a) they hate the Tories and they hate Labour; you might as well ask why there are six hundred different Trot parties.

b) they are a major party in local and regional government

This is the thing I don’t get. Obviously, as the third biggest Blairite party in the country, the Lib Dems are going nowhere, have no political future, will never influence a debate, or make a speech anyone hears, let alone take office and draft policy.

If they can’t get anywhere with Labour in its current state, and even the Conservatives half way through the process of rebranding themselves, then you can really see the case being made for proposing a motion at the next Conference to wind up the party and auction off its assets.

So what keeps that talent going? What is the big ideological issue that stops them joining one of the other Blairite parties?

Are the Labour Party trade union links really so strong they would count for more than 30 MPs and a 10% voting block?

What wouldn’t Cameron say or do about the City for the same prize?

Why do the Lib Dems still exist?

You talk about the need for _big changes_, yet only fools make designs on the horizon. But what happens when you make _big changes_ and you aren’t happy with the result? Do you make more _big changes_? And how do you adjudge whether your not compounding your earlier errors?

No, If you want to see big effects you need to make small incremental changes and keep making them until you are happy with the result.

I’d like to be warned about some of the details for the _big changes_ you Greens propose.

Why can’t the Greens “build over two or three elections” to take a seat? Because they’ve never done so yet? Why must the future be like the past? If your argument means anything, it must also apply to local council seats, where it’s patently false.

[68] Having criticised Wikipedia earlier, it has an excellent article on the Labour Theory of Value. It was a given of classical economics, most certainly not invented by Marx.

ideology never left us, so I don’t know what you mean when you state your wish for a return to it.

As for your oh so obvious bitterness towards your former party and colleagues this looks like shooting yourself in the foot. If you wish to advance the electoral fortunes of the Green party, surely it would be more sensible to help them push for the changes in the electoral system both you and they wish to bring about in alliance rather than by splitting any consensual position which exists between you and they.

The fact remains that the LibDems are far closer to becoming a party of government than the Greens are and that this is unlikely to change within the foreseeable future of even your most ardent and optimistic supporter.

Really your slogan should be ‘Vote Green, Go Nowhere’.

Now I challenge you (or anyone else for that matter) to tell me where and when the arguments of either left or right were conclusively proven to have the correct (or incorrect) answers for all people (or none) in all circumstances (or in none). I would very much like to read your evidence.

I’m not saying Marx is gospel, what I am saying is there are things of value there. For example, there is alot of worthwhile stuff about alienation etc etc. I notice you use the phrase ‘less crisis prone’ which means to me they will still be prone and you recognise that; yes he did, without going into vast amounts of detail it revolved around the tendency of the rate of profit to decline due a top heavy accumulation of surplus value which then leads to the need for capital to be destroyed to restore some kind of parity to the system.

Did Marx have a theory to explain why markets were crisis-prone?

So, for example, are you seriously going to tell me that Marx was wrong about capitalism being endemically crisis prone? I’d like to see you try and say it isn’t now of all times….

I couldn’t care less what the Archbishop of Canterbury thinks about economics. Most Marxists don’t try to defend Marx’s economic theories nowadays. Having said that, I’m not sure I was defending capitalism as presently constituted. It depends what you mean by capitalism.

[57] Mike,

The difference between voting Liberal Democrat and voting Green is that the Lib Dems can build from nothing and take a seat over the course of two or three elections whereas the Greens can’t. The SNP would break up the UK thereby reducing the potential of every Scottish citizen. Nationalism in general is fundamentally wrong-headed – your national identity is a private matter and should be irrelevant to politics. States exist to promote the interests of their citizens, not to promote a particular culture or religion.

On the fraternity point, liberals would maximise your freedom to fraternise. Barring restraining orders you can fraternise all you like.

[62] Liberty is not a right wing idea. The right don’t believe in liberty, they believe in property. The freedom they promote is the freedom to have what you hold and devil take the hindmost. A genuine commitment to maximise liberty is necessarily left wing – it requires redistribution of wealth to ensure that everyone has the means to make choices.

It applies libertarian economic principles in all respects except to land acquisition.

http://www.libdemvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/economic_recovery_plan_brief.pdf

It all depends on what you mean by socialism really doesnt it. Do you mean bureacratised central state planning? In that case I agree with you totally. ‘Socialist’ economies up to this point have been nothing better than glorified companies with a ‘red’ banner whose purpose was to enrich and empower state bureaucrats. Here Mike’s point is relevant; socialism in it’s purest form has actually never been tried. Incidentally, I totally agree with you that it is only fair to examine the opposition.

The notion that economic planning is impossible is however nonsense. Capitalism itself includes elements of planning though ultimately it is anarchic. At the core of this crisis and at the core of the fundemental problems with capitalism itself is the profit motive. Indeed, those ‘greedy individuals’ are there as a symptom of the disease.

If you’re going to have people sitting around here claiming that it is capitalism that is to blame, not the people that took it to extremes, then how can you not have the debate about the opposite side of the scale?

If I haven’t made clear what my differences with the Lib Dems are by now, I don’t suppose I ever shall. And I doubt that all Lib Dems would agree that liberalism “forces” you to do anything! For example, neither liberalism nor socialism, as such, enlighten me much as to whether a United States of Europe would be a good or a bad thing. Nor do they tell me when to prefer local discretion to national standards or vice versa, how to balance freedom of speech against respect for women and ethnic groups, whether to build a third runway at Heathrow or a new high-speed railway (or both, or neither) or how serious the threat of climate change is or… but I hope the point is made.

My basic disagreement with the “markets where possible, the State where necessary” approach is that it supposes that liberty and equality are the only political dimensions we have to consider. I consider fraternity to be as important as either. I am coming to the conclusion that the Lib Dems here simply don’t understand what I mean by the word. Too busy bowling alone, I suppose.

Firstly the Archbishop of Canterbury doesn’t agree with you that Marx was wrong about economics. I find it amazing that as capitalism is spiraling rapidly downward people can still find defences for this system. The most common defence of capitalism; that it would be ‘ok if it wasnt for greedy individuals’ but those individuals are only following the logic of capitalsim to it’s end. I think there is alot of value in Marx’s economics…

Liberalism forces you towards a particular set of policies. I’m yet to see a statement of socialism that does the same. It seems to me that you can start from a socialist/collectivist basis and argue towards a set of liberal policies. You can also start from socialism and argue towards authoritarian policies. What is it that you want to try harder to achieve?

Marx’s view of history and his economics were wrong. His social analysis is interesting, but I think that taking a hard class-based view of things tends to distract from our being able to identify solutions to the problems he identified. Having said that, I’ve always been an individualist an find it difficult to think about things from a collectivist point of view. Chris Dillow seems to have negotiated his way from a Marxist set of premises towards a liberal set of policies.

The Labour Party no longer represents anyone or anything. It’s a hollowed out shell that needs to be kicked to pieces. What is it about the Lib Dems that those of you who want to throw away your votes on the Greens/SWP etc don’t like?

(Mind you, Jack McConnell was quite happy to see certain of the councillors disappear…)

I was in a band with that Greg Mulholland, you know…(it was a long time ago!)