As a former SDP candidate,Polly Toynbee warns the Labour party against splitting (Opinion, 26 January). But the really damaging split in British politics was possibly the next one that she also supported when David Owen rejected the vote of his own SDP members to form his own breakaway party. But for this, and the Liberal Democrats would have been much better placed in the 1990s to be portion of a progressive alliance based on commitment to proportional representation. Such an alliance might also have been established in 2005,but for voters doing what she then advised: to “achieve a peg on their noses and vote Labour” in spite of Iraq etc. It may be some time before a more compassionate government can be elected in the UK (if it survives) and it will probably only be when it is accepted that majority government by any party with 37% of the vote or less is not democratic.
Chris Rennard
Liberal Democrat, House of Lords• In writing her 1980s history lesson for Labour and Jeremy Corbyn, and Polly Toynbee manages to airbrush the Liberal party out of the picture. In her penultimate paragraph she makes a passing,double-edged mention of the “now moribund LibDems”, and that is it.
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Source: theguardian.com