The SDP was formed in the 1980s by four former Labour Cabinet Ministers. Their goal was to ‘break the two-party mould of British politics’. Thanks to our absurd voting system, they failed to win more than a handful of seats and a decade later decided to merge with the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats was born. Nearly twenty years later, the party held the balance of power in a general election. This was the first time the Liberal Democrats had ever achieved this (and the last time their legal predecessors the Liberals held office was in the 1920s).
Their 2010 manifesto made a list of radical commitments to constitutional reform:
- reducing the number of MPs by 150
- replacing first-past-the-post with the single-transferrable vote
- requiring all peers and MPs to pay tax
- Abolishing the House of lords
- Reducing the voting age to 16
- A written constitution
How many of these commitments were carried out? None. The face of British politics is exactly the same as it was in 2010. Had Cameron won outright, politically speaking we will still have a system, which locks out anything other than the duopoly of Labour and Conservative.
One of the biggest mistakes the Liberal Democrats made was removing Charles Kennedy. Kennedy did not need to be sacked – yes he needed time to deal with his drinking problem, but an extended leave of abscence would have been sufficient. It’s impossible to imagine Kennedy handing Cameron a blank cheque.
Clegg spent his career trying to create multi-party politics and squandered it at the first opportunity – an opportunity which probably won’t come up again for a while.
The next general election (presumably in 2020) is likely to result in another hung parliament or a wafer thin majority – the two main parties share of the vote has been steadily declining for thirty years and is unlikely to change. The matter of electoral reform for the House of Commons (which should be a priority for all of the non-major parties) will come up again – hopefully this time the opportunity will not be undermined by someone as vilified as Clegg.
Update: Clegg claims his biggest mistake was sitting next to Cameron at PMQs – which is a strange conclusion – given that no-one outside the Westminister bubble cares about PMQs.
andrewhennager 