The leaders of the three major British political parties participated in a televised debate last Thursday, April 15, and it’s widely agreed that Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, the descendant of the Liberal party which governed Britain for much of the period from the 1850s to 1916, but which hasn’t won a general election since 1910, was the winner. Conservative party leader David Cameron failed to dazzle, and Labour party Prime Minister Gordon Brown did even more poorly. Before the debate, the big story in the campaign was the narrowing of the Conservatives’ lead in the polls and the increasing possibility of a hung Parliament, in which Conservatives would fail to win a majority of the 650 seats in the House of Commons. Polls since the debate have shown the Lib Dems rising sharply, with Labour and Conservatives both falling off.

Clegg did well in the debate by attacking the two larger parties as insiders, and he was helped by the fact that he is freer to mouth appealing slogans because no one thinks he will be prime minister or that his party’s manifesto will be the basis of the new government. His primary goal is to get into government by denying the two larger parties a parliamentary majority and exacting from one of them as the price for the Lib Dems support some form of proportional representation. This might mean that there would never be a clear Labour or Conservative government again, and that the Lib Dems would, like the Free Democrats in Germany from 1973 to 1998, determine which larger party would form the government. This strikes me as a profoundly undesirable result. Instead of parties being chosen by the voters and being held responsible by them, a few insiders of a small party would make those decisions.