Anthony Painter

A couple of days of ago, senior Guardian staff gathered to consider how they would recommend their readers vote come May 6th. They tweeted their readers and solicited their opinions on their website. It seems that they have decided to recommend that the paper’s readers should vote tactical for the Labour or Liberal Democrat candidate best placed to defeat a Conservative if Polly Toynbee’s column is to be believed this morning (though a glance down the comments on their website consultation suggests strong support for the Lib Dems- the old media can do cosmetic consultation as well it would appear.)

This election is shattering assumptions. Whatever happens from here on in, stacked on top of what happened in response to the expenses crisis, we now know that the British political system is broken. Strangely, despite David Cameron’s protestations to the contrary, British society seems to be in ruder health. Brilliant society, broken politics.

In the old politics, you would decide which of the two main parties was the least worst option then vote tactically in your constituency against the candidate who was the worst option. Only about 60% of the electorate actually voted for a party. No wonder well over a third haven’t been voting. It’s such a negative thing to do.

Quite how that Guardian meeting on Thursday managed to come to the conclusion that what we are seeing is purely an anti-Tory moment- as it appears to have done- is beyond me. Liberal Democrats are picking up support because many voters are not only fed up of Labour and the Conservatives but because they are fed up with this negative, stunted, anti-democratic political system as well. And so the Guardian responds by recommending that voters act in the same old tactical way- and it really thinks this will secure change?

What the paper is doing and what we are all doing is working with a tired set of assumptions that are now stretching to breaking point and beyond. This is no longer a game of Parliamentary arithmetic- and the old politics will prove resilient if it’s played in that way. The popular anger at the expenses scandal wasn’t about parliamentary arithmetic either. There was a solid majority against reform in Parliament. But the people spoke with such a loud cry that things absolutely had to change.

And so it could be with this election. For what we have now is the possibility that this election becomes a national referendum for change. If people vote with their hearts and not in accordance with some calculation then things will have to change. I will be voting Labour because I am Labour. But I also believe passionately in a new politics (as will be obvious!) For me, alongside the economic recovery, it is the most important issue we face as a democracy- how we actually go about building a politics that can better reflect and engage with a changing country. But the Guardian like so many others are locked in the cage of old assumptions (and it really isn’t helpful from the perspective of Labour or political reform to dismiss what is happening and the Liberal Democrats as ‘anti-politics’ as David Miliband did this morning even if the Liberal Democrats have yet to crystallise exactly what their notion of change means.)

One of these assumptions, is that the Liberal Democrats are basically a more liberal version of Labour waiting to come home. So as a voter on the centre-left you can flip you vote between the two as regularly as some MPs flipped their homes. The one small problem is that the Liberal Democrats don’t see it that way at all.

They see themselves not as partners in waiting for Labour but as contenders as the dominant force on the centre-left in British politics. Labour is seen as failed force and, much like the political system itself, a political relic. The failures as they see it- in some cases unfairly- on poverty, political reform, reform of the state, civil liberties, and foreign policy have mounted. Credulity has evaporated. They have felt patronised and ignored- and they have been.

Just out of curiosity, I engaged with a few Liberal Democrats on Twitter this morning to market test my hunch that Liberal Democrats see themselves as an alternative to Labour not an ally, a contender not a collaborator. My hunch was about right it seems.

Lee Chalmers tells me: “I’ve recently become a Lib Dem because they occur for me as the only progressive party in the UK. New leadership needs space.” Sara Bedford wrote: “I don’t think the Conservatives see their role as enabling anyone except the articulate and the able.’ She then went on to say: “I feel a sizable number of Labour want to do things ‘for the poor’, rather than enable them not to BE poor.”

And Nick Clegg himself sees the Liberal Democrats as an alternative- not a junior partner to Labour in a newly re-aligned centre-left. In this sense the Liberal Democrats are the DUP to the Labour’s UUP. The strategy is replacement. There is a bit of personal spice to this as Matthew Parris illustrates. But it is far, far deeper than that.

Clegg’s is different reading of political history- one where collectivism has run its course and liberalism is the next leg of progressive change in Britain. Liberal democracy is waiting in the twenty-first century wings to take over from Labour’s clunky twentieth century collectivist machine. How do we know this? Well, he wrote it in a pamphlet for Demos last year. And Sunder Katwala dissected- and critiqued- what it could all mean. Katwala asked portentiously:

“Do the Lib Dems today increasingly represent rising social movements and constituencies that Labour can not reach?”

And that is the issue with the tactical voting ruse. Labour isn’t reaching these voters as of yet. So to ask them to directly or even obliquely vote Labour entirely misses the point. Katwala’s conclusion gets it spot on in terms of where we are politically in relation to Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats:

“Clegg is right that the parties share, and contest, progressive space.

He is no doubt right as a matter of political reality that the politics of progressive cooperation are too difficult now.”

Libearlism like socialism and social democracy is an enlightenment philosophy (and expect to hear the names TH Green and LT Hobhouse- the new liberals- over the next few weeks and RH Tawney will crop up as well.) As such it embodies a notion of ‘progress.’ But Nick Clegg’s notion of ‘progress’ is a very different one to Gordon Brown’s. It is easy to caricature these things but I suspect, in some respects, Nick Clegg has more in common with some of the more progressive elements of David Cameron’s conservatism- on state and public service reform for example. He doesn’t think that David Cameron shares his values on fairness and equality- in that he has more in common with Gordon Brown or that David Cameron really means it. But in philosophical and political terms, if Labour and the media views the Liberal Democrats as just Labour lite then they are making an enormous mistake- one that will be responded to with (rightful) disdain from the Liberal Democrats themselves.

And here it is encapsulated in a quote from Nick Clegg himself:

“Progressive politics is at a critical juncture. A generation of progressive voters has been betrayed by Labour’s disregard for civil liberties, failures on inequality and addiction to central government. They will find little refuge in a Conservative party whose claim to the progressive mantle rings hollow.”

So the worst thing is to just see what has happened over the last couple of weeks as about charisma, style, the secret desire to have Labour in power but boredom with an incumbent, the re-birth of liberal and progressive Britain. This is about a diverse society slowly finding its voice. The reconciliation of that with a new, pluralistic politics may be more fraught and difficult than we can imagine. But let’s not try to be clever and in so doing continue to play the old political games.

I’ll vote Labour because I believe in the labour tradition. You vote who you want to vote for. And we must hope that the voice is clear, the case for change clear- and if the sort of seat predictions we have been seen based on the polls are anything to go by then it will  be- and make the case. Let’s turn this into a national referendum on change and then demand that our politicians respond- just as we did when too many of them had be caught fiddling their expenses.  And let’s challenge those lazy assumptions on which the current politics rests one by one.