Turncoat

I am still to an extent catching up with past events here, and one of these was election day on Thursday 25th ult. I joined the Liberal Party when I was 18, just as it was about to abolish itself, and maintained a sometimes shaky allegiance to its various incarnations over the subsequent decades. On election day last month I finally voted for someone else, for the first time in my suffraged life not casting my ballot for the candidate of the Liberal interest - except the one occasion when I was the candidate of the Liberal interest. For the first time ever I stayed up late to hear the election results and it wasn't the Liberal performance that interested me - at least, not positively.

Plenty of people I know have been through the experience of finding their patience tried by the behaviour of the Liberal Democrats in recent years, and expressed a similar sense of disappointment, and their feelings have an unmistakable reflection in the calamitous shredding of the Liberal vote in the last elections. The party took up a broadly left-of-centre stance before the election of 2010 and then went into coalition with a Tory majority partner which turned out to be every bit as unpleasant as the Conservative party usually is, so you can easily see why the people who voted for it were so very unhappy.

That's not really my issue. I don't see that the LibDems could have done anything much different, presented as they were with a Parliament which made the only other realistic option a minority Conservative government which would have gone to the polls within six months and then, more likely than not, won a stonking victory which would have allowed it to do anything it liked for five years. So I sympathise.

It isn't that, or even the accusation that the LibDems don't have a coherent philosophical position, which is what I might have had a go at them for some twenty years or so ago. It's that I'm no longer really a Liberal in any convincing way. At its heart Liberalism assumes that we function basically as individuals, reaching our own conclusions and taking our own decisions on the basis of how we perceive our interests and those of the society we belong to, and that the function of government is to maximise our ability to do so and to remove obstacles to the realisation of those goals. It's a lovely sort of ideal, but I can no longer see it as very realistic. As much as anything else, twenty years of Christianity has affected the way I look at things: I see human beings now as much more permeable, identity as having much vaguer and fuzzier edges, and the processes which lead to our decisions as much more debatable, ambiguous, and less conscious. I'm no longer sure I believe in free will to any great extent any more. The liberal model of humanity no longer convinces me, and I don't believe it answers the great questions of the age. It provides no tools for making our way forward, not now.