Leader: General election 2005
The 2005 general election campaign has been a defective democratic event in many ways. Yet beneath the surface there has echoed a national conversation of passion and seriousness. Thoughtful people have debated for months with families, friends and colleagues - and with themselves - about how to vote in this contest. Much of the electorate is still undecided. It is an imperfect choice conducted under the imperfect electoral system which is nevertheless the only one that we have got. What to do on Thursday? Let's be honest: it is difficult.
This newspaper's answer to this unshirkable question involves taking the long and broad view. While 2005 will be remembered as Tony Blair's Iraq election, May 5 is not a referendum on that one decision, however fateful, or on the person who led it, however controversial. Like all others, this election must in the end come down to a verdict between the candidates and parties that will produce a parliament and a government.
Yet Iraq overhangs this election for many. It is the issue that makes them most squeamish about voting Labour. The decision to bend this country's foreign and defence policy quite so pliantly to US imperatives has taken a terrible toll on public confidence in the way this country is run. It has been a dreadful distraction from other priorities, of which climate change is the most important. It is the root cause of an equally destructive toll on Mr Blair's public standing and of a wounded anger that has haunted this campaign all the way to May 5.
But does this mean that we recommend a vote against Labour? No. Nearly a century ago, the great editor of this newspaper, CP Scott, reflected in this column on an approaching election in terms that are as relevant today as they were then. As a result of three-cornered contests, Scott wrote: "It is quite possible that while Liberalism and Labour are snapping and snarling at each other the Conservative dog may run away with the bone. That would be lamentable."
If such an outcome would have been lamentable in the early 20th century, it would be just as lamentable in the early 21st. The Conservative party is the worst answer to what is wrong with Britain. Immediately this is because of the damaging and divisive campaign on immigration that Michael Howard has run this time. For this reason alone, it is vital to stop the Conservatives. But there is a longer term reason too. Eight years on from 1997, the Tory party has not rethought what it wants to offer the British people in the 21st century. Until it does, it does not deserve to be elected.
CP Scott speaks across the century on other matters too. Scott spent much of his life arguing for what he described as the "reunion" of the "party of progress". Today, that division remains a reality. Eight years ago, on the eve of the 1997 election, we described ourselves as recognising "without embarrassment or apology that we, the Liberal Democrats and the Labour party are companions on the journey down the same broad river of progressive politics". In 2005, though we have all been tumbled about by some rapids, that remains true. The modern progressive consensus of which Gordon Brown speaks will be the work not of one party alone, but of two.
In that general sense, therefore, we would not be true to this newspaper's deep traditions if we saw anything wrong in principle with a switch of allegiance between the two progressive parties in 2005. People must vote their conscience, and there are powerful reasons for casting one's vote for the Liberal Democrats this time. This is especially the case because the Liberal Democrats opposed the Iraq war, as this newspaper also did. But it is also because the Liberal Democrats have been vigilant and rational in their defence of individual liberty since September 11 2001. The party at least grasps, as many in Labour do not, that fairness, liberty and the law are not merely pieces on a political chessboard, to be sacrificed in some cold-blooded trade-off with the need for security, but are also part of the soul and identity of this nation.
It may be, indeed, that the time is approaching when the Liberal Democrats will be electorally powerful enough, politically coherent enough and well enough led to be considered as a true party of government. That depends partly on Labour and partly on the Liberal Democrats themselves. If and when it happens, we look forward to it. But that time is not yet and not now. There is too much that is unconvincing about Liberal Democrat thinking on too many important subjects. The party needs to stare more unflinchingly at the possibility and reality of power than it has yet done.
That is not something one can now say about Labour. Labour has become comfortable in power. There are alarming, unattractive and plain unacceptable aspects of this, many of them embodied in the way Mr Blair took us to war. If there was one general overarching change we would demand from Labour in the parliament to come it is that it should better respect the visible and invisible lines of the separation of powers in British government: the centrality of parliament, the importance of cabinet, the independence of the judges, the indispensable role of independent scrutiny and audit. Ours is not a presidential system.
Yet Labour's comfort with power has strengths too, and no one feels them more than the millions who have little voice in the running of any aspect of modern Britain. Labour this week stands on the threshold of something it has never achieved: a third successive working majority in parliament. It stands there because, over the past 11 years Mr Blair and Mr Brown have systematically forced the party to rethink itself. As a result Labour has left behind the era of unheroic failure and has made itself the master of the era of steady, incremental success. Millions of people owe essential parts of their present prosperity and greater opportunities to Labour's methodical investment in the public services and the common realm.
It is too easy sometimes to overlook the real substance of what Labour has achieved in these years. In the first place, it has built a stable economic platform - low inflation, sustained growth, low unemployment - which makes everything else possible and which would be at great risk under any other government. Second, it is on the way to winning the argument about the need for public service investment that is the cornerstone of all possibility of real social justice. Having started the work in rebuilding the health service, investing in schools and modestly redistributing, Labour has a powerful case for now going further, exemplified by the plans for early years support for young families. It is the most redistributive of all the main parties and it deserves support on that count alone.
There is much to regret about the eight years of Labour government - the missed opportunities, among which Europe stands out, the enduring fear of offending corporate vested interests, the underestimate of what could have been achieved amidst the national and international goodwill of the early years, the sometimes disabling effect of the frequently formidable Blair-Brown relationship. Above all there has been the visible transformation of the prime minister himself from a figure of almost limitless modern social-democratic possibilities and gifts to a widely disrespected leader whose political shelf-life is now clearly - and rightly - limited.
Mr Blair's recent career has illustrated the wisdom of the late Roy Jenkins, one of the great losses to British life since 2001, who observed that no political leader can - or should - continue at the top for more than a decade. We believe that Mr Blair should be re-elected to lead Labour into a third term this week. But the spotlight of the election has underlined that he was right to pledge not to seek a fourth. We do not call for him to be elected on Thursday and step down on Friday; apart from anything else, that would be a betrayal of the democratic verdict. But we do not think it is in many interests for Mr Blair to hang on longer than is politically expedient. We are not uncritical of Mr Brown or whoever else succeeds him. In his final days our late colleague Hugo Young, another vast loss to liberal Britain, quoted the admonition of the psalm not to put one's trust in princes. We shall remember those words.
In the end an election is about choosing a government and a parliament. We are clear where we stand, in spite of our misgivings. We want to see Labour re-elected to government and we want to see more Liberal Democrats returned to parliament, at whichever other party's expense. What we do not want are more Tory MPs, so we therefore urge progressive voters in the overwhelming majority of Labour or Liberal Democrat held seats to rally behind the incumbent party. Only in a tiny handful of seats - see elsewhere in today's paper - is it safe for Labour voters to switch to the Liberal Democrats without the risk of allowing the Tories to win. Elsewhere, think very carefully before you vote. You are voting not just for yourself but for others, frequently less fortunate, whose life chances rest on your good sense.
CP Scott would have understood such dilemmas. The difficulty arises, he once wrote, "not from the nature of things but from the defects of our electoral system". That is as true today as it was 100 years ago. Reform of that system must be part of the agenda for any future progressive consensus. In the absence of reform, however, voters should use their heads and hearts to re-elect Labour with an increased Liberal Democrat presence.
Election blog: Alan Rusbridger on how the line of this article was decided