All hail the decents.

The death of political journalist Anthony Howard is another milestone on the sad road toward the final eclipse of that peculiarly British sub-species, the middle class decent. To me Howard was little more than a voice on the radio but it was a voice a million miles away from the mean spiritedness that is the hallmark of a lot of modern politics and political commentary. That is what Clegg fails to understand about his own party; the fact that in the Liberal Party there has been a long tradition of a membership, that however politically misguided they might have been, had a genuine concern for the common good and a genuine commitment to the poor and oppressed in their struggle with the rich and powerful. There was a Liberal bedrock of decent people. Where to now the Liberal decents? Will they, like so many Labour decents during the rise of New Labour, remain loyal to the party and hope to change it from inside? Or will they move on? Are the decents lost forever to party politics, and lost also to the media?