There is a strand in the Party which says that it’s all Clegg’s fault: ‘I don’t agree with Nick’. If only he would move on, all would become well electorally.
This misses many points: first, the Party is not a one man band; nor is the Government.
Second: if there were a different leader (‘It could have been me!’ shouts Chris Huhne) how much would really be different? The Laws book on the Coalition indicates that senior members of the Party were bent on coalition with the Tories well before the 2010 election.
Third: while we have all been driven demented by almost daily Government incompetencies, the vast majority were perpetrated by Tory ministers.
Clegg’s appearance at the Lib Dem local Government conference this weekend underlines the fact that his leadership is still alive and kicking.
Nick was there not just to deliver a short, generalised speech before speeding back to the railway station. He took and answered many questions. He also spoke to councillors about specific worries in a private session.
Battered delegates were able to let off steam, get answers and be drawn into the Leader’s confidence.
We cheered when he said: ‘People aren’t the Daily Mail. They aren’t Polly Toynbee. They’re more reasonable than that.’
We nodded ruefully when he told us: ‘We’ve got to believe in ourselves. There is a risk that you start to believe what your opponents say about you.’
We applauded him for the stance taken earlier in the week over Jeremy Hunt.
He was quizzed over the role of local authorities in the Govian chaos created by free schools and academies. He assured us that he still believed that local authorities had a strategic role and he was working on it. (Alarmingly he added that David Laws was doing the thinking: those of us who came across him as Opposition education spokesperson have cause to shudder).
He criticised banks for letting their branch network wither on the vine.
He hinted that there would be a significant government announcement in the near future about how to support housing associations to make a start in building on the numerous sites for which they already have planning permission (400,000 homes have already been given local authority go-ahead but the failed finance system has not come up with the necessary funds.)
He explained the Government thinking on internet surveillance in a way that was almost reassuring (just catching up with new technology) and announced that the concept of regional pay was dead.
He reminded us that, after the savage cuts, public expenditure would still be at 42% of GDP – higher than under Labour.
…Enough material for a good Focus here – and far better than some of the offerings from Party HQ.
President Reagan was once described as the Great Communicator. Clegg can often be in the same league.
Unfortunately the press rarely listens to his communications. And often, nor do we.
* Chris White is a former Leader of the Liberal Democrats on St Albans Council, Councillor for Hertfordshire County Council and Regional Chair: East of England
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Should Labour reconsider the Brexit red lines?
Raising a flap about letterboxes
Arriving at one of East Finchley's ghost platforms
Restrained
Chase Park fair photos
expats
Peter Davies
Nigel Jones
37 Comments
Was there any discussion of electoral strategy/tactics?
My criticisms of Clegg are primarily that he doesn’t have an ounce of tactical sense about him. Last week’s debacle on Hunt was another example of this – we should have voted with Labour and let Cameron sort out his own mess afterwards. The whole tuition fees shambles was a disaster of our own, and specifically Clegg’s, making.
Any time he’s been challenged on this he mistakes (and the more cynical might think this is a deliberate ploy) this for questioning whether we should be in coalition. It doesn’t. But it strikes me that a large portion of our political and electoral difficulties can be traced back to disastrous tactical decisions made by Clegg. I’ve seen nothing to indicate that their has been any consideration given to how we go into the next election having participated for the full term. Again, any time he’s asked this he responds as if we’re questioning the commitment to support the coalition for the full term. It doesn’t.
Given what has happened before I have no great confidence that Clegg is able to provide the leadership that will steer us through this next hurdle. I think he’s too complacent by half about the damaged inflicted on our local government base. I’m perfectly open to be convinced that he recognises the shortfalls of the past but this needs to be on the basis of a more substantive approach to the next election. Unless and until we get this, then I consider him a liability as a leader.
I hoped this was satire, but alas not.
My problem with Clegg at the moment, is that he doesn’t have a strategy of how to get us back up in the polls but merely thinks the electorate will come round. They won’t come round on their own, we need to persuade the electorate with good communications, Clegg is I’m afraid nowhere near doing a good job on that front and on the Communications bill, I hate this just “catching up with technology” line. Just annoys me more.
Ronald Reagan was a Great Communicator since he could persuade people to back him hence why he won elections.
Nick Clegg did well in the Tv debates but not well enough because he didn’t have the strategy to back it up after the first debate and we allowed the tories to smear Nick also because of the “i don’t think the Lib Dems can win” thing, we didn’t do nearly enough to capitalise on that.
One of the problems seems to be that “There is a strand in the Party which says that it’s all Clegg’s fault” – an electorate does not respect a divided party!
And it is surely nonsense to blame errors on Clegg alone – or are the other LibDem MPs’s just sheep?
@Richard – the tuition fee’s debacle was entirely at Clegg’s door. The matter was referred to him for a final decision as many involved recognised the considerable downsides in signing a pledge that most recognised was not deliverable. He decided that it should be signed, required that all candidates sign up and then gave it a priority in the campaign that only stored up trouble. Likewise, his disastrous twelve months as DPM before the annihiliation of May 2010.
However, your basic point is correct. Except that as leader Clegg should be making sure that all the necessary components are in place for the party even if he’s not directly involved himself. I don’t get the impression that the mechanics of how we approach the next elections have been given (and it should be past tense by now) have been addressed.
Mori gave Clegg 26% approval in a poll just 5 days ago, for the leader of the 3rd party that sounds pretty good to me.
Actually if you look at the Mori figures for all 3 main leaders they look suspiciously similar to the parties vote shares in 2010, 2 of the 3 within the range of uncertainty.
My interpration of that is that the voters havent really changed thir minds because they arent thinking about politics at all & wont till spring 2015. Voting intention polls represent the voters letting off steam not a settled view.
We just dont know what voters will do in 2015 because they dont know themselves.
“Mori gave Clegg 26% approval in a poll just 5 days ago, for the leader of the 3rd party that sounds pretty good to me.”
Surely you know better than that?
According to MORI, 26% were satisfied with Clegg, and 63% dissatisfied. That’s a net rating of -37%.
From UK Polling Report, the MORI figures for Charles Kennedy in 2005 were between +8% and +21%. Even for Ming Campbell the worst MORI rating was -10%:
http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/former-lib-dem-leaders
I don’t think someone who is derided by the public so much and has awful leadership poll ratings can be described as ‘the Great Communicator’. I really like Nick Clegg and think much of the criticism is unjustified but describing him as a great communicator at the present time is just fantasy.
“President Reagan was once described as the Great Communicator. Clegg can often be in the same league.”
‘Trickle down Nick’?
Reagan used his bumbling folksy niceness to distract from his endorsement of nonsense economics, which he personally did not understand, being pushed through by someone else in government.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-57359854/how-to-become-a-great-communicator/
“while we have all been driven demented by almost daily Government incompetencies, the vast majority were perpetrated by Tory ministers.”
If only that were totally true. But the most worrying thing is that where it has been true, it has not been communicated to the public to any extent by any ‘great communicator’ which means that the great British public hold lib Dems to blame for it every bit as much as they do the Tories.
@paul barker:
“if you look at the Mori figures for all 3 main leaders they look suspiciously similar to the parties vote shares in 2010,”
Leadership ratings can <never sensibly or usefully be compared with poll ratings for Parties as thy include endorsement by people who would never vote for the leader’s party in a month of Sundays. It is not so much ‘apples’ and ‘oranges’ as ‘slug’s and ‘lettuces’.
@Chris
That’s his second worst rating ever, half what it was in May 2010 and only slightly better than Ming’s was before he was dumped (and Ming’s negative was never on that scale though) . Charles didn’t have a satisfaction rating below 35% after the 2001 General Election.
http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/poll.aspx?oItemID=88&view=wide
Hywel
Thanks – the figures you linked to are a lot more complete than those on UK Polling Report.
There is a North-South divide emerging. In the South (broadly speaking), where the Tories are our main opponents, the coalition looks like a reasonable response to both Labour’s legacy and the national economic problems. In the North though (and I include Scotland and Wales) where the main opponents are Labour (or the SNP or Plaid Cymru) then the coalition looks like a great betrayal, breeding a distrust which will fester for a generation at least. Plus the tuition fees reversal is the very unwelcome icing on the top. Clegg hasn’t given any indication that he recognises these trends, let alone has a strategy to address them. He still has a good liberal sense about him (witness the Leveson inquiry appearance) and probably is a good Cabinet minister, but he seems to have bought into the philosophy that the nation’s problems are so great that he has to be a statesman before being a politician or party leader. If we lost all except ten, say, of our MPs he’d be disappointed, but ultimately think history would judge him as a noble public servant who established a liberal legacy in Government.
@ezekielziggy. Touch of irony there, from me. What struck me on Saturday is how good he is at dealing with audiences and how much useful content he gave us. So why doesn’t it come through? The press is part of the answer. Our willingness to listen is another. But there is also the issue of the effectiveness of the Party machine – hence my comment about Focus material. And that’s something Nick needs to sort out.
@ Nicola Prigg: And no: I can’t see what the strategy is for 2015 other than ‘it will all come right’. Which, from the view point of view of 2012, is pretty worrying.
@Allan. If noone but Clegg was able to choose on tuiton fees, then everyone who couldn’t decide shares any and all blame. Is the LibDem party really as dumb as you imply?
Richard, there are other alternatives to your conclusion about sheep you know.
How very mysterious. Alternatives to sheep … goats? dogs? horses? pigs? elephants? 10 points for the first correct answer!
They say you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. Nick Clegg did very well in the first leaders debate – but he and the party didn’t have any strategy in place to capitalise on that. I suspect no-one expected him to do that well. He was then hit, quite predictably on the issues of imigration, joining the euro and citizenship for illegal immigrants already here. Niether of the last two needed to be int he manifesto and quickly reminded people that perhaps they did not agree with Nick after all. The spectacularly illjudged rose garden – this is the new politics – liberalism = the big society, ran straight onto the tuition fees fiasco, where voters rightly saw a principle being sold out for nothing. Now we know that it upset lots of Lib Dems enormously, whereas when Labour drops a policy like ID cards or the Tories drop a policy like going green – noone seems bothered. Well that is unfair and sadly life if like that.
Nick has become a running joke and people have stopped listening to him. No matter how good a communicator he is he won’t overcome that. Fundamental lesson – coalition politics without proportional voting systems is very very hard to sustain.
Yeah, Richard, there are an elephant or two in the room.
One of the oldest tricks in the political book is to caricature an opponent’s position, demolish the caricature and claim victory in the argument. With any luck (s)he’ll even rush in to defend part of the caricature.
I’ve not heard anyone saying it’s all Nick Clegg’s fault. I have heard a number of reasoned criticisms of Nick Clegg which deserve to be answered – for example that he has little interest in local government, limited understanding of or rapport with the activists, is too close to Cameron, too often appears to have nodded something through that our party then predictably is livid about and too often seems to be the ambassador of the coalition to the Liberal Democrats. Of course there are counter-arguments and plus points too as well as failings among other people. The point of criticism should be to see if anything can be done to improve the situation. That can’t be done without engaging with the criticism.
There is little point in comparing Clegg’s approval ratings with those of previous leaders who were never in government.
Clegg is a brilliant leader, and it’s time people woke up to the need to support him rather than undermine him. He is human and does get some things wrong, but he is often blamed simply as a form of shorthand when in reality it is HQ who are failing to communicate, the media who are failing to communicate, and us who are failing to realise.
Derek Young
There is a North-South divide emerging. In the South (broadly speaking), where the Tories are our main opponents, the coalition looks like a reasonable response to both Labour’s legacy and the national economic problems.
Nope. This is the usual mis-reading of the south. The Guardian today just begins to get it right when its lead article is about the stress faced by ordinary people in large parts of southern England, not just the north. The problem with the South is that it is more unequal than the North. Opinion leaders and those at the top in the South are more out of touch with those at the bottom than in the North, to the extent of scarcely being aware of their existence. So we get large amounts of media commentary about “the South” where what is meant by “the South” is “the sort of people wealthy and influential people like me mix with in the South”. The worst offenders are often northerners who have moved south and never met real southern people – instead they’ve mixed only with their own elite types and just assumed that IS the south.
The south has lacked an authentic non-elite political voice. Labour never really bothered to develop one, don’t mention Blair, he was very typical of the sort of northerner I’ve written about above. The pact whereby Labour was over-represented in the north in return for the Tories being over-represented in the south stifled any attempt to build an alternative to the Tory party in the south. Apart from us – we were it, particularly in the south-west. We would have a far more effective Liberal Democrats if we had a national leader who had come up from the background of south-west Liberalism.
Caracatus
Nick Clegg did very well in the first leaders debate
A chance good performance in one debate was a lot to bet the farm on. I think what actually happened was that because Clegg at that point had barely registered in the public mind he had a high novelty factor, and so a medium performance was particularly well received and people who had not even considered it briefly thought about the possibility of a LibDem vote (as I keep saying, the poll figures at that point were also influenced by every activist in the party getting up and delivering pre-election literature, which is hardly considered as a factor by those who talk only of “Cleggmania”). Unfortunately, once this had drawn people’s attention to him, they considered him more closely in the later debates, and realised from his distinctly pedestrian performance that he wasn’t what he had been somewhat falsely billed as by the over-reaction to the first debate.
Chris White
Second: if there were a different leader (‘It could have been me!’ shouts Chris Huhne) how much would really be different? The Laws book on the Coalition indicates that senior members of the Party were bent on coalition with the Tories well before the 2010 election.
If Laws holds his seat in the next general election, I shall consider it a “Tory hold”. I can sort of see how a gay man whose economic views are right-wing Tory might not want to have joined Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party, but really everything I read from Laws suggests to me he is in the wrong party and now Cameron his liberalised that aspect he really ought to reconsider whether he should move to the party where it seems to me he fits in much better.
If senior figures really had been pushing the party that way, then it is disgusting as they had no mandate to do so. If Clegg was involved in it, then he most certainly should take the blame for how it has damaged the party. If he was not, then he must take the blame for not getting rid of those senior figures and for allowing them to so damage the party by furthering this view.
The coalition with the Tories was always going to be difficult, but the main grounds for its defence, which I support, are that the people of this country gave us a Parliament where it was the only stable government in 2010, and voted to support the principle of a bias in government towards the largest party and against third parties in 2011. The line that it was planned in advance destroys that argument. The idea that senior figure in the Liberal Democrats were already pushing the party towards right-wing low-tax low-spending economics well before 2010 also destroys the defence we can offer against austerity policies now that they are necessary to tackle the deficit. So long as the Laws line is not stamped on, our opponents – and worse, many of those who used to vote for us – can accuse us of using “austerity to tackle the deficit” as just an excuse for what we wanted to do anyway. This line has been an utter disaster for us, it has lost us much support, it has gained us hardly any new support.
If Clegg’s participation in the Laws’ line is the reason he is unable to communicate the position the party is in regarding the necessity of coalition, well, it’s a partial excuse, because I certainly do not find him doing much successful communication to help us build up the party right now. If the reason he can’t do it is because it means going back on what he did then, it makes more sense.
@Matthew Huntbach:
“as I keep saying, the poll figures at that point were also influenced by every activist in the party getting up and delivering pre-election literature”
This cannot be correct. there were not enough Lib Dem activists delivering at that time to influence polls to that extent and there were too many ‘black holes’ where nothing or next to nothing was being delivered. The poll swing was Nick’s, partly due to an excellent first performance and partly because the performance of both of the others in that first debate was pretty dire. The ‘swingback’ later on was only partly because of the next two debates, where Cameron definitely improved his performance, but also because of a sudden massive policy assault on the Lib Dems by the tabloids.Whatever views people have of Nick Clegg’s political and leadership roles, you cannot deny his general high level of presentational ability.
@Chris White:
“What struck me on Saturday is how good he is at dealing with audiences”
So was Tony Blair but at least nobody is accusing Nick of being a mass murdering war criminal. Tony Blair also lost the support of a huge chunk of his Party.
Yes, Nick Clegg shows extraordinary stamina and dignity in trying times. He is under enormous pressure, but never cracks. In my eyes that makes him a statesman. Yes he has made mistakes, but i believe his core values are worthy.
Tony Dawson
“as I keep saying, the poll figures at that point were also influenced by every activist in the party getting up and delivering pre-election literature”
This cannot be correct. there were not enough Lib Dem activists delivering at that time to influence polls to that extent and there were too many ‘black holes’ where nothing or next to nothing was being delivered.
Sorry Tony, I know I was out delivering in the week before the general election was called, and so were most other activists. We also know that with our party more than the others there are fewer voters who will always say they will vote for us and many who will do so if they have recently been reminded of our existence. Where we have won we have done so only because of strong local activity. This sort of activity covers (or in 2010 covered) a very significant proportion of the country. To discount it completely as a factor is to deny one of our greatest strengths.
In fact opinion polls just before the first debate were already showing a big rise in our support. This went almost without reporting, hence the commentary after the debate which put all the rise seen then as due only to the debate. I’m not denying the debate as a factor, though some of the post-debate rise was also down to the “being reminded of the LibDems’ existence” factor rather than to any particular qualities of Mr Clegg.
Westminster bubble people, which includes almost all national media political commentators, have almost no idea of the importance of local activity and so tend to believe all shifts in political opinion are due entirely to them. They are wrong. The LibDems have succeeded because we know they are wrong and we have developed tactics which rely in that. Now is not the time to throw away those tactics – they will be the only way we survive the disaster that wil be the next general election, and the only way we will rebuild from that.
@Chris White (op. article) “Unfortunately the press rarely listens to his communications. And often, nor do we.”
@Caractus “Nick has become a running joke and people have stopped listening to him. No matter how good a communicator he is he won’t overcome that. Fundamental lesson – coalition politics without proportional voting systems is very very hard to sustain.”
It’s the press who have of course made sure that Nick Clegg is portrayed as a running joke – or those papers for whom it is in their proprietors’ interests to kick Nick to further their own. And it will continue as long as they are convinced that the LibDems are thwarting a referendum on Europe.
Until the press and comms. team begins to understand this, alters its strategy and becomes more media savvy, Clegg’s communications will be unfairly or rarely reported, the LibDems will unjustly be portrayed as a bunch of incompetents and another pincer movement in 2015 will finish the Party off.
Yes, coalition politics is very very hard to sustain under our FPTP voting system. It’s an important point to remember for all members – including our MPs. Instead of shrugging off tensions in coalitions as being the norm in many other countries, they should understand how those in coalitions elsewhere can afford more independence, knowing their Party is unlikely to be obliterated under their proportional voting systems.
Sean Blake
It’s the press who have of course made sure that Nick Clegg is portrayed as a running joke – or those papers for whom it is in their proprietors’ interests to kick Nick to further their own.
We should recall this is the same press who put Nick Clegg where he is by continuously pushing him forward as “obviously the next leader” from not long after he first became an MP, and gave him such a firm backing in the leadership election that others who might have considered didn’t.
In fact the press have a long history of this – making their own judgment about where we should go, based on their own Westminster Bubble view of politics which is way out of touch with how we actually get our votes, and then when we go there attacking us mercilessly for it. Lesson – don’t listen to the advice the press give us, they do not have our interests at heart, and they don’t have a clue about how our party ticks.
My problem is I don’t regard the formation of the coalition as something wrong, a “betrayal of principles”, nor do I think Nick Clegg is doing a bad job of defending our corner in it. I can actually see that he and the Parliamentary Party have very limited room to manoeuvre and that what might see from the outside to be fairly minor tweaks are actually major achievements. What I do see is that the balance in Parliament means we inevitably have a government where the broad picture is Conservative and Liberal Democrat influence is only in filling in a few details. We’re not to blame for that – it’s the inevitable consequence of the way the people voted in 2010 and the distortional representation electoral system we had – which we gave the people of this country the opportunity to change and they declined.
All I want to see is our party making it VERY clear that is the situation, it is NOT a situation we are at all happy with, but we accept it because we are democrats so we have to go along with the way the people of the country voted. We should have done this from day 1 of the coalition, but, again following poor advice from our fairweather friends in the press, we did the opposite.
From this point of view, pushing Clegg out would be difficult because it would be seen as accepting the unfair criticisms, which reflect badly in the whole party. So the odd thing is the more we get attacked by the nonsense abuse, the less likely I am to want to get rid of Clegg.
In reply to Sean Blake’s later points, everything we have done from electing Clegg as leader onwards has been because it was thought to be “media savvy”. See where being “media savvy” gets us? Our leadership is surrounded by a whole bunch of people who regard themselves as the epitome of “media savvy” and look with disdain on the membership of the party who they regard as they always did, as the old stereotype of “beards and sandals”, “sleepy” etc. They are as wrong now as they ever were (they are not necessarily the same people, just the same type of people, next generation). When are we going to learn to stop listening to them?
Afraid I take a whole lot more cynical view, Matthew. I think the right wing press are quite well aware “what makes the party tick”, and they are determined to do everything to break us. I do agree that some of the concessions we have gained from the Tories have been well fought for. But, as I have said before, I disagree with you on the inevitability of what we did. We didn’t need to go into any arrangement with the Tories – we could have negotiated, hard, and reported back to the people (assuming the Tories would not concede on various of our red lines), that we could not form a Govt with them because we would be betraying our Lib Dem principles. So, if there had been an election called then, we could legitimately say we defended Liberal Democracy. I don’t accept the received view that we would have been smashed in that election, as long as we gave a convincing account of our actions. It remains my view that if a coalition or other arrangement had been necessary, Tory and Labour should have come together, as their policy prescriptions were a lot closer at that time, than Lib Dems with either.
It is only making the unjustified assumption that there was a major national crisis which suggests that we had to be willing partners in a coalition, to avoid exacerbating the situation.
@Tim13. Elephants? What elephants? I see no elephants! You say you see two? Is the room big enough?
@Matthew Huntbach
“What I do see is that the balance in Parliament means we inevitably have a government where the broad picture is Conservative and Liberal Democrat influence is only in filling in a few details. We’re not to blame for that – it’s the inevitable consequence of the way the people voted in 2010.”
In a way you’ve made my point for me there, Matthew. Without the pincer movement co-ordinated by Osborne against Clegg on the morning of the second debate, which undoubtedly burst the LibDems’s bubble, the consequences could have meant an extra 20-25 seats in 2010.
I won’t convince you (and neither will graphic evidence, presented by Mark Pack) but the bubble lasted all of a week. It could have been maintained, although somewhat reduced, until the day of the election had there been really media savvy people who understand the meaning of damage limitation.
Tim13
But, as I have said before, I disagree with you on the inevitability of what we did. We didn’t need to go into any arrangement with the Tories – we could have negotiated, hard, and reported back to the people (assuming the Tories would not concede on various of our red lines), that we could not form a Govt with them because we would be betraying our Lib Dem principles.
We can agree to disagree on this, but I hope it is quite clear from so much else that I have posted that my point about the necessity of forming the coalition does not come from any ideological support for the Liberal Democrats moving to a more right-wing economic position, nor to any liking for Nick Clegg. I hate what is happening under the coalition and I wish it were not.
Seeing how the Liberal Democrats have been mercilessly – and successfully – attacked by the right-wing press for the small ways where we have tried to stand up for our principles and policies I remain of the opinion that had we been doing so from outside the government and using the only threat we had there – of bringing chaos to the government through uncertainty on its economic plans, we would be destroyed even quicker than we are now. How many people have come flocking to our aid when we have tried to stand up against the Tories? Where’s the popular support for House of Lords reform? Where the popular support for shifting subsidy of the elderly away from tax allowance (which benefits only high earning elderly) to universal pensions? Where was the popular support for electoral reform? In all these cases, our trying to stand up for them was denounced as petty. If we had any Labour support for what we were doing, maybe it would have worked, but then we’d have to be taking precautions against all those flocks of pigs in the sky.
After the 2010 general election we faced not just the problem of there being no alternative coalition, but also the serious economic conditions which I think would make the sort of tactics needed to face down the government much harder to use. The other thing we faced is that our party ended the general election in decline – if it looked like we were n an upwards trajectory we could have bargained far harder because we would appear to be the likely gainers from an early general election. On a downward trajectory we were obviously the main losers, and that’s before what would be thrown at us if we were seen as ditherers delaying a strong government doing what is necessary for the sake of obscure issues no-one except us cares about (which is just what House of Lords reform, electoral reform are seen as – sorry to say this as I have been a lifelong supporter of both).
Tim13
Afraid I take a whole lot more cynical view, Matthew. I think the right wing press are quite well aware “what makes the party tick”, and they are determined to do everything to break us.
No, the secret of our success has always been our local activity, and I am quite certain the “Westminster bubble” has no idea of how this works so successfully – they really do think of politics as all about national swings in response to the national image of the parties. I have seen so much silly comment on these lines which one can see is genuinely held because it isn’t self-serving.
Matthew – agree in several ways with what you say. Especially your points about local activity, obviously, and the fact that we were on a downward trajectory at the election. I have used the corollary, that Labour were on an upward trajectory, to argue for a Labour Tory agreement, as you know, and I think our strategic error was to tear into negotiations with the Tories, rather than saying “hold hard, the Labour Party has considerably more MPs than us, and shares many of your economic and other views, why not talk to them first?”. I fail to see why people generally would have blamed us for taking a stance like that, any more than they would have blamed Tory or Labour parties. If your answer is, we weren’t plugged into NewsCorp the way the others were, surely that’s yet another justification for Leveson.
I think if we were to accept your views expressed here in their entirety, you would end up highly pessimistic. I suppose you could view the local perspective as the only route to the top nationally, but I am afraid there does need to be an integrating ideology (of which I know you are aware) before people vote for a party at national level. It has been an occasional feature of our party’s local success where that has been missing, and certainly missing from the narrative sold to the public, where differences have blown us apart – in your area I can think of Tower Hamlets. How much more damaging at national level, if we elected what amounted to a series of local incumbents without key “ties that bind”?
Matthew Huntbach – Local activity is not enough on its own to counter a sustained a hostile line from the majority of the media.
It may be that you dislike the people surrounding the leadership, but the comment that is silly is the one that accepts they actually are media savvy – they aren’t, that is the problem.
The problem is not Nick Clegg, it is the policies of the party. He is just the public face of the party at national level and the obvious focal point for all criticism. I have supported the party for over 30 years but will not be voting for them next time. The coalition’s economic policy is driven by right-wing political ideology, the idea that we have a policy in the national interest is just a joke. Economically it is completely flawed which the public are beginning to recognise but the party will be identified with at the next election. The turning point for me was the health service reforms, that was the point the coalition should have ended and the Tories made to continue as a minority government.