Elections are often entertaining blood sport (Bigot-gate a fine example!), and sometimes actually significant or important to your life. Very rarely are they of generational and historical significance. The 2010 UK Election could be.
There’s a famous book most students of British Political History would be familiar with: The Strange Death of Liberal England.
The Liberal Party of Gladstone and Lloyd George (even Churchill very briefly) died a sudden and mysterious death at the 1922 election. Certainly it became for the most part politically irrelevant as the Union-backed Labour party surged into ascendancy on the back of Universal Suffrage in 1918 and the changing make up of industrial, urbanised, post-WW1 Britain.
Its a very exciting thought that Nick Clegg in 2010 – more than 80 years later – could be bringing the party back from the dead like one of those scenes in Sci-Fi movies where cryogenically frozen astronauts are resurrected (Cleggmania spreads across Britain). It could mark another tide-mark in the fascinating story of British politics – hopefully.
Labour’s relationship with the Unions that blessed its founding almost became the death of it in 1978. "The Winter of Discontent" was where that relationship had finally become abusive and a dysfunctional state of near-revolution existed as uncollected rubbish and unburied dead mounted up. 1979: Enter the Thatcher years which dragged Britain so far to the right that when Labour did win back power 18 years later, Labour were forced to have become a softer, more socially acceptable version of the same thing when “Tory Sleeze” brought an end to Major’s government in 1997. But even those two truly historic elections might not be as important as the one about to happen in this narrative of the changing make-up of one of the oldest democracies in the world.
And what of the Liberals? Answer – an ever intensifying flirtation with the Labour Party: the Lib-Lab pact in the 1970s that didn’t work; the “Gang of Four” Labour MPs that left Labour in the 1980s and formed the Social Democrats (that ultimately merged with the Liberals to form what we have today - The Liberal Democrats); and Paddy Ashdown’s dalliance with Tony Blair in the 1990s that almost saw him in the cabinet.
The final chapter of that story could happen on Thursday when hordes of disgruntled Labour voters – betrayed by Iraq but still offended by Tory sleeze – can’t bring themselves to vote for either and flock to Mr Clegg as a last resort, giving him anointing-power in a hung Parliament. The 1920s leftward-shift - over corrected in the 1980s by Thatcher’s angry lunge to the right - might finally be coming back to the centre ground. (Check out Scenario B here.)
Whether Clegg is able to anchor it there is another matter. But it makes a refreshing bloody change whatever happens!
(I would like to see: Brown back in, beholden to Clegg, until he is quickly sacked by the Milliband Borthers – Camelot-esque – who achieve Labour renewal after new election within the year.)
UPDATE: Now the results are in and what has amusingly become known as the ConDem coalition brought to life, this new era in Liberal England has fully dawned. Despite losing seats rather than winning them, the Lib Dems are a renewed force on the British political scene. With a referendum on electoral reform on the agenda, the 70-year effort to regain political relevance in England for the Liberal party has almost been achieved. Nick Clegg has secured five Lib Dem cabinet seats including the nebulous role of Deputy Prime Minister for himself (portfolios to be announced), not to mention 15 ministerial posts across Whitehall. The Tories are apparently furious that Cameron gave so much away, and many observers are quietly admiring Labour's tactic of negative bidding to force Cameron into negotiating himself an even more powerless position than he already had. How the coalition will operate - how right it will be and how centre - will be fascinating, particularly as they get down to the business of brutal spending cuts to reduce the Greek-sized deficit. The youth and inexperience of the combined, not to mention their philisophical incombatability - will hamper them greatly. It will be fascinating blood sport thats for sure!
