Over on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free site, Liberal Democrat MP for Taunton and Foreign Office Minister, Jeremy Browne, makes a valuable contribution to what will be an increasingly important conversation for Liberal Democrats to engage in in the coming years: how we can make our participation in government an electoral asset, and make it more likely that 2010-2015 will not go down in history as simply a one-off period of Liberal Democrats exercising national power.
Jeremy’s main thesis is that, to ensure future success, the Liberal Democrats need to replace those voters who supported the party as a protest, whose support a party of government will never maintain, with the (potentially much larger) group of voters who share the values of a modern, liberal party but who have been dissuaded from supporting the party in the past because of our historic lack of national influence, and our unproven record in managing complex affairs of State.
It’s an articulate and considered piece, so do go and read the whole thing, but, in the meantime, here’s an excerpt:
One charge levelled at the Lib Dems – that we say one thing in one part of the country but another thing elsewhere – has always struck me as fairly laughable. In so much as it may have any truth, it hardly compares to the contrast between what Labour says in London and how it campaigned in Oldham East and Saddleworth.
But another charge – that we are, to an uncomfortably large degree, a vehicle for protest votes – has greater force. Within the support for the Liberal Democrats, there is, of course, a strong and principled core liberal vote, but it is not a large enough vote. To make electoral headway, the Lib Dems need to top it up with people who dislike Labour, the Conservatives, or established politics in general.
Voting for negative reasons of course also forms a large part of the support of the other two parties, which is why their campaigns mainly invite people to vote against the other side rather than back positive propositions. But the Lib Dems, more unusually, have also gained some votes from people who are broadly mistrustful of mainstream politics. Many of these voters have a strong civic conscience and an interest in policy. They want to vote, but they feel uneasy about the real-life decisions that governments must inevitably make.
By voting Lib Dem, they have previously achieved the ideal balance: discharging their democratic duty but never being burdened by any responsibility for the tough and often unpopular compromises and outcomes involved with the exercise of power. This section of voters, uniquely and somewhat perversely, voted Lib Dem precisely because they thought we couldn’t win and wouldn’t be sullied by government.
You can read the whole thing here.
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69 Comments
Great article that draws the right conclusions. We need to attract all liberals of other parties and none to our banner.
The obvious difficulty is the potential backwards step we may take betweenb the departure of the Angry Brigade and the wooing of our new support, and the dangers posed by this potential hiatus – namely the catch 22 posed by a drop in support leading to reduced credibility. We have to hope that there are eeal and positive acheivements in government to point to wheb the time comes.
I would have thought that reality had sunk in by now.
The Lib Dems can’t be a home for protest votes because those protest votes are going to be aimed against the Coalition Dems. We can all read the polls and May is just around the corner for those who want to pretend they are meaningless.
The fact is the left leaning votes will never come back unless you start standing up to Cameron, and you won’t get right leaning votes period. They simply won’t desert Cameron for Clegg. Most Conservative voters already think Cameron is too wishy washy but their vote is holding up.
That leaves the core vote, it’s shrinking and on it’s own it might fill a couple of taxis of MPs at an election.
I do admire the way some of Clegg’s spinners are still trying to belittle any previous Liberal Democrat Leaders success as mere “protest votes” though. That takes a hell of a lot of chutzpah considering how popular Clegg is. Or rather, isn’t.
ISNI – you are an idealogue/purist. What you’ve ommitted from your comment are the many pragmatic/undecided/centrist voters who sit squarely in the centre. In the past, both Tory and Labour have been able to say “vote for us because its time for a change/there is no alternative if you want to beat X”
Well now there is an alternative. Exciting times.
Tabman, why has your vote slumped massively since the last general election? The ‘pragmatic/undecided/centrist’ part of the electorate is either around 10% or doesn’t support you. Who is the vote and why are they fewer than at the election should be something the Lib Dems think long and hard about now because then you might be able to do something about it by May.
@Tabman, the woman who has been cleaning our public toilet for the past twenty years thinks they are exciting times as well. She’s being made redundant ,she’s very excited. The kids round our way are also very excited, the youth club is closing. Yep, exciting !
Excellent piece, thanks for flagging it up for LDV readers; and, yes, Tabman – good points too.
In a theoretical sort of way, Browne makes quite a lot of sense. I do think he should have distinguished more carefully between two types of “protest” voters: the thoughtful and principled voters who dislike both Tory and Labour policies, and the relatively thoughtless and antipathetic voters who just want to give all governments a good kicking. In principle, we are bound to lose the latter group if we move into government ourselves, and we may lose some of the former group as well. But that’s only a detail criticism. As Browne points out, in joining any government, we would have had to plan for losing one group of voters, and hope to make it up by gaining a different group, those who like what practical things we could achieve by going into government.
Had it been Ashdown, Kennedy, or Campbell who had had the “good” fortune to enter a hung parliament, Browne’s theories would no doubt have been quite applicable. The trouble is that they didn’t. Instead, we have had a leader who hasn’t just made a deal to get into government, he has made a massive shift in our political position. As a result, he hasn’t just lost the protest vote of the angry malcontents, he has also lost the votes of most of the party’s core supporters. He has probably also gained a few votes in return from what we might call pale pink or “Owenite” Tories (I think ICIN is wrong to ignore them entirely), but, only a few.
So, I think we already know what happens when we apply the Browne theory in these novel circumstances, and boast to the public that we can out-Tory the Tories and boldly lead the country to the right. It may win a few votes in places, but it loses a lot more.
And so it should. if Clegg wanted to govern as a Tory, he should have stayed alongside his early mentor Leon Brittan, and stood as a Tory.
Surely we should take any votes we can get.? The voter, like the customer, is always right. It’s perverse to slag off our old set of voters (ones we were happy to court with target letters about Iraq and tuition fees) as lacking in “responsibility”.
Railing against the wrong kind of voter is like railing against the wrong kind of snow – a waste of time.
What was more interesting were the comments to the piece.
376 and counting, with one of the most judicious moderation policies yet seen on Comment is free.
Yet still wave after wave of insults, criticisms and general distrust of anything contained in the piece.
The Lib Dem loyalists still live in denial.
Your party has nothing to replace the lost voters with. If you’re an Orange Liberal: Vote Tory. If you’e a social democrat – vote Labour.
Exciting times indeed.
G – what vote would that be then? I don’t recall there having been a vote since last May.
Ste Thomas – given that Labour also wanted to cut the deficit who’s to say those events wouldn’t have happenedif they’d won the election?
David Allen – it would save you time if you simply wrote I HATE CLEGG THE TORY, might save you getting RSI.
Gee! It’s a good thing the centre is so uncrowded so we can move right in there.
Hello ? It looks like Miliband and Cameorn have parked their tanks in the centre for months.
I’m not counting the out and out far left or right as they are a very small percentage and have their own outlets. UKIP for the far right and those on the far left just stay at home or vote for Greens or small parties.
When I speak of left and right we both know I mean centre left and centre right as despite the rhetoric, the gap between Labour and the Conservatives became vanishingly small as Blair dragged them to the right and Cameron dragged the tories to the left.
Undecideds I’ll give you, but these strange beasts are a few percent and can never be predicted.
What tells people whether a Party is a realistic alternative and a good home for a vote is the polls. People just won’t vote in any numbers for a Party that’s nowhere near the other big two in percentage terms, and that is the most deadly danger of all.
Hoping it will all get better in the fullness of time runs the risk of getting near an election with a catastrophically low polling % that will make a wasted vote not just the usual tired propaganda from Labour and the Conservatives, but impossible to deny.
Why will the voter suddenly credit Clegg with anything they like about the coalition when they have not shown the slightest inclination to do so for some 8 months. What willl change ? Say the economy gets better, why would Conservative voters switch to Clegg from Cameron ? Because they think Nick is more Conservative than Cameron ? I may have my criticisms but I don’t believe that and I know for certain that Conservatives will never believe it.
There is a limited supply of votes out there and it ebbs and flows between the Parties.
You can’t just magic up voters from nowhere, they all get represented in opinion polls and they all move about.
Undecideds can swing an election result a few percent but praying for them all as an unrealistically large winnable block vote is foolhardy.
Ruth Bright – the article is explicatory rather than prescriptive about who votes for us.
The key thing is to set out a coherent Liberal philosophy; the opportunity is to attract centrist pragmatist liberals. Browne is acknowledging that we may lose purist protestors.
ISNI – who ot the biggest vote last time out? The DNV Party.
Historically in Lab Lib conests, c100 seats ISTR, there has been little to no anti Labour tactical voting. Big opportunity now that we are deonstrably no longer an adjunct of te Labour Party.
Again, DNV is not a reliable vote for anyone.
You must know how hard they will be to change from DNV to getting them out to the polls. That requires almost unheard of enthusiasm here. An Obama could do it but right now Nick is, if anything, toxic and that has to change.
I was going to say May will show if the Tories decide to keep rewarding like in Oldham but the Barnsley by-election should prove informative on that front. I would not rely on Tories being very charitable with their votes after Oldham. And when it’s a real election with high stakes on the ground, like May, I think the truth is finally going to sink in.
Tabman – one sure way to see off that cohort of voters for good is to slag them off as lacking in “responsibility” and voting for us for the wrong reasons! Browne is not just analysing those voters’ motivations it sounds very much as though he is glad to see the back of them and wants to exchange them for a better calibre of voter.
There are some Lib Dems who seem to be paranoid about winning the protest vote. They should have listened to Jo Grimond many years ago. He was asked, isn’t your vote just a protest vote? His reply was “Well, there is a lot to protest about.” If you are going to make any demographic observations about the nature of the electorate and how they vote, it would be good to see some objective evidence that this can be quantified.
Today, especially after the expenses scandal, the Iraq war, the tuition fees farce I think it is a safe bet that the protest vote is getting bigger. People vote Tory as a protest about immigration. They vote Labour as a protest against NHS cuts. The protest vote has never been a uniquely Liberal vote.
The analysis really misses the main question; what kind of person is going to vote Lib Dem and not Labour or Tory? I do not get a sense that Jeremy Browne really has any idea. And the same applies to the party leadership as well.
Ruth Bright – where did I slag off any voters?
Geoffrey Payne – on the contrary. Browne makes it very clear. Given we are now a party of Government with a Liberal philosophy, we will be appealing to liberal centrist pragmatists in much the same way that Blair did and Cameron tried to. The game changer is electoral reform as it no longer makes sense for this group to cleave to the more extreme left and right wingers in the Labour and Tory coalitions. We need to peel off these voters into the centre.
@Ruth
Yes, I agree with you totally, It’s almost incomprehensible.
Even sitting on a good poll rating speaikng of voters like that would be highly questionable, but where the polls are right now it’s bordering on the suicidal.
I simply can’t believe that there is no serious polling expert who has not told Cowley Street and Clegg the facts of life when it comes to where the votes are, where they all went and where they could possibly come from. The spin that surrounds any kind of polling discussion is becoming almost frantic. Step one in getting out of a hole is realising you are in one.
All the talk of Clegg becoming more independent and giving himself a little distance from Cameron seems to have vanished and a bunker mentality is clamping down. The councils and Oakshotte were isolated and shunned by Clegg while Pickles and Osborne were protected and even praised. I’m at a loss to explain the almost total disconnect between Clegg and the Lib Dem Party at large as the polls continue their dismall tale. But it’s there and it’s becoming more obvious by the day.
@Tabman, they had the same plan as you had before the election for the deficit and would have they had front loaded the local authority cuts ? Still as long as you’re excited, thats what counts
What pretty much every contributor to this thread apart from Stuart refuses to acknowledge is that being a “nicer” watered down version of the Labour Party led to eighty years of nothing. Nada. Zilch.
The only strategic long term route to power is to carve out a distinct, liberal centrist, coherent positionN and stick to itM we’ve made a start, but there is more still to do.
Ste Thonas – you’ve avoided the point I made. Who’s to say that those people wouldn’t have experienced he same thing under Labour? They planned to make cuts, more than Darling admitted to.
@ISNI
Much of what you say is true – the centre ground is crowded and has been ever since Cameron’s leadership victory (Blair having previously moved Labour to the centre ground too).
But I would argue that politics isn’t two-dimensional but multi-dimensional – and most liberals would probably view it as predominantly a quadrant: left-right on one axis and liberal-authoritarian on the other. Labour is centre-left and fairly authoritarian. The Conservatives are centre-right and fairly authoritarian. Of course you get liberal Labourites and Tories but they must see their liberalism as secondary to their position on the left-right axis. Either that or they’ve written us off as an irrelevant protest party (not unreasonable given our history).
I imagine most Lib Dems, on the other hand, view their position on the left-right axis as secondary to their position on the liberal-authoritarian axis – i.e. far more liberal than either of the other main parties. Otherwise why are we LDs rather than liberal members of one of the two main parties?
Our goal must surely be to build a core vote based on that position – liberal first, economically centrist/left/right second.
I’m not saying this goal is easy or even that it’s possible – perhaps you’re right and a liberal support base simply doesn’t exist. Perhaps this country is just fundamentally authoritarian at the moment, and perhaps we’ll fail miserably to convince anyone that liberalism is a better political philosophy.
But if you think we’re doomed to fail because the public can’t be swayed towards centrist liberalism then what is our goal? Why do we exist? To win disenchanted voters? For what purpose? Even if we won enough of those to carry an overall majority and govern on our own, without genuine support for liberal principles we couldn’t implement any of the things we stand for (or if we did we’d be voted out again straight away).
It’s not a case of ‘railing’ against protest voters, but of recognising that their support isn’t any help in seeking to change the country in the way we (presumably) want.
Even if we can’t build a genuine support base, isn’t it better to try and fail than to bask in a mirage of popularity based largely on the virtue of being ‘not the other two’?
If we can’t carve out a real liberal base then we have no mandate to create a liberal society. If we’re not trying to create a liberal society then what are we doing? What is the point of us?
Most commentators seeking to answer that question since our party’s inception have concluded ‘the Lib Dems exist to win by-elections’. Wow. Hands up who got involved in politics to fight for that grand ambition?
@Tabman. My point is that you seem more concerned with your party machinations than the lives of real people. The Lib Dem’s I know would be disgusted by such an attitude. Of course you may want them out of the party with you as you march towards your nivana of becoming the poor mans FDP.
Catherine – hear hear, put very eloquently, far more than I could on an iphone!
And to add to your point, Catherine, our aim should be to dominate the centre ground and send the others off to their wings
Tabman
“G – what vote would that be then? I don’t recall there having been a vote since last May.”
There have been over 190 local government (principal) council by-elections since May, and the results there certainly do not support g’s “analysis”.
Lib Dems are (very narrowly) ahead of the game with more gains than losses:
Lib Dem holds = 24
Lib Dem gains = 12
Lib Dem losses = 11
Net gains = 1
For more details see http://birkdalefocus.blogspot.com/2011/01/lib-dem-still-narrowly-ahead-in-council.html
Ste Thomas – this is a thread about party politics and political philosophy. If you want to talk about job losses, write an article for LDV about it. And include some detailed discussion on Labour’s deficit reduction plans whilst you’re at it; we’d like to know which services they would have cut.
@ Tabman
If being seen a a “nice watered down version of Labour” led to “Nada Zilch” , I would hardly say that being Tory-Lite is proving a resounding success either – two-thirds of voters lost in less than a year. Reading your posts reminds me of the phrase the “Hope is not a strategy”
Tabman – if we were competing on “centrist” policies like Blair and Cameron (I appreciate that is not exactly what you say, but is the strong implication) why were we bothering all those years to try and bring something different to birth. It really is quite strange to have harped incessantly about “the new politics” in the 2010 election, if all we are saying is “more of the same”. The latter, of course, has been bettered as an election slogan. Or perhaps the slogan should have been “Back to Blair / John Major”. Sorry, this is not the Liberals / Lib Dems I joined and have campaigned for all these years! And you can see why poll ratings are (charitably) not where they were. In fact, I think your suggestion of the change to PR (if we finally get that) causing people to vote Lib Dem, and not Tory or Labour, is really very tribal, and should not be why we are campaigning for it.
@ Simon Shaw
I think if you analysed the votes rather than a very different picture would emerge, though I don’t blame you for trying to accentuate the positive. I very much doubt that the seats pattern will hold on May 5th. I will be very surprised if there aren’t substantial net losses..
Olly – opinion poll ratings are not the same thing as real votes. See Simon’s post above.
Tim 13 – “I think your suggestion of the change to PR (if we finally get that) causing people to vote Lib Dem, and not Tory or Labour, is really very tribal, and should not be why we are campaigning for it.”
It would be if that’s what I was saying, but I’m not. I’m echoing Brownes point; many pragmatic centrist liberal voters are forced by FPTP to vote Labour/tory against Tory/Labour “for fear of letting the other one in”. They have far more in common with us than with the likes of Redwood or Crowe. Electoral reform suddenly makes a positive vote for us a goer; it reunites those liberal ventrist with their real Liberal Centrist home, not with the left or right wing extremists they’ve hitherto shacked up with.
Olly I governing parties at Westminster lose council seats. Always have, always will.
Catherine, I think for many LDs, care of the environment is also a key feature – that is one of the reasons we are one of the few European countries not to have a relatively powerful Green Party. Infortunately, for the more thoughtful green, laissez faire economics makes not a great deal of sense. Of course liberal social positions should be staked out, as they always have been. It is my impression over the years, Tabman, that Labour has a very strong liberal tradition, and the Tories every so often assert a liberal tendency, but is not truly in their DNA. Labour, however, also has a machine politics tradition, which quite often trumps the liberalism. One of the conundrums of recent years is how anyone, least of all an experienced politician and leader like Paddy, should be so misled to think Blair was some kind of liberal. If he ever did thinklike a Labour person, it was the illiberal right – some of nuLabour’s ideas and practices eg micromanagement, detailed target setting for everyone etc, harks back to Stalinism. Our main liberal allies in Labour are on the left, not the right of that party. As for the Tories, it could be argued that the David Davisite right is very liberal, but you soon learn better when you realise their negative approach to any form of internationalism, which IMO is a sine qua non of open minded liberalism.
It is a good point that a party of Government cannot hold a protest vote, and that some people would rather be perpetual protesters. However, I don’t think this is what has led to the big drop in the polls so much as the manner the coalition has been managed and the clear betrayal over tuition fees.
Tuition fees cannot be regained and some will withold or switch votes because of this and not just those who only voted Lib dem out of protest. The main issue where difference could be made is by the approach to the coalition. This needs to be shown as an arranged marriage and not a love match. Clegg needs to allow dissenting voices to be heard, the ministers who were “stung” by the torygraph would not have been if they had been allowed to share their views on clear Tory policies. The Lib Dems need to demonstrate that they are holding to their principles in Government, the councillors should have been given some support instead of being dismissed.
In short voters need to know the Lib Dems stand for anything distinctive at all before they can make a decision on whether they want to be associated with what the party stands for….
@Simon Shaw
Strip out the elections fought during the so called honeymoon period, and look at the picture again.
Tim 13 – I agree with you that there are liberal strands in both Labour and Tory parties, but I’m confused by your nomenclature – Blair is both right wing and Stalinist?
I think Catherine has it right here – statist micromanagement is authoritarian and is what unites the Labour Left and Tory Right, although they put it to use for different ends.
And I can’t see your characterisation of liberal Labour being on the left – there’s nothing liberal about the likes of Straw, Blunkett, Prescott etc, all giants of the Labour left.
a) Some ‘protest’ is reasonable. If I joined the Lib Dems because I protested against illiberalism and a lack of democracy in other parties, that would still be a positive reason for supporting them even if I were shaken and needed a bit of reassurement form the party leadership [this article fails], b) this kind of article sounds a terrible tone and c) Browne has yet to cover himself in glory in this party in Government, hence is approval is 2% in the party so he was not the best person to say it.
Oh I’m well aware of the ‘quadrant’ but tend to view it with amusement. This may be a fault of my own but I tend to find the usual shorthand preferrable to a set of co-ordinates along an x and y axis when speaking of politics and not algebraic equations. Which is not to dismiss the authoritarian/Libertarian differences as they are very real. But one might just as well look at voters priorities and draw up such quadrants for the Economy and the NHS since almost all voters tend to encompass authoritarianism/freedoms and civil liberties as an issue rather than an idealogical prism through which all other policies must be reflected.
What I’d say in my defence is that, whether deliberately or not, other Liberal Ledaers have been seen by the public as centre left. Now that may have been a trick of the light thrown up by the idealogical prism of Liberalism OR some of the most powerfull policies were easily understood by all as leaning left because they were.
Problem is that if you want to land smack in the centre and spoil Ed and Cameron’s fun then you can’t aim for it through the prism/quadrant. And you also have to grab votes of Ed and Cameron where they have been living for far longer than just May. And here is where David Allen is absolutely right.
The Conservative and Labour ran an election campaign as we had seen them for months if not years. They were both ‘centrey’. one centre left, one centre right. But not by very much either way as they both wanted to be in the sweetspot of exact centre voter payoff. Meanwhile Nick did try and run as centrey as he could but there is no use rewriting history on the matter. Voters and everyone else saw him as centre left not centre right.
Now comes the part where that cruel mistress fate steps in and Clegg makes his choice.
(And it is fate BTW so lets not pretend Clegg got more seats than Charles, Clegg just had better fortune to be leader when the hung parliament occured.) I’m not talking about where he chooses to make a deal with the Tories, the numbers game pretty much made hismind up for him even if that was his inclination, I’m talking about when he chose to swing the Party to the centre right when he made the deal.
He could have had an arms length coalition from the start and continued as he campaigned. Instead he positioned himself four square behind Cameron and decided strategically to place all his bets on a coalition that spoke as one and would in his mind share equally the blame and plaudits depending on the coalitions performance. That was his biggest mistake. Because the public had watched Clegg campaign as pretty much every other Liberal Leader and now had the cognative dissonance of seeing Clegg shift to the right behind Cameron which was at odds with how they saw him behave before. And they did not like it. It smacked of opportunism and when the pledges fell they liked it even less. That is why the polls have tumbled and that is why Clegg is now so unpopular.
Don’t campaign as one thing then change to something else as soon as you get a sniff of power.
The public hate that.
I’m not giving a counsel of despair, I’m saying be realistic and ask yourself what do the public want as the cuts bite and things get tougher. They want someone to speak up for them and Clegg has the power to do something about it, whereas EdM can only talk about it and posture while he replays Blairs greatest hits. Like it or not, the only way to start turning this around is to accept that you will have to be the brake on Cameron, start distancing yourself from him and become an associate rather than an adjunct.
The public will respect and start to like Party that is seen to fight battles for things they know they believe in and things the public wants. They will not forgive a Party that they think has thrown it’s principles away for a few years of power and claiming this was your finest moment simply because you were in power is going to ring very hollow indeed after five years of hardship and some of the things the Conservatives are doing in your name.
The choice is stark. Continue hoping for the best or start fighting for those things you know the public wants. You won’t win them all but at the moment the public doesn’t even think you are fighting for anything of what you believe while Clegg is seen as the biggest opportunist there is. You need to become Liberal Democrats again.
Take this as you will as I want to see a strong Liberal Party that means something more than a few years of ministerial perks and then oblivion. It need not be you who is destroyed by Cameron. It deserves to be him.
Best way to stay in power is to ignore all those leftists who have left and go for Tory soft-votes – I wonder after that has all happened how many liberal policies will be left?
Do the Lib Dems have no concept of a bird in the hand being worth two in the bush? Protest voters vote for a party because they see it as a choice, Jeremy Browne is right to say that the Lib Dems need to be more than just a home for protest voters and that the Lib Dems need to appeal to people who think they can win, but they do that by holding onto the protest voters, not discarding them as Nick Clegg when talking of left wing voters coming to the Lib Dems, you lose the protest voters and those who think you have no chance, have even more reasons to think you have no chance.
@Tim 13 who said: ‘care of the environment is also a key feature’.
Must be why you wanted to flog the forests then 🙂
“Take this as you will as I want to see a strong Liberal Party that means something more than a few years of ministerial perks and then oblivion.”
So do I. But the starting point for that has to be a party based on a Liberal Philosophy, not a pale imitation of the Labour Party.
” It need not be you who is destroyed by Cameron. It deserves to be him.”
I presume by that you mean that Cameron should be destroyed?
I disagree. I think that he is a classic example of someone who by upbringing and tribalism is in the wrong party. There are examples in the Labour Party too.
EcoJon – most of the FC forests were planted to provide pit props for the mining industry. There is nothing “eco” about them; they are pine monocultures.
And they are already being “flogged off” – what do you think they do with all that wood?
Catherine said:
“I would argue that politics isn’t two-dimensional but multi-dimensional – and most liberals would probably view it as predominantly a quadrant: left-right on one axis and liberal-authoritarian on the other. Labour is centre-left and fairly authoritarian. The Conservatives are centre-right and fairly authoritarian. …..
I imagine most Lib Dems, on the other hand, view their position on the left-right axis as secondary to their position on the liberal-authoritarian axis – i.e. far more liberal than either of the other main parties.
Our goal must surely be to build a core vote based on that position – liberal first, economically centrist/left/right second.”
followed by the despairing remarks:
“I’m not saying this goal is easy or even that it’s possible – perhaps you’re right and a liberal support base simply doesn’t exist. Perhaps this country is just fundamentally authoritarian at the moment”
I think the problem is not that the country is fundamentally authoritarian. It is simply that most people have the opposite priorities. They view their position on the left-right axis as far more important than their position on the liberal-authoritarian axis. That is why they lose sympathy for the Lib Dems, when they see what they think of as a strange obsession with liberal ideology, coupled with blithe disregard for the left / right issues.
So there is Clegg, telling us that massive cuts, redundancies and poverty are not key issues, whereas turning a curfew into a residence requirement for less than ten terrorist suspects is a crucial issue of fundamental liberties. The public at large do not buy that, so they do not buy us. It is not the liberal principles, as such, that put most of them off. It is the total disregard for bread and butter issues, and the acceptance by so many non-neocons in our midst that an alliance with the Conservatives is just nothing much to worry about.
David Allen – this is known as building a straw man.
“So there is Clegg, telling us that massive cuts, redundancies and poverty are not key issues, whereas turning a curfew into a residence requirement for less than ten terrorist suspects is a crucial issue of fundamental liberties.”
This is both wrong and a non sequitor. Firstly, the first three issues are not necessarily linked, secondly Clegg never said they weren’t important, and thirdly issues of fundamental civil liberties are distinct from the economic issues in the first point.
“The public at large do not buy that, so they do not buy us.”
Wrong. This positioning is one of your own creation that you are ascribing to “the public” to support your irrational hatred of Nick Clegg.
“It is not the liberal principles, as such, that put most of them off. It is the total disregard for bread and butter issues, and the acceptance by so many non-neocons in our midst that an alliance with the Conservatives is just nothing much to worry about.”
Wrong. Tackling the deficit is about as bread and butter as it gets. and that’s the number one priority. And what on earth is a “non-neocon”? Furthermore, the party is not in an alliance with the Conservatives, it is in a coalition; what is more, its a coalition that may Conservatives find deeply troubling as the letters pages and comentators of the Times, Telegraph and Mail keep reminding us.
I think this is known as building a straw man
“So do I. But the starting point for that has to be a party based on a Liberal Philosophy, not a pale imitation of the Labour Party”
Next time you are leafleting, or simply where the opportunity arises in a public setting, ask a few members of the public these four simple questions.
Do you think Charles Kennedy is a Liberal Democrat ?
Do you think Charles Kennedy was a pale imitation of the Labour Party ?
Do you think Nick Clegg is a Liberal Democrat ?
Do you think Nick Clegg is a pale imitation of the Tory Party ?
I know the answers you will get and they will not be to your liking.
(Try it with Ming instead of Charles too if you wish)
I do this not out of cruelty but because you need to understand that you are in the position you are in because of a shift to the right that has backfired. By all means throw as many insults at the Labour Party as you see fit as I hold no brief for them. But speaking frankly we both know that they are not the problem. They have coasted along doing nothing of any significance or consequence while the dissatisfaction with Cameron and Clegg accumulates them votes steadily.
The problem is how the public view Clegg and view the Liberal Democrats.
Of all the things you need worry about being confused for Labour is at the bottom of the list. You don’t have to become the Labour Party and the public would never believe such a move anyway. You have to become Liberal Democrats again.
Ask yourself this, when the chips are down would Cameron risk his future and the future of his Party if the positions were reversed ? Or would he be as ruthless in gaining every advantage over you as he has proved with his ruthlessness in pursuit of cuts?
He is not your friend. To him you are but a means to an end.
ISNI – you are confusing short term perceptions with long term strategy.
I don’t care whether the public think that Nick Clegg is a pale imitation of the Tories or not, quite frankly. The fundamental issue is that being Labour’s junior brother since c1923 has got the Liberals and the Liberal Democrats precisely nowhere.
That’s nowhere – for 80 years.
If the party is to have any sort of long term future it has to carve out a distinct niche, otherwise it will be condemned to irrelevance for another 80 years.
For far too long the Lib Dems were seen as ” a bit like Labour, only nicer”. If the party is ever to move away from that, then the link had to be broken and as no majority was ever goign to be possible, that had to happen by going into coalition with the Conservatives.
The ultimate endgame is not “victory for the Lib Dems”, but victory for Centrist Liberalism and an end to pendulum extremism of the left and right. I’m sure that further realignment will need to happen before that aim is reached.
Tabman – You are confusing almost irreversable negative perceptions with any strategy whatsoever
Hoping everything will turn out nice is a good idea when speaking of the weather but as a tenable political strategy it is instant death. Once the public makes it’s mind up about a politician almost nothing can change it.
Which is why Clegg was so keeen to throw Ming overboard we must assume.
“The fundamental issue is that being Labour’s junior brother since c1923 has got the Liberals and the Liberal Democrats precisely nowhere.”
I do not know why you have such a deep and abiding hatred for the Liberal Democrats to slander them thus as I know no-one who ever considered them to be Labours junior brother, but you are confusing mere circumstance of timing with a strategy of Nicks own making.
It was not moving to the right that got Nick enough seats to from coalition, it was campaigning as a centre left Liberal Democrat. It was also luck that he happened to be Leader at a time when the big two were so close in the polls.
“that had to happen by going into coalition with the Conservatives.”
As I have already indicated, though some Liberals still think it was folly and you could have folowed a path of confidence and supply, I saw no such problem in a coalition. The problem was how Nick then played it.
The choice of style, strategy, positioning and individual policy allocation was entirely his. The ways he could have chosen to be a member of a coalition were innumerable. He chose to shift to the right and become as close to Cameron as possible. To form a coalition that thought and spoke as one with no distance between Cameorn and Nick.
You now see the result.
As for any long term aims of a Liberal realignment to the centre right…. ( if you have no intention of moving to the left then you are stuck where you are and that is the centre right – to get the votes of we know not who since everyone knows the Conservatives will never vote for Liberal Democrats over Conservatives) That plan will have the bitter taste of ashes if you keep following this path. A path that is fast approaching 1 year gone already and the pain has barely begun to bite with the cuts.
The path of holding Cameron tightly and hoping for the best can have but one end.
I’m afraid it is not a happy one for Clegg or those who have lashed themselves to his mast.
ISNI – we’ll have to disagree and see what the outcome is then, won’t we.
“I do not know why you have such a deep and abiding hatred for the Liberal Democrats to slander them thus as I know no-one who ever considered them to be Labours junior brother.”
You are joking here, aren’t you?
PS – as its always good to have some evidence, take a look at this: http://oxfordliberal.blogspot.com/2008/04/this-is-how-far-liberal-has-gone.html
“As for any long term aims of a Liberal realignment to the centre right…. ( if you have no intention of moving to the left then you are stuck where you are and that is the centre right ”
We’ve been “centre-right” for years – see http://www.politicalcompass.org/ukparties2010
“You are joking here, aren’t you?”
Of course not.
I really have never came across anyone who ever said to me those Liberal Democrats are like Labours little brother.
I find the concept fankly a little bizzare and insulting. Liberal Democrats are Liberal Democrats.
No matter the convulsions now they have always in the past been distinct and unique.
Any and all Parties Party to the left of the Conservatives does not instantly confer on them clone status.
Labour are also not a brand I would be pleased to be mistaken for. Do not assume that being mistaken for the Tories just now would make being mistaken for Labour much more palatable. There is no future in subsumation of any kind. If Liberal Democrats are not a separate and distinct Party then they are nothing.
It’s also not as if we are cursed with such an overabundance of big political parties that we need a shorthand to distinguish between a mere three. The British public can and does handle the complexity of remembering three big political parties come election time.
ICNI its not what you think, its been the wider perception as evidenced by the links above. The Lib Dems need to carve out a distinct niche – not “left” but as Centrist (econmic and social) Liberals.
Hmm, too many interesting points to respond to methodically without boring everyone stiff… I agree with a lot of the points made by both sides – or rather ‘all sides’ in the spirit of aiming for pluralistic quadrant-based politics 🙂
@Tim – I agree about the environment, though some strands of Green philosophy are not what I’d classify as liberal (frequent antipathy to internationalism for example). As you say, some of this is probably because of the historical weakness of the UK’s Green party.
By ‘liberal-authoritarian’ axis I didn’t actually mean specifically on civil liberties issues, but rather a wider approach in many areas including bread & butter issues like crime and immigration – things most voters care a lot about but usually vehemently disagree with us on, tending to take a far more authoritarian stance than most Lib Dems.
Having said that, I agree about our tendency to ignore the bread&butter stuff in favour of things like control orders, which though important to us (and IMO to society in general) aren’t things most voters care about.
But I think that tendency is because we’ve tried to avoid arguing our liberal case on those issues precisely because we know our stance isn’t popular so we’ve swept it under the carpet. We’ve been afraid of defining ourselves for fear of alienating potential voters, rather than trying to persuade voters that a liberal approach could actually work better.
I expect some of this is a human dislike of unpopularity and desire to take the easy road. But partly I think our deliberate avoidance of publicly arguing our case has been fuelled by the political reality – why bother arguing an unpopular case when the wasted vote gremlin means there was unlikely to be a prize even if we won such an argument?
I heard one of our senior figures sum up our GE policy programme as ‘two policies people liked, two policies people hated, and 90 policies nobody gave a flying f£&/ about’. Sounds about right to me.
Most people – even many of our opponents – liked the 10k tax policy. But most people – even many of our supporters – hated our immigration policy. I think Clegg’s defence of it when attacked was as good as could be managed, but to stand a chance of winning people over to our viewpoint we would have had to start arguing the case years ago, instead of coasting along on reasonable poll ratings and assuming all those people would either never know about our less popular policies, or wouldn’t care because they’d assume we’d never end up in government so they wouldn’t have to worry about us enacting them.
Now that we’ve lost the protest vote comfort blanket, and have potentially gained an answer to the wasted vote question, we have both the necessity and the motivation to start defining ourselves properly in the public’s mind, and trying to win support for a broad range of our ideals, not just one or two headline ones. I’m not saying it’ll be easy or quick, but I’m not saying it’s hopeless either. However, it will require political courage and will be especially difficult in the current economic climate.
The prize, though, could be substantial. All the polling evidence has shown our historical support being the softest of the 3 main parties by a large margin. If we grasp the nettle now we have a chance to build a much stronger support base.
@ISIN
Anyone who went canvassing in a Tory-ish area pre-last May would almost certainly have come across plenty of soft Conservatives who said they wouldn’t vote for us because we were too close to Labour.
I don’t know if anyone else read all of the self serving garbage written by Mr Browne but if they did they would have found this gem:
“So we have a peculiar and original task: the Lib Dems have to replace the people who voted for us because they thought we wouldn’t be in power with the people who didn’t vote for us because they thought we wouldn’t be in power.”
Well doesn’t this have remarkable echoes of Brecht’s quote about the East Gernan regime:
Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?
No, Mr Brown you job for this parliament is to represent those “protest” voters who voted for you on the basis of what you said at the next election. The same electorate will then decide whether or not they wish to renew your franchise – and not vice versa. My guess if you abandon them in the meantime is that they will not treat yor kindly – and quite right too. You could of course call a byelection and change your electorate now.
“next election” should have course read as “last election”
Jeremy Browne does not tell us what this “values of a modern, liberal party” we should move to are, but he drops enough hints. He links it with “making tough decisions” in the coalition i.e. voting for Tory policy. Mr Browne has a record of being on the economic far right of our party. You don’t need to read very much between the lines to know what he means by his article. He wants to purge the party of its left and centre and make it what the right-wing press has been urging us to become for years, saying this is what “modern liberalism” means – a party which is fanatically extreme free market and which differs from the Tories only by lacking the residual old-style “king and country” or what in continental terms would be described as “Christian Democrat” attitudes.
The words “modern” and “modernisation” have been taken over by political ideologues in recent years, much as a previous generation took over the word “progressive” and made it mean “oriented towards state centralist socialism”. It is done in much the same way – if you can somehow get your ideology to be seen as the natural way forward, “progressive” or “modern”, you can force it onto people with the idea there isn’t any alternative, and anyone who resists it is a silly old fuddy-duddy who wants time to stand still which it never can. In this way, our country has been pushed down to the disaster it now is, in the name of extreme free-market economic policies pushed forward as “modern” we have become a colony of an international wealthy elite who have no loyalty to any people but themselves, and who will suck us or anyone else dry, run and bolt once that has done, much as British imperialsim did in Africa.
Mr Browne does not like protest because he knows there is much to protest about. He dismisses it as President Mubarak has been dismissing it recently in Egypt.
I am happy to agree that protest about what has become of our country after 30 years of governments obsessed with the idea that “private sector know-how” and dog-eat-dog competition is the answer to everything should be much more than “stop the cuts”. That is why I have no time for the Labour Party, because it offers nothing more than that and it won’t accept that it was part of the 30 years smashing decency out of our country that has brought uis to the horrible state we are in.
But this country DESPERATELY needs a coherent alternative to what we have now. It was my hope for all those 30 years that the Liberal Democrats could offer it in a way that Labour wasn’t doing. There was so much that used to be key to what we said that might have been part of an alternative – our support for industrial democracy, land value taxation, the view we agreed in our 1980 Assembly that “Sustained cconomic growth as conventionally measured is neither achievable nor desirable”.
Yes, a real alternative to what we have now in government requires hard choices and saying things people will find difficult and which will lose us the support of some. So in that way I am agreeing with Mr Browne, but I am not looking in his direction. If we want to offer a true workable constructive alternative the biggest thing we have to tackle is the driving force which pushed us into this economic mess, which is the root cause of the growing social divide, which leads to so much talent wasted on work which is completely unproductive, which feeds the fat cats as they take their cut in the huge private sector bureaucracy created by it: the housing market and the banking industry that pumps it up, and more specifically the idea that buying and selling housing is the principle way to make money and that it should not be taxed in the way that work is taxed.
Now, it is going to be very hard to break the idea that owning a house is owning a money-making machine. Those who profit from it are those with voices in our society – the wealthy and older people. Those who lose out are the poor and the young. I know from past experience the howls of anguish from the wealthy and the comfortably housed that come up should you ever challenge their assumptions about housing. Yes, some of those will be Liberal Democrat voters, some may even be signing petitions and protesting “stop the cuts”, but if you were to suggest the cuts could easily be stopped by something like capital gains tax on owner occupied housing at the same rates and starting at the same level as income tax, would they be with you? Because it’s a somewhat complex issue, and because the idea that housing is a money-making machine and we should all be climbing the “housing ladder” is SO ingrained, it’s hard to get even young people who would benefit enormously by a re-thinking of attitudes on these issues to see through it ad support something different. It’s hard too to get the young and poor to see that we have the power to change things, but we have to do it through organised use of the democratic mechanism – one of the greatest successes of the wealthy elite in our society has been to put across the attitude that politics and democracy are all bad things, so people should not get involved in political parties and the like. But look – isn’t this what we have been singing about for years and years “Why should we be beggars with the ballot in our hands, God made the land for the people”?
The terminology may be old-fashioned, but the sentiments are as relevant now as ever. The land for the people, an end to those who “own” it making profit without effort from those who don’t. This is not “Marxism” as I have sometimes been accused of when I say such things, it is what our party loudly and clearly stood for in the early parts of the 20th century.
I say this just to challenge Mr Browne’s assumptions that there is just one “modern” way for our party to go and that everything else is only “protest”. I agree we must have a constructive alternative, even if it’s one many who have supported us find hard, I give this one only as a suggestion.
the idea that buying and selling housing is the principle way to make money and that it should not be taxed in the way that work is taxed.
I meant “principal”, but actually if that was a typo for “principled” it would work even better.
One of the problems we face is the electoral system, AV won’t change it much.
Even if we take a more benign view of Jeremy Browne’s words than in my previous message, we are left with being a party which fiddles around on the edges in politics. That is just what we are now. We may actually be getting through a lot of small liberalish things due to being a junior coalition partner. If we had proportional representation, we could settle down to that. Our role could be as a watchdog on civil liberties issues and the like. We could jump up and down on things which are important, but their direct impact is only on a small part of the population, so most see them as fringe issues. The classic example is gay rights. I am old enough to remember a time when our party was considered weird for having a strong stand in this issue. I remember a time when if you were out on an election with your Liberal rosette, and you met a bunch of Labour people coming the other way, chances are they would hurl a load of homophobic abuse at you.
The problem is that those who would consider that sort of issue so important that they would put it first in voting considerations is quite small. It tends also to be people at the wealthier end of society who are comfortable on the bread-and-butter issues that more concern poorer people and so can afford to turn their attention to neat little liberal issues. I know myself that there is so much I regard as important in politics, but it is somewhat theoretical or abstract, so very hard to get most people worked up about it.
So long as we don’t have proportional representation, we shall only win seats by finding places where we can get more support than any other party. That doesn’t fit in with the idea that we should be a niche interest party. On the continent, there is a place for such parties, they maybe get 5-10% of the vote, fairly evenly spread out over the country though more in wealthier areas, and from that 5-10% of the seats, and that gives them a seat at the negotiating table when coalitions are formed. Because they have this “watchdog” role, they are quite content with being a junior coalition partner, being the liberal watchdog over whoever is the main driving force in government. The danger than is that they become very comfortable as perpetual junior coalition partners, so even the watchdog role is forgotten, and the parties become a nice route to government office for a small number of technocratic businessmen types who like avoiding the rough-and-tumble of the bigger parties.
Proportional representation turned the continental liberal parties this way, but the lack of it turned us into something different. We became the party of the dispossessed, the party challenging political orthodoxy. To survive, we had to develop new ways of doing politics. We have a legacy of those who loved democracy so much that they were prepared to put the immense effort required into getting the rusting Liberal Party machine working again, doing so knowing they themselves would never benefit from much in the way of power, having the satisfaction only of knowing they had not stood by, they had worked themselves to give the people something different in politics, to make them think, to show they did not have to accept the political establishment in Labour or Tory rotten boroughs. It’s “Why should we be beggars with the ballot in our hands?” again – we showed that you do not have to vote as you always voted, and that you could get something different if you voted differently.
This is as much our legacy as classical establishment liberalism, and we should be immensely proud of it, not dismissive in the way Jeremy Browne is.
I’m sorry, but there isn’t anything that isn’t obviously correct about the central premise of Browne’s article.
Political parties need a core vote and set of values. They need to have something to offer the public. They can’t be whatever their voters want them to be, because it’s impossible to build a coherent picture of what those voters want (if indeed they all want the same thing), and it also leads to swinging in the wind blown by every dodgy referendum and opinion poll.
Having a large section of the vote who chose a party for what it is not, or on a flimsy understanding of what they are getting, leads to anger and disappointment. Look at how empty truths gained Blair the nickname Bliar even before the dodgy dossier.
The other reason being what the protest voters want is unsustainable, is that a political party is above all a group of human beings. They joined because they shared the values of that party, in order to promote those values. Trying to be something other than the shared values of the membership is not going to go far- sooner or later people being people will have problems serving the interests of random protest voters over the values they sought to uphold.
Rather reminds me of that scene in the office where David Brent tells his staff that some of them will lose their jobs and the rest will have to relocate to swindon but hey, the good news is that he is being promoted. Jeremy Browne represents a part of the country where the Labour vote is negligible. I imagine he is calculating that being seen as an ‘Orange Tory’ won’t do his re-election chances much harm. I think it’s pretty plain that Clegg’s ‘own the coalition programme’ strategy, far from being an error, is central to his goal of re-shaping the Lib Dems into an ideologically pure, right wing, Thatcherite party. The practical problem with such a project is that political identity, credibility and trust become so shredded that the electorate simply stops listening to you.
Rankersbo – nothing to apologise for. You’re absolutely correct.
ruthbright@
“Surely we should take any votes we can get.?”
Sounds like desperation.
Still there’s always the prisoner vote to court when Clegg gets even more desperate.
Cameron will stop being Clegg’s NBF if Clegg pushes to poach voters from the Tories as reported in the Indie http://www.independent.co.uk/…/lib-dems-to-target-tory-votes-as-clegg-sees-his- constituency-slip-away-2211230.html ].
Still there’s always the prisoner vote to court when Clegg gets even more desperate.
No doubt he’ll be pledging scrapping prisons because they are illiberal and all Labour’s fault.
David Allan@ “So there is Clegg, telling us that massive cuts, redundancies and poverty are not key issues, whereas turning a curfew into a residence requirement for less than ten terrorist suspects is a crucial issue of fundamental liberties. The public at large do not buy that, so they do not buy us.
It is not the liberal principles, as such, that put most of them off. It is the total disregard for bread and butter issues”
Bravo David,
At last someone gets it. If you can get your leadership to understand that, then I might vote Lib Dem again one day.
[Get rid of Clegg and Alexander too].
Tabman @
David Allan’s feelings about Clegg are not irrational.
Clegg’s performance and behaviour have provided more than enough evidence to enable a rational decision to be made about him. Hatred may not be a positive thing, it’s bad for the blood pressure, but betraying millions of left leaningvoters then telling them to basically sod off is bound to elicit strong responses.
toryboysnevergrowup@
“No, Mr Brown your job for this parliament is to represent those “protest” voters who voted for you on the basis of what you said at the next election”
Spot on.
So marvellously simple yet something the Lib Dems have obviously not even bothered to do.
Why not ? Surely because Clegg and his neolib Orange Bookers never actually intended to represent those voters.
Any general election which kicks out the Party in power can be seen as victory for the protest vote.
The question is why the right wing Liberal Democrats kept silent and weren’t so choosy about which protest votes they could court in the run up to the election
“This section of voters, uniquely and somewhat perversely, voted Lib Dem precisely because they thought we couldn’t win and wouldn’t be sullied by government.”
I have made much the same argument here:
http://jedibeeftrix.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/labours-problem-and-the-lib-dem-opportunity/
And I tend to agree that the Lib-Dem’s need to transform themselves from a party of protest into a party of government, which is exactly what they are doing within the coalition.
This will result in the loss of the feckless idealists, but represents a once in a life-time opportunity to re-brand the Lib-Dem’s as a substantially different and healthier brand of left-wing politics than what is on offer from Labour.
Good article.