Nick Clegg’s excellent book, “Politics: Between the Extremes”, released in September, provides a useful perspective on the new parameters which seem to define British politics. As became clear in 2016, politics is not just a battle between right and left or statist versus anti-statist perspectives any more, but between open versus closed economies and Brexit versus Remain.
But I think Clegg’s analysis would have benefited from exploring more deeply how old and therefore un-random these changes are. Specifically, Clegg’s Twelfth Chapter Was Roy Right? suggests Roy Jenkins– who died in 2003 and in the 1980s was the leading political and intellectual force behind the SDP and Lib Dems– would not have agreed with his view of cross-party cooperation, or that the only division in politics is between left and right.
There is, in fact, plenty of evidence to suggest that Jenkins would have shared Clegg’s analysis. Indeed, I think Jenkins would have likely been his strongest supporter in the Coalition years and would have spoken against the criticisms made of Clegg, implicitly in his name, principally by Lord Oakeshott, Jenkins’ former Special Adviser, who see the Liberal Democrats as effectively a subsidiary of the wider left.
Whilst Clegg is right to acknowledge the logic that runs from Oakeshott’s bipolar view, he is not correct to believe Jenkins would have shared it: in fact, he moved away from it.
Jenkins gave up on Labour to create the SDP and he wished to cooperate with them in the 1990s in order to bring in voting reform and break it up. Just before he did, his 1979 BBC Dimbleby lecture made plain his view that liberalism could no longer be defended in a two party model moulded by the “tyranny” of first past the post voting and a “tight skin…of old labels which have become increasingly irrelevant”. His text was written partly out of guilt for not doing more to help Labour moderates like Barbara Castle in the decade before, and partly as a warning to the Conservative left (its first draft was shared, notably, with his closest political friend and father of his God-Child, Tory MP Ian Gilmour).
Gilmour was a crucial ally of Jenkins in the 1967 Bill which decriminalised homosexuality and the 1975 “Remain” campaign. Gilmour warned Thatcher presciently in 1977 in Inside Right of the dangers for the liberal-right of blind tribalism, and like Jenkins, he sensed that though left-right politics was the most important signpost in politics, it should no longer be its Chinese Wall. Jenkins, then President of the European Commission challenged British exceptionalism compared to the rest of Europe. As became gradually clearer between 1979 and 2016, the UK can now be reached by aeroplane and is no longer an island and never can be again –and as Jenkins pointed out, Britain had evolved to become less “deferential” and more European, whilst its politics had “drawn too tight for effective national performance”.
For Jenkins, the fault of the two-party left-right structure was that the liberal values within their memberships had no focus, and was instead displaced with excessive partisan rage about hobgoblins of the past.
When the Chinese Wall of two-party politics did collapse in 1975, just as it briefly did in 2016, moderates in the big two parties found they had a lot in common and needed to cooperate more for their mutual benefit. As Jenkins reflected in 1991: With the party system “loosening…things were never quite the same for Labour after June 1975”. The 1975 referendum campaign which he chaired, showed that it was as much about what Jenkins learned about the Tory party as the Labour party, which shaped his decision to try to reorganise the centre-left, but the whole “radical centre”.
Jenkins’ words could serve, today, as guidance for Cameroonians and Blairites, whose projects foundered on the idea that Britain had not changed and only left-right distinctions had any democratic relevance, and saw openness as a valuable but less important side-project. For years, both appeased populists like Len McCluskey and Daniel Hannan, rather than looking to other parties as Clegg had. If more of them had fought as hard and smart as Clegg and Jenkins, British politics (and its economy) would be stronger today.
The ideas and actions of some Blairites and Cameroonians, like Jenkins in the first part of his career, are a reminder of the potential of the moderate wings of the Tory party and Labour parties. But Jenkins’ displacement theory explains why these liberal-minded people weigh less in their two parties than their parts: the structure traps them fighting irrelevant wars against the “hobgoblins” of trade unionism and class, and isolated in two minorities with “incompatible people, and still more important, incompatible philosophies.”
But Jenkins’ words from 1979 leave an awkward message to Liberal Democrats, too. Whilst politics is not just about left and right, it remains a crucial divider: as he said even before the SDP a
… break out might succeed…but does not invalidate the argument that the present system which militates too much against a shift in the pattern, which makes the moderates too much the prisoners of the extremists.
Jenkins’ conception of a new political mould logically aligns with a four party model which Clegg would recognise well from his shared experience of northern Europe and the European Commission: a Dutch-style split between the liberal right of (VVD) and the liberal left (D66). In the meantime, ironically, Lib Dems have an identity problem because we have too much political choice, not too little as is often said.
Realignment, of course, is not just logistically tricky but emotionally problematic for people in all parties – including, sometimes, ourselves – who are too easily haunted by “hobgoblins of the past”. We, of course, did a lot between 2010-15, but the cost of inaction will be clearer to most like-minded people in other parties after 2016 too, and sooner or later “liberals” or “remainers” will hopefully now realise they need to organise under some new structure, even if it is not some single entity. However radical, the concept is not new and it was this kind of pluralism that protected Britain from the Tory Brexit crowd during the successful Coalition years, and it remains the Liberal Democrats’ founding and enduring idea: Roy was right, and so was Nick.
* Douglas Oliver is secretary of the Liberal Democrat History Group and is based in London.
