LIB DEM leader Vince Cable’s claim that his party can “shake off the setbacks of two damaging general elections” is not grounded in any acknowledgement of why those elections were so damaging.
This is perhaps why he feels able to welcome a “realignment” of British politics.
The realignment he refers to is not that caused by the collapse of faith in the neoliberal market model and the return of democratic choice to our politics in the form of a mass membership, socialist-led Labour Party with a very different vision of the country’s future to that of the Conservatives.
It is the already half-forgotten splinter created by the so-called Independent Group of MPs, who Cable observes have policies that could be “cut and pasted” from the Lib Dems: pro-privatisation, pro-market and pro-EU.
This is not a “realignment” — it is a bid to put the genie of democracy back in the bottle and restore a broken political consensus that has failed the people of this country (and, through the predatory nature of a foreign policy based on aggression and war, wreaked untold misery on the peoples of other countries).
It is also having scant political impact — at least so far — despite the usual voluminous media coverage given to any pub bore prepared to stick the knife into Jeremy Corbyn.
Survation, the only polling agency to accurately predict the result of the 2017 election, found on Friday that Labour lead the Tories by four points — and that the big two remain the only players at a Britain-wide level, on 39 and 35 per cent, while the Lib Dems languish on 10 per cent, far less than the mid-20s the party polled at before entering the coalition government with the Tories.
Cable’s depiction of Labour and the Conservatives as “old, tired and increasingly discredited” ignores the fact that old, tired and discredited parties do not double their memberships in a couple of years, as Labour did from 2015.
And his view that the Lib Dems can move on from the hatred provoked by their coalition with the Tories ignores the fact that the country has not moved on from the consequences of that grim partnership.
As the national tour being undertaken by the People’s Assembly campaign has it, Britain is Broken. This is a country where homelessness and foodbank use have exploded since Cable joined hands with George Osborne to rob local government and public services blind from 2010.
It is a country where real wages have plummeted in the longest pay squeeze in two centuries and one in five children now live in poverty — most of those from working households.
So dire is the plight of Britain’s poor that the annual Comic Relief jamboree has been slammed by Tory MPs as “an advert for Jeremy Corbyn” because it depicted the terrible march of poverty across our communities.
Meanwhile pundits speculate as to whether a lower than usual fundraising total is the MP David Lammy’s fault for criticising Comic Relief, rather than having anything to do with emaciated household budgets.
The former Brazilian archbishop and liberation theologian Helder Camara famously remarked: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”
The Morning Star does not believe charity is any solution to the grotesque injustice written into the DNA of the capitalist system.
But if Red Nose Day has now become dangerously subversive, it just goes to show that the Tories have done such damage to our society they can no longer hide behind moralistic rhetoric or free market ideology. They have to demand censorship of the facts themselves.
