In his seminal study in 1935, George Dangerfield wrote that the Liberal landslide of 1906 was a victory from which the party never recovered. Over a hundred years since, from a party that held the office of the deputy prime minister and was in a stable coalition government for five years, to the sorry parliamentary rump seen today, history can be said to have repeated itself. But there is one truism in British politics: there has always, in one form or other, been a liberal party. And the Labour party had to stand on the shoulders of Liberals before it could achieve anything at all.
The current Labour leadership election has brought to the fore the hybrid of different political persuasions that exist under its banner. The party was born out of the radical liberal left, its roots forged in the scepticism about the state that inspired the early trade union movement. But it also harbours those whose politics is vintage statism, prone to believe that all problems are best solved by the command of a strong central state. Much has been made of the Liberal Democrats and their two distinct strands of political traditions, but the Labour party exists on the exact same philosophical faultline, if not more so, of British politics.
In the heat of a Labour leadership battle, this may seem too antiquated an analysis. But clearly, given the rise of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership prospects, there is a constituency within the Labour party far to the left of its traditional positioning. The election of Corbyn would simply accelerate that movement. It is to the abiding discredit of the Labour party that, even in its rare moments of ascendancy, it has failed to understand that there has never been a democratic majority for socialism. Its founding was not because of some latent socialism among its first constituencies. But the clear aim of a Corbyn-run Labour party would be to move into this territory of leftish politics.
The Liberal Democrats once occupied, and excelled in, this realm almost exclusively under Charles Kennedy. But as the more far-sighted liberals could foresee, from Herbert Henry Asquith to Jeremy Browne, surely the only time that will be written, such a positioning will never in the long term succeed as a political project.
The Liberal Democrats were decimated in May because, among other things, too few knew what they stood for. The election of Corbyn would at once offer the chance of clarity. The leftwingery of a Corbyn-led Labour would create ideological and political space for the Liberal Democrats and present an opportunity for the latter to forge a far stronger electorally appealing offer then the former. A divided Labour, arguing with nobody but itself, would allow the Liberal Democrats – should they so wish – to be seen as the natural alternative to the Tories.
This of course assumes that the Liberal Democrats’ new leader has the wherewithal to acknowledge this and then lead his party there. Tim Farron’s party has long had a yearning to idly sit where the Labour party now appears to be hurtling off to. But around the time Dangerfield was writing, there was dispute about whether the rise of the Labour party was a political necessity at all, or whether more adept Liberals could not have encompassed the newly formed political space. But if he grasps it, the new Liberal Democrat leader could well use the Labour party to stand tall once again.
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David Talbot is a political consultant. He tweets @_davetalbot
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