The Lib Dems' Fight Back Won't Save You

David Cameron and Nick Clegg (Picture by Dan Kitwood PA Archive/PA Images)

Nothing evil stays dead forever. The Nazis are, somehow, back; spottier this time, and more pitiable, and more likely to crank off to cartoons all day, but no less dedicated to the extermination of the impure races. Thatcher's evil twin has returned to Downing Street, there to scuttle and slither all over the rusting machinery of the state. The static brutality of the old world order is falling apart; the old multi-imperial system of the 19th century is rising once again, shrouded in rapine and horror, ready to steep the world in all-out war. So is it any surprise that the depthless and malicious charm of Nick Clegg is rising face-first from the grave, and the Lib Dems are returning once again to haunt our tiny, fretful island?

The fightback is on. Lib Dems are winning seats in council by-elections, they added an MP in Richmond, their membership is slowly creeping up towards 100,000. They're the real opposition now, they claim: the government is Brexiting us into oblivion, and Labour isn't doing anything to stop them; there must be a better way. It's as if everyone's forgotten – as if we've been pummelled so hard and so fast by all the stupidity of the last few years – that we've stopped remembering that the Lib Dems were a party of government less than two years ago. It's as if nobody remembers what they did.

I won't tell you not to support the Lib Dems. There's no point. Nobody supports the Lib Dems. You might vote for them, you might join the party, you might put a big yellow Lib Dems sticker in your window – it doesn't matter. Supporting the Lib Dems would mean agreeing with their ideological position, endorsing their plan for change, seeking a Lib Dem government and ascribing to a generally Lib Dem cosmology: an understanding of the way the world works, from the nature of politics and the economy down to what really quivers deep in the human heart, that is inscribed on every level with an unmistakable Lib Demminess. You do not ascribe to the Lib Dem understanding of the world. Nobody does. There is no such thing.

At the last election, the Lib Dems seemed to believe they could only ever be an essential element in any new government; they thought they had sewn themselves right back into the constitutional fabric of British society. They were wrong.

At the time they ran on what is, when you think about it, a deeply weird slogan: their party would "add a heart to a Conservative government and a brain to a Labour one". In other words, it didn't really matter who was in government; the presence of the Lib Dems would dull any sharp ideological edges and turn everything into a comforting mush of benevolent managerial competence. Before 2015, the Lib Dems were defending Tory cuts and voting to ramp up tuition fees; now they're trying to form a "progressive alliance" with Labour in by-elections. This isn't just ideological promiscuity; it's the mark of a party that doesn't really have any ideology whatsoever.

For their entire post-war history, right up until 2010, the appeal of the Lib Dems lay entirely in the fact that they were the Other Guys. In what has essentially been a two-party system, Labour and the Tories taking it in turns to suck up to the wealthy and wage murderous imperial wars, tossing power between them in an apocalyptic game of pass-the-parcel where the social contract loses another layer with each exchange, the Lib Dems could always jerk a smug thumb at the two competitors and go: come on, do you really like those guys? And it's true: nobody should like Labour or the Tories very much.

You can understand why some people, sick of the endless double bind, might go for the Other Guys. But "the Other Guys" is all they are. In the field of party-political contention they're a void, the nothingness of the entirely other. And in the field of policy and prescription they're another void, the plodding, paltry nothingness of the same old shit.

The Lib Dems are a liberal-democratic party, and we live in a liberal-democratic system. They stand for free markets, privatisation, a limited welfare state, formal racial and gender equality without any of the measures needed to actually make it happen, large-scale inward migration coupled with violence and dehumanisation for anyone the state considers undesirable, a paper-thin cosmopolitanism that welcomes every kind of person mostly on the basis of their cuisine, and a generally capitalist economy in which the rich get to do what they want and the poor have to work long thankless hours just to feed themselves.

In other words, they stand for exactly what we have right now. Labour under Jeremy Corbyn want to change society for the better; the Tories are hard at work changing it for the worse. Meanwhile, the Other Guys – the romantic dreamers far away from the usual structures of power – are afforded the rare opportunity to imagine, and they imagine nothing more than the same dreary reality we're all living under already.

Their ideology consists of a series of minor little tweaks, things to make the whole deadly apparatus of the state run slightly better and appear slightly sunnier. Maybe we should introduce an alternate voting system. Maybe we shouldn't actually exit the EU. Maybe we should get rid of student fees.

Well, look at how that last one went. Their role in the student fees debacle should be instructive. You can't trust these people, or believe anything they say, because none of their proposals come from a place of genuine ideological commitment. They're all tenuous and provisional, a clever little idea they had; it'd be nice, but it doesn't really matter one way or the other. Imagine if the last election had gone differently and the Lib Dems were once again in a Conservative-led coalition. Do you really think they wouldn't cravenly acquiesce to a Tory Brexit with about as much impact as their current opposition?

You wouldn't expect anything different from them: the politics of the Lib Dems are a chimerical politics. The party doesn't make any sense; it's not a complete being.

On the one hand you have the Liberals, the once-grand architects of Victorian Britain, now succumbing to paranoid cabin fever on their cramped little benches. On the other, the SDP, sandal-wearing moderates so freaked out by the radical positions of the Labour party of the 1970s (positions like "maybe we don't need to annihilate everything on the planet in a Hadean blaze of nuclear pointlessness", and "we're not Thatcher") that they had to split and turn their utter uselessness to the working classes into the foundation for a new party, positioned right in the centre of nowhere.

No wonder various Lib Dems can advocate for the privatisation of the NHS, free universities and eliminating the budget deficit, all at the same time, without achieving any of them. They're polymorphous, taking about governmental responsibility one day and populist fight backs the next. They're omnivorous, eating up anger and frustration and hope. And now, at long last, back from the dead and hungrier than ever, they want everything; they want to eat you up whole.

@sam_kriss

More from VICE:

How Brexit Could Criminalise Whistleblowing

How Liberals Fucked It and Paved the Way for the Right

Thanks to Brexit, We'll All Work Even Longer