The Liberal Democrats are riding high
in recent opinion polls. They are presenting themselves as something
“new” and “clean”. A closer look reveals a very old party that has
always carried out the policies dictated by the capitalist class of
Britain.
The
Liberal Democrats have always been a capitalist party. They still are.
They claim to be new and different from the two main parties. In fact
they have done centuries of abject service in Parliament for the rich
and the capitalists. Now they still stand ready at the disposal of the
ruling class, like the Tories and New Labour, to load the burden of the
crisis on to the shoulders of the working class.
The modern Liberal Party has its origins in the cliques of bourgeois
and aristocratic place-seekers who dominated the unreformed ‘rotten’
Parliament of the eighteenth century. They were then called the Whigs;
their opponents were the Tories. Few points of principle separated the
two gangs.
Gradually with the development of capitalism the Whigs became the
party of the industrialists, while the Tories represented the
landowners. The political issue in contention was free trade versus
protectionism. While Britain was the workshop of the world the
manufacturers favoured free trade, while the landowners called for
protection against imports of grain. As the vote extended to the middle
class and then to some workers in the nineteenth century the trade
unions tended at first to support the Whigs, now renamed the Liberals,
as the more radical capitalist party.
At the beginning of the twentieth century the organised working
class split from the Liberals to set up their own party, Labour. The
Liberals went into decline, partly because British capitalism began to
face fierce competition from more modern capitalist countries, such as
Germany and the USA. So the capitalist class rallied to the Tories and
protectionism. The Liberals were squeezed between the parties
representing the polar classes in society – Labour and the
Conservatives. In the 1930s they played a squalid role as junior
partners in a ‘national government’ of Tories and Labour traitors like
Ramsay MacDonald. They helped carry through cuts in unemployment
benefit and public sector pay to cut the deficit caused by economic
crisis. Is that the shape of things to come? By mid-century they were
seen as a sandal-wearing, lentil-eating political irrelevance.
So they are not a ‘new’ party, as Nick Clegg tries to kid us. But
they have always been a capitalist party. There have since been a
number of third party revivals that have benefited the Liberals. These
revivals are a product of the disgust felt towards the two established
parties, in particular by the failure of right-wing Labour to carry out
a programme that would enthuse its working class support.
The most spectacular third party revival was the rise of the Social
Democratic Party, founded in 1981 as a right-wing split from Labour. As
the Labour Party moved left in revolt against the failures of the
right-wing Labour government of 1974-79, arch rightwingers conspired to
split the anti-Tory vote and to split the Labour Party as the main
opposition to Thatcher. Their rise was meteoric. They were boosted by
the media. Opinion polls at one time showed they had the support of 50%
of the electorate. The bubble soon burst and in the 1983 and 1987
general elections the Social Democrats campaigned jointly with the
Liberals, with the effect of splitting the anti-Tory vote and keeping
Thatcher in office. In 1988 the two parties merged to form the Liberal
Democrats.
What do the Lib Dems stand for? As the party leaders’ debate has
shown there is a wide measure of consensus among the candidates. All
agree that the British people must be made to pay for the economic
crisis through years of cuts and austerity. Yet this crisis is none of
their making.
TheLib Dems stand for proportional representation, since they lose
out to the two established parties through the ‘first past the post’
electoral system. Clegg’s image hasn’t been dirtied by recent office
and he comes across as new and fresh-faced compared with Brown and
Cameron. Brown is a discredited and disliked figure as the Prime
Minister in charge of a deep recession; Cameron hasn’t been able to
carry out his professed aim of detoxifying the Tory brand from the
monstrous image of Thatcherism.
Nick Clegg is personally from a privileged background. British
papers have published pictures of the family chateau in south-west
France. Early in his political career he was taken under the wing of
Tory grandees like Lord Carrington and Leon Brittan. Only the lurch of
the Conservative Party into euroscepticism deflected him from following
the natural course of his career into the Tory party. For him, as for
the ruling class, the Lib Dems were the next best thing.
Clegg denounces trade union backing and financial support for
Labour. What is his alternative? His party, like the Tories, is
financed by big business backers. Some of these, like some Tory
supporters, are ‘non-doms’. That means that they are not recorded as
living here (because they are dodging UK taxes), yet they presume to
buy political influence with their tax-free cash. Does that sound
‘fresh’ and ‘clean’?
Clegg
and his Party offer no alternative to the orthodoxy of austerity pushed
by New Labour and the Tories. Nick Clegg promised, at his Party
Conference last year, bold and even "savage" cuts in government
spending that he claimed would be necessary to bring the public deficit
down after the next election. Clegg set out plans including a long-term
freeze in the public sector pay bill, scaling back future public sector
pensions, and withdrawing tax credits from the middle class. He is even
prepared to examine means-testing universal child benefits.
The Lib Dem election manifesto talks about, “Tough choices needed to
cut the deficit.” They promise to cut spending by $10bn a year. This
has set off a sort of contest between their leaders as to who can
promise to inflict the most pain on the British people. Vince Cable,
the Lib Dem Treasury spokesperson said the cuts would have to be even
bigger than the £10 billion a year in the manifesto. He went on: “There
is more to be done. I fully appreciate this isn’t enough. We have to go
beyond that.”
Like the other two main parties, their figures don’t add up. All the
parties are deliberately vague as to the scale of the horrors they will
inflict while they are still appealing for our votes. But the Lib Dems
are quite clear that they will cut working class living standards and
public services by as much as it takes to restore the bosses’ profits.
Cable is also trying to claim some credit for warning against the
buccaneering follies of unregulated finance capital and predicting the
present economic crisis. This is the opposite of the truth. In 2006 he
denounced “the current clamour for regulation of financial products.”
Sucking up to the City he called for a “lighter touch” in financial
rules.
So the Lib Dems are up for cuts, as much as the ruling class needs.
How can we prove that? What they are contemplating nationally is what
their supporters are already carrying out at a local level. In
Birmingham the Lib Dems are currently in cahoots with the Tories. They
propose savage cuts to deal with the council deficit of £26m. On top of
800 jobs already shredded they propose that 2,000 more should go this
year. This is the real face of the Liberal Democrats. They are doing
exactly what the boss class wants.
In many solidly working class areas the Tories are so widely hated
that they never had a realistic prospect of getting more than a handful
of seats on the council. So the opposition to Labour has been taken
over by the Liberal Democrats, who are really Tories in yellow
rosettes. As an opportunist capitalist party, they take on whatever
colouring is convenient to win support and office. For instance
leaflets from the Lib Dems in Holborn and St Pancras cry, “Stop arming
Israel Now”. Holborn has a large Muslim population. Nearby in Kilburn
and Hampstead the local party boasts that Clegg attended an event
sponsored by Jewish News. This, of course, is intended to go
down well with the local Jewish population. Famously the Liberals who
ruled Tower Hamlets in the 1970s flirted with racism and the far right
National Front.
Blairites whisper that the creation of a hung Parliament (on account
of the failure and unpopularity of New Labour as the ruling party!)
would mean the culmination of their ‘project’ to sink Labour’s
political identity into a merger with the Lib Dems, an outright
capitalist party. So, far from being a way forward, that would take us
back to the nineteenth century. It would neuter Labour as a force for
radical change.
Far from being a fresh face in politics, the Liberal Democrats are
Tories in all but name. Far from being new, they are the old
discredited face of Tweedledum and Tweedledee politics that the workers
turned their backs on when they took the historic decision to set up a
Labour Party to represent their own class interests. Class is the
defining feature of British politics. The Tories and the Liberal
Democrats are prepared to make cuts because that is what the capitalist
class needs. It is a disgrace that the Labour Party has also been
captured by pro-capitalist politicians. The solution is for workers to
drive them out and reclaim Labour as a working class party with a
socialist programme.
