“I think I am quite different to the other leaders.” 

So said Jo Swinson at the launch of the Liberal Democrat manifesto. [20N0v2019] “They’ve all got an outlook which is very much harking back to the past, whether that’s the 1870s or the 1970s.”  

The 1970’s was not a great decade for the Labour Party, and I dare say Ms Swinson, in naming this decade,  was alluding to the slide of the Callaghan Government towards the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher and all that followed. 

As the Labour Party did not exist in the 1870s she must have the Conservative party in mind in relation to this second reference. As it happens,  in 1867, under Benjamin Disraeli the Conservative Party passed the Reform Act, which significantly extended the franchise. This stands as one of the more progressive moments in Conservative history. Still, I am not here to defend the Conservative Party.  I dare say the symmetry of 1970 and 1870 was hard to resist, and Ms Swinson’s barb was really intended to suggest that both parties are backward looking and out-dated unlike Ms Swinson who presents herself as “focused on the future ……[a future] that is open-hearted, open-minded, outward-looking, internationalist and liberal.”   

These are admirable sentiments, eloquently expressed; yet this does not excuse her rather glib smear of the Labour Party’s proposed policies by association with their 1970s record.

So far as the Labour Party are concerned, the 1930s is a more illuminating connection to make with the ambition of their policy proposals which quite explicitly draw inspiration from President Franklin D Roosevelt’s Keynesian inspired New Deal. 

It was Roosevelt whose policies of investment in infrastructure took the United States out of the depression, which had so destroyed the World economy, following the 1929 Wall Street Crash. The New Deal included large scale planting of trees to stem the loss of topsoil which had resulted from the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl and also the extension of the necessary infrastructure for electricity supplies to reach rural parts of the US which the free market roll out of electricity had failed to connect.

Despite its unfortunate record in the 2010 coalition I continue to see the Liberal Democrats as a party whose fundamental impulses are progressive and therefore I  puzzle at their refusal to see an opportunity to work with Labour in the event of a hung Parliament, where they may hold the balance of power. Cooperation with Labour is the most likely route to a second referendum and the most probable way in which they may achieve their stated objective, to stop Brexit.  

Perhaps Ms Swinson believes she can wring a second referendum out of Boris Johnston, with his deal and remain as the options on the ballot. She is welcome to try, but actually I think he’d rather die in a ditch, or more probably, crash us out without any deal at all.