DESPITE its weaknesses – and some of its language appears ever more unacceptable as we get further from its publication in 1935 – George Dangerfield’s book The Strange Death of Liberal England still deserves to be read, not least for its sheer energy. That alone justifies its inclusion in the Modern Library list of the 100 best 20th century non-fiction books.
Dangerfield’s central thesis – that the Liberal Party in the years leading up to the First World War essentially destroyed itself – is also eerily appropriate as we consider the fate of the Scottish Liberal Democrats who today do not even have enough seats to secure recognition as a Parliamentary group at Holyrood.
In 1999 they had 17 MSPs which made them essential coalition partners for Labour. Now they are down to four.
It may not be fair to blame Willie Rennie for all of this calamitous decline, though he has been party leader for a decade, but someone who is best known for relishing photographic stunts does leave himself open to criticism. During the election just concluded he was happily pictured driving a Lamborghini supercar, sitting in an outsize deck chair, dressed up as a karate student and feeding the penguins at Edinburgh Zoo.
READ MORE: It’s farewell to fun Willie Rennie as Scottish election slog ends
What he was not seen doing was making the case for Liberalism or Democracy. Indeed, he did the opposite by the stridency of his attacks on both the SNP and a second referendum and by his determination to make those issues the key elements in the Liberal Democrat campaign.
In so doing he appears to have willingly accepted that in seats like his, where he was facing a strong SNP threat, and in others with the same problem but held by the Conservatives, there needed to be the strongest possible tactical voting predicated solely on the constitutional issue.
That led to the grotesque spectacle played out in Aberdeenshire West where a party with supposedly radical principles was content to see its voters defect en masse to save the political skin of the richest Tory laird in the Scottish Parliament, Alexander James Amherst Burnet of Leys.
But there was of course a method in such political madness because what Willie lost on the swings in a seat that was held by the Lib Dems up until 2011 he gained on his own North East Fife roundabout, with the Conservative vote gathered in behind him.
That favour was also repaid in Edinburgh Western but it couldn’t come into play in places like Ayr where the Lib Dem vote was already rock bottom, with their candidate securing the same minuscule 1.9% of the vote as five years before. So weak are the LibDems that in lots of places there is simply nothing left to trade away.
READ MORE: Willie Rennie won't support indyref 'under any circumstances'
Of course some will say that this is just the usual dirty politics but for many the Liberals were the successors to the radicalism of the Highland Land League, the party of the crofters, standing up for the dispossessed.
No wonder that in places like Argyll, held for years by the redoubtable Ray Michie, the Liberal vote has disappeared like snow off a dyke, the melting initiated by Nick Clegg’s decision to support the Tories in a Westminster coalition and accelerated by Willie Rennie’s wrong-headed insistence on negative constitutional campaigning in which everything bad is attributed to the pursuit of independence without offering any other solution to the local and national problems which are the real matters for decision.
That increasingly bankrupt approach has been Willie Rennie’s constant theme at every FMQs and in every appearance across the country for years and its failure must now be apparent, even to him.
For just as the Liberal Party put itself in the wrong position on the most important issues of the day in England at the start of the 20th century, so the Liberal Democrats in Scotland have done the same here a hundred years later.
READ MORE: Tactical voting helped UK parties hold key SNP target seats
They are, by dint of promoting no credible or achievable alternative, not only out of date champions of the already rejected constitutional status quo, they have also reneged on their Europeanism just at the time when it is most needed.
The sad thing is that I think Willie Rennie’s instincts are liberal and democratic, unlike those of the man waiting in the wings bizarrely eager to inherit what little is left, Alex Cole-Hamilton.
Yet by failing to articulate the case for liberalism, and actively opposing the case for democracy, he is effectively responsible for the death of the very party he was elected to lead.
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