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For all the “objections” to the First Past the Post system, the reality lies in the fact that it has grown directly from our Adversarial System of Justice where there are only one of two answers, Guilty or Not Guilty.

Despite all the “noises”, there is little much to divide the two main parties especially in terms of actual policies after the next General Election where tax increases and cuts in public spending will be identical. To take that a little further, whilst the Tories may seek to downsize the State and what we can expect it to provide by shifting things to the voluntary sector, Labour would wait until things got better and then expand the State again using taxpayers money.

It is a Difference of Emphasis

The only practical difference between the two approaches is that by shifting things to the voluntary sector, the burden lands on the citizens shoulders in terms of their personal time, under Labour they rob the citizen via taxation which they then distribute because “they know better”. As the Country is virtually bankrupt, at this time the Tory approach is both practical and efficient, the Labour one hopeless. However things do not stand still, when prosperity returns, the public will want to sit on their backsides and prefer to ‘pay’ for the State to ‘provide again’.

The point that I’m making is that in the UK unless you have a specific, narrow cause and defined voting base, SNP, Sinn Fein, UDP, Plydd and so on, being a “Third National Party” is virtually impossible and PR won’t help. What the LibDems needed to do over these past 18 months was to make a “breakthrough” at the expense of Labour by pushing them into third place which is what Labour did to the Liberal Party a 100 years ago.

The Radical Ground

The reality is that politics is like “a Football Tournament or the X Factor”, it is a marathon with only two people or teams in the final (General Election), along the way through the qualifying rounds, you have to knock your rivals out of contention and the LibDems have failed to do so consistently over the decades.

If we look at our history and political parties within it, there have always been two threads, Establishment which is normally associated with the Tories and the Radical, Whigs, Liberals, Labour. Perhaps because of the demographics and the understanding that the National victory is won or lost in England, the LibDems have always projected themselves as a sort of “Tory Light” which is a mistake, they should have positioned themselves as Radical.

Fighting the Wrong Battle

Instead of promoting Constitutional Reform based upon PR which always was seen as self serving to people outside of the Party, they should have concentrated on looking at broader reforms to encompass and satisfy the 3 Celtic Nations within the UK as well as the English. But ultimately Britain is pretty middle of the road in politics as is the US and both likely because of Civil War, for all the noise there is only one narrow strip called the “Middle Ground”, there is only room for two in that space.

The LibDems will never make progress until they realise that their target is the Labour Party and they set out to displace them on the Radical Wing of British Politics. Done properly, they could attract a strong youth vote but right now they are too fuddy duddy and introverted, the worse job in British Politics is Leader of the LibDems, the best front man they had was driven to drink by the experience !