Germany and this week's budget in France were the latest reminders of that. Labour was canny about the economy this week: Ed Balls got the balance right in his speech. But parties of the left are losing ground across the world right now and Labour shouldn't imagine there is a magic moral bullet that will enable it to buck that trend.

Labour's move to the left can be, and has already been, exaggerated – by friend and foe alike. Yet it has been a significant declaration by the party nonetheless. The coalition parties will undoubtedly respond, and not merely with abuse and caricature. Expect surprise moves that try to undermine Labour claims to ethical uniqueness.

Electorally, the danger for Labour is that the party will have convinced itself that it has rediscovered its own sense of ethical virtue without persuading sceptical voters that it can run the economy. The party may be more at ease with itself but less relevant than ever. Miliband may want to see himself as the new Clem Attlee. But his ratings suggest that the voters still see him as the new George Lansbury – an unworldly leader and an electoral failure.

Lid Dem Conference: Portait Of A Party In Denial

Facing disastrous polls, stuck with an unpopular leader and short of star names, the Lib Dems should be panicking at their conference. So why does it feel like a holiday camp?












Nick Clegg on stage at the party conference.

Arriving at the Liberal Democrat conference at Birmingham's ICC on Monday, I'm confronted with a strange, becalmed atmosphere. At first I think everyone present is still in a state of shock, reeling from the double-pronged assault on the senses presented over the weekend by Hugh Grant's appearance and the minister of state for children and families' attempt at standup comedy, but it appears to be something else, a sort of blithe cheeriness.

I've never been to a party conference before and I've come expecting dissent. But apparently I've missed the boat: I should have been at the spring conference in Sheffield, when there were "a lot of angry people inside the conference and out", the latter group including 4,000 people marching in protest at the cuts. Now, the delegates at least are all pacified, convinced that a corner has been turned, that a line has been drawn under the tuition fees debacle, that public anger at the cuts is due to subside. The spirit of the party who in 1981 leapt to their feet, fleetingly convinced by David Steel's line about going home to their constituencies and preparing for government, is very much abroad.

The moment when a lone voice shouts: "Rubbish!" as Danny Alexander suggests Gordon Brown spent too much money turns out to be a dizzying pinnacle of insurrectionary excitement that the conference will never scale again. It's all glossy optimism, and woe betide anyone who attempts to suggest that said glossy optimism might be bordering on the delusional. A man from the BBC quotes a few poll figures at a Guardian Q&A panel, but no one wants to know. Someone bellows: "Did Miliband send you?" A woman seated behind me starts pretending to snore. "You're a miserable sod," snaps Lynne Featherstone, the equalities minister. Everyone cheers. The BBC man leaves.

My own search for dissent is equally fruitless. You would think that somewhere within the ICC lurked hand-wringing angst at the ongoing state of affairs, desperate to unburden itself to a representative of the press, but if it's there, I can't find it. I try Liberal Youth, surely at the sharp end of public displeasure thanks to the the spectre of tuition fees, something they continue to oppose. Nothing but visions of a bright future, in which Britain suddenly wakes up to the brakes put on Tory policy by the presence of the Lib Dems in the coalition and flocks to their bonded side.

So I try the people who look like party traditionalists, who are substantially easier to spot than some reports have suggested. One idea posited in the papers is that the very fabric of the party has changed, that the traditional beards-and-sandals Lib Dems have been displaced by the hard-nosed political operators in Heston Blumenthal specs. If you wanted to prove it, you could certainly get a shot of the delegates that doesn't feature anyone who looks like a Daily Telegraph cartoonist's idea of what a Lib Dems looks like, but you couldn't take it with a wide-angle lens, and you might have to crop it in Photoshop later. They're everywhere, the beards ranging from 50s jazz enthusiast to competitor in The Great Egg Race. Perhaps somewhere behind them lurks the simmering discontent conspicuous by its absence elsewhere. Perhaps not. They clearly like power – "before, you'd debate a policy at conference and think, well, the absolute best that's going to happen is that another party's going to nick that idea," offers one local councillor – and its trappings, or at least some of them. "There are a lot more lobbyists around conference these days," shudders one delegate, principles being something that are noticeably easier to keep when no one's interested in buying them. But for most part, even the lobbyists' baleful presence seems to be cancelled out by the positives, high among which ranks the preponderance of TV cameras and microphones. You can't walk far without overhearing someone expressing astonished delight at being canvassed for their opinions by the media: "I've been waylaid by Anglia TV!" cries one elderly gentleman.

The mood even seems to surprise Nick Clegg. "Heavens! What docility!" he says during a Q&A on Monday afternoon. "It's like a North Korean party conference." One theory is that it's all evidence of the redoubtable Lib Dem character, forged in endless adversity. You hear a lot about the time under Paddy Ashdown when Lib Dems were represented by an asterisk in the opinion polls: after taking into account the 3% margin of error, they were unable to say that the party had any discernible support at all. However bad the polls get, they've seen worse, even when the polls strongly suggest they haven't. Another is that they realise power is a temporary blip in a life of opposition and they're trying their best to relish it, which necessarily involves ignoring what's going to happen in three-and-a-half years' time.

The most prosaic answer is that a lot of delegates seem to view the conference as a kind of holiday. Like holidaymakers who've paid a lot of money to get away from it all – "more than £1,000, less than £2,000", suggests one delegate when I ask him how much it's cost him to be here; "more than a week in the south of France", offers another – they don't really care to be reminded of what's going on back home. "Do I wish that there was more robust debate?" frowns one local councillor. "No. I get enough of that on the doorstep."

And, if you wanted to relax, there are worse places to come than the Lib Dem conference, where it's frequently hard not to be lulled into a torpor by what's going on onstage. Part of the problem is that the Lib Dems are evidently in desperately short supply of stars. On Monday night, Vince Cable is booked to speak at three fringe meetings at exactly the same time. Outside, a jovial Brummie police officer approaches a gaggle of press photographers, apparently baffled at how they prosecute their business: "Have you lot got a Who's Who or something? I haven't got a clue who any of them are." His theory seems to be borne out when you visit the Liberal Image stall, where a Lib Dem hi-visibility jacket – something a cautious man might think twice about wearing in public – will set you back £14.50. There's a selection of badges available featuring the faces of the party's MPs: they seem to be doing a brisk trade in Welsh Lib Dem leader Kirsty Williams – "we've sold about 12" – but you'd defy anyone other than a party wonk to recognise most of the others.

But the real problem is that what stars they have are hopeless at public speaking. It's hard not to feel that party president Tim Farron's rise is predicated on possessing an identifiable personality, something almost everyone else who gets in front of a microphone seems to have been surgically deprived of. You can mock Nick Clegg's closing speech all you like, but it's like Alexander the Great's address at the battle of Issus next to the orations of Chris Huhne, a man who sounds like he's reading out the building's fire regulations even when he's quoting John Donne (he gives a speech quoting John Donne for the specific purpose of proving this). He gets a standing ovation at the end of it, which makes you marvel afresh at the dogged resilience of your average Lib Dem delegate. They're determined to be roused regardless of whether what's on offer is rousing or lethal.

Given the climate, you start to find yourself baffled as to why Sarah Teather's standup routine went down so badly. In fairness, her awful jokes were no more awful than anyone else's, and everybody else's seem to be greeted with widespread hysteria. Vince Cable tells one about bankers having their pants around their ankles, "showing us their assets – if they've got any". A woman two rows in front of me nearly dies laughing. Perhaps what Teather should have done was mention the bankers, which it quickly becomes apparent is the Lib Dem politician's equivalent of Peter Kaye saying "GARLIC BREAD?": no matter how many times you hear it, it always seems to get a round of applause.

The reliable arrival of banker gags aside nothing really seems to be happening. Journalists looking for something to report are reduced to making headlines out of the fact that Huhne is sorry about the effect that his affair had on his wife. But even at a Lib Dem conference where nothing appears to be happening, there's always the Glee Club, the ritual last night of conference knees-up. It's existence is – at last! – a matter of some controversy within the party. There are those who think it's part of a rich, glorious and idiosyncratic tribal tradition. There are those who clearly view its existence with profound embarrassment: "Lembit often MCs," says one local councillor, darkly. To the impartial observer, however, it simply represents an opportunity to have your mind repeatedly blown: if you thought the general air of positivity at the conference was a bit unreal, then the Glee Club is on hand to teach you that "unreal" is very much a relative concept. You don't even have to go to get the effect of being subject to an intense hallucinogenic experience. You just have to pick up the songbook, which is the best £3.50 you could spend at the Lib Dem conference, Liberal Image's enticing selection of badges featuring MPs notwithstanding.

For some reason, I'd expected it to largely consist of 19th-century political songs: The Land, stirring stuff about free trade and Gladstone. They're certainly present, but they're pretty much dealt with by page six. It's what's in the remaining 52 pages that knocks you sideways, not least when you get to the song about the coalition set to the tune of Making Your Mind Up by Bucks Fizz: "You gotta Lib it up and then you gotta Con it down, coz if you believe that our coalition can hit the top you've gotta play around."

By the time I arrive, Lembit Opik is very much in evidence, playing his mouth organ to a less dismayed reaction than you might expect. Some Welsh delegates favour the room with a rendition of Cwn Rhondda: if nothing else, it permanently punctures the myth of Wales as the land of song. Paddy Ashdown does a little standup routine. Tim Farron takes the stage and performs a comical version of That's Not My Name by the Ting Tings: "They call me Shirley, but I'm not a girlie." There has been some discussion at conference about the necessity for the Liberal Democrats to convince the British public that they're different from the other parties. If all else fails, they could always show them this. In the corner, a lobbyist looks on, wearing the kind of frozen, aghast expression that makes me think of the first-night audience at Springtime for Hitler in The Producers.

The next day, at a fringe meeting just before Nick Clegg's speech, the guy from Ipsos Mori lets them have it with both barrels. His Powerpoint presentation opens with a slide reading HOW DEEP IS THE HOLE?, but not all of it is as upbeat as that: if his news was any worse, he'd be wreathed in smoke and glowing green. Fifty-eight per cent of people who voted Liberal Democrat at the last election wouldn't again. A quarter of former supporters have swung to Labour. The Lib Dem voters that are left admire Margaret Thatcher. And, for the benefit of anyone who tends to the view that they've had worse, Nick Clegg is the least popular Lib Dem leader ever, beating a record David Steel has held since 1988 by 4%.

On and on it goes, until you wonder what Clegg can possibly say to lift their spirits – what price a new summer schools initiative and a few swings at Labour against the news that more than half your voters have deserted? – but they go bananas. Afterwards, I see one of the Liberal Youth activists, who's eager to tell me how encouraged he feels. The councillor who had more than enough robust debate on the doorstep is bucked, ready to face as much robust debate as the world can throw at her. Off they go, boundless optimism and Lembit's harmonica ringing in their ears.

Top 50 Most Influential Liberal Democrats 2011: The Rise Of The Left

The battle to succeed Clegg and left-wing dissent over the party's role in the Coalition is reflected in this year's list of most influencial Liberal Democrats.












Establishment rebel: Lib Dem president comes in at number three.












Rebellion in the air: for how long will Nick Clegg remain Britain's most powerful Liberal Democrat?












Sticking power: Chris Huhne has been dogged be accusations over his driving - but keeps his top five slot.

If the opinion polls prove accurate - the last three showed the Liberal Democrats on 10% - this might be the last time we can find enough elected Liberal Democrats to form a viable top 50. The stark reality they face, and the internal debate that is now raging, is reflected in the top ten.

There is the whiff of succession planning in the air. The resilience of Chris Huhne is also hanging around – down just one place despite a difficult year in his personal life. Those in, or close, to the Clegg Operation (as Liberal Democrats a little self-consciously call it) remain powerful - his Chief of Staff stays at five. There have been recent changes reflected here, but the conflict between the government and the internal opposition has become much more of an equal one over the year.

As one MP put it, the year has been “about the rise of the left”. Confidence in the party outside Westminster has grown even as polling numbers remained minimal. Liberal Democrats seem to have discovered that even in government the world does not end if you disagree. And this has given rise to a new breed of rebel, personified in Tim Fallon, Lib Dem President and the leading establishment rebel (up 31 places to number three).

The Liberal Democrats have learnt a great deal about coalition politics this year. It is unclear sometimes which are the sanctioned and which the unsanctioned rebellions. If Nick Clegg is eyeing an eventual move to Brussels - to replace Baroness Ashton - then this is informing the positioning that is taking place now.

The experience of government has also lead to a rather different set of discussions this year. There was much more talk about the hidden wiring of the political game. Names like Ben Williams, a fixer from the Whips Office were discussed - and while he did not make the cut, James Gurling, who is modernising the party’s electoral machine, comes in at 46. Also in at 35 comes James McGrory, the leader’s favourite spin doctor. Described by some as a cockney thug he is not your typical Liberal Democrat, but he has also been described as the best press officer in the business. The highest new entry at 26 is also from the inside of the machine: Julian Astle comes in to the Clegg machine and into the heart of government as the newly minted Deputy Head of Number 10 Policy Unit.

The Liberal Democrats who hold Cabinet positions and can therefore, in theory, shape policy have had a mixed record this year. The sharpest debate surrounds Danny Alexander. He survives at number two because of his status as part of the mixed doubles Quad – Cameron and Clegg, Osborne and Alexander. But he has also been described as being dead in the party. Vince Cable, still hugely popular in the party, also slips down a little (three places to seven) and opinion is sharply divided on the extent to which he is a busted flush. Further down the food chain, junior ministers have struggled to make a mark and some have slipped back – for example Michael Moore but others have done obviously better, like Steve Webb, up two as Minister of State for Pensions. It depends on the extent to which they have delivered what is grandly referred as the Liberal Democratic Agenda in Government.

The discussion on Ministers vs the Party is reflected over and over again in this list. Does the party hate Danny Alexander because he is competent? Would they love him if he held the same post – they love to have Cabinet Ministers after all - but was utterly incompetent and ineffective in fulfilling his brief? One gets the impression that many of them would feel better, a little more like themselves, in these circumstances.

In the past when Liberals have formed coalition governments with the Conservatives, the ministers have tended to go native and be absorbed into the Conservative Party. Alexander matters while he holds office. The impression is that when the government ends so does his career in the Liberal Democrats. Any safe Tory seats going?

The big gainers, overall, have been from the left and it is here that the succession planning is really going on. Simon Hughes stays securely at sixth and Evan Harris is up 14 places to ten. Shirley Williams has campaigned across the board but especially on the NHS and is up 13 places to twelve. Brian Paddick pops in on the strength of the nomination to contest for Mayor of London and Caroline Pidgeon, Leader of the Greater London Assembly Liberals, squeaks in at 49 - one of a very few local government people to make it in on to the list. The party in the country, where it has clung on to power at local level, has had a quiet year.

Even though the left has made noise, the Liberal Democrats remain too fond of being in power to walk away from Clegg’s great gamble just yet. But the sound that we can hear this year from Liberal Democratic left, even up to the President of the Party, on the back benches and in the council groups that survive, is the sound of burying weapons for the battle of succession to come. The trouble is at 10% there might not be much left for Tim Fallon or A. N. Other, to inherit from the Cleggster.

Cameron Is Railroading His NHS Bill Through Parliament

After a political fix with Nick Clegg, Cameron is denying MPs their constitutional role to scrutinise this waste-ridden legislation.












David Cameron and Nick Clegg meet nurses and doctors at Guys Hospital in London.

After a politically turbulent summer, coalition MPs might have been hoping for a quiet first week back in Westminster. But as Save the NHS protests and vigils are held across the country, the House of Commons begins two days of crucial debates on the hugely unpopular health and social care bill.

Despite the unprecedented pause and the NHS Future Forum's demolition job of the bill, the chorus of criticism has grown again as doctors, nurses, patient groups and health experts have digested the detail of the reorganised reorganisation and concluded that the government is failing to properly safeguard the NHS.

During and after the so-called listening exercise, David Cameron made much of his willingness to pause, listen and reflect. Nick Clegg, meanwhile, boasted of major concessions to the original plans – plans he himself had signed off last year. In reality, what happened in June was a political fix, more concerned with the future health of the coalition than the future of the NHS, and a fix that has acted as a smokescreen around the detail of the repackaged bill.

The changes to the bill have left it more complex, more costly and less likely to help the NHS change to meet the financial and service challenges it faces. Meanwhile, many essential elements of the long-term Tory agenda – to break up the NHS and set it up as full-scale market – remain in place and need further challenge.

The revised bill will mean more bureaucracy, more complexity, more cost and more waste. It creates at least five new national bodies to manage the NHS, centralising power into unelected bodies. Having promised to "abolish the bureaucracy", the government is trebling the number of statutory commissioning bodies from 163 to over 500.

The scale of change reflects the Tories' long-term plan to set up the NHS as a full-scale market and break up the NHS as a national public service, with patients seeing the services on which they depend subject to the lottery of where they live.

The government's response to the NHS Future Forum promised that the role of the secretary of state in providing the health service, established since 1946, would be restored. However the key wording of the founding act is still changed. Legal analysis commissioned by 38 Degrees confirms what Labour has argued: that the national duties of provision will be weakened and broken up.

Monitor, meanwhile, remains an economic regulator with the power to enforce competition law, fine hospitals 10% of their turnover, or direct commissioners to open up all services to competitive tender.

Far from getting on with real reform in the NHS, we have had a wasted year of chaos and confusion, which is set to drag on as the government forces through the biggest reorganisation in NHS history. £850m will be spent on redundancies, while 2% of PCTs' budgets, almost £2bn, is being held back from patient care to cover the costs and risks of the reorganisation.

All of this is taking place at a time when NHS finances are being squeezed and when all efforts should be dedicated to making sound efficiencies and improving services. It is high cost and high risk, and Labour continues to believe that many of the changes the NHS must make could largely be achieved without legislation and huge internal reorganisation.

Having done his political fix with Clegg, Cameron is now railroading his bill through parliament with a procedural fix. Limited time for debate and the lack of a new impact assessment means that MPs are being denied their constitutional role to properly scrutinise his plans for the NHS. They are being asked to judge the recommitted bill and over 1,100 amendments in rapid time and without the full facts at their disposal. By rushing the parliamentary process, David Cameron is forcing through bad legislation that will lead to more waste, cost and confusion in the NHS.

UK Politics: Recovery Postponed

Dismal growth prospects have sharply redrawn Britain’s political landscape, write George Parker and Elizabeth Rigby.











Political cover: David Cameron, right, seen with Nick Clegg, has come to realise how useful his junior coalition partner is in protecting him from his own party's ranks - not least over issues such as Europe, tax and health.

This week Britain’s cabinet was confronted with a bleak political picture. In cold and precise terms, George Osborne, chancellor of the exchequer, told colleagues in Downing Street on Tuesday that UK growth prospects were deteriorating and did not look like they were coming back soon. The significance of his analysis is only slowly being grasped by Britain’s political classes: everything has changed.

“The reality we face is stark,” confirmed Nick Clegg, deputy prime minister, in a speech on Wednesday that reflected the growing sense of foreboding around the coffin-shaped cabinet table. “There is now little margin for error,” he added. One minister confirmed that Britain was facing “a terrible situation”; another said it felt like 2008 when the financial crisis hit.

Much has changed during Britain’s long and dismal summer. Mr Osborne confirmed to ministerial colleagues that the eurozone crisis, shrinking export markets, the US slowdown, high inflation and rising commodity prices had all taken their toll, draining demand from an economy already sapped by the biggest fiscal consolidation of any major economy.

The riots that ravaged British cities last month may have been little more than mass copycat looting, but images of burning buildings and police struggling to regain control of the streets were reminiscent of the conflicts that scarred cities across the country during the brutal recession of the 1980s.

As Britain’s politicians prepare for the annual party conference season, the implications of economic slowdown – and the possibility of another recession – are slowly becoming clearer. The economy will dominate debate and shape strategy; a new phase in politics is opening up.

To understand the scale of the shift, consider the outlook at the start of the year. The Treasury was drawing up plans to start selling its stakes in banks, nationalised during the crisis, in 2012 in a sign of confidence returning to the City of London.

Government advisers talked confidently of next year’s Olympic Games in London as “a pivotal moment” – a shining light on the horizon – when austerity Britain would regain its verve. (Queen Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee would further lift the spirits.) All parties expected to fight the 2015 general election against a backdrop of plenty that would have followed a few years of tough-but-necessary choices.

Now the bank sales have been shelved until after the election and few in the cabinet mention shining lights. Party strategists have suddenly stopped talking about “spending the proceeds of growth” in the second half of the parliament.

Of course, the picture could change dramatically again, but for now Mr Osborne’s grand political plan – two years of pain, three years of recovery – seems in doubt. Ministers admit that come the election, the economy may still be mired in low growth and few now expect the independent Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecasts to be achieved. As recently as March, the OBR forecast growth of 1.7 per cent this year, 2.5 per cent in 2012 and 2.9 per cent in the two years before the election. Current consensus forecasts see 1.3 per cent growth this year and 2 per cent next year.

The strains were showing in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition even before the economic outlook worsened; now the two sides will have to march together through what could be almost four years of economic hardship, punctuated by public sector strikes over the cuts.

Pressure is also mounting on David Cameron, prime minister, to do something to cheer the rightwing of his Conservative party, which has applauded the government’s tough economic message but feels badly let down on other issues, including Europe, tax, schools and immigration.

Tim Montgomerie, editor of ConservativeHome, an activists’ website, says Mr Cameron has been able to contain this unrest by pointing to the coalition’s success in sticking to its central mission: “sorting out the mess” in the public finances left by his Labour predecessor Gordon Brown. “That could change if the economy goes wrong and the coalition gets the blame,” Mr Montgomerie says.

Mr Cameron is drawing up a growth strategy built around delivering big infrastructure projects, cutting red tape and reforming planning laws. But he is under growing pressure from some in his party to emulate Margaret Thatcher and administer the type of radical economic shock therapy that she delivered as prime minister in the 1980s. Suggestions include cutting the 50p top rate of tax, scrapping European Union labour laws, reintroducing selective grammar schools and engaging in ambitious supply side reforms.

Tory MPs have been scrambling to put their advice to Mr Cameron down in writing before the conference season. David Davis, who ran against the prime minister for the party leadership, has co-edited a book – The Future of Conservatism – claiming that Tory ideals have been “significantly diluted” by what he once dubbed the “Brokeback coalition”.

Priti Patel, one of five new Tory MPs to contribute to After the Coalition, another book, says: “Being in coalition should not be an excuse for holding back on many critical issues such as sentencing, immigration and Europe. David Cameron is in charge and with a Conservative majority in cabinet there is no reason why the status quo should become the default option.”

. . .

The grumpy mood on the Conservative benches is reinforced by a suspicion that Mr Cameron – who describes himself as a “liberal conservative” – is using the Liberal Democrats as cover for refusing to deliver a more rightwing agenda. Indeed one Tory official admitted the coalition had been “brilliant for us” because it allowed Mr Cameron to stick to the centre ground.

The prime minister is also blamed by some Tory MPs for a big review of parliamentary constituency boundaries – almost everyone is affected; some will lose their seats altogether – while others complain that the well-heeled Mr Cameron is remote and disconnected from the grassroots. “We’ve been taken over by a Bullingdon Club clique,” complained one senior Tory MP, referring to Mr Cameron’s past membership of a plummy-yet-boorish Oxford university drinking club. “It’s almost Edwardian.”

Mr Cameron’s team rejects this as an inaccurate caricature, pointing out that the prime minister has been dining with MPs and visiting the House of Commons tea room regularly – a classic manoeuvre to try to quell unrest in the ranks. But he knows that the ongoing economic gloom – manifested in rising unemployment and falling living standards – will only make party management harder.

Nevertheless, Mr Cameron appears unperturbed for now. That is in part because he believes he can win the 2015 election even if the economy is in the doldrums – provided he can blame external factors and claim that he had taken the tough action on the deficit to ensure things were not even worse. Clinging to the mantle of “economic competence” has become yet more essential to the prime minister.

Under Ed Miliband, the Labour opposition has so far failed to regain its reputation for economic credibility, which suffered under what Alistair Darling – the party’s last chancellor – has admitted was a period of “chaos and crisis” during the last years of Mr Brown’s government.

One coalition minister says: “All our feedback tells us that people don’t like what we are doing but they attach no credibility to the alternative. I think people have made up their mind about the Labour leadership.”

Mr Miliband must give a strong performance at his own party conference to reassure the doubters, fleshing out an alternative economic Plan B that does not simply remind voters that it was Labour which presided over the surge in borrowing in the first place.

Shaping Labour’s economic strategy is Ed Balls, a former Brown lieutenant, who has long argued that the coalition’s rapid deficit-reduction plan would hobble the economy. He talks of a “growth crisis” and told the BBC this week: “The evidence is clear that I was right and they were wrong.” But being right may not be enough.

Lord Mandelson, former Labour business secretary, says his party must recognise “the economy will not be growing quickly and real incomes will not be rising” at the next election. Writing in a new pamphlet called The Purple Book, he argues Labour must develop policies for tough times, including plans to modernise public services, to keep taxes low and to keep the economy competitive.

. . .

For Mr Clegg the economic downturn presents a major political challenge as he prepares for his Lib Dem party conference in Birmingham next week. Members of his centrist party have been prepared to go along with the coalition’s tough fiscal plan on the understanding that things would be better by 2015. Now what?

The deputy prime minister is determined to stay the course; he believes there is a big political prize in securing a record of economic competence in government. But Lib Dem strategists admit they were betting on fighting the next election in good times and are having to rethink.

“The Tories can get away with an election in bad times, because they can say they are still trying to clear up the mess left by the socialists,” says one party strategist. “It’s harder for the Lib Dems, we are a party which thrives on optimism – that may be in short supply.”

To raise morale, Mr Clegg has sharpened his party’s identity in the coalition, fighting to water down “Tory” health reforms, opposing the removal of the 50p tax rate or the introduction of private profit into the schools system. Like Mr Osborne, he needs to show that the coalition has a strategy for growth to counter the downturn.

But Mr Clegg has always warned his party not to think of itself as an “internal opposition” in government. His allies say he needed to “turn up the dial” in differentiating himself and his party from the Tories following dismal local election results – and defeat in a referendum on electoral reform, a core Lib Dem issue – in May. But, they predict, he may turn the dial down again once the conference season is out of the way. “The next year is going to be very tough,” says one ally. “We’ll have to knuckle down and get on with the job.”

Europe: Sceptical genies brood in the bottle

In Brussels every crisis is an opportunity to further European integration. But at Westminster, particularly among most MPs in the Conservative party, the eurozone crisis offers a chance to move in the other direction. For them the current euro troubles are a rare opportunity to take Britain further from the centre of a European project they detest.

For David Cameron, prime minister, turmoil in the eurozone is thus not only an economic danger, but a political one too. Once the Tories were split on Europe; now almost the whole party is eurosceptic. (This week at least 100 MPs discussed a new “moderate” agenda to reclaim powers from Brussels.)

Mr Cameron’s problem is managing this visceral dislike of Europe. “I was told never to seek a meeting with David to discuss Europe,” says one Tory minister. “He thinks that even wanting to talk about Europe is swivel-eyed.”

The prime minister – who describes himself as “a very practical eurosceptic” – fears that when the Tory party talks about Europe, it starts to sound like a strange cult, out of touch with voters’ real concerns such as health and crime.

Tory MPs see the negotiation of a possible new European Union treaty to reinforce eurozone integration as their moment. They want Britain to use its veto to take back powers from Brussels on issues such as criminal justice, employment policy or immigration. Their hopes were raised last week when George Osborne, chancellor, said such a treaty was “on the cards” to pursue the “the remorseless logic” of monetary union: closer fiscal union. He knows that the tighter the core of the EU, the less likely Britain would ever be part of it.

Mr Cameron hopes that the crisis can be addressed without treaty change – a view shared by Herman Van Rompuy, EU president.

Tory demands for the repatriation of powers would strain coalition relations with the pro-European Liberal Democrats, who say Britain should be helping to solve the eurozone crisis.

So far Mr Cameron has managed to hold his party and the coalition on Europe. But many Tory colleagues believe he is hiding behind the Lib Dems as an excuse for not delivering the European policy they demand.

Liberal Democrats Vow To Fight Rightwing Policies Of 'Ruthless' Tories

Nick Clegg signals combative approach to coalition describing PM's party as political enemies who must be taken on.












Nick Clegg speaking at the Liberal Democrat party conference.

Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats have vowed to face down "ruthless" and "extreme" forces in the Tory party to protect the British people from right-wing policies that would widen inequality and benefit the rich.

At a rally on Saturday night to open his party's annual conference in Birmingham, Clegg underlined the Lib Dems' newly combative approach to the coalition, describing David Cameron's party as "political enemies" who must be taken on when necessary in the national interest. After a traumatic year during which the Lib Dems' popularity has plummeted and their leader has been accused of abandoning his party's principles, Clegg struck a markedly more assertive note.

While trumpeting his party's successes so far in influencing health and tax policies, he said it was more prepared than ever to "fight tooth and nail" for what was right. "We are prepared to be awkward," he said. "We are not here to make things easy. We're here to put things right."

In an interview with the Observer, his deputy Simon Hughes goes further, telling the Conservatives they have no mandate to drive through a rightwing agenda. Hughes says the Tories have shown themselves to be "ruthless" operators in the first 16 months of the coalition over the referendum on electoral reform and boundary changes and says the resurgent right of the party is "extreme" on issues such as Europe and tax.

He says Tories must come to their senses and realise that they did not win the last election – and that they rely on the Lib Dems for power.

"Not only did they not win but they got a third of those who voted," he said. "The Tory party is not the dominant party in British politics that it used to be. It is absolutely not the dominant force in Scotland and Wales that it used to be. The Tory right have forgotten that."

In a rebuff to Conservative hardliners he adds: "There is absolutely no majority in parliament for your views. If there is a coalition government in the national interest then extreme remedies and answers are not appropriate."

The comments are bound to infuriate Cnservatives as the conference season opens. Many Tories are beginning to resent profoundly the way the Lib Dems are already watering down Tory changes on health and education and blocking Cameron from developing a more hardline approach on Europe.

Clegg and his ministers are now convinced they can claw back some of their pre-election popularity if they can demonstrate that they are reining in the Conservatives and stamping their own mark on government. Deep division between the coalition partners will surface in Birmingham over tax, welfare, health, pensions and last month's riots.

The party leadership will announce it will veto the abolition of the 50p tax rate for people earning over £150,000 – a key demand of the Tory right – unless and until other measures, such as a mansion tax, are imposed. It will also unveil plans to exempt the first £12,500 of earnings from tax, raising the target from its current level of £10,000.

Hughes says the party has to make the fight against wage inequality in the private sector a key theme. He said he is pushing hard for measures to limit the gap between the highest and lowest paid staff in the private sector. "The differentials are obscene and you really cannot just stand by," he said. "Liberal Democrats have to be clear. If Labour is really relaxed about the stinking rich, some of us are not relaxed about it."

Hughes also insisted that reform of party funding was essential to stop the Conservatives running ruthless campaigns – as they had against electoral reform. "The Tories can be nastier – with a result – if they are allowed to collect more and more money legitimately," he said.

On tax, he said the UK properties of wealthy non-domiciled individuals should be hit. "It would be entirely reasonable to say that if someone is not domiciled in this country but has six mansions they should be paying more into the system." Danny Alexander, the chief secretary to the Treasury, will announce the commitment of £600m to boost infrastructure projects and will attack bankers who fail to lend to businesses. "Our judgments about what needs to be done should be driven by the liberal economy we want to build," he will say.

On Saturday night, the Lib Dem equalities minister, Lynne Featherstone, dismissed suggestions that Cameron had been a major force behind the move to legalise gay marriage when she claimed ownership of the policy. "Conference, this is a Liberal Democrat policy," she said.

Clegg said his party had shown courage entering a coalition that was now shaping policy by "cutting taxes, not for the rich, but for millions of people on low and middle incomes". The Lib Dems could have "bottled" the chance to govern but instead "rose to the challenge", he said, "and we did it knowing it meant working with our political enemies and almost certain short-term unpopularity".

The party leadership was celebrating the failure of former health spokesman Evan Harris to force a vote on the NHS. The Lib Dems believe they are making more progress to dilute the reforms behind the scenes.

Coalition Braced For Boundaries Revolt

MPs may mutiny over changes to constituencies.










George Osborne's Tatton seat is among those that could disappear in the boundary change.

David Cameron and Nick Clegg are braced for a collapse in coalition discipline when dozens of MPs learn this week that their constituencies are to be axed.

The redrawing of parliamentary boundaries, which will cut the number of MPs from 650 to 600, will ignite a political storm tomorrow, with government whips fearing that the prospect of being kicked out of the Commons could lead some MPs into rebellion for the next three years.

"Trying to control Lib Dems is like herding cats at the best of times," said one party source. "If a dozen are de-mob happy, counting down till polling day when they know they'll be out on their ear, it will be a nightmare."

Senior ministers including George Osborne, the Chancellor, Grant Shapps, the Housing Minister, and Danny Alexander, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, are among those whose seats are under threat.

It raises the prospect of more junior MPs being shunted out of safe seats to make way for key government figures. "It will be every man and woman for themselves," a Tory backbencher said. "It will be piranha pool-time," said another. There is even speculation that some disgruntled MPs could quit within weeks, sparking a wave of by-elections.

MPs will be briefed on the plans tomorrow, before they are published officially by the Boundary Commission on Tuesday. They will only cover England, with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland following later this year. In England there will be 502 new seats. Two will be on the Isle of Wight, but the remaining 500 will have to have between 80,473 and 72,810 voters. There have already been rows about planned constituencies spanning county borders, with Devon and Cornwall MPs refusing to countenance the idea of straddling the Tamar.

In Leeds a tussle is being predicted between Ed Balls, Labour's Shadow Chancellor, and Hilary Benn, the Shadow Leader of the House, while in north-west Scotland, Mr Alexander could be pitched against former Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy for a berth.

Analysis by Rob Haywood, a former Tory MP, suggests that Labour stands to lose 25 seats, the Tories 15 and Lib Dems 10, while Lewis Baston, a senior research fellow at the University of Liverpool, predicted that Labour would lose 18 seats, the Tories 15 and Lib Dems 14, with other parties losing three.

Labour has accused the coalition of gerrymandering, while No 10 insists the high number of seats with relatively small electorates favours the Labour Party. At the last election, the average Labour seat had an electorate of 68,487 compared to 72,418 in Tory-won constituencies and 69,440 for Lib Dems. Downing Street argues the policy will save £12m a year.

"By making constituencies more equal in size, the value of people's votes will no longer depend on where you live, and with fewer MPs the cost of politics will be cut," a source said.

A 12-week consultation will be followed by a second phase allowing parties to respond to each other's complaints.

Ruth Davidson Promises No More Devolution If She Wins Scottish Tory Leadership

Ruth Davidson has promised to draw a “line in the sand” on the constitution by promising the Scottish Conservatives would oppose more powers for Holyrood if she is elected leader.







Speaking at the official launch of her campaign in Edinburgh, she said the range of powers included in the Coalition Government’s Scotland Bill should be the final word on devolution.

She also delivered a withering attack on leadership rival Murdo Fraser’s plans to start a new right-wing party to replace the Tories, saying there would be “existential crisis, no wringing of hands” under her leadership.

But the 32-year-old estimated that it would take a decade to turn around the Scottish Conservatives’ dismal election performances and make the party a political force.

Miss Davidson also brushed aside concerns about how she could lead the current Holyrood group of MSPs, the largest group of whom have backed Mr Fraser and his plan for a new party.

Sir Jamie McGrigor has become the latest MSP to back him. But the leadership contest will be decided by party members, many of whom remain fiercely loyal to the Tory brand and deeply suspicious about devolution threatening the Union.

Mr Fraser remains the bookies’ favourite to replace Annabel Goldie as leader but has not ruled out supporting the transfer of more taxation powers to Holyrood after the Scotland Bill has been enacted.

This was vigorously opposed by Miss Davidson, who said: “The Scotland Bill currently going through Westminster is the line in the sand.

“The time for arguing about the powers the people want is over. It’s time now to use the powers that we have.”

The Glasgow MSP also claimed to be the best candidate to thwart Alex Salmond’s separation plan during the forthcoming independence referendum campaign.

“I believe the United Kingdom is a force for good in the world. I will make that positive case for the Union and together we will win as we have right on our side,” Miss Davidson said.

“No halfway house, no second question, no march to fiscal autonomy. When the referendum is done and Scotland in the Union has won the day, let that be an end to it.”

The early skirmishes of the campaign have been dominated by Mr Fraser’s assertion that the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party has no future in its current form and must be replaced.

The Daily Telegraph has revealed how a jittery Mr Fraser has sent messages to hundreds of sceptical members trying to convince them this would not mean disbanding their party.

In an appeal to rank-and-file members, Miss Davidson said: “I have no interest in change for its own sake. We could spend the next 12 months discussing the internal machinations of the party.

“We could tie ourselves in knots. Alex Salmond would love that. Real change for the Scottish Conservatives won’t come from a new name.”

She added: “Under my leadership, there will be no existential crisis, no wringing of hands. Instead I want people to call themselves Scottish, Conservative and Unionist.”

Jackson Carlaw, a West of Scotland MSP also opposed to Mr Fraser's plan, is the third candidate standing for the leadership.

The Liberal Democrats Aren’t Especially Liberal – Or Even Democratic

The junior Coalition partner’s policies have made a mockery of its historic name.












What is Sarah Teather's party actually delivering for Britain?

If the Liberal Democrats didn’t exist, under what circumstances would you choose to create them? I’ll assume that it’s the “Liberal” bit of their historical accident of a name that matters (not many anti-democrats run for election these days). If we did feel the need for a Liberal Party, I guess it would be because neither the Labour nor Tory organisations were being sufficiently, well, liberal in their policy-making.

Ten years of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown making illegal anything that moved, while repeatedly trying to give the state the power to lock us up without charge for longer and longer periods? Yes, I can see a need for some more liberalism; that there could be a useful role for a party to react viscerally against Labour’s criminalising tendencies. Ten years of Margaret Thatcher? I’m hardly one to criticise my political hero, but I can’t deny that prolonged exposure to her governing style might make a voter yearn for something a little less prescriptive; a little more laissez-faire in matters social. Regardless of your own political disposition, then, I don’t think it’s hard to make the case that political space could exist for a party which prioritised the autonomy of the individual over either stateist or corporatist collectivism.

Now imagine that you are a Liberal Democrat. Your organisation has been in the wilderness for 80 years, since the time of Lloyd George. The general election of 2010 gives you the chance to share government with the Conservatives; this is the first time in recent history that an administration will have a serious Liberal presence. How would you behave? Me, I would be bending over backwards to demonstrate that not only is a liberal instinct a useful one to bring to the art of government, but that it also makes sense to have that instinct embodied by my organisation. Anyone anyone can call themselves a “liberal”. The trick is to convince voters that such an instinct requires a party to carry it.

Instead, what has happened? Andrew Lansley’s Health Bill, which made a tentative step towards liberalisation of health provision in the UK, is first of all postponed, and then watered down, largely at the behest of the Lib Dems. Even after the Bill passed the Commons this week, Baroness (Shirley) Williams and the dis-elected ex-MP Evan Harris continued to mutter darkly and publicly about their inability to support it. Lib Dems ensured that the planned GP consortia – supposed to act for us, the patients – will include hospital doctors and nurses; a prioritisation of the producer over the patient. Unelected peer and dis-elected ex‑MP – I withdraw my opening remarks about the party’s name: they’re not even democratic, let alone liberal.

Also this week, Nick Clegg gave a speech about the Coalition’s flagship free schools. These schools are the last, best hope of those children failed by local education authorities. Academic excellence through freedom of choice: what could be more liberal than that? Instead, Mr Clegg chose to focus on the importance of preventing anyone running such a school from making a profit – profit is bad, apparently, because successful schools might use the money to expand – and went out of his way to support an even greater role for councils – the LEAs – in controlling access. In a straight choice, the Lib Dem leader prioritises the producer interest.

I could go on. Lib Dems also want to delay the election of local police commissioners. Anti-democratic again; and when was denying a voice to the people a “liberal” characteristic? And I’ve not mentioned the party’s support for the Human Rights Act, largely because it defies parody, let alone analysis. “Votes for prisoners”, say Lib Dems. It’s not quite the heady fight of the People’s Budget of 1909, is it?

Ah yes, say Lib Dem activists, but think of all the good we bring to the Coalition. When pressed, they trumpet the lack of recognition of marriage in the tax system. I’m not clear why it’s liberal to penalise the natural pair-bonding affinity of human mammals, but there you are. They also claim to have secured the increase in the personal allowance for the poorest taxpayers, as well as the retention – thus far – of the 50p top rate.

The 50p top rate is economically illiterate, and needn’t detain us. Symbolism does matter, though, and if keeping it there for a few months longer means that those such as Simon Hughes (“Champion of University Access”, no less) continue to vote with the Government, so be it. But did we need the Lib Dems to make the case for the increase in personal allowances? Tories have campaigned against the complex and inefficient recycling of income from the poor, to the government, and then back to the poor, for years. More importantly, the Right-wing view of tax (to reduce it wherever possible) is truly liberal, because it seeks to free people from state dependency. Lib Dems view tax as an instrument of social engineering; hence the posturing over 50p.

Eighty years in the wilderness, 80 years protecting the flame, and they can’t even mount a coherent case for electoral reform (“AV is a miserable little compromise” – Nick Clegg. But then: “Vote for AV” – Nick Clegg). Measured as the opportunity to show that British liberalism deserves the vehicle of its own party, coalition has been a disaster for the Lib Dems.

We have to face up to this political category error. Just because we can all agree that there’s a need for some liberalism in our politics, just because some unpopular politicians have given themselves that name, we’ve taken the Liberal Democrats at their own valuation. But Shirley Williams and Evan Harris are not liberals, and nor are the other former leaders and big Lib Dem beasts who haunt the media airwaves with a greater prominence than the paucity of their electoral support could ever justify.

Not that a political position has to be popular in order to be worth holding; and if a party wants to act as a pressure group for the producer interest in health and education, or as a supporter of judicial activism on Human Rights, or to call for ever-greater European integration (as Danny Alexander did this week), then good luck to it. But it shouldn’t mis-name itself.

Where the Lib Dems have been politically effective in the Coalition, they have been anything but liberal. And when they claim to be liberal, they are merely copying policy which the larger party would implement anyway. Neither tactic makes them a worthwhile coalition partner for a Conservative; worse, from the Lib Dem point of view, neither tactic has demonstrated that the 80 years without them were a political loss for Britain. If the Liberal Democrats didn’t already exist, to answer my opening question, I suspect that few would contemplate breathing life into the politically unattractive, social democratic clay from which they are fashioned. We already have a party to represent the sectional producer interest. It’s called “Labour”.