POLITICAL COMMENTARY

Dead or alive?

-the political mongrel

PETER PATERSON

What price the Liberal party? The rump of this once and former half of the two party system, now relegated to the political equivalent of the Isthmian League, this week gathered in Eastbourne to quarrel over what remains of its Parliamentary influence and to plan a future which looks as desolate and unrewarding as its recent past. The Liberals, in a word, have had it.

They have had it, mostly, because they clung stubbornly and for too long to the belief that their exclusion from alternate status as the governing party was only tem- porary, that they could mount a come- back. That false and heartbreaking hope was fed and kept alive by isolated by-election victories (Orpington has a lot to answer for), by a sometimes impressive total vote in general elections, and by the vanity and ambition of its leaders. And now, reduced to a derisory six Parliamentary seats, they meet at the seaside, just like the big parties, to argue their strategy for the next election, unaware in their overwhelming self-absorp- tion that it doesn't matter anyway.

Who really cares whether Mr John Pardoe's insistence that every seat should be contested by a Liberal candidate is accepted or not, except Mr Pardoe himself and, presumably, by whoever has to foot the bill for such a reckless squandering of £150 deposits. At this moment there are bound to be people arguing for a more cautious ap- proach, urging that the party should confine itself to fighting the seats that it now holds, those that it recently lost, those in which it collected a respectable vote, ie, where their candidates saved their deposits, and in what is laughingly known as seats in traditional Liberal areas. The latter, it seems to me, must be defined by the world's oldest psephologist sitting at Liberal headquarters poring over parish voting rolls for the 1830s, or perhaps by including every con- stituency within a fifty mile radius of any country house occupied at any time in its history by any relation of the Asquith family. But the argument is irrelevant anyway : everyone knows that one Liberal by-election victory—and they are easier to come by when a Tory government is in power than when Labour is in charge—will be sufficient to send the adrenalin racing through Liberal veins once more, and that Liberal corpses will be piled as high as ever on the next electoral battleground.

To jeer at the Liberal Party is, of course, regarded as political bad taste. They do their

best, and everyone knows that they are robbed blind by the first-past-the-post voting system. They also produce more gentlemanly, less abrasive, more entertaining leaders than are thrown up by Labour and Conservative, and from a purely enter- tainment point of view, the short time they are allowed on the telly during elections is much better value than the drivel we get

from the others. And, don't forget (even if they allow you to) that the Liberals came out first for the Common Market, that they believe in co-partnership in industry (whatever that might mean), and that they are the only radical, humane, concerned, youth-orientated party in British politics. Without the Liberals the mindless zombies who represent the other parties in the House of Commons would march even more regimentally into the voting lobbies, the voice of independence would be stilled and darkness would descend on the face of our bit of the earth. Or so they would have us believe.

Let us take, first of all, the youth thing. A number of clever, likeable young people of Marxist inclinations captured the Young Liberal organisation, and the party elders, naively assuming that their own rhetoric had converted them, welcomed their arrival. In fact, what had happened was that the youngsters regarded the Liberal Party as a kind of 144 Piccadilly, empty and inviting, whose temporary occupation would shake up the establishment. It certainly did that, and had Mr Jo Grimond still been in charge, no doubt Maoism with a Liberal face would have been tolerated indefinitely. Instead, the right wing element in the Liberal Party which Mr Grimond tried to pretend for so long did not exist but which is really the strongest force within the party (a feature which is readily recognised by Tories who wish to rebuke their own party without voting for the wicked socialists) angrily asserted itself. If he ever has time these days to contemplate the less serial-worthy episodes of his Prime Ministership, Mr Harold Wilson might well reflect on how long a Lib-Lab alliance would have lasted, given this hard core tendency to the right, had he accepted Mr Grimond's overtures in 1965, or had he had the misfortune actually to need the support of the Liberals if his second general election had produced as hairline a result as his first. It was always a Grimondian pipe dream anyway : every Labour leader with an ounce of history in his bones must know that you can't trust a Liberal.

But the catalogue of Liberal illusions over the party's role, and its catalogue of com- plaints about the system, does not end with the idea that this is the only party sufficiently switched on to attract, young people, nor with the dream that what cannot be won by mass electoral power can be sneaked by a few makeweights in the electoral system holding the majority up in a balance of power ransom deal. Liberals (insofar as they have a coherent, collective view of anything) seem to believe that the main purpose of electoral reform is to bring more Liberal son into the House of Commons. Why, apart from self-gratification, such an objective should be considered necessary to the health

of democracy, defeats me.

It is arguable, and I have often argued it, that the grip of our dualitarian Parliamen- tary system should be broken, and that the House of Commons should not be the ex- clusive property of two major parties alone.

Certainly independent voices should be raised in Parliament, but how far do Liberals qualify for this. role? They are, after all, rem- nants of a party which was once a leading player in the game of ins and outs, and their complaints of unfairness date from the time they joined the outs on a permanent basis. They continue to play the Parliamentary game as though they might at any moment once again become ins. What and whom do they represent?

The what is much more difficult to define than the whom. Everyone knows the great British consumer and his reluctance to make a choice if he can avoid it. The Liberal Party, looking and sounding like the other parties, but somehow standing for a middle way, a compromise, meets the need of the un- decided. Having decided to be undecided, it is baffling to know what sue' voter ex- pects. Probably he expects, anti nopes, that his vote will be wasted, and he may even derive a wry satisfaction from his candidate's lost deposit. But to tot up all these non votes from all over the country and to claim, as the Liberals do, that they are somehow being cheated out of their birthright is stretching the argument too far. Any variety of pro- portional representation which threatened to make all these votes effective would probably lead to their disappearance into thin air: an effective voting system is in all likelihood the very last thing that the Liberal voter wants.

So what does the party stand for? It is a political mongrel, the product of too many defeats and a desperate opportunism. Some of its members favour a Parliamentary strategy, a candidate in every seat, financial backing from big business, no doubt even a shadow cabinet in permanent session: others see themselves as an extension of the welfare services in big cities, or even as urban guerrillas fighting the system. But policies always come back to the Common Market and co-partnership in industry. Given any new issue, no one can forecast how the Little Six will vote in Parliament, not even the Little Six themselves. In terms of influencing the House of Commons, of shaking the two major parties out of their complacency. of making people feel that things are changing. the two million Liberal votes at the last elec- tion would each count for more if they were cast for the Communist Party, or Social Credit, or the real-live Maoists who have presented themselves for election lately.

So what we come down to is a party that exists merely to be a party. Its leaders are on the Palace mailing list, the honours system extends to them, they are in position at all the appropriate Westminster Abbey moments of national rejoicing and national gloom. They are of the system, they pine to be like the others, not to change anything. In terms of wasted protocol effort, their com- plete disappearance would actually save the taxpayer a little money—but only a little, since their lost deposits in an expensive roundabout bookkeeping way probably PaY for their subsidiary, hangers-on role in public life. The Liberals have long been dead but the corpse, inspired by a zest for the trap- pings and privileges it enjoyed fifty years ago, refuses to lie down. In many ways it is a harmless, almost endearing old corpse. but it has been around a little too long, and it is beginning to smell a little high.