Only four days after the cataclysm, already there’s a rosy (garden?) hue about our ignominious performance – martyrs to the cause of the Coalition, country before self-interest, fallen heroes. History will be kinder to us than the electorate. If we are ever going to recover from our nemesis, this is a very dangerous mindset.
Of course it was always going to be tough being in Coalition with the Conservatives, and a price was always going to be paid. But as Lord Steel said right after Nick Clegg’s moving farewell speech, it wasn’t the Coalition itself that destroyed trust in us and our vote, it was our performance while in it. This has been done to death here and elsewhere in the last few days, but it cannot be allowed to be swept under the carpet as we try and revuild.
Between 2010 and 2015, we drove wave after wave of people away from us, not because of the Coalition, but because of what we did above and beyond the constraints of the Coalition. Tuition fees: students and young people (All those new members who flocked to our local party for our 2010 campaign: vanished). Bedroom tax and the NHS: millions working in and benefitting from the public sector. Secret Courts: true Liberals (now we were now losing old school local members for whom this was the last straw).
We did it to ourselves. And when some of us tried to stop it, we were harangued, cajoled and bullied into thinking that Daddy knew best. Remember Shirley and the big guns being wheeled into the NHS conference debate? Remember the wave of grey suits filling the hall to vote against the SLF housing motion amendment which was merely invoking what was already party policy? In the bleak light of electoral oblivion, there’s no joy in saying ‘I told you so’.
There is no way back without a root and branch clear-out of those responsible for promising the electorate a socially-liberal manifesto in 2010 and then using the Coalition to impose their own centre-right agenda on our party and on the country. It is extraordinarily patronising to the electorate to say they punished us for being in Coalition – no, they understood all too well our behaviour – we promised them ‘new’ politics and within months had broken that trust. Of course, five years of undiluted Tory rule would have been far worse, but this entirely misses the point. If we’d have had five years of Coalition where we’d been seen not only to put the brakes on the Tories but held firm to our Liberal values, who’s to say whether we’d have got 25 seats or 75? I noticed the word ‘values’ more in Nick’s departure speech than in any of his others, but that was too late. Instead our campaign was ‘anchored to the centre ground’, rather than rooted in belief and conscience.
We’re all nice people in the Lib Dems (well, mostly!) and we’d all love the luxury of having a mega group hug, dusting ourselves off and carrying on as we were. Ironically those who seem most willing to do so favour the free market approach in everything but holding those accountable for failure to account. In any commercial enterprise they’d have walked the plank a long time ago.
But we don’t have the luxury of just carrying on. We must not delude ourselves. We’ve had our Gerald Ratner moment and have to re-brand and re-build. We have to be totally clear that the Orange Book approach, as David Howarth and others predicted has no electoral appeal whatsoever. We have to rebut it, and rebuild our party on proper social liberal values and ideas. The Labour party is still totally confused; the Greens are still in incubation. Despite the near wipe-out, far more fortunately than we ever deserved, and although the path will be torturous and long, there’s still an opportunity to be the progressive party which our country needs and which we once threatened to be.
* Mark Blackburn was a PPC in 2020 and 2017
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40 Comments
Agree for a party that seems to spend a great deal of time talking about policy and it’s history
Come 2010 after the election we seemed to lose all sense and act like a bunch of kids in a sweetshop once Cameron handed out the chance of Coalition
Certain people in my view went native and lost touch with the grass roots of the party as each year more and more of the party either left or was defeated at the ballot box.
Last year I signed the letter calling for Clegg to resign
It all became a bad dream and last Thursday we woke up!
Great thinking, and reflecting my feelings entirely!
In 2005, I campaigned hard for the superb Liberal Democrat candidate in my rural Worcestershire constituency. As Councillor, he was picking up a 4-figure majority in just his own ward, and we all wanted him to do his magic in Parliament. Instead he was let down by inept campaign management – canvassing empty villages on a Saturday when everyone in the town is at home or out shopping, and blitzing the towns during the week when the only ones at home were Tory pensioners, and the real support was at work. None the less, he made that hopeless Shire seat a target marginal. Even in this election, he and his Lib Dem partner held on to their two-seater district seat comfortably. He even had his own posters everywhere there, but very few for the Parliamentary candidate.
Then, after the Orange Book took over, the party went all authoritarian and started to stage-manage the events. All the questions were pre-selected on safe topics, and no time was made for the awkward squad like me, and in fact most core thinking and educated Liberals. By the time the Clegg bus came along in 2010, I had already given up and voted Green.
Please don’t underestimate the appeal of the way in which the party did politics over the past few years. Equally, please consider thatmoderation in the way policies are discussed and opponents debated with does not have translated into purely centrist programme. An open minded and reasoned approach can be coupled with a radical agenda, and I do not think it would serve the party well to follow the tribalist approach of other parties, and to substitute ideas and reasoned argument with vitriol.
We need to redefine the political map as a triangle with Liberalism at one corner, Socialism at another, and Conservatism at the third, instead trying to insert ourselves somewhere into a line where the two other parties are often almost in the same place. So whenever someone asks “are you in the centre ground” or “are you left of Labour” we reply “No! we believe in Liberalism” and tell them what that means
“By the time the Clegg bus came along in 2010, I had already given up and voted Green.”
How did that work out ?
Hear Hear, Mark. 🙂
5…4…3…2…1…
This is the countdown for Simon Shaw to appear and ask you to define exactly what you mean by “right, centre-right, centre-left” etc…
I could not agree more with this article.
Totally agree.
Superb and accurate article. In my opinion the worst (best?) example of the LibDem leadership’s getting its own way was when Baronness Williams “changed her mind” re. The Health and Social Care Bill. She and Mr Clegg were in favour of this Bill. The LibDem Party membership, I believe, was not. The Leadership prevailed and thus supported the worst instincts of the Tory Party; a disaster for the LibDems. Mr Blackburn is spot on with his analysis.
Mark – you are SPOT ON. Unless we can recognise and address how we alienated the 4.4 million voters who deserted the party between 2010 and 2015, it is currently unclear how we can move forward. The people have spoken. Humility is the only way to accept their verdict.
Aclassic case of what psychologists call “projection”, attributing ones own faults to others. Thinking that we could have done it differently & made a real difference to the outcome is itself a comforting delusion. We just have to accept that taking part in any Coalition where we are not the dominant Party will Clobber us good & proper. The conclusion I draw from that is that, short of some National Emergency we should avoid Coalition at Westminster till we have 200 MPs.
Meh.
Hear, hear indeed. But let’s be careful with phrases like “a root and branch clear-out of those responsible”. At the leadership level, it is justified. But not for the ordinary members.
We should elect a new leader who can articulate the change. Then each member can decide if they share the new leader’s vision.
I am afraid that the Lib Dems need a spot of Leninism. They refused (couldn’t?) define what their values were with 50-odd MPs; if they want to survive they’d better learn how to do it now. And that means banishing the non-liberals from the party. And that means those who disagree on our core message on economics which is NOT, and never has been, one of libertarianism. Britain is changing rapidly- deindustrialising, financialised, never as before open to the buffetting of global financial flows, trade flows, labour flows. People who did fine under the old economy are being left behind in the knowledge economy (how many British adults are illiterate? and how many blame immigrants for their plight when no one is explaining their story in terms of economic fairness?). Economic inequality is exploding in a Britain which does public sector, call centres and financial sector centre. And asset prices keep getting bidded up (shares AND land are now arguably entering bubble territory).
Labour lost because they had no story to tell of what kind of economy we needed to move towards. The Lib Dems lost because they were happy to manage the decline a tad differently. Now’s the time for big thinking. How to we empower those who have lost all sense of power and agency in this new economy? How does the unaccountable power of financial services come under democratic power? How does labour get its fair share from capital which is global and greedy (new forms of mutual ownership?)? How to we return “small is beautiful” and community to our towns and villages?
It ISN’T libertarianism, it IS social liberalism. If people decided to think radically and tell the story loudly and clearly and positively.
DaveN I agree. I have said many times on here that if the Lib Dems had put a stop to the NHS reforms after the ‘pause’, many of us would have then forgive the tuition fee issue. I was actually saying to dear husband “thank God for the Lib Dems” when the ‘pause’ was announced. Only to be even more severely disappointed when it then went ahead.
I agree strongly with the article.
Also agree strongly with David Allen’s comment.
VERY strongly disagree with Stevo’s comment.
It airways seriously frustrates me when I hear people suggest that fellow liberals should leave the party. Treating each other like the enemy is a surefire way to tear ourselves apart.
Yes, we need to have a serious discussion about our direction, but it needs to be rational, not personal and especially not vindictive!
I agree Mark’s brilliantly clear contribution- it’s true that the the UK doesn’t have a coalition tradition but that’s no excuse for our failure; if we don’t learn the lessons of how to manage this and project our own identity as a Party the electorate will go on treating us like a joke whether we’re in Govt. or opposition – another loss on the same scale in 2020 would take us down to 2 MPs who would be forced to join one of the others and the Party could get snuffed out just like Owen’s continuing SDP was (a project that was all about the vision of an able but flawed leader rather than building a social movement – sound familiar?). I suspect folk can argue out the mythology of orange-bookery for ever and a day, but it was always clear to me from day one of the last Govt. that those at the top of the Party were persuing their ideas/agenda of how a Coalition should work (which perfectly suited the tories and fitted the tory world-view) rather than the wider Party’s agenda…
Who said that I was being personal or vindictive? The whole point is that libertarians ARE NOT liberals. I wouldn’t want fellow liberals to leave, obviously. But the Party has to STAND FOR SOMETHING. And that might mean irritating some of the membership who joined to be part of a Macmillanate Tory party that we became under Clegg as we go about trying to reclaim all of the votes and the members that we lost amongst our liberal base.
Mark Blackburn
Thank you for this article. A good mainstream Liberal Democrat analysis.
I would like to echo your point that –
“… We have to be totally clear that the Orange Book approach, as David Howarth and others predicted has no electoral appeal whatsoever. ”
The Orange Book phenoomenon resulted in a combination of entryists and the easily mislead which has been a disaster for the party.
It was always ludicrous to imagine that it would be possible to win votes by changing a
Oberal De ocrat Party into something like the sort the RightWing Libertarian Party that Mark Littlewood promotes.
Compare the results in Southport and in Westmoreland where we were successful and our re-elected MPs were clearly not of the Orange tendency with the results in Yeovil and Taunton where the former MPs were the two most clearly identified with the Orange Book.
The proof of the pudding was in the voting.
Thankfully all of that is now history and we can put this disastrous diversion down to experience and learn never to be mislead by these rightwing, false prophets again.
Great article. Hits the nail on the head.
It should have said –
“…The Orange Book phenomenon resulted in a combination of entryists and the easily mislead which has been a disaster for the party.
It was always ludicrous to imagine that it would be possible to win votes by changing a Liberal Democrat Party into something like the sort the RightWing Libertarian Party that Mark Littlewood promotes.”
Apologies for the typos in that last comment from me.
I am never quite sure if these things are typos, something malfunctioning in the iPad, or gremlins that creep in from the unknown on the way to LDV moderation approval. So let’s assume it was my inexpert keyboard skills, please accept my sincere apologies.
@John Tilley so much for inclusivity. Have you ever read the Orange Book?
Phyllis, I Remember Mrs Shirley Williams when she was the Labour MP for (I think) Stevenage, Hertfordshire. Back then she was a very enthusiastic supporter of British public services. So what happens to our politicians, like Baroness Williams, to change their view of the world so drastically? [I recount this recolection, not on a personal level but as factual political history]
TCO
Yes – but I would not suggest that anyone else should even try.
I have always stressed that the contributors to and the actual contents of The Orange Book werevnot the problem.
The problem was the faction that was deliberately organised around the name Orange Book.
It was the Libertarianism that dared not speak its name.
So much so that the Orange Tendency had to keep trying to invent new names such as “classical liberal”, “four cornered liberalism” , “small state liberalism” etc etc.
Jeremy Browne seemed to have a new name for it every week before he announced that he could not face the voters in another general election.
It would be interesting to know how many copies of The Orange Book were actually sold and were actually read by anyone.
I rather like the story that one Liberal Democrat member of The House of Lords bought up piles of copies and put them in his garage so that innocent members of the party would not stumble across them.
The story must be true — I heard it from David Laws himself.
I have struggled to find a sentence in this article I disagree with – but I have failed
DaveN yes I previously held Shirley in high regard. This is just one of the many mysterys of the last five years. Why did Shirley change her mind? Why did many Lib Dems break the Pledge? I have no idea but perhaps all will be revealed in due course.
Yes, spot on, every word. No revisionism, no excuses, the leadership (and not just Clegg) completely miscalculated. We need to rediscover our soul as a party – what makes us unique – and “being in the centre” is not it, emphatically. What people want to know is what makes us distinct, different, and worthwhile. We need to “sell” liberalism again, and liberalism does NOT mean Tory-lite free market nonsense.
After the worst electoral defeat in living memory, we need to be sure why we exist. And where we’re going.
We are not pale imitations of this party or that. We are the guardians of British Liberalism, and we cannot – will not – let it wither and die.
So here’s a refined Liberal message, based on our shared Liberal Democrat history, that we can all, surely, unite around, rebuild our party around, and take to the people:
We exist to protect those without power.
We exist to give them a voice.
We exist to ensure that Government serves them, not the other way round.
We do not hunt for some mythical place called the centre ground, we search for a place where there is justice, and compassion, and where the great talents of the people are liberated for the greater good of the community.
We do not seek to rule our people, we seek to give them the tools, the knowledge and the support so that they may rule themselves.
If you agree with this very simple statement, please comment here and show your support – or raise any issues – please post it on your blog, on your Facebook page, tweet a link to this article, have it adopted by your local party, write to what’s left of the Parliamentary party to get them fired up and agreeing …
Remember: the future starts today. The future is what we make of it.
Be a planter of oak trees.
Well written, Stephen Yolland.
David-1 12th May ’15 – 4:54am
Well written, Stephen Yolland.
Yes, Mr Yolland has boiled it down into a few key sentences.
One of the best post-election articles so far, the opening paragraph is absolutely spot on.
There is one point I take issue with “We have to be totally clear that the Orange Book approach, as David Howarth and others predicted has no electoral appeal whatsoever. We have to rebut it, and rebuild our party on proper social liberal values and ideas.” I don’t think this is at all clear; the problem is that Orange Book ideas are incompatible with most of what the party presented itself as standing for. It is this disconnect that was the big problem for the Liberals in government, there was a long history of the Lib Dems being centre-left with a solid basis in Social Democratic thought yet in government they assisted and cheered the most hard right policy programme in post-war British history (although the next five years will doubtless be worse).
The Liberal Democrats need to decide what they stand for and communicate that to the public. That could be Orange Bookery or it could be something more like the SDP but it can’t be both.
Steveo
Economic inequality is largely due to inequality in education, skills and attitude. Compare the service skills of those working in many clothes shops in New York and the UK: far more Americans understand the skills for the service sector.A German car worker a few years ago could earn $41/hr because they were were producing a high quality product. In the UK, bricklayers can now earn £40k/yr.
A recent joke I heard was : what does one say to someone with an arts degree ” Big f Mac and Fries please “. Whereas , chemical engineering is the most sought after degree of all.
Both J Callaghan and John Major have publicly commented that the education and skills of many of those leaving our schools are inadequate : perhaps their common sense was because they did not go to university. People in the UK need to know whatever type of education and training they receive , it is the best in World and that means bench marking against the best public and grammar schools in the UK: the technical training in Germany and the maths and science in India and the Far East.
When it comes to making financial companies accountable ,a return to partnership would help. The Barings did not watch Leason and he bankrupted the company. In the 19C Rothschilds and JP Morgan were the most successful merchant bankers but they risked their own capital. In a PLC , employees do risk their capital but that of the shareholders . We need to make the top 3 levels of management responsible for all losses. I would argue that where risk is removed for failure and there is only reward ( this includes public services ) then mistakes are more likely to occur.
Jack: It is clear. According to the BES data, very few voters combine liberal cultural and social attitudes with free market economics: perhaps as few as 2% and no more than 5%. See my article in Liberator 368.
@ Stephen Yolland
Agree completely, and what is more it is completely in line with the preamble to the constitution which all members are supposed to agree with…
I think if we can take an inspirational message to the electors like that instead of defining ourselves as “less Tory than the Tories and less Labour than Labour” as we have done recently, we will soon start rising in the polls
Fantastic article. Spot on.
Rebuilding the public’s trust (hell, even the membership’s come to that) is going to be an epic task. We must never again get into the position where it’s possible or a small group to stage de facto coup. That means we must expect MPs, councillors and other opinion formers to be far more rambunctious and tough-minded. It means that the way the Party is run must be revisited with supporting constitutional changes. It means promoting a vigorous policy debate instead of closing it down.
I Agree with Mark !!
Absolutely spot on !!! The Liberal Democrat party totally betrayed the trust invested in it by all the wonderful people who voted for them in 2010, including many many young people (I wonder why that was) ??
It is frankly disgraceful to suggest in any patronising and condescending way that the electorate were somehow “at fault” in giving the party a damned good kicking !! Look for example at the Tory vote in Torbay – it hardly moved, but the Lib Dem vote despite having an Excellent MP in Adrian Saunders splintered to Labour, UKIP, and Green.
I am a legal aid criminal defence lawyer (NOT a “fat cat”), I would earn more as a teacher, get better holidays,and have a pension, and get sick pay !! My wife is an NHS Speech and Language Therapist. We went to Manchester University, and we are Proud to be “public servants”. The Liberal Democrats are the natural party of SO many people in this country. We DO however have an intelligent, articulate and very “switched on” population, and in particular with the young people – they are the Future of this party, and they won’t be “fobbed off” with platitudes or promises that don’t then materialise !! A really good look at the “demographics” of those who voted for the party in 2010, would not go amiss here. Two final points : 1. As we all know there is no such thing as a “Safe” Lib Dem seat, 2. Going back to the days of the SDP/Liberal Alliance etc – the received wisdom is that a party needs 20 or 25% of the national vote to stage a “break-through”, 8% or less gets no where near that !! Onwards and Upwards (It’s the only way to go now) !!!
Cllr Nick Cotter
I Agree with Mark !!
I don’t.
I have been one of Nick Clegg’s most persistent critics ever since he was put forward to us by the right-wing and elitist press as “obviously the next leader”, but I disagree with what is put here quite fundamentally.
To me, what came out of the Coalition was what one might expect from a government with that make up. I don’t want to join with those who jeered “nah nah nah nah nah” at us for having to accept what the distortional representation system we have gave us, and pretend that somehow 57 Liberal Democrat MPs could have persuaded 307 Conservative MPs to drop their deeply held principles, because I simply do not believe it as true.
We were damaged because the “nah nah nah nah nah”s turned their attack on us, made out we were all mad keen Cleggies, denied the very existence of our party’s left, and so let us take the brunt of the attacks that should have been made on the Tories, as if somehow all those policies of that 5/6 Tory government were ours rather than the Tories’. Well, the nah nah nah nah nah”s destroyed us, but because they did nothing actually to promote a positive alternative or even to talk about the realities of what it costs to have decent public services and the necessity to raise taxes to pay for them, the Tories got off lightly and the main thing that happened is that our vote in key seats went to turn poor Labour third places into poor Labour second places and so put the Tories back in.
If we now go along with the “nah nah nah nah nah” line that we really did trick the people and endorsed policies far more right-wing than what was in our manifesto because we liked them, but now we have changed a bit, how is that going to go down? Not very well, I think. I think rather we must make more clear that we made the sad mistake of trying to promote ourselves by exaggerating what was achievable in that situation and pretending we had done more than we actually were able to do, in the hope of looking good – but that gave the wrong impression.
Yes, we must certainly demonstrate that we are not right-winger like the Tories and the New Labour people now emerging, claiming that anyone who is rich is a “wealth creator” and that therefore the sort of taxes needed to provide good public services that inevitably must fall on those who have wealth are an attack on “aspiration”. That is absurd. This New Labour and Tory idea that someone with a good idea for a new service or product to provide sits back and thinks “Well, if I start a business to promote it and make lots of money form it and buy a great big house, I’ll have to pay a mansion tax on that house, so I won’t bother” is bonkers. Rather we need to the sort of stable society with good public services that is needed to that people can develop to their best and take risks and try out new ideas, everyone, not just those with ready access to big money from the start. If people have to pay huge amounts of money to get a roof over their heads, if they have to pay big taxes because shifting taxes to the idle rich is regarded as an attack on “aspiration”, well,THAT is what is really an attack on aspiration and life chances. Is it really so difficult to make that point that no politician now seems able to make it?
It is now Labour who are propping up the Tories. They wanted to destroy us to return to the two-party system in which they can languish in unchallenged opposition to predominantly Tory governments. Well, they think they are there – let’s show them they are not. They support the distortional representation system which gave the Tories so many more seats than their share of the vote and so gave them a majority in Parliament which we say with our support for electoral reform they should not have. To everyone who dislikes the Tory government – if you carry on voting Labour with its support for the electoral system which gave the Tories extra seats and so complete power with just 37% of the vote, YOU are the Tory proppers-up, and not even in the position we were in the coalition to modify it slightly.
The message we need to get across is not the “we are failures” one that we were wrong in the coalition, but that we did what we could, which really was just to swing things away from the hard right wing of the Tories when there was a fairly even balance in the Tory party itself. That message was not got across because Labour and the Tories conspired to make sure it was not got across in their usual Old Pals Act.
On the Tuition fees issue, sure it was horrible to have to turn away from our ideal. We need to carry on saying that what we wanted in the 2010 as our ideal is still our ideal and IS affordable so long as the people of this country are willing to pay the tax it needs. But there was just no way the Tories would have agreed to that tax in the coalition, so we had to look around for the best alternative that would still achieve what we wanted – full university funding, and no-one unable to take up a university place due to being unable to pay.
Me
That message was not got across because Labour and the Tories conspired to make sure it was not got across in their usual Old Pals Act.
Well, ok, also because of the utter failure of the Cleggies to use the sort of powerful lines we could have used. But let’s be conciliatory and not go out attacking them in public. Just sack them from positions of influence in our party …
Steve Yelland and Mark
Looks like liberal democracy is back in business couldn’t agree more with both the article and comments