Chief Whip while I was Liberal Chief Whip during the pre 1987 General Election period. At a painful meeting at the Social and Liberal Democrats' Conference at Blackpool in 1987 we made a joint appeal for a 'cooling off' period and for reflection before the divorce was concluded. We were shouted down. It is a sad reflection on our system of politics that party activists in all parties are frequently out of step with the electorate's wishes. The Alliance represented a genuine attempt at partnership between parties and it was that conviction which the voters supported in their millions. When asked to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the respective parties, the one area where voters put Liberals and Social Democrats ahead of the others was in their ability to heal the nation's divisions. The intolerance and bitterness displayed on both sides after the 1987 General Election, and the proclaimed new objective of setting out to eliminate, rather than work with, others, blew apart the one conviction which the electorate identified with Liberal Democrats. I hope that the Liberal Democrats will learn from this experience and again see the need to make a virtue of a willingness to work with others. They must recognise that - as in the rest of Western Europe - a reformed electoral system will in any event require such a willingness as a precondition of politics. I joined the old Liberal Party when Jo Grimond was leader. He preached the need for political realignment. On entering Parliament I became convinced that this was an over-riding priority and that our existing system of adversarial politics is deeply destructive. I recently came across something which Wilberforce wrote some 200 years ago describing a House of Commons which has largely remained unchanged. He said that you could recognise our Parliament:
by that quick resentment, those bitter contentions, those angry retorts, those malicious triumphs, that impatience of inferiority, that wakeful sense of past defeats, and promptness to revenge them, which too often change the character of a Christian deliberative Assembly, into that stage for prize fighters, violating at once the proprieties of public conduct, and the rules of social decorum, and renouncing and chasing away all the charities of the religion of Jesus.
The Liberal Democrats alone argued the case for changing all that. It is to their credit and I hope they will once again realise that a co-operative approach offers the best hope for Britain.