Talk of Labour/Lib Dem co-operation seems so first term these days. It occupies a receding part of our memory banks, along with Things Can Only Get Better, debates about cutting single-parent benefit and nasty old William Hague. The cabinet subcommittee on constitutional affairs, which had Lib Dem members, has been disbanded, Paddy Ashdown is off in the Balkans and the Jenkins report on changing the electoral system is silently rotting away in a dank Downing Street basement.
It did not always seem destined to end this way. Anybody who has read Paddy Ashdown s fascinating diaries will know that he and Blair planned to establish a Lib-Lab coalition on May 2 1997. It was only the extraordinary size of the Labour landslide that held the Prime Minister back. As late as 1999, Blair was still explicitly longing to bring the Lib Dems into government, and cursing the facile tribalism which kept these two wings of the left apart. So what went wrong?
It is tempting to resort to the mouldiest old cliché in political commentary and say that Harold Macmillan s events, dear boy, events overtook Blair and Ashdown s benevolent attentions. At a time when the electoral system disproportionately rewards Labour, co-operation with another party is always going to seem like a luxury which could easily be blasted off the agenda by Kosovo, fuel protests and public sector delivery. It is a time-consuming, party-antagonising project, with no obvious constituency of support in the country.
It is easy to see how its opponents, like John Prescott and Alistair Campbell, could argue that it would be an example of chattering-classes decadence to pursue another, minority party when there were real problems to be getting on with. And they have won. The cabinet members most attached to co-operation Mandelson, Mowlam and Cook are all gone or demoted now, while the opponents Blunkett, Straw, and of course Brown are stronger than ever. Charles Kennedy appears less interested than his predecessor in working with Blair. It seems that the grand first term vision is shattered into a thousand pieces.
It is vitally important, then, for us to remember that Blair and Ashdown had a compelling thesis, which is as true today as it was in 1997. Their analysis of the Conservative century showed that a divided left, with majority support, had at several key general elections handed power to a minority right. Fifty-six percent of the British electorate voted for parties of the left and centre-left all through the dark Thatcher years. If the left had not chosen to indulge its own tribal sentiments, we would have defeated her. Of course the scourge of Bennism would still have had to be defeated; of course electoral change and healing of the left s divisions would not have been a panacea; but Blair and Ashdown were absolutely right to argue that our division greatly helped the Tories.
But now a dangerous fantasy is spreading which posits a siren alternative to this analysis. Some people both Labour and Lib Dem are beginning to believe that the Lib Dems can become the official opposition and eclipse the Tories altogether. They argue that we are witnessing the strange death of Conservative England. Ashdown was right when he said that the Tories have a bedrock of support which is too strong for this to happen . Yes, they are a shambolic, hard-right rump today but they are not going to die altogether, any more than Labour did in the 1980s. The Lib Dems cannot supersede them. The history of Britain s leftwing parties trying to leap-frog each other is clear: both in the 1920s and in the 1980s, the only winners from this scenario were the right.
We must co-operate. Labour s ascendancy will not, sadly, last forever. When it wanes, we will need the Lib Dems. We should begin the process of working together now, so that it doesn t look like an act of electoral desperation further down the line. We should work to strengthen the Lib Dems through electoral reform. Perhaps victory in the euro referendum (where, by the way, we will work with the Lib Dems against our own hard-left Labour rump) will embolden Blair to excavate the Jenkins report.
But is Charles Kennedy somebody we can work with? He is not the outstanding politician that Ashdown was, it is true, but I believe we can. Kennedy himself joined the Labour Party initially but was put off by the dogmatic class war he found there. Who in New Labour today cannot empathise with that? Who in New Labour can say, in all honesty, that they would not have been tempted by the SDP? I defy any supporter of the government to read Kennedy s 2001 book, The Future of Politics, and find much that they honestly disagree with. When there are disputes with his agenda, they are clearly within the family of the centre-left; we are not fighting a stranger or a Tory here. Blair said his aim was to heal divisions on the left in British politics. We have succeeded in doing this in Scotland, where there is a successful Lib-Lab coalition. There is still a chance to do it in Westminster too.