The historic destiny of the Lib Dems. There is one.

One of the highlights of the Guardian's election coverage over the weekend was the group of 'blind dates' between opposing politicians they set up - Caroline Lucas with Vince Cable, Danny Alexander with Stella Creasey and so on.

One of these was an unlikely pairing between Natalie Bennett and the ultra-Tory Jacob Rees-Mogg, and it was here that he was quoted as explaining the basic two categories of Liberal Democrats:

"The Lib Dems have two strains: the classic liberal strain, which is essentially Peelite and quite conservative, and the Social Democrat strain, which is closer to Labour; so they could emphasise one bit of their personality to do a deal with either side..."

I was unnerved by this, not because I'm unaware that people think this, but because - for one awful moment - I thought to myself: maybe he's right.
I recovered my sense of myself, and my sense of the party I belong to, shortly afterwards.  But just imagine, if Rees-Mogg was correct.
It would mean that there would be no place for me in the standard bearer for Liberal parties everywhere.  I am not a Peelite Conservative and am, in no sense, a social democrat.  It would mean there was no place for Liberals either, as I understand them - and other people who recognise that same Liberalism in a straight line from Cobbett, Russell, Gladstone, Lloyd George, Grimond and so on.
It would mean that the ideology that shapes what I believe is no more than an awkward compromise between conservatism and social democracy, both backward-looking creeds, when I see myself as something quite different.  Liberalism, it seems to me, is an essentially forward-looking creed.
Nor can we really blame Jacob Rees-Mogg for misunderstanding.  If the party has failed to explain where they stand, what their ambitions are beyond coalition, then really it is their own fault.  I was on the party's federal policy committee for 12 years - it must be my fault too.
Yet, even in government, it seems to me, the party edged towards a Liberal view of the world whenever they could - apprenticeships, mutualism, green energy investment, local government involvement in health.  Perhaps the mistake was in failing to explain how these little shifts fitted into a Liberal approach that went beyond the sum of its parts.
This isn't the right moment to pick over the remains of the coalition years - they may not have finished, after all.
Nor is it really the right time for me to have another go at a future articulation of Liberal economic policy.
But I do think this.  Every 40 years, with some accuracy, there is a major shift in economic thinking in practice in the UK.  The next one is due in 2020 or thereabouts.  The outlines are already clear: it will sweep away the brittle, basically destructive power of finance.  It will reshape the economic landscape so that ordinary life can be affordable again, and can stay so.  It will end the growing chasm between the tiny elite and everyone else.
The big question is how.  It won't happen until all sides agree broadly about how it can be achieved, and I have some ideas myself, and then - when the crisis hits - the political parties are able to shift relatively seamlessly to the new dispensation.  History suggests these shifts happen, in the end, quite fast (1979/80, 1940, 1908/09, 1868, 1831 and so on, and so on).
One political party needs to hammer out the basic outlines of the post-Thatcher/Reagan economics in practice.  It is the historic destiny of the Lib Dems, it seems to me, that they should play this role.  Inside or outside government, that is their task in the next parliament.
Why them?  Because deep in the Liberal soul, it seems to me, is an understanding of how economies might work quite differently, and based on an idea that flies in the face of everything we are now taught: that small plus small plus small plus small equals big.
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