This weekend has seen yet another series of pronouncements from journalists and politicians on the future of the Liberal Democrats as an independent party. Here’s a round-up:
Labour leader Ed Miliband is appealing to disaffected Lib Dem supporters, an appeal that follows one earlier this week by the First Minister Carwyn Jones , urging Lib Dems to ‘come home’ to Labour. And the week before, unveiling a Welsh Lib Dem councillor who was defecting to Labour, Shadow Welsh Secretary Peter Hain said there was ‘an open door’ to party members who felt betrayed by their party leaders.
In this week’s Spectator, James Forsyth reckons that UK politics is returning to a two-party model, arguing that the very construction of the House of Commons chamber makes it almost inevitable. In the same magazine Nick Cohen claims that ‘the two-party system is beginning to reassert itself.’
Forsyth’s prediction goes something like this. The party’s right-wing, sometimes known as Orange-Bookers, are ‘the political descendants of the Peelites’ and no longer hostile to David Cameron’s socially liberal Conservative party. Forsyth says it’s easy to see these ‘modern-day Peelites’ returning to the Tory fold.
Social Democrat Lib Dems, Forsyth claims, will head back to the Labour party, like the Welsh defector John Warman I mentioned earlier. It might also mean something that there are reports that the former SDP leader David Owen has been in contact with Ed Miliband.
Meanwhile there was a heated discussion on this morning’s Week in Westminster programme on Radio 4 between Conservative MP Mark Pritchard and the Liberal Democrat MP Chris Davies about allegations that the Conservatives had held back in the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election to give their coalition partners a better chance of winning.
Mark Pritchard said that he was in favour of such arrangements between the two parties in Westminster by-elections although only for as long as the coalition lasts and not in Welsh Assembly or Scottish Parliament elections.
Chris Davies rejected that out of hand. If Lib Dem leaders even talked about making that sort of agreement, he said, it would ‘split the party.’
ITVAdrian 
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