Written by John Wallcraft   

So UKIP harvested the protest vote and that’s the headline. What’s really at the heart of this though is a massive vote of no confidence in the Coalition (or the Cameron Ministry, to give it it's official title). This is a particularly searing jab at the Lib Dems whose support, as everyone suspected it would, simply died. Ah hem. Tuition Fees. Even those who didn't agree with or care about the policy looked on in dismay as a cornerstone policy of their election platform was simply thrown away without so much as a fight. Nick Clegg looked like a sacrificial lamb to his supporters or worse, like a cynical poser.

To be fair what the Lib Dems did must have seemed like sound strategy from their perspective. Let’s remember please that the Lib Dems are the smoldering embers of the Whig party with an admixture of renegade Tories.That is their political DNA. John Stuart Mill formulated the doctrine of maximal liberty that lies at the heart of their philosophy and Nick Clegg has publicly referred to ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ by Isaiah Berlin as key to his own political philosophy.

So what’s that all about?

Well. Mill’s doctrine of maximal liberty and Berlin’s doctrine of negative freedom share the same central premise; that freedom is fundamentally a question of individual liberty and that individual liberty should be inviolable to the degree to which it does not impinge upon the liberty of others. And that’s about it. This doesn't go the whole Tory hog of saying that any attempt to control individual liberty is wrong and that therefore government is an immoral idea per se, but rather that government should be minimally concerned with ensuring any blocks to personal liberty are removed and that any attempts to suppress liberties are thwarted.This is what the pundits in the field of political philosophy refer to as the ‘night watchman state’ i.e. the government keeps its eye on things and makes sure no one does anything naughty but otherwise keeps its nebb out. Economic Protectionism through trade tariffs is fine since you are just protecting your own economic freedoms from predatory trade practices. Redistribution? Umm.

So to a Lib Dem strategist circa 2010, flanking left to grab votes from a flailing Labour party didn't seem a betrayal of bedrock principals at all. Oppose the war? That’s government over-reach. Go soft on drugs? Personal liberty. Tuition fees? Well. That’s something that the young and the aspirational middle classes will love and we’ll see about it when we get some power. Put these as your shop-front policies and a political narrative is created. Also you can be safe in the knowledge that the whole election will be fought on soft issues since on free trade economics NONE OF THEM DISAGREED WITH EACH OTHER.

So the British electorate has exercised its right to be chippy intolerant assholes. But the real issue that is leaching life out of civil democracy is not division, it is consensus.

When Labour excised Clause 4 from its manifesto they effectively signed the Thatcher/Regan pledge that had held good for nearly twenty years; to wit ‘thou shalt not interfere with the free market’. History was over and state interventionism had lost, the Soviet experiment had failed and even China was falling in line economically. During Nu Labours reign the handing over of the economy to the invisible hand of the market that Thatch had begun reached its logical conclusion. Manufacturing crept back onto these shores in a discreet balkanized fashion that unions could not turn into inflexible pools of Labor power, but most of our economy, about 20 – 30 % came from City of London ‘financial services’. What’s ‘financial services’ I hear you ask. Basically we became a state sponsored tax haven.

Did Labour really believe in this economic model? Well Blair certainly did and so did Brown and if there was dissent in the ranks it never troubled them during their chats on the Downing Street sofa. The alternative, progressive taxation and Keynsian market control, was so 1950’s. Who questions a winning formula when you’re in a growing economy? I mean have you visited a City of London brokerage firm? Have you seen all the computers? They must know what they’re doing right? Right?

So when, in 2008, it all went down like the house of cards it always was none of these idiots had any other ideas. They’d already marginalized all the people who disagreed with them. The academy was full of free market yes men. And all the pubic knew was that they were getting shafted. And then more shafted. Do we challenge the market? Labour say no, Tories say no, Lib Dems say no, because after all, you can't interfere with the market. What then? Must be the state's been spending outside its means again.

No one believes in the political discourse because there is no political discourse, just different shades of pale grey on the same backcloth. So parliamentary politics looses credibility and anyone with an even vaguely divergent narrative stands out like a splotch of color even if, as with UKIP, that color is just very, very dark grey.

'We' are broke because 'we' overspent, who says different? No one. Oh but here's someone with a plan. If 'we' are broke why don't 'we' radically reduce the number of people who qualify as 'we' so the money we have got will stretch further. Look for reasons to exclude people, any old reasons will do.

But don't challenge the market.