The central fact about the election results is that none of this happened. Against the predictions, and hopes of most commentators, many of whom have still not forgiven Ed for usurping his brother David’s presumed throne, Labour did everywhere perform better than expected.

In Scotland Labour and the SNP both made gains at the expense of the Lib Dems and the Conservatives, but the SNP did not make the expected headway against Labour, whose control of Glasgow remains strong. Boris did, of course, win the London mayoral contest, but by a slender margin of 3 per cent, and this despite the embarrassment of Livingstone’s tax arrangements and tactless remarks about both Jews and gays. Labour took 20 seats in Birmingham from the Coalition parties, and further south it won control of Plymouth, Exeter, Southampton and Reading, as well as some towns on the fringes of London.

In other words predictions of the impending death, or irreversible decline, of the Labour Party, which occur about every ten years or so, have once again been exposed as political wishful thinking. One obvious reason for this is the terrible damage the Lib Dems have inflicted on themselves by their ardent embrace of the Tories in the coalition government, and of the Tory programme of attacks on the NHS, the welfare state and the public sector as a whole.

In Scotland they, like the Tories, are back on the fringes of politics.  In my own city of Sheffield it is hard to believe that they were the party in power just over two years ago. They now hold 23 seats out of a total of 84 whilst Labour have 59. There are two Green Councillors and no Conservatives.

Until the Coalition was formed, the Lib Dems attracted support from those disillusioned, for a variety of reasons, with the two major parties. Since 2010 the disillusioned have had to look elsewhere.  Rising unemployment and related hardships have enhanced the xenophobic appeal of UKIP, which did almost as well as the Lib Dems in the seats it contested. More encouraging was the success of Respect in Bradford, where they successfully followed up on George Galloway’s stunning by-election victory.

Respect and the Greens show that there is room for radical alternatives to the mainstream parties, but the overall results show that Labour, and especially the two Eds, Miliband and Balls, have been right to attack the Tories economic policy. People are starting to listen to their critique.

Most Lib Dems cannot bring themselves to admit it,  but it is clear that the decision of Nick Clegg and his allies to identify themselves wholeheartedly with a dominantly Conservative government has turned out to be disastrous.  Many voters no longer see them as a ‘moderate’ alternative to the Conservatives, let alone a radical alternative to Labour.  And indeed the latter option was explicitly disowned by Clegg soon after the 2010 election.

Now they are making frantic efforts to try and re-establish their separate party identity, having suddenly discovered their misgivings about the Tories’ plans for the NHS – soon to be re-named the National Health Market (NHM).  It is probably too late.  They could have retained their independence by offering the Tories’ conditional support after last year’s election.  They chose not to do so.  They are now paying the electoral price.

One beneficiary from this disenchantment is likely to be the Greens.  And there are some signs (in Brighton?) that this is already starting to happen.  But Ed Miliband is quite right to see that there is an opportunity here to draw disillusioned Lib Dem voters and activists back to the Labour Party.  But that won’t happen on a large scale unless and until Labour rediscovers its radical and social democratic values.  And there is not much sign of that at present.  Consider the feebleness of its opposition to Lansley’s plans to commercialize the Health Service.  Both the public and the medical professionals have been more vocally critical  than the Labour front bench.  This is, of course, a reflection of Labour’s own sell-out to market ‘principles’ – if you can call them that.

What this shows is that there is more public support for social democratic policies than most politicians and commentators suggest or assume.  This is most clearly so in Scotland and Wales.  In both countries the devolved governments have preserved many of the free public services which have been so easily abandoned by both Labour and the Tories in England, and even plan to abolish long-established charges like those for prescriptions.  The success of the SNP – at the expense of all three UK-wide parties – is due as much to their adoption of popular social democratic policies as to nationalism, let alone any great enthusiasm for complete independence.

No doubt social democratic values are more deeply embedded in Scotland and Wales than they are in southern England outside London, where Daily Mail culture so widely prevails.  Nevertheless there is more support across the country for public services and welfare than is reflected in mainstream party politics.  If Labour cannot articulate and embody that support, and the opposition to library closures, education cuts, and the whole ideological assault on public services, then we are doomed to a long period of neo-Thatcherite Tory rule.

PS  For all their proclaimed opposition to the Alternative Vote, it is worth noting that the Tories in both Wales and Scotland benefit hugely from the proportional allocation of seats.  In Scotland only 3 out of their 15 seats in the Holyrood parliament were won on a constituency basis.  In Wales, if constituencies only counted, they would be down from 14 seats in the assembly to 6.

What has shocked many rank-and-file party members, as well as a number of local leaders, has been the enthusiasm with which Nick Clegg and his allies have endorsed the Tory agenda of laying waste to vast areas of public services and public spending. The coalition is using the public deficit as a heaven-sent opportunity to attack and even demolish key sections of the welfare state, and while Clegg and his friends seem happy enough about this, his party is uneasy and unhappy. Speaking to the Liverpool Echo, the leader of the Lib Dem group on the city council, Warren Bradley, spoke of feeling ‘physically sick’ on hearing of the coalition’s cuts to the school building programme.

‘I simply do not believe that there is no money for schools. The funding of Trident and the war in Afghanistan costs billions of pounds, so if we cannot find £1 billion a year to improve children’s education then it’s a sad indictment of the state of the government and the country,’ Bradley said.

‘I will not be toeing the national party line just because we’re in a weak coalition. That will deliver nothing to the Lib Dems except total electoral decimation. I give you that absolute guarantee: we will be wiped out by Labour in the north and the Tories in the south.’ Rather than rushing into government jobs, Nick Clegg and colleagues ‘should … emphasise that social justice is the golden thread which runs through our party’, Bradley argues.

He is surely not alone in believing that cuts on this scale were neither what Liberal Democrats were campaigning for in the election, nor what Lib Dem voters were voting for.

This tension may or may not bring down the coalition. Either way, as Bradley suggests, it will do terrible damage to the Lib Dems at the local level. The support they have slowly built up over many years in major cities such as Birmingham, Liverpool, Newcastle, Sheffield and Hull is already melting away. The erosion may become an avalanche in next May’s local elections. No wonder local Lib Dem leaders and activists are worried.

Unresolved conflict

What has gone wrong? The standard response is to point to the left-right divide among the Lib Dems, and that is correct as far as it goes. But what this division really reflects is an unresolved conflict within the liberal tradition that first developed in the late 19th century, and helped to bring about the dramatic collapse of the British Liberal Party in the first 30 years of the 20th century.

This conflict was about the role of the state, and in particular the relation of state intervention to personal and individual liberty, or freedom. The traditional liberal view of freedom is simple: we are free to the extent that we are not controlled, regulated, taxed, interfered with, or subject to laws, rules and commands. From this point of view, the state, law and government are necessarily the enemy, always threatening to order us about, and often, alas, succeeding. This kind of liberalism is close to anarchism, or what is often nowadays called libertarianism.

In the 19th century it was anti-interventionist. Most liberals opposed factory legislation, designed to regulate the hours and conditions in which people were expected to work. Such legislation was instead championed by radical Tories. When the great Whig/Liberal leader Lord Palmerston was asked in 1864 what were his plans for domestic legislation, he replied with evident exasperation: ‘There is really nothing to be done. We cannot go on adding to the statute book ad infinitum … we cannot go on legislating forever.’

The legislation went on regardless. And many Liberals began to re-think their attitude to state intervention. Urged on by philosophers such as T H Green and D G Ritchie, they began to argue that the state could be used to increase personal liberty, not diminish it. ‘State assistance, rightly directed, may extend the bounds of liberty,’ said leading Liberal politician Herbert Samuel. And the Liberal thinker L T Hobhouse argued: ‘There are many enemies of liberty besides the state, and it is in fact by the state that we have fought them.’

Their conception of liberty was positive, not negative. It stressed the importance of ability and real opportunity. Freedom of the press means little or nothing to those who cannot read. How meaningful was it to say that anyone was free to stay at the Savoy hotel if 90 per cent of people could not afford to do so? The New Liberals wanted to empower ordinary people so that they could make use of these largely nominal freedoms.

As the Liberal leader and prime minister Herbert Asquith put it, ‘To be really free, [people] must be able to make the best use of faculty, opportunity, energy, life.’ Hence his party defended the introduction of compulsory education, old-age pensions, and other state-provided services, as ways in which the real, substantive freedom of the mass of the people was increased, not diminished.

Facile rhetoric

Now contrast these statements from Liberals of a century and more ago with what Nick Clegg and David Cameron have been saying about the values they apparently have in common. ‘We share a conviction that the days of big government are over; that centralisation and top-down control have proved a failure.’

Mainstream conservatism, especially in the wake of Thatcher, is, with its commitment to free-market capitalism, naturally hostile to ‘big government’ and ‘the state’. And proclamations that ‘big’, ‘top-down’ government is a thing of the past, are two-a-penny. They are seen as an easy way to win popularity. But to find the Lib Dems going along with this facile rhetoric of liberalism marks a rejection of the tradition represented by New Liberalism and a reversion instead to the crude, hard-faced anti-statism and anti-interventionism of the mid-19th century.

Two of the most important architects of the post-1945 social democratic settlement were leading figures in the Liberal Party: Keynes and Beveridge. But when did you hear Clegg or Huhne, or even Cable, invoke them? If they were genuinely ‘progressive’ Liberals, they would be proud of the role their forebears played in alleviating poverty, creating the welfare state and establishing the principle of full employment. But they say nothing about it.

Probably they are ashamed of it. From the enthusiasm with which they have identified themselves with the Tory attack on welfare and the programme of public spending cuts, we should probably conclude that either they have never read Keynes, or they think he was wrong. The current Liberal Democrat leadership, in other words, has gone back to its 19th-century roots, and rejected the advances in understanding made by the New Liberals, and by Keynes and Beveridge. Is it any wonder the party’s rank-and-file are so restive?

Whether Labour, under new leadership, can effectively exploit the Liberal retreat remains to be seen. Labour has conceded so much to the rampant market philosophy that it may not be able to regain the social democratic initiative. But the opportunity is there: to re-assert the positive and beneficial role of the state and public authorities, not only in reducing poverty and inequality, but also in increasing the real, substantive freedom of the great majority of the population, who, without state support and welfare provision, would lead wretchedly constricted lives.

The Liberal Democrats have lost sight of their own tradition and will pay the price. The left never should.

In the early years of the 19th century, when respectable families of all classes in Britain brought up their children as Christians of one variety or another, the philosopher John Stuart Mill received a purely secular education. He had it from his father, James Mill, and the founder of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham. He was brought up as the heir to the utilitarian throne; and he never entirely renounced his inheritance.

Utilitarianism is very much a this-worldy doctrine. It teaches that the aim of all our actions, and the basis of morality, should be ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. As that famous phrase indicates, it is an egalitarian and democratic creed. What matters is not just the increase in the sum of human happiness, or well-being, but that it should be spread as widely as possible. If a few are blissfully happy, and the rest of us are miserable, that is far worse than if the happiness were spread more evenly, and we were all moderately satisfied and comfortable.

Bentham was a very consistent thinker. Anything that made people happy was good, provided it wasn’t at the expense of others. So ‘push-pin’ (bowling) was as good as poetry, when it came to happiness or pleasure. Whatever turns you on …

Education, education, education

John Stuart Mill wasn’t happy with this. He was a great believer in education, and he was firmly of the view that educated pleasures were superior to others. He also took the view that people should be literate and educated before they could vote; and that, ideally, the masses should defer to the wisdom of those with ‘superior minds’. Although he favoured the extension of the franchise and believed, unlike most 19th-century male liberals, that women should have the vote on the same terms as men, he did have serious misgivings about democracy.

This may seem paradoxical to some people, because Mill is best known as a philosopher and champion of classical liberalism. His most famous work, On Liberty, published in 1859, is still widely read, discussed and quoted. Richard Reeves, in his lively and extremely readable new biography, John Stuart Mill: Victorian firebrand, calls it ‘the new testament of liberalism’.

What sometimes comes as a surprise to its readers is that Mill locates the biggest threat to personal liberty not in government, but in society. What he fears most is ‘the tyranny of public opinion’, or, borrowing a phrase from Alexis de Tocqueville, ‘the tyranny of the majority’. Society, Mill wrote, can produce ‘a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression’.

No one with personal experience of racism, or homophobia, or mob hysteria of one kind or another, is likely to underestimate the terrible power of collective intolerance and hostility. And it should be said of Mill himself that he was utterly fearless in his championship of unpopular causes. He campaigned against Governor Eyre of Jamaica, who, following a small scale rebellion, had more than 400 Jamaicans executed and a further 600 flogged. He spoke up for the rights of Irish Fenians – the kind of people who would today be labelled ‘terrorists’. And, as an MP, he proposed a pro-women amendment to the second reform bill in 1867.

But Mill surely exaggerated the danger of a monolithic public opinion both then and now. Developed modern societies are more diverse than he expected them to be. People on the left are sometimes over-impressed by the vast efforts made by governments and the media to mould public opinion. But the very scale of these attempts to ‘manufacture consent’ in fact bear witness to the difficulty of the task. If it were that easy to mould people’s minds, they wouldn’t have to try so hard. The (uneven) spread of literacy and increasing access to a variety of sources of information mean that more and more people think for themselves, making for a deeply sceptical attitude towards those bodies whose opinions were once accepted as authoritative and reliable. Think of the dramatic decline in the power of the Catholic church over people’s minds in countries such as Ireland, Spain and Portugal.

For the same reasons, we cannot now go along with Mill’s efforts to preserve within democracy a dominant role for an elite of the ‘wise’ and the educated. People won’t stand for it.

Democracy and liberal values

The west pays lip service to democracy, but little more. If people freely elect the ‘wrong’ party or person – Chavez in Venezuela, Hamas in Palestine – they are isolated and, if possible, destabilised. But increasingly people are not satisfied with electoral charades. They want the real thing, a real choice, and those who deny this to them, like President Mwai Kibaki in Kenya, find that they have unleashed popular forces far beyond their control.

This is not to say that there is always and necessarily a perfect accord between democracy and liberal values. If democracy is construed as the unfettered rule of the majority, it easily leads to a denial of minority and individual rights. Remember the history of Northern Ireland under (majority) unionist rule? Mill understood this very well, and we need to understand it too.

But the principle threat to current freedoms comes not from public opinion, but from the state and its increasing authoritarianism. Just as, during the cold war, the supposed threat of communism was used, especially in the US, as an excuse for attacks on civil liberties and witch hunts against the left, so now the so-called ‘war on terror’ is relentlessly exploited to justify the erosion of basic freedoms and the rule of law.

This is a difficult issue for the traditional left. For more than a century now, socialist and radical liberals have argued in favour of using state power to curb and regulate capitalism (at least) and to create a humane and civilised society. That approach has not lost its force or relevance. But the left must also recognise that state power can be repressive as well as beneficial, and that when Labour politicians start to sneer at liberal opinion, and talk about civil liberties as luxuries that we can no longer afford, we are in real danger. Mill would have understood this. We still have much to learn from him.

When a recent poll asked what Blair would be remembered for, offering a range of alternatives, including ‘improving public services’ and ‘the minimum wage’, 69 per cent chose Iraq, and 9 per cent his relationship with George Bush. Three per cent opted for the minimum wage.

The public perception is correct. Modest improvements at home have been completely overshadowed by the disaster and disgrace of the Iraq war, coupled with Blair’s grovelling relationship with George W Bush, acknowledged almost universally as a leading contender for the title of Worst US President Ever.

Now that the troops are being forced to withdraw, it has become commonplace to admit that the project was ‘flawed’, ‘mistaken’ or ‘poorly planned’. But such limited admissions do not begin to encompass the scale of what has gone wrong, the disaster we have brought upon Iraq and its lasting global effects.

One sober estimate put the number of Iraqis who have lost their lives as a result of the invasion and occupation at 655,000. Some two million people have fled the country, placing huge burdens on neighbouring Syria and Jordan. Another 1.5 million are estimated to be refugees in their own land. Iraq’s different communities are at war with each other, and it may prove impossible to hold the country together. A whole country, a whole society, has been wrecked.

To portray this as just a ‘mistake’, or as unforeseeable consequences of a wellintentioned act, or to blame it all on ‘the terrorists’, as Blair does, is not just ludicrous; it is completely dishonest. There were no ‘terrorists’ in Iraq under Saddam’s ruthless rule. And it was entirely predictable – and was predicted – that there would be bloody resistance to the occupation. The consequences of the invasion will be with the Iraqis and the whole Middle East for decades to come.

Worst of all has been the dishonesty with which virtually every aspect of the war has been handled – above all by Blair himself. It is doubtful whether we have ever had a less honest prime minister. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he hardly knows the difference between fantasy and reality. What he wants to believe is true, is true as far as he is concerned. Perhaps he ‘sincerely’ believed in those non-existent weapons of mass destruction, but only because he wanted to. To claim that he was misled by the intelligence, as he does, is nonsense.

The truth is that he and Bush had agreed on the plan to attack Iraq in April 2002, and they then had to find or invent the reasons that would apparently justify such an attack. WMDs were the key invention in that respect. But not the only one. Even more blatantly dishonest was the linking of Saddam Hussein with 9/11. There never was any evidence for this, but Blair, like Bush, managed to suggest there was a connection, so that the attack on Iraq could be sold as the next stage in the so-called ‘war on terror’.

Before the attack took place, Blair’s line was that Saddam could remain in power if only he gave up those terrifying WMDs. After the failure to discover any such weapons, he took the opposite line.The war was justified because it had removed the tyrant.The dishonesty is so blatant as to be almost breathtaking.

It suits Labour loyalists to shrug off Iraq as an unfortunate sideshow. But, quite apart from the sheer callousness of such a verdict, it completely misses the scandal of Blair’s conduct throughout the crisis. Dishonesty was inherent in the war project from beginning to end. Yet Blair has never offered a word of apology or an admission of error. No one responsible has been punished; no one has resigned. It is the most disgraceful episode in British politics in the past 60 years at least.

Astonishingly, this is the man who has constantly paraded himself before us as a leader whose decisions are guided by morality, who always, in his own eyes, does ‘the right thing’.The only possible conclusion must be that he is a man of impregnable self-righteousness, endowed with an unrivalled capacity for self-deception.

We are well rid of him. But, as with Thatcher and the Tories, Labour has been so weakened and corrupted by Blair’s devious dictatorship that it is doubtful whether it has the will or the ability to shake off the habits of evasion, dishonesty and subservience to Washington that are his real legacy to British politics.

We are offered more choice. As Veronica Beechey writes (see “Spoiling for choice“), who could possibly be against that? Only bossy know-all authoritarians, surely? No wonder both Blair and Michael Howard are making choice their election slogan for the future of health and education. It sounds so good. Ironically, though, since they are both offering us the same thing, or variants of the same idea, they are not giving us much of a choice.

Many people, not only on the left, are suspicious of this glib, plausible rhetoric – and rightly so. It conceals some very damaging plans from both leaders for the public sector.

The talk about “choice” in health provision is largely a distraction. It is designed to conceal the fact that what is planned is even greater reliance on private health provision. The Tories are pretty open about this. Labour is, as usual, more evasive.

Nor is there any evidence that people are particularly concerned about choice in health provision. What most people want is very clear and simple. They want their local surgeries and hospitals to be good and efficient.

To be offered the option of admission to a good hospital 40 miles away because the one down the road is second-rate is not a real choice. It is a feeble attempt to compensate for the failure to achieve improvement across the whole public system.

When it comes to education, especially schools, the talk of choice is worse than a distraction. It is a fraud. We get to choose between a struggling secondary school and one with a high reputation, or even, in the Tory plans, a private fee-paying school. Of course, the better schools will not be able to take in all those who want to attend them. So, they will operate a system of selection. In effect, we will be back with the 11-plus. Comprehensive schools will cease to exist. The secondary modern will be re-born. That is what “choice” means for the secondary school system. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Of course, there does need to be choice within schools and colleges. As Beechey and Marian Barnes point out, much more could be done to involve both patients and health workers in improving public services. The health service, for example, could be more flexible and responsive to patient needs, wishes and anxieties than it often is.

Different educational paths should be open to children and students with different talents and aspirations. But the only paths this government has opened up are those that suit employers. They have pushed the national curriculum so hard that many options have either been marginalised or have disappeared altogether. Look at the decline of music in schools, despite its official place within the curriculum. This impoverishment of young people’s lives and horizons has become a national scandal.

Behind the smooth talk of choice, what is being proposed is more privatisation and more commercialisation. Notice that in Wales and Scotland Labour is not moving down this slippery slope. There, the policy is to improve and expand public and free provision, not to introduce more fees and charges. The radical challenge of Plaid Cymru, the Scottish National Party and the Scottish Socialists pulls Labour back towards its old principles. It is the lack of such a magnetic force in England that gives Blair his chance to press ahead with the erosion of the welfare state.

But for many of us the Iraq war and the lies used to justify it will be the deciding factor at the forthcoming general election, and we will be supporting candidates that have honourable, anti-war records – whatever their party.