I mean, are they leftists, or libertarians, or what? I know the party was formed from a merger of the libertarian Liberal Party with the leftist Social Democrats. So how could it go into coalition with the Tories, of all things?!
Posting this thread in GD instead of GQ because it would be bound to end up here eventually.
The Social Democrats weren’t leftists. The founding members actually left the Labour Party because they thought it had gone too far to the left.
No the Liberal party was not libertarian: see the Wikipedia article:
Based on posts so far, it appears that all British parties are, and have been for the past century, social-democratic, and only disagree about details.
Ha ha ha. No.
The Conservatives have to pay lip service to some elements of social democracy, but it is very much kicking and screaming. And there are plenty of smaller parties that aren’t.
I thinks it’s a reasonable statement, at least by the standards of US politics. The Conservatives support the idea of a welfare state just like any other major UK political party, whatever you suspect of their motives and whether or not you think they support it enough.
It’s true that they are not a social democratic party under the European definition, where it means centre-left, i.e. within the spectrum of opinion that is considered mainstream, but more supportive of “left-wing” ideas such as a bigger role for the state, more redistribution of wealth, etc. It’s a question of degree rather than absolutes, though.
Regarding the 2010 Tory-LibDem coalition, at the time the LibDem leadership was drawn heavily from the “orange book” faction of the party, classic liberals who had a lot in common with the more socially liberal elements among the Tories. There wasn’t a vast gulf politically between David Cameron and Nick Clegg.
Maybe more detail than you wanted but I think it helps to know the history of the party name.
The Liberals were (with the Tories (AKA The Conservative Party)) one of the two great parties of the 19th Century. They helped to usher in many of the great (Liberal) reforms that transformed Britain from an aristocracy into a democracy. Hence: The Liberal Party. The Liberals went into decline starting in 1918 and the newly ascendant Labour party edged them out of the top two. They have been in the political wilderness ever since.
Labour started out as the working man’s party and were helped into power, ironically enough, by the Representation of the People Act passed by the last Liberal prime Minister in 1918 which gave the vote to all adult men for the first time. Labour was officially (and in reality) a socialist party working towards “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange” until the Blair reforms of the 90s. Corbyn wants to take them back there which is why he causes so much trepidation among the moneyed classes.
For most of the 20th century, power alternated between the (capitalist) Conservative Party and the (socialist) Labour Party. The Liberals were squeezed in the middle but it’s not really fair to call them a centrist party because politics is not one dimensional. They are certainly not Libertarian. If anything, they are the opposite.
In the early 80s, the Labour Party had drifted way over to the left in response to the rightwing shift of the Tories under Thatcher and a bunch of breakaway Labour MPs formed a new party — The Social Democratic Party (SDP) to escape the nakedly socialist Labour Party and take advantage of the empty centre ground.
During this timeframe, the Liberal Party were languishing at an all time low but, still, there was not enough room for two parties in the centre and the Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party merged to become the Liberal Democratic Party, AKA the Lib Dems.
I wouldn’t draw too many inferences from the names of the parties.
The Conservatives were once conservative but no longer; they have become a radical, nationalist, neoliberal party. More Ayn Rand than Milton Friedman.
Labour was once the party of labour. They still are to some extent (for example, most of the Trades Union are affiliated with the Labour Party) but it’s not clear that this association will survive Brexit. As with the Democrats in the USA, Labour is now an odd mix of blue collar workers and educated people of the left, often dismissed as Champagne Socialists. If Corbyn has his way, they will go back to their socialist roots (he has plans to renationalise several industries) but it’s not clear that he will survive long enough as leader to make that happen.
The Liberals chose their name when liberals stood for democratic reforms and individual freedoms. The word “Liberal” really meant something back then and bears little relationship to what Americans (or Australians) mean when they say “Liberal”. Social Democracy is a real thing in most of the world outside America and that’s what the SDP stood for. The name “Liberal Democrat” is an accident of history and it doesn’t pay to read too much into it.
The Lib Dems of today are internationalist, environmentalist and oriented towards local control. Even in their wilderness years, Liberals and LibDems have been a major player in local government. On economic issues they are somewhere in the middle, but that doesn’t even begin to capture what they stand for.
One more point. I’ve just come back to the UK after 25 of living in the States and politics is very different here from what it is over there. Americans tend to view politics through the lens of their own political system. The words “Liberal”, “Conservative”, “Socialist”, “Freedom”, and “State” all have different meanings here. It’s not useful to analyse British politics in American terms.
The SDP weren’t leftist. They were founded by MPs from the Labour party who expected to be voted out by their constituency party because they were extremely right wing. It was no surprise to anyone passing attention when they happily jumped on board with the Tories, or when they recently refused to work with Corbyn on Brexit.
Except that the lib dems seem to me to be closest to Amercian moderate Democrats, so in that sense the words happen to be similar through a random accident. The Clinton-Clinton-Obama wing of the Democrats would be staunch Remainers but lukewarm socialists whereas the Sanders/Warren wing would fit better with Labour since they would be lukewarm Remainers or even Leavers, but obviously there isn’t a complete parallel because the lefter American Democrats would attempt to institute economic justice through the tax system rather than state control.
Here’s the preamble to the Lib Dem constitution
Traditionally, the LIberals had been the party combining the interests of radical reformers and smaller business/commercial interests and predominantly anti-imperialist, where the Conservatives were the party of the major landed and business interests and predominantly imperialist.
Liberals would be mainly oriented against statism and for fairly tight government fiscal policy; this put them on the wrong side of socio-economic and political development, especially in the aftermath of WW1, hence the rise of Labour in the 1920s. The anti-imperial internationalist tradition meant that by the 1950s they were enthusiastically pro British participation in the European movement.
The Social Democrats, coming from the Labour tradition, were less opposed to statism in principle, but had been strongly influenced by thinkers in the Labour Party who by the 1950s saw that the public mood had turned against the bureaucratic government required for extensive nationalisation of the economy, and what was seen as excessive tax-and-spend policies. Also, they were alarrmed by the Labour left’s suspicion of NATO and similar alliances, and particularly their support for unilateral nuclear disarmament (actually, the Liberals also had a strong element of pacifism among their membership, too, which caused problems while they were negotating their alliance in the 80s).
As for why the coalition with the Tories… In the 1990s, Blair had persuaded the Labour Party to rewrite theclause in its constitution that committed the party to “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”, and had managed to persuade the electorate that Labour would not be giving up nuclear weapons and would be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. In the face of a Tory party disunited over Europe, beset by personal scandals and policy failures, and seemingly bereft of any sense of purpose, both Labour, and to a lesser extent the LibDems, benefited. The LibDems had hoped to be in a more influential position if there had been a close result, but although Blair agreed to an investigatory commission to look at electoral reform (the other great objective of the LibDems like the Liberals before them), its proposals got nowhere. Towards the end of Blair’s time in officer, a number of senior LibDems published a series of essays with a range of non-statist proposals for social and economic change, and with a change of leadership, the mood changed, especially once Blair was replaced by Gordon Brown. By then Cameron was in his more liberal, vaguely green phase, proposing the idea of encouraging local charitable initiative as a means of substituting for state services.
And in the circumstances of the 2010 election result, LibDems could say, as a previous Liberal leader did after the inconclusive election of 1974, that if it wasn’t clear who’d won, it was clear who’d lost - and on this occasion, it was Labour who’d lost.
“Extremely right wing” from the perspective of the 1980s Labour Party. Others would call them centrists. 
And, the difficulty about working with Corbyn on Brexit is that one first must identify what Corbyn’s goals are, to see if a working arrangement can be agreed. It’s that first step that is a doozy.
They sound like Greens.
In the past, things could be simplified as Labour representing the working class, the Liberals representing the middle class, and the Conservatives representing the upper class, but with many middle class voting for one of the two big parties. Blair’s New Labour moved Labour from the left to the center-left, and the Conservatives at the same time moved to become center-right “compassionate conservatives”. Corbyn has since moved Labour to the left and Brexit has moved the Conservatives to the right, so the Liberal Democrats are positioned as the center ground party, and have attracted defections from centrist Labour and Conservative MPs who are unhappy with the directions their respective parties are taking. With the Labour Party’s position on Brexit being unclear in recent years, the Liberal Democrats have emerged as the largest unequivocal Remain party.
Your statement is an oxymoron. “US politics” is the opposite of “reasonable”. Your “left” party is at best centrist by any “reasonable” measure
If “reasonable” means “international consensus.” But you’ll find a lot of hostility to that notion here.
From what I gather reading the BBC website ISTM that one of the current issues regarding Corbyn, Labour, and the remain campaign, is that Labour seems to consist of a coalition that in US politics has already fallen apart. The stereotypical “white working class” voter has left the Democratic Party and now supports Trump. From what I gather the same demographic in the UK support the leave position but still remain part of the Labour coalition. The closest elected official I can think of in the US who represents this type of voter is senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and he seems to be the last of his kind. Do I have that about right, or is that hopelessly wrong?
Without knowing your Virginia chap, I think that sounds about right. Traditional Labour voters (working classes) are feeling at odds with their party, largely due to Brexit, although not entirely. Labour has been socially liberal for a long time now, and that doesn’t always fit with traditional Labour voters either.
Erm, why are you talking to me like I’m the new bug? 