Was The Guardian’s Martin Kettle right yesterday to argue, as per his article’s headline, The biggest problem for the Liberal Democrats is illiberal Britain. It was a long, thoughtful piece – and, hey, it’s much better to be talked about than not, especially if you’re a Lib Dem – but, still, it was at best a partial explanation.
Let’s start with the positive stuff. First of all, Mr Kettle acknowledges the various ways in which the party has “been right on so many issues”:
By so many yardsticks, the Lib Dems deserve to be higher in the polls than they are. Michael Meadowcroft, intermittent party loyalist and former MP for Leeds West, listed several of them in a typically forceful Guardian letter today: the economy, Europe, ID cards, Iraq and localism. On all of them, as he says, the Lib Dems have been consistently right. One can add others to the list that Meadowcroft omitted: climate change, police powers, tax, electoral reform. All big subjects on which the Lib Dems have been right most of the time in ways that put the other parties to shame.
Couldn’t have put it better myself. But then there’s the problem of the current opinion polls: the Lib Dems have been tracking in the high-teens, occasionally breaking the 20% barrier.
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