Broken Words Broken Promises - Labour Party: Fill & Download for Free

This is an interesting and fiddly question that I’ve got a few flippant but I think accurate answers for:The Liberal Democrats are Social Democrats, the Labour Party are Democratic SocialistsThe Liberal Democrats are socially international progressives and the economic policy is negotiable, the Labour Party are economically left wing and social policy is negotiable.The Liberal Democrats are the party of the nice middle classes. The Labour Party is the party of the gentrified former working classes.But a fuller answer requires a potted history of left wing politics in Britain over almost the past 40 years because who political parties are is a function of their history as much as policy.In 1980 Michael Foot, a left winger who I’m told was almost entirely devoid of charm won the Labour Party leadership election. Less than six months later the “Gang of Four” left the Labour Party in protest against it being too left wing and founded the Social Democratic Party. To cut a long story short the SDP first allied and then merged with the remnants of the Liberal Party (who were one of the two big parties of the 19th Century but were shattered by the first world war and never recovered) to form the Liberal Democrats - a socially liberal centrist party.So we need to look at how the left wing Labour Party under Michael Foot did - the 1983 general election. It was a “khaki election”, Thatcher having called it for a year almost to the day after winning the Falklands War. The Labour Party fought it under what one Labour MP called “The Longest Suicide Note In History” and contained such radical notions as Brexit, unilateral nuclear disarmament, a national minimum wage, and a fox hunting ban. The outcome in terms of seats was a Tory landslide but is possibly the best example of how bad a system First Past the Post is; the Tories managed 397 seats with 41% of the vote, Labour 209 with 28% of the vote, and the proto-Lib Dems just 23 with slightly more than 25% of the vote.(A lot of left wingers hate Tony Blair - but it’s worth pointing out that of those four parts of the Longest Suicide Note that are frequently cited as being ridiculous he implemented two).Anyway, for now we leave the Lib Dems because we need to tell Labour’s story - and the Lib Dem story up to 2002 is one of a slowly decreasing share of the vote but gaining a few more seats in return. The Powers that Be looked at that result (and to be fair 28% of the vote was a terrible result for the Labour Party) and said “Never again!”, electing Neil Kinnock as they did so. And did their best to purge the hard left (especially the Trotskyist Militant Tendancy but like all purges it didn’t end there) out of the party.So we have the centrist Lib Dems at this point who are approximately half Liberals and approximately half made up of people who left the Labour Party because it was too left wing. And we have the Labour Party determined to purge itself of its far left - and especially to make sure that there weren’t enough socialist MPs again to lead to another situation like the formation of the SDP or the 1983 election; one of the favoured tools for this was to park an all woman shortlist (made up of women carefully vetted by the central party) on any local constituency party that might want to present a socialist or even left wing MP. Possibly the most extreme case of the central Labour Party was Frank Field MP actively campaigning against Lol Duffy and for the Tory whose seat Lol Duffy could have won. And that in an election where Labour were predicted a mere 20 seat majority; the Tories instead won a small majority.(As a sidenote in 1991 David Icke was speaker for the Green Party. Yes, that David Icke -Jill Stein isn’t bad by comparison).So. The Labour Party was purging its socialists. What did that mean in practice? It meant that when the Labour Party checked people were politically orthodox enough for them it ended up with a lot of people that looked like the central party and were picked to “always vote at their party’s call and never think of thinking for themselves at all”. Not all of them but many (which is a major source of Labour’s current difficulties, especially as the activists were cranky enough to pick Corbyn). And what the purges didn’t do to the activists the Iraq War did. This is why I call it a gentrified party.And now back to the Liberal Democrats because their story gets much more interesting starting in 2003 after Labour implemented tuition fees and started the Iraq War. As a centre/centre left party the Lib Dems were major beneficiaries; they were the only major British party to actively oppose the Iraq War; to a lot of people (myself included) the Iraq War was a moral event horizon (that said I voted Labour in 2005 - but only because I lived in the constituency of possibly the Labour MP with the strongest anti-Iraq War credentials - Jeremy Corbyn). The Lib Dems swelled their ranks with students opposing tuition fees and people who found the Iraq War vile. In other words most of the soft left; and with 62 seats the Liberal Party hadn’t done better since 1923. So that was the high water mark of the Lib Dems.But now to explain the Lib Dems we also need to go into why there are so many ex-Lib Dems. To put it bluntly the right wing of the Lib Dems mounted a messy and successful coup. First they wrote The Orange Book and put out their economic ideas. Then they removed the current leader Charles “Chatshow Charlie” Kennedy for his badly concealed alcoholism. He was replaced by “Ming” Campbell - who they removed less than a year later for being too old. And then they managed to ensure that the candidates in the 2007 Lib Dem leadership contest were both authors of The Orange Book - Chris Huhne and Nick Clegg. (Clegg won).And then we have the 2010 General Election. The Lib Dems campaigned on a platform of “Say goodbye to broken promises” and every single Lib Dem MP signed their name to a promise to vote against any rise in tuition fees. They became part of a coalition government, and promptly almost all voted for a bill that raised tuition fees - and then Nick Clegg gave a notpology that he shouldn’t have made any promises he wasn’t absolutely sure he could keep (and someone autotuned it). And they seemed fully onboard with Tory economic policies (although did oppose things like ID cards). Unsurprisingly Lib Dem promises are now considered worthless, they crashed from 23% of the vote to 8%, and from 57 seats to 8. And lost the entire student vote.I hope at least some of that helps.

The simple fact is that few people trust the Liberal Democrats and with very good reason. In the 2010 General Election the Liberal Democrats ran on a campaign of “Say goodbye to broken promises” (as seen below). They won 23% of the vote, 57 seats, and came third.As a part of the campaign every single Lib Dem who was subsequently elected MP personally signed the Vote for Students pledge which stated:“I pledge to vote against any increase in fees in the next parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a fairer alternative.”Below you can see Nick Clegg with his copy of the pledge he personally signed (via the NUS website).When you sign up that personally to vote one way on an issue it doesn’t matter how trivial the issue is. You’d better vote the right way or have a damn good reason why not. Because voting the other way shows that your word is utterly worthless and that even by the standards of politicians you are completely untrustworthy.It at this point probably isn’t going to surprise any readers when I say that there was a vote to rise tuition fees later in 2010. But there was no immediate election to come, and the Liberal Democrats had joined the coalition. Every single one of the 57 MPs had personally pledged to vote against any rise in fees. This should be an easy decision, right? Especially for a party that campaigned on “Say goodbye to broken promises”?The Liberal Democrats, in power for the first time, voted 28–21 in favour of raising tuition fees. Selling out a pledge made by every single one of them personally in favour of the power given to them by their coalition partners.So even by the standards of politicians the Liberal Democrats showed themselves to be highly untrustworthy. But this story wouldn’t be complete without someone forgetting the first rule of holes (stop digging). Almost two years later Nick Clegg realised he’d utterly trashed the reputation of his party over this and had the bright idea of apologising. So he took out a national party political broadcast apologising - but apologising not for proving their word wasn’t worth the paper it was written on but for offering the promise in the first place.And in 2015 the Liberal Democrat vote share plummeted from 23% to 7.9% and their seats from 57 to 8.Right now the leader of the Liberal Democrats is one of those people who proved that their word wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. I was a fairly consistent vote through the 00s - but it doesn’t matter how much I agree with the Lib Dems, I just can’t trust that their word is worth the paper it’s written on especially while they have a leader whose isn’t.

History. I went into a history of the Liberal Democrats in a previous answer on the difference between the Lib Dems and the Labour Party (that contains a summary of the history of the Lib Dems since before they became Lib Dems). The quick answer is that they had a soft left base, took a hard turn to the right, governed with the Conservative Party, and they now have about a third of the support they used to have.And now back to the Liberal Democrats because their story gets much more interesting starting in 2003 after Labour implemented tuition fees and started the Iraq War. As a centre/centre left party the Lib Dems were major beneficiaries; they were the only major British party to actively oppose the Iraq War; to a lot of people (myself included) the Iraq War was a moral event horizon (that said I voted Labour in 2005 - but only because I lived in the constituency of possibly the Labour MP with the strongest anti-Iraq War credentials - Jeremy Corbyn). The Lib Dems swelled their ranks with students opposing tuition fees and people who found the Iraq War vile. In other words most of the soft left; and with 62 seats the Liberal Party hadn’t done better since 1923. So that was the high water mark of the Lib Dems.But now to explain the Lib Dems we also need to go into why there are so many ex-Lib Dems. To put it bluntly the right wing of the Lib Dems mounted a messy and successful coup. First they wrote The Orange Book and put out their economic ideas. Then they removed the current leader Charles “Chatshow Charlie” Kennedy for his badly concealed alcoholism. He was replaced by “Ming” Campbell - who they removed less than a year later for being too old. And then they managed to ensure that the candidates in the 2007 Lib Dem leadership contest were both authors of The Orange Book - Chris Huhne and Nick Clegg. (Clegg won).And then we have the 2010 General Election. The Lib Dems campaigned on a platform of “Say goodbye to broken promises” and every single Lib Dem MP signed their name to a promise to vote against any rise in tuition fees. They became part of a coalition government, and promptly almost all voted for a bill that raised tuition fees - and then Nick Clegg gave a notpology that he shouldn’t have made any promises he wasn’t absolutely sure he could keep (and someone autotuned it). And they seemed fully onboard with Tory economic policies (although did oppose things like ID cards). Unsurprisingly Lib Dem promises are now considered worthless, they crashed from 23% of the vote to 8%, and from 57 seats to 8. And lost the entire student vote.