We are witnessing a spate of exits from the Liberal Democrats announced online. While these have been happening intermittently for a while, we’ve had several in the last week or so. James Graham announced that he was leaving the party, and elaborated that the issue was party politics generally, rather than the Liberal Democrats specifically. Yesterday we had blog posts by Chris Ward and Daniel Furr announcing that they were resigning. No doubt there are many others deciding to leave the party less publicly. From the left and the right there is discontent, but for different reasons.

A focus for much of this discontent is the recent shenanigans around the Health and Social Care Bill. Those who were pleased – either for political or policy reasons – that Conference voted to amend the “Shirley Williams” motion are disgruntled, first, because of the way the leadership tried to manipulate the vote in the first place and, second, because almost immediately after Conference had voted Parliamentarians were indicating that they were going to ignore the vote and support the Bill. And so it came to pass in the House of Commons on Tuesday.

In contrast, those who supported the Health and Social Care Bill and believed the Libdem Lords had won significant amendments were frustrated by the whole Drop the Bill effort. Rather than an onward march towards the sunny uplands of a bright economic liberal future there was a feeling that the Drop the Bill grouping represents some form of backsliding towards soggy socialism – Libdems somehow succumbing en masse to delusion, under the spell of the Labour party.

So no one is very happy. Continue Reading →