I was a member of the Labour Party, but in the nineteen eighties joined the Social Democratic Party when it split away. In 1983 the Labour Party was committed to leaving the European Union. I saw the SDP as having the pro-European, internationalist outlook that the Labour Party had abandoned.
By 1997 I had arrived in the new Liberal Democrat Party after the SDP merged with the Liberals. The Conservative MP for the constituency I was then in, Carshalton and Wallington, produced an interesting leaflet arguing that the Lib Dems were well to the left of “new” Labour. He aimed to deter people from voting for such radicalism, but it strengthened my support for the Lib Dems. When we were the only party opposing the Iraq war, I felt the party was positioned in the right place on the political spectrum, a party espousing liberal, radical and reformist policies, concerned about the environment, the welfare state and the socially excluded, while opposed to militarism. I want us to get back there.
Since 2010 it has been events that have re-positioned the party rather than decisions to re-position ourselves. Given the election outcome in 2010 and the sense of national crisis – a hung Parliament, a failing economy – there was no responsible option but to enter coalition. Undoubtedly we did not say clearly enough that this was an alliance of people with quite different philosophies and outlooks, forged in the national interest, and that coalition means that some things not in your manifesto and not what you would have really wanted would be done.
We now have the opportunity to re-assert our liberal identity and values. We have confused people by being implicated in a Conservative-led Government that did many things hostile to our values, in particular the attack on welfare and public expenditure cuts that went beyond what was necessary. We must say clearly that – rather than this rhetoric about being a moderating force in the centre – we have defined, liberal and in some parts radical views about the type of society we want. We need to start anew with an assertion, not of detailed policies and definitions of where we are by reference to other parties, but of liberal and democratic philosophy.
Including:
* We are primarily liberals concerned about individual freedom, the rule of law and individual rights. We support international organisations concerned with human rights and oppose their erosion by the state
* We are internationalist in our outlook. We support the European Union and organisations concerned to promote benign international standards and behaviour
* We are strong supporters of the welfare state and concerned to assist the poorest in society. We believe in a cradle to grave national health service and public services, based on local decision, as a way of ensuring all people, regardless of income, have access to the basic services our town halls, schools and colleges provide
* We are opposed to militarism and foreign military adventures, such as the war in Iraq. We would prefer our national budget is spent on schools and hospitals rather than weapons of war, to the extent compatible with a basic standard of national defence
* We are concerned about global warming, to protect our environment and cherish our open spaces and countryside.
* Richard Clifton is the councillor for Sutton South
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104 Comments
There seems to be only one way for the Liberal Democrats to regain the faith lost via the coalition. It might seem unlikely, but I hope it occurs to party members to consider becoming ‘The liberal party’. This would allow a clean slate and furthermore would allow them to call on the Liberals fine history, and pick up where they left off under Lloyd George. Many people don’t like Labour because they are too left, and Tories because they are too right. Perhaps it’s time for a real party of the people, ambitiously targeting Labour and Tory voters. You can guarantee many people who voted them wouldn’t have been happy about it. Just an idea.
Good piece.
I think in the end the party is going to have to repudiate the coalition. It wanted to do what was right for the country, but it made a mistake joining with the Tories, and it regrets it. Do that – move on. Or stay arguing 2010-2015,
Many of the comments today express outrage that these nasty Tories will now continue with cutting back welfare, undermining our place in the EU, etc. There is almost unanimous feeling that the Lib Dems stand for the opposite of almost every Tory policy and the party must now re-assert this position with its counter policies.
May I point out that the public have just voted for the hated Tories, giving them a moderate majority while almost wiping out the Lib Dems.
At the European election, the hated UKIP performed the same trick with great losses suffered by the Lib Dems.
It is admirable that the party should work ever harder to reinforce its convictions and ideologies. Good luck with that.
I think listening to who is voting Lib Dem, avoid playing to the critics instead of the audience(avoid The Bubble and having your head turned by some flattering press) and think. One of the big problems was that there was a tendency to adopt the New Labour idea that if the message was unpopular the problem was communication or the ability of the electorate to grasp what was being said rather than the message. And remember that you are servants not masters. The electorate is your boss and if they vote for you then your biggest priority is to fight their corner.
@Bolano
“It wanted to do what was right for the country, but it made a mistake joining with the Tories, and it regrets it.”
I am totally opposed to this viewpoint and reject it categorically.
We made the right move for the country, because we ensured stable government for five years while we brought our economy and public finances back from the brink while bringing in major measures like the £10,000 personal allowance and Pupil Premium.
We made some big mistakes, as do all parties. But the bigger mistake would have been to have allowed the Tories to slash and burn the welfare state and public services entirely as they are almost certainly about to do now.
To repudiate the coalition would be to repudiate all the work of ministers like Vince Cable, Lynne Featherstone, Ed Davey etc. NO.NO. NO.
@ Peter
“May I point out that the public have just voted for the hated Tories, giving them a moderate majority while almost wiping out the Lib Dems.”
Based on a wave of Scotophobia stirred up by the Conservatives.
We’ll have to wait and see where values like that take this country, won’t we?
And by “the public” we mean “37 percent of those who voted.” What of the other 63 percent?
Also, and I hate to bring up history again, but I don’t believe the coalition was a mistake. Ramsey Mcdonald also chose country over party back in 1929 and I respect the Liberals for putting their neck on the line again.
“May I point out that the public have just voted for the hated Tories, giving them a moderate majority while almost wiping out the Lib Dems.”
One of the first things I drill into A-level history students is that when writing essays, never refer to “the public”, because they don’t exist. Statements like this sound fine, but they’re incredibly misleading.
For example, the parties hostile to the Tories (Lab, SNP, PC, Green) increased their vote share significantly more than the Tories did. The Tory vote rose by about 600,000 – certainly an achievement after the recession their austerity caused. Labour alone increased their vote by more than that, despite their disaster in Scotland. Throw in the SNP, PC and the Greens’ significant increases and what you have is a situation in which the Tory vote remained strong, the explicitly anti-Tory parties attracted significantly more additional votes, and the party perceived as friendly to the Tories – the LibDems – was destroyed.
There’s some interesting analysis to be done on who the UKIP voters were and whether they are Extreme Tories or hostile to Tories – I suspect, given the piling up of UKIP votes in white working class constituencies, that we’re going to find these include a lot of disenfranchised ex-Labour voters.
So basically, the same old story : the Tories benefit enormously from having well-concentrated votes as the broad-church party occupying nearly all the right of the political spectrum. The SNP benefits hugely from the geographical concentration of its support, and the centre-left suffers, as it has since the 1970s, by having its vote split between several different groupings.
Political commentators (and Tories) love to talk of “the public’s decision” and “what the public have said”. But it’s guff, really. The Tory vote held up very well, the supportive-Tory party was annihilated, and the non-Tory vote was fragmented. Our increasingly bizarre electoral system did the rest.
So to argue that somehow this election was a massive vote of confidence in the Tory Party is hugely misplaced in my view.
@RC 8th May ’15 – 6:12pm
“I am totally opposed to this viewpoint and reject it categorically… NO.NO. NO.”
Even if – let’s just speculate – even if it dramatically helped the recovery of the party?
It is interesting that Cameron’s first reaction to winning is to try to buy-off the SNP. Without the steadying hand of the Lib Dems I think we will see a Britain (I mean England) (I mean London), where wealth rules everything and the gap between rich and por will get bigger and bigger.
@ Bolano
a) It would be morally wrong;
b) Wouldn’t help the party in the slightest.
This is a helpful piece, and I agree with it completely. I am not sure what Peter means by his comment, though. Is he really suggesting that political parties should have no guiding principles at all? Do we just exist to get elected, by nothing distinctive to offer? Liberalism is a political creed and it has substance, which means that not everyone is going to agree with it. I do not have a problem with that. I do not believe that, in the five years between the 2010 and the 2015 general elections, 15% of the electorate were converted away from our core values to those of the Tories. Therefore, what we need to do is make our values distinctive, and our actions consistent with those values. Of course, red-blooded socialists and cold-hearted neocons will not agree with us; neither will the Daily Mail. So we will never attract every voter in the land, nor should we expect to. But, by being consistent and clear about what we stand for, and putting the toxic legacy of the Coalition behind us, there is a chance (no more than that, I admit) that we can draw previous voters back to us, and win seats again. What is the alternative, Peter? All go off and join the Conservatives, just because they won this time?
@ Julian Critchley
I do not disagree, but it is not as simple as that. Many people (aka the public) are very concerned about uncontrolled , soaring immigration that drives up our population. They would like to see state spending reduced. They would like to see powers returned from the EU. Even Europhiles want a referendum to give EU involvement some democratic legitimacy.
They have had months of Nick Clegg opposing all of these concerns and saying he would block any attempts to address them. The Lib Dems have policies that are not popular with the electorate, public, or whatever you would like to call them. That has been a factor in this election.
@John Nicholson
I’m trying to say that many LD policies are out of phase with public concerns at the moment. This is fine, provided the party is fully aware of this when they review and develop their strategic priorities for recovery.
I don’t have a problem with ideology being a known vote loser. I’m just trying to heighten the awareness to prevent “blind Lemming” syndrome.
Julian Critchley
I think the factors which influence peoples incomes and quality of life are being ignored. Rather than expressing lofty sentiments people need to ask how any policy will impact on those on average and below average incomes in the private and public sectors living within inner city, suburban and rural areas while technology advances rapidly and trade becomes increasingly competitive .
Kieth,
I think your off point, my guess is Cameron will offer fiscal autonomy without the power to raise tax. At which point the SNP will say no, we want the oil and we want tax . The SNP basically see Westminster as a foreign power and Cameron pretty much played the anti-Scots card all through the election. So they will both will dig in. Cameron will come up against a similar problem over the EU. Germany and France might offer a portion of the rebate back , but they are not going to renegotiate anything major. There are serious fault lines in the Cameron narrative. The English press and TV pundits hold no real sway in Scotland or anywhere else. The people who voted SNP take no notice and ditto for the rest of Europe.
I agree with your five points. I also think we will need some sort of strategy from here, beyond simply spelling out our policy positions.
We have just been horribly burnt by getting too close to the Tories. Whereas during the nineties and noughties, the tacit cooperation with Labour via tactical voting contributed greatly to our growth in MPs. We need to consider rebuilding bridges with Labour – and other progressive parties – and trying to get back to that understanding. There will never be electoral reform through the Tories. There might be through Labour, particularly given the Scottish situation.
So we need a strategy that includes tacit cooperation with other progressive parties – while maintaining our differentiators, e.g. civil liberties – that could create a majority anti-Tory bloc in 2020.
Tell me Peter, are you a supporter of the Trans Atlantic trade treaty? If you are I find your points on national sovereignty rather hypercritical. We are about to witness a very bizarre period of British histrory. The Tory govt is going to hold a referendum on Europe on the premise that it wants to repatriate powers to Westminister. No doub all the right wing press will fill their pages with union jacks and talk about the sovereignty of the British people. However at the same time the same govt and their corporate media backers will be itching to sign the TA treaty.
This Treaty will destroy the British people’s right to pass any law that is not wanted by international capital. Technically it give no powers to capital to stop or veto any law. However it gives them the right to vast compensation for any cost. This means that any attempt to improve the health of people by banning say smoking or encouraging healthy diets will be sued by the corporate Giants for compensation. Cigarette companies, food companies can all threaten to sue for huge amounts of money. The power this gives over the people of this country will be terryifiying. Almost all aspects of public life will have to be privatised otherwise a corporation can claim loss of profits. This will see off all public hospitals, or public transport. There are almost no limits to its scope. An attempt to ban harmful chemicals will be stopped. Publishers could argue that library’s be closed down because they could sell the books to the library users. Any future govt will be locked into this corporate take over. Some people on the right in the US are waking up to what this would mean for American people rights ,and it is not guaranteed to pass congress. Pity the Right in this country song actualy practice what they preached on their rhetoric on national sovereignty.
But the right hates progressive policy more than it loves national sovereignty. This bill will give the right and their private capital masters the power at a stroke of a pen to kill off democracy in this country for ever.
Some thoughts on the numbers. The UK turned right last night not left when you add Tory and UKIP votes together. Labour’s leftward lurch didn’t exactly help them. So you cannot blame our predicament on being seen as too soft Tory. It should have helped. Neither will it help for us to now do a leftward lurch in response. Clegg survived because his local Tories didn’t attack.
Our 7.9% would have earned us 51 seats in a fair voting system. UKIP, bless them, polled 3.8 million votes for 1 seat. The Greens over a million for their 1 seat. The SNP had 1 million fewer votes than us but now have 54 seats. Cameron gets a majority with barely more than a third if the votes. This election more than most demonstrates how FPTP cheats the electorate. If we get an English Parliament now it must be on the same voting basis as the other national assemblies. We will get an EU vote now; let’s win it and rebuild our credibility that way. UKIP are spent once the referendum happens whatever the result.
I don’t think anyone really knows how last night happened, and they won’t do for a while if ever. But an observation from a seat that lost 80% of its LD vote is that the party focus moved from being local champions to being concerned with national issues and running central government. It is inevitable that if you have to spend most of your time being Sec of State for Business you will have correspondingly less time to be Twickenham People’s Champion. Labour and Tory local parties with their greater resources can perhaps compensate but we couldn’t.
In my view we must return to being local champions not national sacrificial lambs. 8 seats is a terrible return but let’s remember that it should be 51 by rights. The SNP went from 6 to 54 this time, with fewer votes, so great leaps are do-able. The great EU referendum that has hung over the country for 20 years will soon be done and won with UKIP put to bed. This will be a very interesting parliament with lots of positive opportunities. If the lessons are learned and this party returns to what it does best – focus on building formidable local fortresses.
@ Steven Rose – “We will get an EU vote now; let’s win it and rebuild our credibility that way. UKIP are spent once the referendum happens whatever the result.”
I agree with much of what you say but i have to question that. Does the scottish situation not call you question the assumption above?
Steven Ross.
Weren’t the SNP meant to be a spent force after the Scottish referendum! Obviously, if there was a vote to leave UKIP would be spent, but a stay in vote would probably harden their support. These issues don’t just go away that easily because they have deep roots, People who have strong feelings about nation, sovereignty and immigration don’t stop having them simply because a vote didn’t go their way.
“So you cannot blame our predicament on being seen as too soft Tory. It should have helped. ”
That really makes no sense. Because a right-wing party won votes, it does not follow that losing votes was due to being seen as insufficiently right. Labour won a lot more votes than the Lib Dems too.
The fact is that most of the votes to be had are on the moderate left and moderate right. Successful parties start from one of those positions and then try to hoover up adjacent votes (somewhat more centrist, somewhat more extreme) by suggesting that they are the best of available options.
The Lib Dems were stuck with the ground between those two poles where there are fewer votes. Nobody expects the Lib Dems to pick up a majority! But the Party has been ploughing that furrow for quite a while now with some success. What happened here was that Clegg & Co. attempted to relocate the Party out of its traditional furrow into what they hoped, or wanted to believe, would be fertile territory.
Instead they ended up on what may be one of the most barren patches in British politics — the centre-right — and furthermore on ground which the Tories had already ploughed. In direct competition with the Conservatives, voters comfortable with the positions the Lib Dems had staked out were still more likely to vote Tory, because the differences were small, the Tories are the more powerful party, and from an early date the Lib Dems looked like they couldn’t hold it together. Probably the only candidate to successfully till that ground was Nick Clegg himself — and he faced a much closer election than he anticipated.
Meanwhile the voters who had voted Lib Dem but who were not comfortable with the new positions simply melted away: in Scotland to the SNP, in England and Wales to the Greens, to Labour, or, most likely, to no one at all.
Moving to the right would only have made sense if the ground there were not already occupied (e.g., if it had been abandoned by the Tories for more right-wing positions) or if the Lib Dems could have mounted a credible challenge, portraying themselves as better centre-right candidates than their Tory counterparts. But they could do neither.
Leaving the ideological rights and wrongs aside, from a political point of view the experiment was defensible as an experiment: for the sake of expediency, not out of a conviction that the centre-right was the correct ideological place for the party. But two years in it was already clear that the experiment had failed. It was then time to reverse course and try something different. That was Clegg’s leadership test: to discern that he had gone wrong and to take a different tack. Instead he kept on doing the same thing, either because he couldn’t see (or couldn’t believe) the warning signs, or because he lacked the imagination to come up with a new plan. That was his failure.
Here are some issues where I think Lib Dems can still make a difference:
1) Opposing Theresa May’s relentless zest for an improved police state
2) Making sure that the UK stays in the EU
3) Avoiding any cludged-together partisan compromise like EVFEL and working for a truly federal UK
Others will no doubt present themselves over time.
@David-1
That’s an excellent post.
@Stevan
“The UK turned right last night not left when you add Tory and UKIP votes together. Labour’s leftward lurch didn’t exactly help them. So you cannot blame our predicament on being seen as too soft Tory. It should have helped. Neither will it help for us to now do a leftward lurch in response. Clegg survived because his local Tories didn’t attack.”
Well avowedly left-wing parties certainly gained more votes in total than the Tories, and they also added more votes and more vote share than the Tories did. Which rather undermines the idea that – in anything other than disproportional seats in the HofC – “the country turned right”.
I think your view depends on classing UKIP as a right-wing party. You and I may well know that it’s leadership is, and that its policies are what many Tories would like to do. However, do the people who voted for it know that ? If you look at where the UKIP votes stacked up, they were in white working class areas suffering economic hardship. Those are what used to be traditional Labour voters. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if a majority of them simply didn’t think in terms of right or left, or even knew what UKIP’s policies actually are. They just had a party saying “You’ve had a rough deal, it’s not your fault, we hear your anger”. UKIP are a party of the disaffected, more than the right, channelling that anger through crude nationalism. They’re a contrick, rather than a conservative party.
@David-1. Someone will have done the maths but it appears that overall our 2010 vote has moved as much, if not more, to the right and the Tories as it has to be the left. You will not recover those votes by shifting out of the middle ground towards the left. Or come to that by moving to the right. We need to expand the middle both ways to recover our position.
I agree totally with your 3 issues.
@Julian. Yes I do view UKIP as right wing as that’s where their activists and policies firmly sit. And their voters are under no illusions about that wherever they came from electorally. The far right have always drawn their support from the most impoverished sections of society; those that might traditionally be Labour areas. Con-UKIP-BNP in 2010 won 41%. Con-UKIP in 2015 won 49%. Lab-Nats-Green in 2010 were on 32%. And now around 39%. The middle has been squeezed as we well know but I would still argue that since there are more votes to the right than the left moving left will not help. Moving right is unthinkable so we cannot change our fortunes by changing the ground on which we stand.
Where do you go from here? I said this on another post, but it’s just as apt here. You could start by making apologies to/for:
All those hit by the Bedroom Tax who were willing to move but had nowhere else to go and the disabled people made even poorer because of it.
The NHS reforms which the public were strongly against and which are now having horrible consequences.
To everyone forced to rely on food banks due to sanctions.
To the disabled and mentally ill for what the DWP has done to them.
To students not for making the pledge in the first place, as you have done, but for breaking the actual pledge itself.
To everyone who truly believed in Clegg’s promised “New Politics” and an “end to broken promises”.
To all the people who voted LibDem in 2010 believing you to be a centre-left party (as your 2010 manifesto largely was) who had no idea you would not fight your corner against the Tories and make clear coalition was only to provide a stable government, not a meeting of minds.
Next? Position yourself once again as a non-authoritarian centre-left/social democratic party. Make the party even more democratic and open, so that you’ll have that over Labour. Stop being overly hostile to the Unions. Same with the SNP. Admit the truth: the Tories used you and treated you like an abusive partner. They are not your/our friends.
But most of all: rediscover and fight for the ideals set forth in the Preamble to your party’s Constitution.
If you stop doing the wrong things and start doing the right things then the situation changes remarkably quickly.
I have personal experience of this in a large company I once worked for. The accounts were a sea of red ink and everyone was in despair. But a new chief executive came in, a lot of dead wood left and suddenly we were moving forwards albeit slowly. Over the next year or so the speed gradually picked up and three years later we were making quite astonishing amounts of money.
That can happen in politics too. Alberta, usually considered Canada’ most right-wing province has just elected the nation’s most left-wing party by a landslide.
http://www.ianwelsh.net/alberta-elects-the-new-democratic-party-ndp/
That can happen for the Lib Dems. There are lots of great people, just appalling leadership. I don’t just mean Clegg – it’s a problem in depth; Bill le Breton’s recent comments point to the astonishing level of self-deception in the upper echelons of the Party.
I would add that all the discussion of which part of the political spectrum – centre-left, centre-right or whatever – the Lib Dems should position themselves in misses the point because it meekly accepts the political landscape as it is, not as it could and should be. Since Thatcher all main parties have lined up to colonise their own corner of the new political continent she found, the land of neo-liberalism. Voters have punished those who betrayed their hope for an alternative and limply signed up for the neo-liberal project. The party that succeeds will be one that finds and articulates an alternative to neo-liberalism.
@Steven Rose
“Labour’s leftward lurch didn’t exactly help them”
On what planet did Labour lurch to the left?
Sure they promised to repeal the health and social care act and the bedroom tax, but I would not describe that as lurching to the left.
Labour were still talking pretty tough on welfare & Immigration and other things.
Labour failed miserably because they failed to counteract the Tory Scare tactics over the SNP.
David Cameron provided the fuel and Nick Clegg provided the Kindling and that turned out to be disastrous for Labour and for Liberal Democrats.
I do not believe the country turned rightwards at all.
It was Labour & Liberal Democrats failed to react effectively and responsibly.
The response from Milliband and Clegg to Camerons and the Tories scare tactics over the SNP should have been simple. The SNP will not be able to hold the UK to ransom and another referendum, because the 3 main parties in Westminster do not support Scottish Independence. A simple sentence that would have killed the Tory line of attacks stone cold. But for whatever ridiculous reason, Clegg supported the Tory Line and Milliband refused to acknowledge that Labour would require to work with other parties. It was that Mayhem which threw the election away to the Tories. It wasn’t any rightward shift.
Labour was promising electoral reform. Liberal Democrats have always been the champion of PR. It was ludicrous of both parties to rule out coalitions with one another when PR would deliver more coalition governments.
Labour and Liberal Democrats missed a perfect opportunity to deliver a more democratic society and I will be angry with both of them for some time to come.
I’m blown away by David-1’s analysis. It’s excellent.
Moving forward and only half-joking, what do you think of drafting Paddy to serve as leader for the next 2-3 years until we start the recovery? If our former MPs don’t want to continue as active, central Party figures for the next few years then we have a potentially terminal leadership crisis on our hands. I’d rather have a big-hitter as leader who isn’t an MP than risk a relatively inexperienced MP in charge of stabilising everything. Putting pressure on our remaining MPs to stand when they don’t want to might not be a good idea.
I want to point out one more thing that I hope the editors will pick up on and highlight.
Congratulations to Mary D’Albert in the Holyrood ward on Bury Council, who gained her seat from Labour in what looks like it was a very close race.
Mary’s local vote of 2,112 is significantly more than the 1,690 polled by the parliamentary candidate covering the ward and not far off the 2,622 polled by both Bury North and South candidates. Which intrigued me enough to add up all the local election votes. They came to around 6,500 bearing in mind several wards had no Lib Dem candidate. I wonder if that same pattern shows up elsewhere – an extreme differential between council and parliamentary votes. Which is still there if you entirely discount the new Cllr D’Albert.
And if so what does it mean? Could it explain the discrepancy between opinion and exit polls. Why would 60% of our local voters switch whilst actually voting. Is it normal?
©David -1
To have an improved Police State you have to have police. They have been decimated, there are already a scarce number of officers on shift and the danger level will be reached with more cuts. However I do believe that the goal is a private police force which will be unaccountable. The constant attacks on the police are having the same affect as the scrounger rhetoric. When you can be arrested, tried, imprisoned and rehabilitated by the same company for profit it will be in that company’s interest to arrest on a whim. No doubt as in America a certain number of priso
ners will be guaranteed. Got to pay the shareholders don’t you know! Then we will have the police state. Will we even have another election? Expect the same for the armed forces.
The local elections, for obvious reasons, have not been mentioned much today. I recall that because of the 4 year electoral cycle this was supposed to be where the party recovered from its losses in 2011 (https://www.libdemvoice.org/ouch-lib-dems-suffer-first-antigovernment-backlash-in-80-years-24049.html https://www.libdemvoice.org/nick-cleggs-email-on-the-election-results-24055.html).
But the figures seem to show that Lib Dems have lost even more councillors this week (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2015/results/councils).
Hopefully today is finally the low-water mark.
From a relatively hostile, but not entirely unsympathetic observer.
I think you need to consider just how much Cameron is going to consolidate his power. Very quickly, without legislation, he will introduce EVEL. This gives him a majority of 50+ for most bills (assuming it really means EW&NIVEL).
He then gets another 20+ seats in the boundary review (which he intends to nod through).
Finally he will add up to 5 million English ex pats (all Tories) onto the voting lists.
He owns the press and the BBC. Don’t believe the latter – Nick Robinson (young conservative chairman) Dimbleby (ex Bullingdon chap), Lansdale (ex Eton chum). Most of the rest are Tories. The reason the SNP scare worked is that press and media combined to report it 24×7, regardless of what policies were being presented by Labour.
It is going to take something special to beat that.
So, given the Lib Dems are in parliamentary terms no longer competition to Labour ( by which I mean Labour have won the LD marginals, and they have no winnable presence in the Lib Dem heartlands of the South West and rural North); perhaps a re-alignment and alliance would work. It would be worth talking at least. I would suggest it might be possible to provide a single slate (in marginals) to combine the left of centre and centre vote, with a shared commitment to PR as part of the deal.
Of course the problem with PR is this time you get a ToryKip government (but them’s the breaks).
@TechnicalEphemera
I don’t necessarily agree with some of your more conspiracy-minded stuff, but I actually do agree that a pre-election Lib-Lab pact might well be a possible move (depending on the state of play in three years or so). Especially if we were lead by Tim Farron and Labour by Andy Burnham – two people who seem to have a good rapport . It would be difficult for us to abandon the possibility of winning back seats like Cambridge, though (perhaps the pact could allow for Libs and Lab to compete in places where the Tories have no chance).
—“I am totally opposed to this viewpoint and reject it categorically… NO.NO. NO.”
Even if – let’s just speculate – even if it dramatically helped the recovery of the party?
Before starting the discussion, you need to work out why you personally think it would be a good thing for the party to recover at all, rather than to shut up shop and for the members and sympathisers to enter other parties.
Exchanges like the above, which assume that *what you actually think* is just one of many options of what to present to the electorate, show why the vehicle of the Lib Dems does not currently contribute to furthering the beliefs of it’s core supporters and potential voters.
The same applies to policy discussion too:
If you want to rebuild the party then build on the policies you believe in yourselves, not what you think voter X Y or Z will like. Otherwise you are just rebuilding something fake and people who want that are well served by the other parties already..
Countries outside of the EU are rapidly industrialising and training hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers . The consequence is that the EU share of World Trade is declining. The top 20% of the UK have the educations and skills to compete in World Trade but the bottom 50% increasingly do not. The reality is that many of the Mediterranean and East European countries in the EU are going to fall behind many countries in the G20 . The UK needs to bench mark our craft training with Germany and schools maths and science education with the best in India and Far East Asia.
The Liberal Party was the party of the Industrial Revolution. Murdo MacDonald was the Liberal MP for Inverness . He was a civil engineer who built railways in Scotland , worked on the Aswan Dam and irrigation schemes along the Indus .
Macdonald became a Colonel in the RE in WW1 and served in Egypt and founded M Macdonald and Partners which became one of the World’s leading consulting engineers in water and sewage design. Why are we unable to attract people of such ability to the party nowadays?
Britain still produces large numbers of the World’s top engineers and scientists and many innovative people but too much of the talent is in S E England. It is wonderful that the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and London produce so much World Class talent but it needs to be replicated in other parts of the UK. 24% of R and D is spent around London. I suggest the following
1. We need to aim that everyone is trained to at least NVQ 3.
2. The Civil Service needs to change: recruitment it is still based upon the 1857 reforms when an arts degree from Oxbridge was adequate. What we need is to recruit chartered engineers to run civil service departments such as energy, transport, business, MoD: their pay to be equal to that of medical consultants.
3. Return to evening and weekend trained at universities in science, engineering and vocational subjects so that people can obtain degrees and enter the professional classes while still working . Mitchell -Spitfire, Chadwick – Lancaster and B Wallis- geodesic airframe, Wellington, bouncing Bombs, Tall boy and swept wing technology; all obtained professional qualifications through evening study.
The aim is to produce a nation with the highest per capita income; the most skilled and sought after people in the World, whether it be actors or vets ; so that the UK becomes the innovative hub of the World . We would expand our Armed Forces to the size we had in 1997; would be recognised as the best in the World and provide the most sought after training. I would argue that if many of the problems caused by armed forces in many parts of the World had a fraction of the integrity and skills of the British , there would be far less problems.
We have a population of about 60M and if we pursue quality of training we can become a major influence in the advanced manufacturing/knowledge /service sector economy. Whether someone on £1m a year is taxed at 40, 45 or 50% has little influence on someone earning less than £26K a year and especially less than 60% of average wage . What does: is raising the tax threshold to £12k and increasing someones education, technical skills and confidence so that they can enter skilled employment and earn above the national average wage.
We need thousands of those members who left the party in dismay and disgust at Nick’s behaviour as leader to return and reclaim the Lib Dems and its values. Last year I tried to raise funds to take out a full page advert in a National daily to urge people to do it before it was too late, but I ran out of people to ask at about £5k (about £10k short). Going into an election having got rid of Nick as leader and having said sorry for the worst excesses of the Coalition (be it Tuition fees, bedroom tax, secret courts or whatever) would have been much less of a risk than staying with him, but so many people ultimately chose not to chip in. We are now in a position where we are in a much worse starting point and so it will be much more difficult, but it will be a journey we have to make. The first MP to say this nationally (in a manner people can believe) will trigger a great wave of new support and is the one who will get my vote as leader.
Stevan Rose
Some thoughts on the numbers. The UK turned right last night not left when you add Tory and UKIP votes together. Labour’s leftward lurch didn’t exactly help them. So you cannot blame our predicament on being seen as too soft Tory. It should have helped. Neither will it help for us to now do a leftward lurch in response.
Well, the right-wing press and the Tories, and the Cleggies painted the Labour Party as having made a “leftward lurch”. But that was obviously nonsense. I don’t see anything in the Labour Party that is particularly left-wing. It is a timid centrist party, quite a long way to the right of where we were in the 1980s. It is ridiculous to paint it as it is now as some sort of extreme left party.
I find that most ordinary people just don’t think in terms of left and right. A lot of people I have spoken to and overheard didn’t like Miliband because they felt he was some sort of out-of-touch intellectual elite type. They didn’t see him as leftist at all in the sense of someone wanting to make society more equal. In fact in that sense they saw him as part of the right. Quite a few people saw UKIP as “left” in the sense they thought of it as a party which wasn’t elitist and was composed of people like the rather than strange alien elite types.
What one so often finds is people coming out with a whole load of things that might suggest they are very leftist politically – about how unfair society is, about how they hate the way the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer, about how everything us run in favour of big business – and then saying they’re not sure how they’re going to vote. Of course, the political right exploits this, by trying to make out that they are somehow the champions of ordinary people against the elitist left establishment. It’s nonsense, but they have the money and influence to be able to do that.
What I noticed today was the gloominess of most people. People are just not happy with the government they’ve elected. Many of them did it because they felt there was little to choose from between the parties, so might as well go for the one that’s already there. But there’s no great enthusiastic call for more right-wing economic politics.
@RC
You’ve just offered the same self-serving argument that if the Lib Dem hadn’t gone into coalition the Tories would have “slashed the welfare state”.
How exactly would they have done that? A minority government cannot do any such thing without another party, like the Lib Dems, voting for said slashing.
Frankly, Lib Dems clearly still don’t get it, and it looks like you will need to be slashed further at the next election.
After the election I had hoped to be commenting with a happy “told you so” rant from a previous lib dem voter disgusted by Clegg support for DC over the last five years, but then I expected to be doing it with Labour government installed at No.10. It gives me no pleasure at all,in the event, yo say “told you so” in our present position of a Tory majority government. For the first time in my 40 plus years I am actually fearful about the future. Untethered the tories could make this country unrecognisable in 5 years. I fear for the nation, for Europe and for the life chances of my children (housing and uni fees). I fear for human rights…oh God, when I think of what the Tory right will now want to do and have the power to do…..
There can be no hope of change until the lib dems utterly break ftom the narrative they have peddled over the past five years. Say you got it wrong and start again, but stick to your principles because they ARE more important than power. If you had done that before we could have been seeing the formation of a cabinet that believed in social justice this weekend.
@Matthew Huntbach
Miliband’s Labour is positioned to the left of New Labour. That it is to the right of the historical average shows that the entire spectrum is shifting right. The most extreme right you can get is of course national socialism which is rarely elitist.
I don’t see any gloom, only indifference. If Cameron can control his party and retain a Lib Dem flavour even without Lib Dems he’ll be relatively effective. If he is unable to control his backbenchers we’re all in deep do-do. Too early to tell. I have no intention of spending the next 5 years looking for the negative downside to everything. I sincerely hope we don’t turn into the Liberal Whiney Party.
Hi Friends! Well it is not as if you weren’t warned! Long since I wrote that there was nothing new or ‘responsible’ about the Coalition – just a tired old re-run of the LibCon 1930’s one, with the predicatble outcome of the smashing of the Liberal party. We had the same regression to the disastrous Gladstonian laissez-faire ‘free market’ policies now as then, the rejectoin of a Keynesian active social and fiscal policy, a rejection that prolonged the Depression and expanded the growth of the huge wealth-differential now as then, the same truckling to anti-Keynhesian ‘monetary policy’ a la Monague Norman now as then …
One good outcome is that the Cleggites who strappped themselves to the front of the Tory finacial killing machine have been eliminated swiftly (along with fellow-travellers like Ed Balls) instead of lingering on in a “National Liberal” group before openly becoming Tories. Now as then we are left with a Liberal (Dem) party that I long ago joined and than can share a taxi on their way to the Commons, like the Clement Davies Six.
Unfortunatrely this time we will probably experience little more than attempts to ‘reposition’ (or rather continue) the LibDems as a pro-Finance Lobby pussycat forthe centre-right. There is little chance of recognition that here, unlike Scotland, there was no outright anti-austerity party that could command victorious support, no chance to take up our cudgels of active fiscalo and executive policy: now on, few will continue to waste votes on the LibDem Tory-Lite. Better the real thing stripped of its mask (as Camerons nasty side gets more clearly revealed) so that new attack forces can be constructed; without, I hope, yet more endelss futile debate on alternative voting systems etc. as a way of still dodging that need for a direct challenge. – though I wouldn’t bet my lunch on it!
@ MH – “People are just not happy with the government they’ve elected. Many of them did it because they felt there was little to choose from between the parties, so might as well go for the one that’s already there. But there’s no great enthusiastic call for more right-wing economic politics.”
Of course, the political left exploits this, by demonising even the very notions that a smaller less interventionist state can lead to a happy society. It’s nonsense, but they have the cultural influence to be able to do that. It was easy to see the silence on facebook from people who simply didn’t want to start a storm of vitriol ‘publicly’ among their friends. I had quite some fun running rings around a recent political enthusiast who simply didn’t have the intellectual foundation to understand why his ranting was just ranting, despite being a extremely capable and intelligent chap whose spent 15 years leading design teams on multi-year projects. I confess I’ve never been that fussed about being liked so I got politely stuck in, i may not be on the party list after this however.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/im-a-proud-tory-but-with-the-left-this-belligerent-and-selfrighteous-is-it-any-wonder-that-so-many-of-us-are-shy-10236544.html
The party jumped in front of a bus when Richard Reeves was given the sack.
We might all disagree about the positioning of the Lib-Dem’s as a soft-right party (I have always been clear I thought the opportunity for the party was on the soft-left), however, at least it was a distinct brand.
What happened in the summer of 2012 was a catastrophic loss of nerve, choosing bland centrism with a collection of niche positions designed to chase the ~15% of natural liberals.
Britain is an adversarial political society, and fptp discourages fracturing of political ideologies into niche sectional interests by requiring conglomeration within a broad church in order to succeed. We don’t need artificial barriers like 5% thresholds, the system itself penalises minority interests.
This in turn means that winning requires winning-big, across the geographic and ideological divide. so parties need to appeal to the common ground with broad brush policy making. If a party isn’t interested in winning power then the system crushes them.
Being utterly crushed is the natural consequence of precisely those niche positions that appeal only to the ~15%, the party actively rejected the rest of the electorate and were punished.
I am sad for the party as i rather hoped 2020 would be the time the lib-dem’s would dethrone Labour, but I demand that parties succeed within the system and that means playing the common ground (not the centre!!!) game.
Can I ask us to spare a thought for the Steve Radford-led Liberal Party. They put up four parliamentary candidates at the election, and they respectively polled 1.24% (Chelmsford), 4.99 % (Liverpool-West Derby), 1.36% (Peterborough), and 2.15% (Thirsk and Malton). Whatever way one looks at these results, this is not a rational basis for carrying on as an independent national political force. Although it is over twenty-five years since the paths of our two parties diverged, many of the small band of those who currently support the Radford-led Liberal Party started out their political lives in by the same Liberal Party as we did, and now that we are going to be back in opposition and able to assert our principles untrammelled by the compromises forced on us in 2010-5, why should they not rejoin us ?
@ Michael Parsons – Well said. Thank you.
Hi Richard,
I’m afraid I cannot agree that there was no responsible alternative to a formal coalition. Whats more, i suggest to you that when liberals say this to the general public, they can expect derision in response. So better if liberals stop trying to use this as justification for what has happened, it is part of the problem not part of the solution. There were alternatives, and with benefit of hindsight I believe they would have led to better outcomes both nationally and specifically for the liberal party.
Liberals made the wrong compromises and greatly undervalued their contribution to the coalition. At minimum they should have insisted on being regarded as equal partners. Fundamentally all the liberals did was defer events for 5 years – to the situation we have now- by inserting 5 years of conservative controlled government which carried out a conservative policy. Incidentally fundamentally destroying the personal trust between liberal MPs and their voters, which was all that had kept many of them in place for so long. Nothing was achieved. No, worse than that: conservatives carried out their intended policies and managed to transfer much of the blame onto liberals. The coalition helped Cameron carry out conservative policies, contrary to liberal ones, which he could not have done unaided by liberals. Thats just insane.
Bolano, I agree. It is necessary to repudiate the coalition. I guess Clegg was staking all on an attempt to get PR, which would have allowed liberals to benefit from the vote share they got even now in this election. He failed. He might have done rather better with a minority conservative administration. Under our voting system it is fatal for a third party to closely associate itself with one of the big parties. He was outmanoeuvred by the conservatives. I dont believe there was anything particularly wrong with the aims and objectives of the liberals at this election. It was simply they had no credibility whatsoever. Who in their right mind would vote for a bunch of oathbreakers?
Peter, I dont believe the public just voted FOR the tories. they more voted AGAINST liberals as a waste of time, for SNP as the best party to fight for the needs of scotland, for UKIP to keep out foreigners, against labour for giving in to the SNP (even though this was simply conservative propaganda). The only party with real popular support was the SNP. If we did have PR, i might even have voted for them myself here in sothern England. They actually seem to understand how to run a parliament made up of small partie, in a way Clegg did not.
RC, I’m sorry, but I do not see what supposed financial crisis the coalition cured. Had there been no election, labour under Brown had been dealing effectively with the 2008 crisis and would have continued to do so. there would have been a bit less austerity, but probably not truly dissimilar to what happened. Its such an irony the libs claim to be the nations saviour when the real crisis had already passed and it was simply a question of applying basic financial rules to slowly bring deficits etc under control.
@GF, ” The party that succeeds will be one that finds and articulates an alternative to neo-liberalism.” Nail. head. hit.
it isnt a million miles away from the traditional liberal approach of constituency centred politics rather than national. Not that this would necessarily be the desired alternative, but it was the model the libs used to have, and it did succeed with a broad ranging policy but directed to constituents. that is all wrapped up in why tuition fees was so disastrous. the reason the SNP has been so successful is because they have both right and left appeal. They have social redistributive policies, but they are fighting for the nationalistic rights of Scotland. UKIP are promising the poor they will get jobs and more money (by removing foreigners stealing said jobs): social care and national sovereignty in one package. Pro europeans need to explain the EU is not a loss of sovereignty but a gain.
And would everyone stop talking about conservatives as if they are not socialists. just what is the right name for a party borrowing huge amounts of money to spend on social services? How is that right wing? In their own way, they are already doing this same thing, trying to appeal both ways.
I’m afraid a lot of Lib Dems are still not getting it. The problem was not that you went in to coalition. The problem was the way you did it. Large swathes of the population were prepared to vote for you when they saw you as equidistant to the Tories and Labour. After the rose garden, people saw you – rightly or wrongly – as kindred spirits with the Tories. The fact that this caused your left-leaning voters to desert you should have been easily predictable; it wasn’t much more surprising that your right-leaning voters did the same, for when there is little visible differentiation between the Tories and Lib Dems, why not just make a job of it and vote for the genuine article?
I won’t harp on because what’s done is done and there is no going back. Though I am not a Lib Dem I take no pleasure in the electoral woes you have suffered – especially as, rather unjustly, half your surviving MPs were among the pledge-breakers. Though it may seem hard for you to take any positives from this election, you did still get 2.4 million votes. That’s still a substantial base of voters to start from, especially now you are back in your traditional comfort zone of opposition. So I do believe you will bounce back to some degree. FPTP distorts the results and makes things look a lot worse than they actually are for the losers. A lot of people are talking as if even Labour are dead and buried after this, but the Tories were in a much worse position just a few elections ago, and I’ve seen Labour in much worse positions too. As a Labour supporter I’m surprisingly low on despondency and high on optimism for the next election, and I don’t see why the Lib Dems shouldn’t be too.
Michael Parson.
I think hits the nail on the head. For me the big problem was there was lots of talk about hearts and heads but otherwise stuck the the basic Conservative narrative when the fact of the matter is for first two year austerity worsened the economy and this didn’t end until “austerity” was more or less abandoned in favour of more mainstream economics approach Sticking to the idea that Osborne’s experiment was a success simply reassured the people in areas of the country that simply don’t vote Labour, but would vote for a different opposition party that the Conservative were doing a good job so you might as vote for them. The North was already lost because the Conservatives had been a distaster for them in a the Thatcher/Major years and this one has proved to be pretty much the same again. There are reasons people vote the way they do. Scotland went for the SNP because Westminister politics destroyed their country it went from being a fairly conservative Nation in the 1950s to a labour stronghold to now virtually a SNP one party state because of destructive policies that damaged the fabric of its society, Those votes are not coming back any time soon and in truth it probably will end in Scottish independence. What the Lib Dems and need to do is offer a vision of a Country that is much better than the one we have, hope and a future, Not ever declining living standards, ever more personal and private debt or endless waffle around entry level economics aimed at the talking heads of newspapers or pundit who in truth are just espousing the orthodoxy of the day anyway. Newspaper columnist aren’t fonts of wisdom Andrew Neal, Jeremy Paxman and Andrew Marr aren’t seers. There just people paid to spout stuff. I.e. offer a liberal progressive vision because actually countries that do that have a better standard of living as anyone who as ever travelled knows . The concentration on GDP and light economic debate is a distraction that makes social failure look like economic successes and it doesn’t even do a good job of it.
The other thing we’ve got to do is mobilise voters. This government was elected on a bout %60 turn out which means a sizable chunk of the population feel politics is irrelevant to their lives or simply do not have a party or parties fighting their corner, obviously their will be some that simply can’t be bothered.
And Jedi
“I demand” that we aim for proportional representation because advocates of FTPP tend to be bullish and think 30 something of a per cent of the vote is actually a majority of anything which is not even mathematically true when you think about really is it? Also proportional representation wouldn’t stop a genuinely popular government from winning a real majority, It would just curtail the ones that aren’t that popular from doing things they have no real mandate for. Actually. I think political parties should represent the people and communities who elected them in something like an assembly or a committee meeting with strict rules of conduct so as to block grandstanding by egomaniacs. Politicians in my opinion are chiefly representatives not leaders and maybe a Prime minister should be nothing but an overseer of the negotiation rather than a decision maker. and should even be elected separately.
Stop banging on a about Europe for a start – it’s a toxic issue until the in/out referendum is sorted. Look what has happened to Labour in Scotland. Pro-independence voters turned out en masse to help push Labour out of Scotland because they felt Labour worked against them in the IndyRef. Not every Lib Dem voter or potential voter will support the EU. You have to find a stance that can work for both. Present the party as the one giving the ‘true facts’ and then offering the public enough solid information to make up their own minds, without telling them how to vote.
Let’s kill this myth that the SNP are popular. They got half the votes we did but 6 times as many mps because they are beneficiaries of FPTP. They can be all things to all people ( sound familiar?) Because they wrap themselves in a flag. After independence they will collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. There success was to persuade scots that they can “end austerity” using taxes gathered in south east England and kept quiet on how that would be sustained after independence
@TCO
“Let’s kill this myth that the SNP are popular. They got half the votes we did but 6 times as many mps”
What a bizarre way of looking at it. They did not get half the votes the Lib Dems did, they actually got over 60% the number of votes the Lib Dems did, despite putting up less than a tenth of the number of candidates.
The SNP got an average of 24,651 votes where they stood – more than six times more than the Lib Dems’ 3,828 votes.
As a left-wing English voter, I only wish we had something remotely like the SNP to vote for here.
Richard Clifton
Good and thoughtful article .Just to cheer you all up in Rugby we bucked the trend retained our existing seats and gained a seat from the Toeies.I retained my own ward after 3 recounts !
I think we need to understand that it was the negative parties who won this election who were against migrants, the EU and the SNP.They blatantly exploited fear and prejudice .The New Liberals which I hope we will become must be part of the healing process that unites Great Britain and does not as they have done turn neighbour against neighbour .Isolation and fear must not be our nations future.
TCO the SNP are popular in Scotland and they are the Scottish Nationalist Party that’s why it counts. dismissing the concept of nationalism doesn’t really help because whether you like it or not most people are to some extent nationalists which is arguably the card played by all the English parties as they fell over themselves to say they wouldn’t do deals with the SNP or rather disgracefully tried to demonise them as a threat to the English. but I agree under FSTP in a British election the votes distort all kinds of things, For the life of me I cant see why Nationalism is seen as good when it lead to the break up of the soviet union and gave people there countries back but is seen as innately destructive/dangerous here. I can see that it might be an economic threat to Great Britain PLC, but as an innately threatening idea, I don’t get it. They’re are not threatening pogroms and seem rather progressive to me. If I lived in Scotland I would have voted for them above Labour or The Conservative in a seat where the Lib Dems stood no chance given that they stood a good chance of actually attempting to represent at least some of my views in parliament.
@Glenn we have a populist left wing party; the Greens. We have a populist right wing party; UKIP. We lost votes in both directions.
A populist regionalist party might do well but it’s not a liberal party
Scratch Labour and ultimately you find Communist philosophy and psychology. Scratch the Conservatives and ultimately you find capitalist philosophy and psychology. Scratch the Lib-Dems and what to you find? Where is the distinct philosophy and psychology? That is the existential challenge. It is not good enough to offer to restrain the excesses of the left and right. The centre has to offer an actual alternative to communism and capitalism that is grounded in workable ideas that lead to practical policies.
As the Liberal Democratic Party on formation was never intended to become the right-wing Liberal Party fiefdom that has now virtually destroyed us… it’s time to enforce a true Liberal-Social Democratic agenda or many more unhappy left of centre party members will follow the countless number of our disaffected colleagues and electors who have already fled us… a situation that will be compounded should a breakaway party similar to the original SDP arise, and extend a welcoming hand to all from Labour’s present forlorn situation…
TCO 9th May ’15 – 12:18pm
“..,,,, this myth that the SNP are popular. “. What???????? So you think the SNP are unpopular with a string of majorities of more than 10,000 whilst winning all but 3 of the seats they were standing in !!
Do misunderstand the word “myth” or the word “popular” ??!
What language are you speaking?
Danny 9th May ’15 – 10:23am
“@GF, ” The party that succeeds will be one that finds and articulates an alternative to neo-liberalism.” Nail. head. hit.”
Please sign me up to that also.
When people say that all parties are the same, they are frequently saying, in a non-politically informed way, that no one offers an alternative to this Conservative/Corporative big business agenda.
It has been sold to us as if there is no other way. That is a big fat untruth!
“The Liberal Democrats exist to build and safeguard a fair, free and open society, in which we seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community …” YES!
TCO
fair point, I was off topic. I wasn’t saying that the Lib Dems should be a regionalist party, though it does seem to help SNP (waspish aside, as well as the Conservatives in the South east and Labour maintain votes in The North) and I was just questioning the idea that they are not that popular and that Nationalism is innately a big bad thing. I do think there are a lot of votes to be gained by offering a vision of a nicer country with a better future rather than getting bogged down talking to the gallery about the business of politics. What was interesting about Cameron is that he started to invoke positivity and one nation Toryism in the latter stages of his campaign and being positive is also what made the SNP popular in Scotland. If you look at the Yes campaign what has given the SNP momentum since it’s actually mostly upbeat and about creating a better way. If you look at the Lib Dems campaign it was all about how dangerous the other parties were and how only the Lib Dems could temper them and if you look at Labours it was mostly about threats to the NHS etc. Negative campaigning only works if you set out to absolutely destroy the opposition in crude ways by saying their leader is too weird, shifty, Scottish etc and then offer something better, Vague fears about specific issues don’t work and nor do hints. But the main thing that failed was that Clegg thought the coalition was reliant on people voting for the Conservatives and Lib Dems. when it was actually nearly as reliant on enough of them voting Labour .
jedibeeftrix
In response to your message of 8:58am, I have read it through several time, but I still can’t get what you are saying.
So far as I am concerned, the party went precisely down the road you and other who wanted to push it in a right-wing economics direction said it should go down, and it got hammered. You say “The party jumped in front of a bus when Richard Reeves was given the sack”. Well, Richard Reeves wrote an article which said people like me should get out of the party and join Labour. It was billed as coming from “Nick Clegg’s outgoing Director of Strategy” and Clegg never repudiated it. I didn’t get out of the party, but that article marks the point where I stopped doing any work for it. In the past I have gone to help Simon Hughes in Southwark and Bermondsey. This time when I was sent letters and emails asking me to do so, I ignored them – and I ripped up one of the letters and sent it back by Freepost to party HQ. You tell me I’m not wanted in the party, that I, who gave over so much time in the past to helping Simon Hughes establish a decent opposition to Labour in south-east London ought to go off and join Labour, and THAT’S what you get, my dear. How many other Matthew Huntbachs were there who perhaps would have turned up and helped Simon Hughes this time but didn’t because of insults like that?
Jedibeeftrix, people like you have destroyed the party, and I wish you had the decency to stand up, plead guilty and apologise.
The message I am getting from SO MANY casual contacts in the south – the sort of place where politics used to be Conservatives v. LibDem, but now what were good LibDem second places have been reduced to third or fourth places is the same. People used to vote for us because they didn’t like the Conservatives and thought us the best opposition to the Conservatives. But the message that was coming across was that a vote for us and a vote for the Conservatives was a vote for the same thing. That is what people who used to vote for us honestly thought. So they stopped voting for us. Some went to Labour or the Greens or UKIP, some didn’t bother at all. Some who were more sympathetic to your point of view went to the Conservative on the grounds that as there wasn’t much difference between the Conservatives and the LibDems, why vote for the LibDems rather than the Conservatives?
Why can’t people like you get it? No-one wants the “distinct brand” you say we should be, or at least, those who do want it think the Conservative Party is a better version of that brand.
Stephen Hesketh 9th May ’15 – 1:56pm
Danny 9th May ’15 – 10:23am
“@GF, ” The party that succeeds will be one that finds and articulates an alternative to neo-liberalism.” Nail. head. hit.”
Please sign me up to that also.”
We had several of those at the last election Stephen: the Greens, UKIP, Trades Unions Socialist Alliance; PC and SNP.
All had varying degrees of success.
Alternatively if you believe that the Tories, Lib Dems and Labour are neo Liberal they got 3/4 of the vote between them.
“We need thousands of those members who left the party in dismay and disgust at Nick’s behaviour as leader to return and reclaim the Lib Dems and its values.”
I am reclaiming the party’s values; you are indulging in dubious practices; he’s is an entryist. To misquote Yes Minister.
TCO evidently thinks it is significant that the SNP failed to win even a single one of the seats they did not stand for in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
This is a fair indication of the level of TCO’s political analysis.
Whiggy: “Scratch Labour and ultimately you find Communist philosophy and psychology. Scratch the Conservatives and ultimately you find capitalist philosophy and psychology. ”
Neither of those statements is really true.
Brenda writes “it’s time to enforce a true Liberal-Social Democratic agenda”. No. It is not time to “enforce” anything, and this is not a party that “enforces” a value set on its members. To those on all sides who are sharpening knives and talking about jumping or pushing or seizing control – stop it. Grow up. Get over yourselves. What needs to follow is a debate about what the party is for and what values it has; a debate that will inform a better internal structure, hopefully, as well as an electoral recovery. Anyone calling for particular values to be “enforced” needs to get back in their box and wait their turn in this debate.
We have over 3,000 new members to welcome in; let’s not do so by “enforcing” values on them.
David-1 likes to build and demolish straw men. That is a fair indication of his rhetorical skills.
Hugh p:
Can I ask us to spare a thought for the Steve Radford-led Liberal Party. …, why should they not rejoin us ?
Wondering about them myself earlier, I looked them up. It appears that they are (have become?) an anti EU party, which really precludes a re-association. The reason I looked was partly a similar thought to yours, but mostly because I wondered if in returning to our root values, we should drop the “Democrat” in our name and return to ‘Liberal’.
There seems to be an assumption that our defeat is the fault of the Tories. It is certainly a comfortable analysis yes, but we have been doing a little too much comfort analysis and polling for our own good I think
To test the coalition hypothesis, let’s explore what would have happened if we had supported a Labour Prime minister in 2010. If it was Gordon Brown, we also would’ve had a backlash, propping up mr. Barnacle was not what the public wanted either. We would have retained more of our voters perhaps, but would Clegg, Cable,… the LibDems in the former Tory seats have survived? I think not. Meanwhile the attitude of Labour was one of ‘you can support us but don’t ask too many questions’. It would have been an unhappy coalition as well!
We have to look at ourselves to figure out what we have done wrong. We won’t change the Tories nor the Labour party!
@ Matthew Huntbach – “In response to your message of 8:58am, I have read it through several time, but I still can’t get what you are saying.”
I have always said I saw the opportunity for the party on the left of british politics, because the tories as an adatpable creature were in robust health where in contrast an ossified labour party has ever less to offer the positive liberty electorate.
I also said that Reeves pushed in the wrong direction, (right rather than left), but that it was marvellous that he was pushing the party beyond the ~15% of natural liberals myopically crunching statistics on their favoured technical method of electing people.
“Jedibeeftrix, people like you have destroyed the party, and I wish you had the decency to stand up, plead guilty and apologise.”
How can these even be remotely true?
I have never claimed to be a party member.
I have broadly limited myself to three main topics here:
1. Defence and Foreign Policy
2. Taxation and the size of the state
3. Constiutional matters, particularly whether we should be transferring governance to EUrope.
I have always argued for distinct points of view:
1. My own personal perspective on an issue as an interested outsider (right wing).
2. Where I though there was electoral space for the Lib-Dems to thrive (left wing).
I have been repeatedly called out as a non lib-dem, and I have always said that is absolutely true.
The only possible way I could have achieved what you claim in damaging the party is if my arguments were so persuasive that people didn’t care that I was not a lib-dem, and they accepted and adopted my views without regard to how that fits within the framework of party policy.
I’m pretty awesome, but that is absurd. 🙂
Stevan Rose
Miliband’s Labour is positioned to the left of New Labour. That it is to the right of the historical average shows that the entire spectrum is shifting right. The most extreme right you can get is of course national socialism which is rarely elitist.
One of the things the Leninist left managed to do is to get National Socialism categorised as “extreme right” to make it look as if it was the opposite of them. But what is the actual measurement of leftness and rightness which places all parties and movements on one scale and puts National Socialism at the far right? If left means active state and right means small state, then National Socialism is very much to the left, not far right at all. When I use “left” and “right” I mean it in its original meaning: “right” means a belief that those with wealth and power are the right people to have wealth and power, they need to be protected, and any change is dangerous, whereas “left” means a belief that wealth and power need to be shifted from those who have it and spread more widely. As you say, National Socialism is rarely elitist, so again I don’t see it as “far right” in those terms.
You say the entire spectrum is shifting right, yes, but I say that is not being done democratically. There are two reasons I believe this is happening. One is the capture of left movements by people from a social and intellectual elite, who turn those movements into movements which are more about fringe issues which those people are keen on than about the sort of redistribution to the general populace that a true left should be about. The result is that the general populace are put off from active involvement in the left movements, which results in a downward spiral in their activity and support, as these movements need mass membership to be effective. The other reason I believe is that there has been a big effort by the political right to push the “anti politics” idea. Often it is put in a superficially leftist tone “all politicians are elitist, so you don’t want to be involved with them”, but the result, and I believe there is a deliberate two-pronged strategy by the right to get this result, is again a drop off in the sort of mass membership the left needs to be effective.
So, actually I don’t think there is a big popular demand for the rightward shift in politics, and I am very much opposed to what you seem to be saying, which is that we should accept it and move along with it. I think that’s what we did in 2010-2015, and now we see where it led us. I think we should take the opposite approach and build a new left which explicitly stands up to this rightward shift, which points out it has been happening and say “Stop – we don’t want this!”.
Because that’s a message I hear again and again from ordinary people. They don’t like this rightwards shift in politics, but they feel they are powerless to stop it. Now, one issue is that people lack the language to express their feelings on this. It is an Orwellian situation, the idea that if you have no language to express an idea you can’t even think about it. Most people have little idea what “left” and “right” means in politics. Most people don’t even understand the traditional form of liberal democratic politics with political parties as social movements where people get together and choose some of their number to promote for political office. I know this because I find often when I talk to people in these terms they are incredulous, they just never even though that is how it was. To them, a political party is like a big company, run from the top, and members are like workers who just do what they are told.
I think this shift happened in the south of England first because the south of England didn’t have the big industrial Labour culture of the north. I saw it happen myself, growing up in Sussex. In the south before in the north, ordinary people saw the Labour Party not as a “workers’ movement” but as just another political elite composed of people very different from themselves. The distortion of the electoral system meant the Parliamentary Labour Party had almost no southerners in it, helping to break the link between it and the people. If you are southern working class, you don’t necessarily identify with a northern working class accent, and see it as meaning someone who is your sort of person.
I was attracted to the Liberal Party in the 1970s because I could see it was a force that was able to build up a new sort of left that worked with people in the south who wanted left politics but were alienated from Labour. It worked well, that is why the Liberals managed to build up and become the main opposition in so many parts of the south. The core of the Liberal and Liberal Democrat vote was the council estates. Only in Brighton was this resisted, with a strong enough Labour movement boosted by the academic community round Sussex University and the Brighton trendy community to fight back.
Well now, we still have Eastbourne, first won at local government level for the Liberals in 1973. But everywhere else in Sussex, utter destruction. In so many of those constituencies where it looked like with a bit more push we could win (as we did in Lewes some time after Eastbourne, and we did much more at local government level), we have now been pushed right back. The Conservatives have win handsomely, yet among the people I know in their constituencies, there’s no love for them. There just isn’t the rightward shift you claim. What has happened instead is that the seeming shift of the Liberal Democrats to the right has put them off.
So, it is just like I’ve been saying it would be for the past five years. The “nah nah nah nah nah”s have managed to pull people away from the Liberal Democrats, and build up some distant Labour second places where Labour was once third. People who used to vote Liberal Democrat seeing that as the anti-Conservative vote did not do so this time, because they saw voting Liberal Democrat as a pro-Conservative vote. But that’s it – the “nah nah nah nah nah”s have handed those constituencies back to the Tories, or firmed up the Tory grip on them, just as I said they would. Those places are never going to go Labour, they could and in some cases had gone Liberal Democrat. Congratulations, “nah nah nah nah nah”s, you have what you wanted, Liberal Democrat destruction and a Tory majority government.
Neil Sandison 9th May ’15 – 12:41pm
Richard Clifton…………………….. Good and thoughtful article .Just to cheer you all up in Rugby we bucked the trend retained our existing seats and gained a seat from the Toeies.I retained my own ward after 3 recounts !
I think we need to understand that it was the negative parties who won this election who were against migrants, the EU and the SNP.They blatantly exploited fear and prejudice .The New Liberals which I hope we will become must be part of the healing process that unites Great Britain and does not as they have done turn neighbour against neighbour .Isolation and fear must not be our nations future………..
Firstly; well done in Rugby……As for your second paragraph; ‘Spot On’….
I am 71 and have never experienced such a negative, nasty campaign (and I thought 1992 was bad)….
I don’t blame the Tories, after all they are the nasty party….However, they are supported by most of the media and this time round, by the BBC…….The attacks on Milliband were unremitting and, sadly it worked (Lies told often enough are accepted as the truth)…..That voters should be more interested in how Milliband eats a sandwich than . , how a £12Billion ‘promise’ will be enacted says much about the political nous of many voters….
Lynton Crosby earned his pay; he kept Cameron away from Milliband, ensured that Dave’s/George’s appearances were carefully scripted to avoid awkward questions and orchestrated the demonization of the majority of Scottish voters…..There is the old golfing adage “It’s not how; it’s how many” and winning an ‘overall majority’ says it all….
Tim Oliver 9th May ’15 – 2:57pm
Brenda writes “it’s time to enforce a true Liberal-Social Democratic agenda”. No. It is not time to “enforce” anything, and this is not a party that “enforces” a value set on its members.
As for boxes Tim Oliver champion of the right-wing Liberal Party fiefdom that unilaterally enforced its agenda on us all… giving rise to an objecting not-to-be-boxed-in “LibDems4Change” call from former SDP members as me… however it was plea scornfully ignored by the party’s then enforcers—much to the detriment of our party’s future… so, please, it’s certainly never the time to scornfully call for those whose rightful views one disagrees needing to get back in their box and wait their turn in this debate…
Martin 9th May ’15 – 3:19pm
” … but mostly because I wondered if in returning to our root values, we should drop the “Democrat” in our name and return to ‘Liberal’.”
Martin, I was a Liberal party member and agent when the SDP was formed. Some of their number appeared quite convinced that they were god’s gift to politics. Over the years since the merger however we have become a pretty homogenous party with many former SDP members contributing much to the combined party. I cite Charles Kennedy for starters!
Although when writing I do sometimes still have to remind myself to add the word Democrat to that of Liberal, I would be strongly opposed to opening up any divisions with like-minded people who might still consider themselves social democrats at heart.
‘Social Democracy’ is far less a threat to the cohesion and future of this party than are the successors of Liberals such as Clegg, Laws and Browne.
So – A lot of people want to repudiate the coalition, a lot of people insist on defending it. How can a party with this divergence of views think about rebuilding itself at all?
If there is a positive answer, it’s this. In a leadership contest, the winning candidate should be the person who can best articulate a clear, distinctive philosophy and a viable way forward. The party will then have made a decision on where it wants to go and who should lead it there.
The last leadership contest was a misleadingly anodyne discussion between two candidates who both conveyed primarily a “steady as she goes” message. It did not work out quite like that.
Next time, the party cannot afford to elect a down-the-middle leader, a broad-church person who promises to reconcile the irreconcilable. The party needs a leader who makes a clear pitch, does not try to please everyone, says what he or she will do, and sticks to it.
“…many more unhappy left of centre party members will follow the countless number of our disaffected colleagues and electors who have already fled us… ”
So your answer to unhappy left of centre members is to force those members in the centre and centre right out and then hope the voters will go for what remains. No-one is happy right now. Instead of being destructive and encouraging more division why not be constructive and focus on those policies and principles that unite what is quite a broad church. We can’t all have everything we want all the time.
““Jedibeeftrix, people like you have destroyed the party, and I wish you had the decency to stand up, plead guilty and apologise.””
Matthew, you will also I hope do me the courtesy of acknowledging the fact that i am not one of the “nah-nah-nah” voters you often rail against.
@Matthew Huntbach 9th May ’15 – 4:17pm
“So, it is just like I’ve been saying it would be for the past five years. The “nah nah nah nah nah”s have managed to pull people away from the Liberal Democrats, and build up some distant Labour second places where Labour was once third. People who used to vote Liberal Democrat seeing that as the anti-Conservative vote did not do so this time, because they saw voting Liberal Democrat as a pro-Conservative vote. But that’s it – the “nah nah nah nah nah”s have handed those constituencies back to the Tories, or firmed up the Tory grip on them, just as I said they would.”
This is just reductionist nonsense. I didn’t vote for David Laws. I would’ve voted for Tim Farron, Adrian Saunders, Julian Huppert, Charles Kennedy, etc. Do you understand why? If John Tilley stood as a candidate I would vote for him. If Nick Thornsby or TCO stood, I wouldn’t. Am I getting through your fog of nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nahnahnah?
Bolano (in response to me)
This is just reductionist nonsense. I didn’t vote for David Laws. I would’ve voted for Tim Farron, Adrian Saunders, Julian Huppert, Charles Kennedy, etc. Do you understand why?
Yes, but it is you who are talking nonsense. The vast majority of people who used to vote Liberal Democrat are not people who follow the party closely and read Liberal Democrat Voice and so on as you do. So the vast majority of people who used to vote Liberal Democrat didn’t see it that way, they didn’t make the fine distinction on the standing of individual candidates.
To the vast majority of people who used to vote Liberal Democrat, EVERY Liberal Democrat candidate was David Laws, because it was the David Laws image of the Liberal Democrats that was being pumped out from the top, and the David Laws image of the Liberal Democrats that was being written up in the press. You might have voted for Tim Farron, Adrian Saunders, Julian Huppert, Charles Kennedy, etc, but many voters in their constituencies could not distinguish between them and David Laws, so felt of them as you felt of David Laws.
Why does the Liberal Leader have to be a current MP, why can’t I vote for Lynne Featherstone as Liberal leader? Or Shirley Williams? Does it have to be a man just because all the women MPs got sacked by an illiberal electorate misled by the tory newspapers and labour supporters saying that the bedroom tax etc were Libdem policies? They punished the Libdems but rewarded the Tories! aaargh …
Am I allowed to mention the Green Lib Dems Conference Saturday 27th June 2015 ?
jedibeeftrix
Matthew, you will also I hope do me the courtesy of acknowledging the fact that i am not one of the “nah-nah-nah” voters you often rail against.
No, of course you are not. You are not a Labour Party supporter, are you? You are not someone who believes or posts the message that the Liberal Democrats gave up all they used to believe in and became uncritical supporters of the Conservative Party, are you? No, you are the opposite of that sort of person, so you are very much not what I call a “nah nah nah nah nah”.
While I am unhappy about the way the fact of the coalition has been used by those at the top of our party to push it to the economic right, I have also very much accepted that it was inevitable that in this coalition we would have to make many compromises that way, and would obtain only modest achievements that were distinctly Liberal Democrat as opposed to a slight watering down of right-wing Conservatism. By “nah nah nah nah nah” I mean those who wish to destroy us by denying what we have done and pretending that somehow 57 Liberal Democrat MPs could have persuaded 307 Conservative MPs to change their core beliefs, and have ignored the difficult reality of the situation in May 2010 because they thought the way forward was for Labour to destroy the Liberal Democrats by jeering “nah nah nah nah nah” at them rather than developing and promoting attractive alternative policies, or explaining policies which might seem initially unattractive in order to build support for a viable alternative.
Of course if there really was a viable alternative that could have been built from the Parliament elected in May 2010, it would have to be Labour leading it. So the very fact that Labour was yelling “nah nah nah nah nah” rather than telling us what that viable alternative was and asking the Liberal Democrats nicely to come over and support it shows what we all knew underneath – there wasn’t such a viable alternative, and if there was Labour was too timid to offer it.
As I predicated all along, since most Liberal Democrat seats had been wrested from the Conservatives, and since most seats that could have gone Liberal Democrat if there was a swing to the Liberal Democrats were Conservative-held, the main effect of Labour’s “nah nah nah nah nah” campaign has been to strengthen the Conservatives. Oh sure, there are now some Labour distant second places in constituencies where Labour were once firmly third, but what good has that done? Where once the Conservatives were being challenged in their heartland, now they are safely back in place there. And Labour has found that since yelling “nah nah nah nah nah” at the Liberal Democrats didn’t actually involve them doing any positive thinking, it hasn’t done much to win them strong and committed support anywhere, it may have helped them lose support in places where there was another effective challenger, such as Scotland.
Matthew Huntbach
The party is riddled with soft Tories. You’ve only got to look here. And yet in your arguments the perception that the party is soft Tory is always the fault of those outside, never the soft Tories within., never the fault of the party members who failed to take an effective stand against the Lib Dem’s own Tea Party.
@ Matthew – Thank you.
Apologies, my initial reply at 9th May ’15 – 3:50pm was held by censor, and you may have missed it.
Stevan Rose
So your answer to unhappy left of centre members is to force those members in the centre and centre right out and then hope the voters will go for what remains.
The way people like you wanted to push the party has been tested to destruction. The party put out the sort of image that people like you said would win it millions ore votes, and it had the opposite effect. Can you at least have the humility to admit that? If you want to keep the party together, at least maybe you ought to consider letting the other side of it have a chance to show what they are about, so that the party can restore a wider image of what it is about.
Bolano
never the fault of the party members who failed to take an effective stand against the Lib Dem’s own Tea Party.
Er, sorry Bolano, what do you think I have been doing all this time writing so much stuff critical of the “Orange Bookers” in the party? If you still want to yell “nah nah nah nah nah” at me, rather than offer assistance in helping build the party back to where it was, fine, do that. I’m sure kicking the party when it is down will be fun for you. Much easier than actually doing something productive, eh?
@Matthew Huntbach
Your probably not going to give a stuff what I have to say, however I am going to say it.
I used to enjoy reading your posts and what you have to say, however over the last few weeks your constant use of the ““nah nah nah nah nah”” is getting very irritating, to the point that I can not bare to look at what you have to say for fear of seeing that same old phrase, which is a shame really as you have an important voice and message.
Just an observation for which I am sure I will be told to stick it lol
Matthew Huntbach.
I would never dare to say you haven’t taken a stand against the Orange Bookers over the last few years.
Would you describe it as effective?
I believe that the Party can keep its left and right wings together and expand its base. But that can only be done on the bases of (a) a principled adherence to the spirit of the Preamble; (b) a pragmatic approach to electoral politics.
As for (a), the people need to see that the Liberal Democrats have a heart and soul and stick to their guns. In Parliament the Lib Dems are now hopeless underdogs, but remember that people like a plucky fighter battling against the odds. Let’s pick fights, even if we can’t win them, that will demonstrate what our principles are.
As for (b) we now have good evidence of what approaches work and what don’t. We’ve tried it the Orange Book way and come up dry. That has to be abandoned. That doesn’t mean we have to do exactly what we did in the Nineties; the political landscape has changed and we need to recognise that and adjust, and think of innovative ways of presenting our principles. But we know that there’s a large group of people who turned away from the Party because of Nick Clegg, many of whom are now considering returning. Our first duty is to get as many of them to return as possible. Then we can look at expanding beyond that demographic to others: the disaffected who failed to vote at all; Labour voters who are upset with their party or pessimistic about its chances; UKIP voters who have realised that their party is a hollow vessel; Green voters who are not entirely in tune with the Greens’ agenda; SNP voters who are dubious about the hardcore nationalist element in their party. We need to make the Party more expansive and open to women and BAME voters. We need to be sensitive to moves for regional autonomy and reflect that in Party structure. We need to understand concerns about immigration and strive for innovative solutions that are sympathetic to the needs of immigrants while addressing the fears raised by the prospect of an open door to Europe. And we need to anticipate issues that will come to the forefront in 2020, even if right now they are only a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand.
Ideology is neither the problem nor the solution here. The best thing the Liberal Democrats have going for them is the willingness to think about issues without assuming an ideological solution. Unfettered by either socialist dogmas or free-market orthodoxies, there should be an openness to ideas that can originate anywhere, without being seduced by gimmicky fix-all theories. It’s this willingness to experiment that gives the Lib Dems an advantage no other party has; but it has to be coupled with a willingness to admit when experiments have failed.
I agree with matt; I would be willing to put up with a single “nah,” however.
Matthew: Although I find your avowed refusal to do anything for the party rather petulant – not so much not doing anything, more having the need to repeatedly announce your inactivity on LDV, I do appreciate much of your analysis. I would however suggest caution with responses such as “he way people like you wanted to push the party has been tested to destruction.” to Steven Rose as it sounds a bit like your ‘Nan, nah nah, nah, nah characterisation of a Labour automaton and it is not too obvious what you are referring to. There will always be a spectrum in the party and there needs to be a range across right to left wing Liberalism. Perhaps you are referring to the dangerous idea that equidistant centrism can be a successful strategy.
I believe that we need to look at first principles and educate ourselves in the foundations of Liberalism. There has, I think, been a tendency for this to get lost. In part we need to reclaim the language. An example is ‘Eurosceptic’. There have been some (who I doubt actually have the interests of Lib Dems at heart) who urge us to be more ‘Eurosceptic’, when really they mean Europhobic. As Liberals we should be literally the most Eurosceptic; since our raison d’être is to doubt and challenge the remit of any state, in fact any governing body, at all levels and any concentration of power, multinationals in particular. Whilst Tories have complained about powers ceded to ‘Brussels’, they and the Labour Party have been responsible for a relentless drive to centralise to Westminster over the last quarter century. If we do not express our intense scepticism at this trend, who will? We need a more explicitly Liberal critique of the balance of powers across each level of government. Inevitably this will encompass views that from another perspective might be labelled as left or right.
That said, however, we need to recognise that depending on how Labour respond, we may find ourselves again characterised as criticising Labour from the ‘left’; it is up to us to make it clear that we are actually criticising from a more Liberal perspective.
@ David-1
The Liberal Democrats are an ideological based party. The Conservatives have no ideological base that is why Disraeli could boast of steeling the clothes of the Liberals and Thatcher could embrace neo-liberalism. There were once lots of Socialists in the Labour party, but there are only a few left now.
I joined this party in the hope that together we could make the UK a better place to live for everyone. We need to check all our policies to see if they support our vision for a more liberal society and ditch those that don’t help bring this about. We need to ensure that we are not supporting the powerful few but are supporting the weak, poor and disadvantaged.
For decades the main Lib Dem election strategy has been to assemble an anti-Labour or anti-Tory tactical bloc to win wards and constituencies. This has meant the party has been collecting voters who did not share Lib Dem (or indeed liberal values) but it was hoped such voters were in a small minority. The 2015 GE has in fact shown that a large proportion of the national Lib Dem vote was made up of people who were willing to switch to UKIP and it is UKIP that now has the base to assemble tactical voting blocs to win constituencies. It is a gut wrenching irony that UKIP has been the beneficiary of decades of Lib Dem hard work but that is the nature of modern politics. It is an even bigger irony that UKIP intends to campaign for PR which if successful could restore Lib Dem fortunes.
If the electorate feel our voice has been lost due to our part in the Coalition then we should make ourselves heard again by throwing ourselves into the preparation needed to become the centre of the ‘Yes’ campaign for the inevitable EU Referendum.
As they are all more than 10% could all 7 MPs stand so we get to know who they are and their strengths and weaknesses? There’s a clear favourite so an election between just two would be a waste of stamps time and money!
Me
Well now, we still have Eastbourne,
Actually we don’t, we lost that as well, though it was close. I had somehow picked up that we’d kept it.
Martin
Matthew: Although I find your avowed refusal to do anything for the party rather petulant – not so much not doing anything, more having the need to repeatedly announce your inactivity on LDV
In many cases this was because I was defending the Liberal Democrats and what they had done in the coalition, and found as soon as I did so I was attacked by the “nah nah nah nah nah”s who despite everything else I said assumed hat because I was not too just joining in with the “nah nah nah nah nah” attacks on the Liberal Democrats that I must be saying all I was saying because I was a Clegg fan.
This was what I found so bad in 2010-2015 – finding myself stuck between two positions neither of which I agreed with, and any attempt to reason with someone from one of them generally ended up with me being accused on being with the other.
But that’s what I’ve been saying all along – the “nah nah nah nah nah”s and the Cleggies worked together to destroy the Liberal Democrats. The refusal of the “nah nah nah nah nah”s to accept there was anyone in the Liberal Democrats who was not a Cleggie, and their frequently stated wish to destroy all of us, regardless of our individual positions, worked wonders – for the Tories. As I said all along, the main effect of the “nah nah nah nah nah”s was to make sure we lost support in all those places where we could beat the Tories and Labour couldn’t, and make them all safe Tory again.
Matthew: at least you did not become another of the relentlessly and tediously negative types who have littered these pages.
Alexander Hegenbarth : re
“we should make ourselves heard again by throwing ourselves into the preparation needed to become the centre of the ‘Yes’ campaign for the inevitable EU Referendum” We will have to be very cautious about this one.
– We cannot afford to align ourselves with Cameron, we really do have to distance ourselves
– Cameron’s renegotiation may include controversial elements with which we would not wish to be associated nor wish to appear to endorse.
Are the LDs against coalitions or just coalitions with the Tories?
I joined the Liberal party because of the principles it believes in, Justice, Liberty and Freedom. When I was deciding which party to join, I borrowed three library books about the history and development of the three parties. Labour was a grassroots party that fought against the exploitation by the ruling class. However, it hd a list of proscribed organisation that you were not allowed to join. This was a restriction of my individual freedom so I ruled out joining the Labour party,, The Conservative party was organised from the top down to build a party machine to fight the Labour party. No principles were listed at all. So I joined the Liberal party as it was then called.
However, whether it is worthwhile rebranding the party as the Liberal party instead of remaining as the Liberal Democrt party, I don’t know. However, I think our slogan must be “A Fair Economy, A Strong Society” Our policies must clearly and explicitly reflect this. Society will remain fragmented and dysfunctional while it is based on the vast inequalities of the currently constructed economic system.
A new economic system must be established that is fair for everyone; and that includes the billionaires as well as benefit claimants and the working poor. The establishment of an equitable economic system must be the way forward for the Liberal Democrat, party..
The Lib Dems have never been against coalitions and have worked well in council coalitions with many different parties.
However — and here I don’t speak for anybody but myself — given the Conservatives’ ugly tendency of chewing up and spitting out their coalition partners, a tendency which now has a century’s worth of history behind it, I would be loath ever again to go into coalition with the Tories on the national level.
At least for the next 200-300 years. After that one might reëvaluate.
TCO,
in your post you suggested that at this election multiple candidates sprang up with alternative ideas and approaches, with limited success. I think, suggesting all in all that departing from the mainstream is a bad idea. Perhaps I can offer another interpretation. Vote share by labour and conservative in England did not change much. Conservatives up 0.5%, labour up 2%. As the official opposition, you might expect labour would rise a bit.
So what do the figures say? they say the lib vote dispersed elsewhere and did not go to either of the two main candidates! The anti labour and conservative voters went to anti labour and conservative parties. Does no one understand that is what liberal voters want?