Speaking about the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party, Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron (who, you might ask?) says, “For my party, the Liberal Democrats, it potentially changes everything. (There is) a massive space in the centre ground of British politics for sensible, moderate, progressives who are opposed to what the Conservatives are doing, but cannot bring themselves to support a party of the hard left.” I don’t really know where to start on this one. But it gets worse: “Over the past few days I have received a number of messages and calls from friends within the Labour party distressed by the direction that their party is taking,” adds Farron, to which I reply, “Really???”
No matter how distressed I am regarding Corbyn’s ascent to the leadership of her majesty’s opposition, the last person I would message or call would be a Liberal Democrat. The same Liberal Democrats “in the centre ground of British politics” – those “sensible, moderate progressives” – who were responsible for allowing the Tories to bring in the Bedroom Tax, who tripled university tuition fees after promising to abolish them (Farron, to be fair voted against this, but his party didn’t), presided over the persecution of the sick and disabled, allowed Michael Gove to introduce his Frankenstein’s monster of education “reforms”, stood to one side when the Tories introduced a top down reform of the NHS and sped up privatisation, who slashed the number of frontline public sector workers and were jointly responsible for the damaging austerity that blights our country today. If a single Labour MP called or messaged someone with a track record in government like that, imposing out and out right wing Tory policies, I would politely suggest they might wish to join up with him as soon as possible, just like the traitors of the early 1980s who formed the SDP and eventually merged with the Liberal Party.
I considered whether I should remain in the Labour Party after Corbyn’s victory for all manner of reasons, but I have come to the conclusion that there was nowhere else for me to go. The Trotskyist Militant tendency “front” organisation, the Trades Unions and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), has been as successful as any other Militant campaign, that is to say it has been an unmitigated failure and anyway I could not consider going left of Corbyn. To the right of Corbyn lies the centre left which is where I belong. Remove the centre left from Labour – and that’s probably more than half of its current membership, but less than half if you count the £3 voters – and you are talking about a lot of people.
The choice in the short term at least is either to stay in the Labour Party, to get a little more active and try to influence its policies or to just give up and resign myself to a place in the political wilderness. It really is that simple.
This is because Labour has always been the broadest of broad churches, from the likes of Jeremy Corbyn on one side to Tony Blair on the other. In many countries, there would be two parties where we have one. An openly hard left party and one based closer to the centre ground, but to the left of it. Here it's Labour or nothing. I have never regarded the Liberal Democrats, or either of their predecessors, as being left of centre because, quite frankly, they weren't. In fact, the Liberal Democrats are very hard to pin down at all, being all things to all women and men wherever they happened to be at the time. Their opportunistic, fast and loose politics came undone when they entered government and showed their true colours, not just as a centre party but a party of the hard right.
And anyway, how could anyone from Labour associate themselves with politicians who wilfully peddled the lie that it was Labour that crashed the world economy in 2008? Sit back and think of Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander smearing Labour - "the mess that Labour left" - just as dishonestly as the Tories. I for one will never forget that and I will never forgive them for it either. The Tories have always been the nasty party but the ambitious shysters of the Liberal Democratic Party rivalled them in every single way.
In all honesty, I don't believe Farron. I think he is stirring the pot in a lame effort to make himself noted and it won't work. Once a Tory, always a Tory, once a Lib Dem, always a Tory too. That's the one thing we learned from the last five years and no one who calls themselves Labour could go anywhere near the Lib Dems, not now, now ever.
