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Why you should vote Lib-Dem Samuel Brittan Based on article in Evening Standard 28/02/05 According to opinion poll experts, floating voters are the least informed members of the electorate. That puts me in my place. For I have voted every possible way, except for extreme nationalist parties, and have also abstained. I have never been any kind of socialist or collectivist. I was a member of the Cambridge University Labour Club from general radical instincts and concentrated there mainly on issues of foreign policy and personal liberty. On the other hand the Conservatives have never appealed to me. At the last election I wrote that "they stand for all that is most nasty minded in British public attitudes: a simulated hatred of foreigners, a mean minded punitive attitude to immigrants escaping either from oppression or poverty and hoping to find a better life." Their main approach to crime has been to promise even more prisons than Labour. Present day Tories have abandoned the Thatcherite goal of reducing the influence of the state. Their main reliance is on focus groups and spin doctors and their regret is they have no Alistair Campbell of their own. They remind me of the saying of the German playwright Berthold Brecht, "I am their leader; I must follow them." The conflict between my instincts on domestic economic policy and other issues was resolved for me when Labour chose one business adviser, Sir Peter Gershon, to claim to lop off some £22bn per annum of "waste" from public services, and the Conservatives another, David James, to take that total to £35bn. This really was scraping the barrel. A former French prime minister, Pierre Mendes-France once said "To govern is to choose." To leave everything to so called business efficiency experts is to give up. Of course there is a vast amount of waste in government as in corporate spending. But eliminating it is altogether different matter. The task of government is not to emulate business, but to provide a framework in which business can operate in the public interest. If any government ever tried to carry out the full economies advocated by either of these gentlemen, we should come up against all kinds of nasty policy surprises which no one intended. Take even an issue where the Tories seem to be adopting a pro choice policy, namely school vouchers. As a concession to their own "wet" wing, the Conservatives seem to have decided against any topping up of such vouchers, thus losing all chance of bringing in the independent sector. There is little to choose between the two main parties on economic policy. I advocated voting Labour at the 2001 election precisely for the reasons that made the Labour grassroots so reluctant to do so. Not only has Tony Blair failed to introduce socialism and has left many of Thatcher reforms in place. He has even gone further in some respects in promoting market forces and price mechanism, for example tuition fees and support for congestion charges. It would be a lie to give the Iraq war as my main reason for turning away. Well before the fighting started I concluded that the case that Saddam was a danger to the west had not been established and this was much more important for me than the technicalities of UN voting. But I did not join the anti-war protesters, who too often gave the impression that they thought Bush and Blair were more hateful than Saddam and a greater menace than al-Qaeda terrorists. Instead of stating his real reasons for supporting the war Blair either resorted to, or turned a blind eye to, political manipulation involving the death of a government scientist. What are the domestic reasons why I have turned against him? It is partly a matter of style, which is more important than strait-laced people imagine. History is to be junked. We are always advised to "move on" and "put" things "behind us." Nor can one avert one’s eyes from the people that Blair has assembled for his campaign. Most elections involve dirty fighting, but the coming one looks like establishing a near record in modern times. I am quite sure that the prime minister is not anti-semitic: if anything the other way. But there are those under him (and I am not referring to Ken Livingstone) who will give a nod or a wink in the pathetic hope of preserving the Muslim vote, which is five times as large as the Jewish one. At one time we were threatened with a Tory slogan "Vote Blair, get Brown". But this now looks more an enticement. Gordon Brown has done a good job in securing overall stability. Any underlying budget deficit is chickenfeed. Even here, however, I become increasingly irritated with the way he speaks as if the world began in 1997. Of the 50 quarters of continuous growth of which he boasts, he never mentions that the process began in 1992 and were therefore under the Major Government. But I am afraid that his incessant intervention in every nook and cranny of business life is beginning to undermine his headline achievements. He cannot throw off the habit of equating "being on the left" with more government. He is far from anti-business, but cannot understand the desire of businessmen, like the rest of us, to be left alone. He cannot speak in favour of motherhood and apple pie without offering a medal for the first and a cash incentive for the second. I am entirely in favour of his much needed redistribution of income towards poorer people via in-work benefits; unfortunately these have now reached a level of complexity which requires a rocket scientist to understand. In going for the Lib-Dems I am under no illusion that they are the party of Gladstone and John Stuart Mill. But at least they are different from Labour and Conservative; and there is nothing wrong in voting for negative reasons. In the past I have shrunk from supporting them because they looked too much like the unreconstructed Old Labour of the 1980s. But since Gordon Brown’s large increases in public service spending, they have found less mileage in that direction; and the recent Orange Book from the still-too-small free market wing of the party suggests a move in the right direction, as does the appointment of the eminently sensible Vincent Cable as their shadow chancellor. There is no avoiding tactical voting in our present electoral system; and if your main objective is to keep out either Labour or the Conservatives at all costs then there are only a few constituencies where voting Lib-Dem would make sense. But if you believe that two terms of Labour are long enough and you would not mind a hung House of Commons then feel free to go for the Lib-Dems. Samuel Brittan writes for the Financial Times. A collection of his essays, Against The Flow has just been published by Atlantic Books.
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