Cameron, his Brexit Referendum and how progressives unintentionally helped make it happen!

By 2015 many progressives had had it with the Coalition Government and the Lib Dems in particular because they saw their participation in that government as being far more negative than positive. They had to show their frustration with the Lib Dems by giving them a kicking at the 2015 General Election and what a kicking it was!

However, in quite a few seats the effect of kicking the Lib Dems was the opposite of what those frustrated voters wanted. I’m talking about the seats where the real political battle at each election was between the Lib Dems and the Tories. Withdrawing votes from the Lib Dems, usually to give them to 3-placed Labour, had the effect of gifting those seats to the Tories! So those frustrated voters did very much what they did not want to do.

Of course, this situation was created by our first past the post electoral system and in reality many voters actually have to vote for their least worst option at every election because the vast majority of seats are between two parties; 3-way marginals are very rare.

So the pleasure of giving the Lib Dems one hell of a kicking helped to deliver a Tory-majority government from 2015 until the present day.

The other great irony of our presently crazy political system is that Labour’s right-wing, working-class voters then went and delivered Brexit in Cameron’s wrong-headed referendum which would not have been called other than by a cornered Conservative majority government!

Yes, I’m a life-long Liberal, actually I’m a Social Liberal of the left, but I got why voters took against the Lib Dems as we progressives expect that party to always be progressive. That at times it wasn’t during the Coalition was a matter which caused me great pain and frankly it still does. We know that Labour will often drift into being anti-progressive, indeed Starmer’s present Labour Party seems to revel in presenting itself as right of centre and therefore not progressive.

Yet there is a solution to all this electoral madness – proportional representation (preferably via the Single Transferable Voting system) which would empower voters rather than many of them wasting their time participating in our electoral system when the same party always wins their constituency seat anyway!

The big ‘reason’ for sticking with first past the post is that ‘it delivers stable government’ Well we’ve not had one of those since 2015! I accept that the Coalition Government was stable but that it was highly unpopular with progressives. Having said that, despite this unpopularity it actually delivered £1b less in austerity savings than Labour had pledged to make in that Parliament had it won in 2010.

So here we are in 2023 with an unelected Cameron back in the corridors of power and made a member of the House of Lords via a hasty process to legitimise things. Let’s be grateful that the Lib Dems aren’t looking to find a way back for Clegg as that would be a step too far for this old Liberal.

And my assessment of where the major parties presently stand -

Conservative – Right wing and further right

Labour – Centre-right

Lib Dems & Greens Centre-left

The 4 letter word that’s destroying our fragile democracy

The word? - Hate

Our politics and fragile democracy has been on the slide for many years.

The once decent upstanding Conservative Party (well that’s what my old dad would have called it up until around the turn of the century) is now UKIP II.

Labour, having been holed below the water line when it elected the wrong Miliband as leader was also further damaged by UKIP when significant numbers of its right-wing, working-class vote decided to back Brexit and Boris Johnson.

And my own party, the Lib Dems? Our leadership remains stubbornly and strangely, to me at least, quiet about being pro-Europe and seems to have lost its radical/progressive edge/voice whilst, of course, also struggling to shake off being holed below the waterline by Cleggism/The Coalition Government.

So with such a recent political history is there any wonder that the right has marched in to claim to be the dominant political agenda, whilst the left has all but melted away. And with our politics being, at best, centre-right these days (and I include Labour in this) is there also any wonder that the further/far right has gained a foothold in the corridors of power?

It’s not then too big a leap to realise how an agenda dominated by division, intolerance and yes, hate, has come to the fore. Did we ever expect to see, in this day and age, a national newspaper use the word ‘hate’ in its lead headline on Remembrance Day! Did we ever expect a Home Secretary to brand a peace march as ‘hate’!

The back-tracking of progressive politicians has in my view helped the further/far right to march in to fill a political vacuum. Can you imagine a John Smith, a Shirley Williams or a Charles Kennedy allowing this to happen? You know they’d be promoting a very different agenda based on inclusion, tolerance and the very opposite of ‘hate’.

And the big question is, where will the next progressive political leaders come from who will take on the divisive legacy of UKIP which has so soured our politics? I **** to say it but the runners and riders to be our future centre-left leaders look to be few and far between presently, so the poisonous legacy of UKIP may well dominate our politics for another 10 years. 

Oh how much I hope I’m wrong and how I long for ‘hope’ to replace ‘****’ in our politics and everyday language.