Since 1997 it has often seemed that Britain is without a paliamentary opposition to the government. After the devastating blow that New Labour’s 1997 election win dealt to the Conservative Party they have been largely ineffective as an opposition party. The Liberal Democrats have made some sensible comments, but are still not strong enough as a parliamentary force to back up their words. The most effective opposition forces of the past seven years have been New Labour’s own backbench MPs who, in debates over War with Iraq and Top-up Fees, have brought the government perilously close to defeat.
The current British party system is relatively young. Looking back two centuries to the days when the dominant parties were the Whigs and the Tories, parties were loose affiliations of members of parliament. With the increasing professionalisation of politics since the Great Reform Act (1832) and the recent requirements to invest in costly publicity materials and high-profile campaigns, MPs have become more dependant on their parties to support their careers. And in theory the party affiliations also provide a mechanism for local party activists to have a say into how their MP behaves.
Many would argue that we are seeing the beginnings of a significant shift in the form which politics takes. Decreasing voter turnout, ineffective parliamentary opposition and unprecedented turnout for demonstrations show a growing disparity between the established political mechanisms and the way that motivated activists are able to make their voices heard. At least one columnist at the time of the G8 Summit in Genoa (July 2001) noted the irony that while the leaders inside lamented falling voter turnout in their respective countries, they ignored the voices of the 300,000 passionate young activists just outside their protected zone.
It’s in this context that Charles Kennedy has raised his voice to suggest that rather than understanding British politics in terms of a left-right continuum we should be thinking in terms of liberal-conservative. In many ways, that is simply moving to the linguistic conventions of US politics where the terms ’left’ and ‘right’ are subservient to ’liberal’ and ‘conservative’. It is certainly far from a new idea: the Whigs and Tories were generally known as liberal and conservative respectively.
For Kennedy, this distinction allows him to distinguish his party from either of his competitors, both of whom fall firmly in the conservative sphere of British politics. But it does seem good that an establishment politician is acknowledging that we need to think about the language we use to describe politics; it can only be hoped that linguistic discussions will intersect with structural discussions to look at new ways of involving the people in the political process. For myself, I suspect we are going to see an ongoing shift in the alignment and possibly the substance of political parties.