Wake up Polly

Polly is still trapped in the 1970's. She just doesn't get it. Wake up Polly! The political landscape is changing dramatically. Her article is on the Lib-Dems, and their trying to fine a leader to replace Charles Kennedy. They need a leader for the twenty-first century but she is still obsessing about the political battles of the twentieth.

Splitting the left, eh? But wait a moment; that is exactly where we still are: Labour 36%, Lib Dems 22% at the last election.

New Labour is a broad alliance of authoritarians, and the Lib-Dems a broad alliance of liberals. It would be more accurate to say that it is the Conservative that are the splitters, containing as they do both liberals and authoritarians as a broad alliance on the economic right.

The angry Labour MP John Spellar, who most loudly denounced SDP splitters at this meeting, also, like many of his party, just as ferociously denounced any attempt to reunite the left now. He would permit no plurality, refusing to consider introducing PR or any accommodation with the Lib Dems. "Who says the Lib Dems are of the left?" Spellar demanded. In many councils - indeed in my own Lambeth - Lib Dems now hold power with Tories to keep Labour out.

The Lib-Dems are not principly of the old 'left' they are liberals. Perhaps someone should point this out to him. The name offers a bit of a clue. The liberal Lib-Dems have joined up with liberal leaning Tories to keep out the authoritarian New Labour Party. That New Labour is authoritarian can be seen by the fact that John Spellar "would permit no plurality", you can have any view you like. So long as it is New Labour approved.

It may maximise their vote to dance about saying "neither right nor left", but what is the point of merely existing in nothingness?

Polly shows here that she too shows that she just doesn't get it. They are neither right nor left, they are liberal. The old left/right divide is no longer particually relivant since the collapse of communism showed that big S Socialism doesn't work. This turned large chunks of the old left/right divide uninhabitable by anyone that actually looks at evidence to make their judgements. The important distinction is not left or right it is authoritarian or liberal. The Lib-Dems are liberal, New Labour is authoriatrian and the Tories are dancing around saying neither liberal nor authoritarian.

Already the Lib Dems alone own civil liberties, and they are the pluralists who would rebuild council and Commons chambers in horseshoe shape under proportional representation

They own civil liberties be cause they are LIBERAL, somebody please clue the bitch in. IT IS IN THE NAME POLLY.

why bother to propose creating a host of health-insurance providers competing for the custom of NHS patients?

Because it works? France for example has the best health care system in the world. It is a social insurance system which poeple top up with their own insurance and then simply buy the services they need from private providers. Competition works, the market is the best way of distributing scarce resources we know. Big centralised state provision doesn't, as has been obvious since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

There is no future in this middling stuff in the present landscape. But a sharp prod from the left could force the old Labour tribe to abandon its insistence on total power, total control, obliging it to open and share with others.

No future Polly? This is the future! The left/right battles over economics are over. The right won. The future is the 'middling stuff' of the fight for liberty against the authoritarians, who at least she is willing to admit exist within the Labour Party and want 'total power, total control'. Over everything.