There’s a by-election! Chaaaaarge! This pretty much sums up Lib Dem strategy in Crewe… or is it tactics masking as strategy? And if there are any voices in the party who think our blind rush to by-elections is as mad as the Charge of the Light Brigade, I have news for you. It’s the only strategy we have.
Tactical voting is our ‘strategy’ even if the circumstances don’t suit it – for example, if we are third in polling data and the main strong challenger is not us! In Crewe our message was, err… ‘Vote for us because we can….ummm……win’. After we came third, our main pronouncements were, in effect, ‘Hooray, Labour got a pasting because it increased taxes on the poor,’ and, at the same time, ‘People voted Tory as a protest but they don’t want a Tory government’. To describe this as unclear for the public and limp as a position (whether deliberate or not) would be euphemistic.
What’s worse is… well… let me put this as a question: what percentage of the voting public now identifies us with which policies? That is a more important question than what our main ‘headline’ policies actually are.
Tactical voting as an approach can help us in some circumstances, even in a general election, but it has come to dominate. Some might say it filled a nearly-empty space. Blind Charges of the Lib Dem Brigade need to be stopped, however. This will force us to face an uncomfortable truth. At the root of the ‘strategy deficit’ are the fragmented policy development and implementation processes across the party. By this I mean the actual, not theoretical, system.
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