Wow! What a year 2015 was! It is staggering to think that just 12 short months ago we were in coalition. Now we have eight MPs. Despite that Jeremy Corbyn has been elected leader of the Labour party, leaving us with a centre-left vacuum to move into.
Coalition was by no means perfect. The vast majority of members and voters can agree on that. I believe tuition fees was a big mistake. It was wrong to go back on a key commitment in the manifesto. We most a lot of trust after that and we paid a heavy price in May. We lost 49 liberal democrat representatives in the Commons.
Another failure of coalition was communication. We were so busy showing that coalition worked we did not announce where we disagreed with the Tories. I think this was a key factor in the public feeling that we were “in bed with the Tories”. Progress was made on this but far too late. For the Chancellor’s final budget ministers produced an alternative Liberal Democrat budget. We should have been doing that for the whole government.
On the theme of communication, our election campaign was a bit of a mess. Norman Lamb mentioned this a lot in his leadership campaign. Pitching ourselves as some sort of centrist compromise between the two main parties was destined to fail. We need to show we are a radical liberal party with developed solutions to the complex problems facing the UK today.
However, we went away as a party and reflected on that. How could we regain voters’ trust? How could we communicate our liberal democratic message on a diminished media platform? Tim Farron was not the only answer to these questions, but he was a big part of it. In July Lib Dem members duly elected the man who has been a passionate liberal since just 17.
Our mistakes do not mean coalition was a failure though. We must learn from our first time in government in 100 years. When it comes to regaining trust, actions speak louder than words. In coalition we implemented dozens of liberal policies: increasing the tax free allowance and giving over 30 million people an £800 tax cut, introducing the pupil premium, investing in the future with renewables, increasing mental health awareness & funding, introducing same sex marriage and a whole lot more. Coalition wasn’t perfect. However I do think we can be proud of doing right by the country.
When you compare the coalition to the last few months of Tory majority hell our achievements are even clearer. One example of this is tax credit cuts. In coalition such a proposal wouldn’t even have left Downing Street. As it was the Chancellor was fully prepared to disincentivise work and make a mockery of the Tory claim to be the party of working people. I saw the poor lady close to tears on Question Time because she felt so betrayed by the Conservatives. The Chancellor should apologise for the stress he has put so many families through.
Luckily the Lib Dems were there to save the day again. We were the only party to vote to scrap the tax credits cuts in the Lords; Labour voted to delay them. We sent a strong signal to George Osborne; Labour sent a weak one. Anyway, Liberal Democrat and Labour cries of protest forced Osborne to rethink. Luckily he found an excuse for his U-turn in the form of the billions of pounds he had found down the back of the sofa.
Another point of comparison is renewables. Under the last government we championed policies like the Green Investment Bank and we encouraged investment in renewable energy. Under this government this bank is at risk of privatisation and subsidies are being cut massively. Just days after signing the Paris agreements, the Tories announced an end to carbon capture funding and gave the go-ahead for fracking under national parks. If Cameron did say “cut the green crap” in coalition I wouldn’t be surprised. The Liberal Democrats have learnt from tuition fees that actions speak louder than words. However hugging a husky doesn’t help the hundreds whose homes have been flooded this week, does it Mr Cameron?
What does all this mean for 2016 then? We must continue to punch well above our weight in Parliament. We must stick to our principles even as a party of eight MPs. We must continue our success in by-elections and make more gains at the local and devolved elections in May. We must pressurise the government to take its fair share of refugees. Most importantly of all we must make a positive case for remaining in the EU. As the largest party committed to the EU, we must explain that to have a better relationship with Europe we have to lead from the front. We must continue the #libdemfightback for a fairer, freer Britain.
* A Liberal in Leeds is the pseudonym for a Lib Dem member. His identity is known to the LDV team.
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16 Comments
” As the largest party committed to the EU” the SNP might disagree.
” leaving us with a centre-left vacuum to move into.” 7% nationally 4% in Scotland with the greens on 10%
Hi Bruce
I believe there is a space but we haven’t moved into it. We are much larger than the SNP in terms of proportion of the vote in 2015, which was what I meant, but I’m afraid that wasn’t very clear. We both support proportional representation so I think they would accept that we have a larger mandate for the UK than them.
Bruce
“… with the greens on 10%”
Are you sure about that? You are presumably talking about the Green Party that saw less than a tenth of the number councillors elected in May 2014 as compared to the Lib Dems, and around an eighth of the number in May 2015.
The Green Investment Bank is “at risk” of privatisation? I was under the impression Lib Dems thought privatisation is a good thing?
The battle for 4th place between the Lib Dems and the Greens is a reality in many places what with UKIP still performing strongly in lots of areas. The party should not be ashamed of this its just the way things are at the moment.
@Silvio
“The battle for 4th place between the Lib Dems and the Greens is a reality in many places what with UKIP still performing strongly in lots of areas. The party should not be ashamed of this its just the way things are at the moment.”
I’m sure there are some places like that, just as there are other places (Southport being a good example) where, for example, Labour and UKIP are battling for 4th place, with the Greens in a poor 5th place, securing in May 2015 less than a tenth of the votes that the Lib Dems secured.
My view is that we are currently in a period of four or four and a half party politics, and that once you move beyond the top two parties in any given location you can see a lot of tactical voting in all sorts of directions.
@ Simon Shaw..I accept Southport may be different but in huge areas like Birmingham Sheffield Manchester etc the fight is on to take 4th place and that’s not to be sniffed at. The energy and passion of party members will be Zapped if we look at anything over 4th place and it then does not happen. The road to recovery starts with reasonable targets and sadly in most areas 3rd place is not going to happen.
the battle will be for 5th place in Scotland, of course. It is unfair, the liberal tradition was strong there, and the party did disproportionately well thee in the past.
In terms of national votes then yes the Lds outpolled the SNP, but in terms of elected members, and sheer numbers of members, that’s not the case. The problem is that the snp only operates in a part of the UK with a bit less than 10% of the total population in it …. I often wonder how many votes they would getbifvthey did run outside Scotland!
Silvio / Simon Shaw
There is no doubt that in areas of strength, such as Southport, we have made something of a comeback. This does depend on our level of on-the-ground organisation. Even here in the westcountry, “our heartlands”, we have been devastated. It will take a long time to rebuild. The other rebuilding will need to be of trust, and I am sure urban areas, and areas which are relatively less well-off this will take longer.
Yes, there has been a subtle change eg our approach to the tax credit cuts, and TF’s stance on benefits in general, but we so powerfully “got into bed with” the economic position of the Tories (visibly), and NuLabour (less so) in our economic approach, that we no longer held up a radical “new politics” banner. We visibly lost our USP, and that is why we lost so badly over 2010 – 15. Looking at the figures, you can actually see a decline in Lib Dem support from the removal of Charles Kennedy as Leader, and under Nick Clegg with the more palpable move to the right. At present TF is trying to ride two horses, a careful move back, combined with a defence of what happened under and before Coalition. Ultimately that will not lead to a rebuild. In an era where it is more and more evident that coordination and democratic control are needed in an ever-smaller world with all manner of environmental and other threats, we can no longer look to “the market” for all our solutions. Increasingly that was the approach of Orange Bookers – we now need a new (?old) approach.
Hi Tim
I agree with your analysis there. The problem we had / have is that austerity was necessary and yet unpopular. UK austerity has been less than any other major economy. Because we were the smaller party, and seen as betraying the public by being less radical than expected, we got the blame for the bad stuff. Of course, that makes sense emotionally but not logically because the Tories are the party of the small state.
@Silvio
“in huge areas like Birmingham Sheffield Manchester etc the fight is on to take 4th place and that’s not to be sniffed at.”
Any Lib Dems involved in such a ‘fight’ are not involved in any genuine fight at all. They are embarked upon a strange irrelevant diversion. Any campaigners who cannot pick an appropriate number of target wards (which may be as few as only one) and either win them or come within 10 per cent of winning them in six months is not a campaigner at all. Percentage averages when you are anywhere below ‘a good third’ in a substantial area are a worthless set of numbers of interest only to geeks.
A Liberal in Leeds, I congratulate you on what you are doing here and what you have been doing here in recent weeks – especially your discipline to replying to people.
You have outlined our difficulties very well, but – you knew there would be a but – you seem to buy the solutions too cheaply.
“However, we went away as a party and reflected on that. How could we regain voters’ trust? How could we communicate our liberal democratic message on a diminished media platform?”
“We must continue to punch above our weight”.
You see we haven’t even begun to re=establish the trust that took 40 years to build. We are not punching at all, let alone above our weight. Our leader is not gaining traction. We have slipped in the polls since May.
We can go on saying how well things are going but is that really going to help us revive or even save the Party?
We are setting out on another ‘long march’. That isn’t a viable strategy. We are hoping Labour messes things up and creates a space for us. That’s not going to help us – though it helps the SNP and the Tories. We are relying on old ‘squeeze’ arguments but know that in a uninominal electoral system that doesn’t work. We are not engaging with those with new ideas.
We cannot go back to 1977 and start again, because the world has changed, and we are not willing to change.
A Liberal in Leeds, I agree with your last paragraph and we must move forward more boldly to achieve that and more. The Tories are setting about wrecking the state as we knew it in our life-time and turning back to Thatcherite principles of leaving those with riches to enjoy them – while the rest of the population goes without because the rich do not want to pay for state institutions. All our Lib Dems with an audience need to campaign right now. We must STOP MOANING about 2015 and get going, all of us not just the few in the HoC. Use everyone in the HoL while it exists. Use online social media, use any part of the hard-copy media. Forget the BBC which is threatened so blatantly by the government that it dare not speak out as it used to do. We need to increase our young membership numbers right NOW – and their media talents – to inspire our older generations to embark on new methods of reaching the population. How do we do some of that?
A Liberal in Leeds , excellent , as often with your good self , but much to agree with in Bill le Breton here on his point about the future . S o , a challenge to both , as with us all, what is in your opinions , the solution ?!. On other posts , such as on the New year resolution about infighting , I put forward my view strongly , which is we need to be both mainstream and exciting .
Lorenzo, a quick stab, because if my ideas were developed I would have already communicated them.
First, Paul in Wokingham posted a comment quoting from Dr Michael Burry under the last piece which by AlexH:
““When the entitled elect themselves, the party (that is not the political party by the way) accelerates, the brutal hangover is inevitable.”
These trenchant observations underpin an existential crisis that is facing not only the Liberal Democrats, but also Labour and even the Conservatives.
The way in which people consume information is changing so rapidly – will hard-print newspapers and broadcast TV as we know them even exist in 10 years time?
The relationship of people to the self-electing “entitled” is changing so rapidly- we see surging support in Europe and the USA for those on both left and right that promise change, whatever that means.
And in particular the relationship of young people to the state is changing so rapidly – we oldies exchanged long-term risk for short-term benefit, which Burry describes as “the gospel of drunk drivers and cheating spouses”, and it is the young, for whom home ownership, job security and pension security seem like fantasy, who must pay for the party their parents enjoyed.
How does a political party of the old consensus survive? I don’t know. Does it deserve to? I don’t know that either.”
Here is a beginning. If the medium is the message then we need to be using the new media and that will help us define our new campaigns.
In the members forum where I also posted Paul’s piece someone has written about how we might widen policy development by ensuring that where a panel of experts are developing their ideas, papers, evidence etc are totally open to the everyone to comment and participate. We need to be in the forefront of the movement that changes the way people remove the self-electing elites dominating decision making that affects them, that robs of their freedom and reduces their opprtunities and limits their potential.
I hope you see that a few of us are searching in a thick mist. All I know for certain is that the only way to respond to what happened in May is to sweep the old away – and replace it by that which aids us in campaigning with people to help them take and use power, to communicate ideas at the earliest stage and to involve communities affected by change in those campaigns, and to keep in touch as the old guard is swept away.
Carbon capture and storage. At the risk of being boring, it won’t work, takes 25% of the power you have just produced to compress and cool the exhaust gas – and the storage reservoirs will almost certainly leak within 1000 years, which is how long you would have to keep the gas. See this http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/california-methane-gas-leak-more-damaging-than-deepwater-horizon-disaster-a6794251.html
it’s about natural gas storage, but the same principles of leakage apply.
If CCS were a workable technology, the fossil fuel companies would be all over it, as it would enable them to carry on producing the 80% of fossil fuel that otherwise will cause disastrous climate change….as it is they hope to do that anyway.