I've had a fair amount to say recently about
political cross-dressing, mainly in relation to David Cameron's attempts to re-occupy the centre ground and, in some circumstances, to triangulate his policies to the left of Tony Blair.
The one aspect of this I've not touched on so far, however, is the attempt by the Liberal Democrats to steal the Tories clothes by posing as
tax cutters and abandoning their credentials as a progressive party by ditching the 50p top rate of tax.
Let me be honest about my own position. I believe in redistributive taxation, and furthermore I believe that people like me who are on decent incomes ought, in general, to pay a bigger proportion of those incomes in tax. "From each according to his means, to each according to his need" seems to me a basic ethical Christian principle that should underpin the way we do politics.
But no mainstream party is now advocating this sort of taxation system in any real sense. Even the Lib Dems, petrified that the rise of Cameron will deprive them of votes in Middle England, cannot any longer bring themselves to argue that people earning £100,000 a year or more should pay slightly more tax than those of us earning £30,000.
What this means is that whole swathes of opinion on the progressive left of politics are steadily becoming more and more disenfranchised, accelerating the process that begun under New Labour as a result of Blair's abandonment of anything resembling democratic socialism.
It's still not too late for Labour to do something about that before the next election - see post below - but what about the Lib Dems?
Well, sadly, I have seen nothing over the past three months to make me think I was in any way mistaken in my initial assessment of Charles Kennedy's overthrow as party leader and his replacement by Ming Campbell: that it was a mistake the party would come to regret.
From being the nice party in British politics, the one which actually seemed to stand for something rather than bending with every wind, they have now ditched both their leader and their most distinctive policy in what I believe will prove a vain attempt to counter the Cameron threat.
We read this weekend that Mr Kennedy himself
regrets not standing in the leadership election which he triggered. I'll bet he does - with his popularity among the party grassroots, he would have won hands down.
Yet as Kennedy surmised and as a recent post on Jonathan Calder's
Liberal England blog confirms, strenuous efforts were made by senior party figures such as Lord Steel to ensure an uncontested coronation for Ming Campbell.
Although Chris Huhne and Simon Hughes did their best to prevent that outcome, the end result of all these stupid machinations was that the party ended up with a leader far less popular than the one they had - and no more effective in the House of Commons for all that - and with policies far less distinctive or attractive than the ones on which they fought the last two elections.
Is it any wonder that some of us are considering voting Tory?
