I have just received an email from Simon Hughes. It said:
It’s been a great month for Liberal Democrats who are setting the pace on the green agenda!
It doesn’t quite say it’s been a great month for ‘the’ Liberal Democrats but most people will read it that way and think vaguely of my one and only Kipling joke:
If you can keep your head while all around are losing theirs…then you haven’t understood the true seriousness of the situation.
To be fair on Simon and his team, we do need reminding that there is more to this coalition than AV, Lords reform and putting up with Eric Pickles or [insert ghastly alternative Tory minister of choice].
I am proud of the fact that Lib Dem ministers are introducing an Energy Bill, a carbon budget, and the Green Investment Bank. These are good policies which remind us of why we do politics in the first place. And we need to make sure that we cover them in our leaflets and conversations with the public.
But will the public notice? I have been to a fair few post mortems over the past week or so, from purely local to ALDC and the Federal Party. All pretty gloomy. The public caned us over tuition fees and being in the Coalition at all – and yet were nice to the Tories. True: someone who did not vote for us because of the Coalition probably did not themselves back the Tories, but it is hard to dislodge the idea that it is, in teenager speak, ‘so unfair.’
Meanwhile the public did not, except in isolated cases, give much support to the Greens. They rarely do, preferring an Augustinian ‘Lord make me virtuous but not yet’ approach, while hacking down trees because they ‘block out the light’. The Green Investment Bank, bluntly, is not going to float their globally warmed boat.
But what was truly unfair was that we were punished over AV: punished by the Tories who came out in higher numbers than normally would have been the case in local elections to vote No and Tory, punished by Labour who came out in higher numbers to Vote Yes and Labour (and also No and Labour). And punished by the blithering nature of the Yes campaign.
Move on, eh? Next year won’t be so bad. Thankfully there won’t on polling day in 2012 be another extraneous issue which will causes Tory voters to pour out and spoil our usual local election differential.
Well: there won’t be provided we don’t have Police Commissioner elections.
Still keeping your head?
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9 Comments
If Simon (or indeed several others) would care to note there is the small matter of Scotland. Seeing that email, with little real relevance to Scotland (most green issues are devolved) saying is was a good month made a mockery of the idea that we are supposed to be a federal party.
In Scotland it was a bad month and nothing, absolutely nothing, can be shown to have been good in it.
Willie Rennie got elected leader. That’s at worst neutral, surely?!
Whilst I believe Willie Rennie to be a good leader, the reason he is leader is due to the dire response we got from voters in the Scottish elections meant that Tavish Scott felt he had not choice but to step down. At best it is neutral so my belief that nothing good happened in the last month is still valid.
As a former hard working Lib Dem Councillor from what used to be a safe seat I’ll try and remember just how great May was while I’m waiting for my benefits to be sorted out!
“The public caned us over… being in the Coalition at all – and yet were nice to the Tories. …the public did not, except in isolated cases, give much support to the Greens.”
Well, yes and no. I would suggest that the public were not particularly nicer to the Tories, it’s just that the people who voted for them before voted for them this time. The isolated cases of support for the Greens were basically the only places where, with FPTP, people felt it was worth voting for them because they had a good enough chance.
Here’s where I think that lost LibDem support went. The portion of the LibDem vote that came from voters on the Left who had become disenchanted with Labour especially over issues like Iraq, and other issues (possibly even the environment) where they felt it had become too much of a “Christian Democrat” party was lost, because those voters see the participation of the LibDems in the Coalition as representing the fact that the party is now a party of the Centre Right. This may be down to what is seen as support for too-rapid cuts in the public sector, tuition fees, wholesale back-door privatization, failure to address corporate tax evasion and other issues.
This group of essentially left-wing voters, won over to the LibDems for its opposition to Iraq and other factors that portrayed it as being to the Left of New Labour, discovered that the right wing of the LibDems had now conclusively won. The party has been schizophrenic about this issue for some years, with two blocs of opinion, the leftwards one actually being surprisingly far to the left. It would appear that the latter group no longer has a significant influence on policy.
British public opinion in general, too, is in many areas significantly to the left of the position taken by all the major parties and ascribed to them by the popular newspapers, as Johann Hari pointed out before the General Election. Those people are thus not represented by any major party, and they are currently wondering where the hell to go. As it is panning out at present, they will drift remorselessly to the Labour Party, and the more it configures itself as an actual party of the Left, and leaves old New Labour, with its continuation of Thatcherism asnd deregulation and its support for war in Iraq, behind, the more that group of voters will be lost to the Liberal Democrats – until they forget, or they decide that the Labour Party is still in the thrall of big business and thus is not worthy of their attention. In which case they will have nowhere to go at all.
Increasingly there will be a body of public opinion that is firmly on the Left and feels it is no longer represented by any major party, and thus has no voice in Government. Portions of that body are already taking to the streets on an increasingly regular basis. It will be interesting to see if they will be able to mount a continuous demonstration in the Spanish style, but it’s a real possibility.
It’s difficult to guess which way it’ll go. Chesterton’s The Secret People comes to mind:
“It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest
God’s scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.
But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.
Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.”
Chris, in Scotland they did have an alternative and they went en masse to the SNP.
Again, this makes the point I’ve said before – the party in London is seeing Scotland as “collateral damage” and doesn’t really care about what happened. Perhaps LDV might like to get someone from Cowley St to come on here and prove that they do actually give a toss about us, or are they just more concerned about appointing Marketing Directors and fitting out their new offices?
“But what was truly unfair was that we were punished over AV: punished by the Tories who came out in higher numbers than normally would have been the case in local elections to vote No and Tory, punished by Labour who came out in higher numbers to Vote Yes and Labour (and also No and Labour). ”
You could have summarised this as being punished by Clegg not listening to those warned in advance of the dangers of holding the referendum the same day as local elections. All of which came true…..
@ Richard E – ‘This group of essentially left-wing voters …. discovered that the right wing of the LibDems had now conclusively won ….. (T)he left…..no longer has a significant influence on policy.’
In fact, the left of the Lib Dems has been steadily regaining ground in internal elections since Nick Clegg was elected leader in Dec 2007. (Tim Farron is now President, elected on the same electorate as the leader, and Federal Ctte elections in 2008 and 2010 were significant victories for the left). That is why Nick Clegg had to ‘walk through fire’ to get his tuition fees policy through the Commons (because almost half the Parly Party voted No), and why he is having to renege on the promises he must have given Cameron over NHS reform. Some activists are refusing to work for Pro-tuition fees MPs. I expect the next leader of the Lib Dems (Farron himself?) will move the party firmly back to the centre-left. The real question is how much damage we will take en route.
@ Terry: Well that’s good to know, and if that shift in personnel is reflected by shifts in core policy, I’ll be very pleased – I am waiting for rail re-nationalisation to become policy for example. But I am not certain the Left-leaning voting public necessarily sees people in the party: they see policies. And the policies they see currently are not even slightly to the Left. This is not least because, one might argue, the Tories are the senior Coalition partner and all the LibDems can do is ameliorate Tory policy to a greater or lesser extent . But most people don’t see that: they see policies perhaps even worse than Thatcher – and there are no cheap council house sales to keep them quiet. Increasingly, they are wondering if it could possibly be any worse if it was only the Tories in power. The answer to that question is probably yes, but it’s quite bad enough as it is.