The were originally right-wing Labour MPs who left the party because they were opposed to moves by the Labour membership to impose democratic control on the MPs, as the members tended to be more left-wing than the MPs this would have led to various right-wing Labour MPs becoming unemployed, so they (the “Gang of Four”) went off to found the SDP, which merged with the moribund Liberal party to form the LibDems. They stand now, and have always stood, for whatever will get them power, money and employment. Meanwhile the Labour party have veered drastically to the right, which is why the LibDems were once meant to be to the right of labour, and then left. Having shown their true colours by whoring themselves to the Tories don’t expect them to do well for the foreseeable future.
Remember the TSB. She was nothing more than a common thief. And now, as then, the official position is that unemployment in the north is a small price to pay to avoid inflation in the south. That is a concsious decision.
The Lib Dems are like most parties a bit of a coalition themselves. One strand of the party, including many of the senior members, are quite - in US terms - libertarian ( the Orange Book-ers), and other party factions such as the Beveridge Group are to the left of the Labour leadership.
Sounds like there’s a great gaping space on the left side of the electorate that any enterprising party might exploit – only, how big is that space? How many UK voters really want something to the left of where all three major parties are now?
Yes it is a big Elephant in the room that despite everything the Tories could not win an election…of course when Scotland leaves, we will never get a labor government ever again.
There is no gaping space on the left. There are parties there, but nobody votes for them. If we must use a too-simplistic left-right axis, I would say that the consensus of British politics is now more concentrated around the centre than it has ever been. That is why the Tories didn’t win an outright majority. Before you ask “how come the Lib Dems didn’t gain more from that trend towards centrism”, it’s because (a) our geographically-based system favours two established big parties and (b) the two big parties squeezed in to the centre too. Even a centrist can comfortably vote for one or the other these days, and the Lib Dems have always had a lack of credibility as a serious party of government - the “wasted vote” problem. Whether their actually being a party of government will help them or hurt them in the long run remains to be seen.
I think that Thatcher was more of a pragmatist than the popular image suggests. If you look at actual numbers such as the level of public spending relative to GDP, it did not shrink as radically as you might think. She also caved in to opinion many times, when it was politic to do so. What was different was that she was prepared to make enemies. Which she certainly did.
I’m prepared to cut an English person of Thatcher’s generation a lot of slack on this. I can well imagine she was opposed to German reunification. Heck, I could imagine her preferring that Germany be broken up into a dozen smaller states, never to be a significant economic or military power again.
Let me note the concluding sentence in Joseph Gregory’s obituary for Margaret Thatcher which appeared today in the New York Times (which quoted the Lady her herself):
You forget that the SDP only ended up forming because Labour at the time got hijacked by radical leftists who demanded unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from the EC among other things.
