Since May tens of thousands of words have been written here on Lib Dem Voice and other Social Media about the Lib Dem Fightback. Since last Saturday tens of thousands more have been written about whether we should or should not welcome Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader.
However, we should not repeat the mistake of the Coalition years and define ourselves only in relation to others. We are not Conservative or Labour Lite, we are Liberal Democrats, otherwise surely we should just join one of the other Parties in the first place? Proclaiming in 2010 that the Coalition was a ‘meeting of minds not a marriage of convenience’ was a disaster for our Party. So was the 2015 national election campaign in arguing that we were just a bit different to Conservative and Labour. In which case people might as well vote for the real thing –and they did.