A fissure at the heart of the Liberal Democrats

The Paul Richards column

The reaction up and down the Burma Road – the warren of cramped Lobby journalists’ offices in the House of Commons – to the sacking of Lord Oakeshott yesterday was a resounding ‘who he?’ It’s a fair question. His sacking, prompted as Ed Balls said for ‘telling the truth’ about Osborne’s lettuce leaf of a deal with the banks, sent hacks scurrying for Google, or Who’s Who for the veterans of Fleet Street and hot metal. I reached for a copy of the Dictionary of Liberal Biography, but unfortunately he’s not listed.

It turns out he’s some ex-Labour, ex-SDPer, who stood as a Labour candidate in Crawley in 1974, and as a SDP-Alliance candidate in Cambridge in 1983. He holds directorships aplenty, which equipped for the role of chair of Vince Cable’s Business Advisory Group (a role he has not resigned from as far as I know). He wasn’t actually in the government, merely the ‘Treasury spokesperson in the Lords’ which sounds like a made-up job if ever there was one. And no, he wasn’t Michael Oakeshott the conservative philosopher who died in 1990. Do keep up.

The reaction from Nick Clegg was less sanguine. It represents, not a hissy-fit by a Life Peer you’ve never heard of, but a fissure between the old Liberals and the social democrats who comprise the modern Liberal Democrats. Oakeshott, like Vince Cable, was a Labour man in the 1970s. Both were Labour councillors, and both joined the new SDP in the early 1980s. They were SDP/Alliance candidates together in 1983. They rejected Labour’s loony-leftism, but they signed up to full-blooded social democracy, including an increase in public borrowing to create jobs through infrastructure projects, an extension in the youth training scheme, industrial democracy, increased pensions and benefits (paid for by increases in National Insurance), more council house building and massive increases in international aid. The 1983 SDP/Liberal Alliance manifesto wasn’t a full-blown suicide note, but it was a loud cry for help. Emphatically, it rejected the kind of neoliberal economic politics pursued by Thatcher then and Cameron now.

Oakeshott is Cable’s man. He speaks the truths that Cable dare not. As such, he articulates the deep unease within Clegg’s party about its direction. Clegg was born to do this stuff. Those in the Liberal Democrats who started out as Labour, or joined the SDP directly, did not come into politics to close libraries, and put nurses on the dole. The letter in the Times this morning from Liberal Democrat councillors decrying the cuts their government is imposing on them is further evidence of a breakdown of discipline. Local Lib Dems have a simple electoral strategy: put as much distance between themselves and the government as possible, in the hope the electors won’t notice they belong to the same party.

But it’s about more than policy – it’s about politics. That’s why Clegg has real cause to worry. Whereas Labour’s factionalism has usually been about strong personalities and political ambition, the Lib Dems now have factions forming on ideological lines. It’s the social democrats versus the liberals, a feud which makes the Jets and Sharks look like guinea pig fanciers. Oakeshott’s sacking, performed live on Channel 4 by Danny Alexander, does not silence a critic; it emboldens one. Oakeshott is now the unofficial leader in the Lords of the provisional wing of the Liberal Democrats. Vince Cable and Simon Hughes are its Adams and McGuiness. Clegg knows that if he goes too far or too fast, it will cost him his leadership. It may be that he’s not too bothered, knowing he’s on a promise of a ministerial post in the next Tory government and a place in the House of Lords. I doubt he’ll sit anywhere near Matthew Oakeshott.