In the year and a bit I have been involved in the Lib Dems, I have noticed one particular train of thought that percolates in the minds of many members. In their eyes Paddy Ashdown is a now legendary leader of almost Arthurian stature, who led us in a golden era as we swept back to relevance in local and national politics. Whilst there is much truth in this, this train of thought often doesn’t stop there, but evolves in a secondary, more negative direction.
“If Paddy couldn’t do it nobody can,” goes the refrain. In other words, under Paddy we had strong leadership, a world class organisation and growing numbers in the polls, but we still failed to get the key political reforms that would have allowed us our fair place at the table of national life. In 1997 we broke through in terms of seat numbers, but the dreaded First Past The Post system delivered an oversized majority to the party we thought we could be going into coalition with, and they ignored a report they had commissioned recommending electoral reform. Then, when a chance for Government did come round, it was with our traditional enemies, and nearly destroyed us, a calamity from which we have yet to recover.
In other words the system proved too strong for us to take on, and our attack on it left us in pieces on the floor. So why do we continue to bother trying?
To me, this line of thinking is a very valid analysis of what happened to us from 1988 to 2015. We did indeed try and fail to take on a system that proved too robust to conquer. However it leaves out one crucial thing- and on this point we should take comfort and get ready to fight again, and this time win.
The system that defeated us then has become a lot weaker in the last twenty years. Charles Kennedy said in 2005, after our strong showing in that year’s election, that the era of three party politics was upon us. Actually he was wrong, the era of multi-party politics was at hand, and it this that will force the electoral changes through that we have so long sought.
Simply put, outside of Northern Ireland, we now have six parties who are achieving vote levels that should give them a seat at the national table. Crucially this means the current system is no longer really in the interest of any party except the SNP! Certainly for Labour, and arguably for the Conservatives it is no longer the guaranteed majority producing machine it once was.
The evidence is there for everyone to see. In the fifteen years since Kennedy’s bold statement, we have had four elections. Three of them have produced either no majority in the House of Commons or one so weak to be perceived as unworkable. The fourth, that of 2019, was won by a Conservative Party building a coalition of voters that looks so contradictory and fragile, that it increasingly looks like a loaded gun in Boris Johnson’s hand, but he hasn’t realised the barrel is pointing at the beating heart of his own party.
So that should leave us thinking that, with a robust new leader, a clear plan for improving the party and getting ourselves ready for the next elections local and national, we should be quietly confident that, if we get it right, the time is ripe for some of the real breakthroughs we have long dreamed of.
* After years living in Greater China, Charlie has recently returned to the UK, and is both a Lib Dem activist and businessman.
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8 Comments
The 2 Party system has been gradually weakening for the last 70 Years but because it is so slow its easy to miss in the Noise of short-term changes.
Having said that I dont believe we can make a Breakthrough in 2024, at least not if The Election is held in May.
I agree with the analysis, to a degree.
The Tory Party was split in two by Brexit. It could have been split further if the grass roots had decided that the Brexit Party was the only one that could deliver. In the end, it stepped aside to give Boris his majority but if Boris had faltered , it could have gone the other way. The fiasco with a deadlock created by parliament finally convinced the electorate about the value of their votes and no party is now safe enough to feel complacent. The electorate will punish anyone who takes it for granted.
The Corbyn supporters perhaps buck the trend with their fanatical support for a man who could never win a majority. Perhaps that is a win for the democratic system.
The Labour Party took Scotland for granted and the SNP stole their crown. Yet another example that loyalty votes are not forever.
Do Lib DEms fail because of FPTP or is FPTP the main excuse for failing?
Our party is so far down in the polls that we are going to have to align more closely with the Labour party whatever position they take on electoral reform. We can expect Starmer to move his party towards us and we will struggle to win back LibDem defectors to Labour until we have a credible media plan. Fortunately we have 3+ years to identify core beliefs and viciously focused targeting on the yellow halo 40 seats.
Pete asks ‘Do Lib Dems fail because of FPTP or is FPTP the main excuse for failing?’ The answer is that having spent 50 years building up a party from 6 to over 60 MPs, by learning the lessons of the past from those who had been successful, we had two leaders who knew better than those who came before and squandered all the previous generations had built up, and many of their most ardent supporters are still in positions of high power and influence in the party.
The only short cut to success for the new generation of Lib Dems is learning the lessons of the past from those who did it and made the mistakes first time. The alternative is to ignore the past and its mistakes (codified to “move on” by those who made them, but don’t want to admit it) and make them again, take the hit and start again.
That takes much, much longer.
I agree with Charlie’s basic premise – we cannot achieve major national clout without electoral reform. I think it is also true that, having virtually lost Scotland, Labour has no hope of an overall majority at Westminster. The recognition of that by Keir Starmer can be the key that unlocks this dilemma. Labour must dust off the Jenkins Report on electoral reform.
Dennis, for decades many liberals have been bemoaning the fact that (as you put it) “we cannot achieve major national clout without electoral reform”; that someone else is the key that can unlock the problem and that old proposals are the solution.
Sadly it never worked.
What did work was thousands of Lib Dems working hard for their communities year after year, being part of a team, getting elected into councils and ultimately winning parliamentary seats. It gave us enough influence with Tony Blair to get PR in Scotland.
Sadly experience proves that there is not the slightest chance of getting electoral reform until we achieve major national clout. We need to stop this endless obsession with wishing someone else would do the job for us and make it different, by doing it ourselves.
Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy’s ‘way’ delivered a certain kind of Party designed to do a certain kind of task. After 1970, leveraging local politics and by elections produced a patchwork – eventually quite an extensive patchwork – of constituency parties who used liberalism a kind of franchise or rohrschach test onto which any type of opportunistic national or local issue could be projected. Often enough this was sufficient to win the seat in certain circumstances.
But this approach had a central problem – as now highlighted by Mark Pack. There was no core vote, and few enough of the voters had changed their minds because they were persuaded by ‘liberalism’. It is an exaggeration, but a pardonable one, to say that 50 or 60 constituencies had 50 or 60 individual stories about how they became Lib Dem.
So, Paddy and Charles’s Party had survived and to a certain extent thrived. That was its task and it had done well. But in 2010 there was new task – to be part of a government. But the very manner in which the Party had built ensured its own destruction. I believe that the coalition delivered a fairly liberal programme, but there were no Liberals to vote for it. The ‘Lib Dem’ voters disintegrated back into betrayed Labour, fearful Conservatives and incredibly even some UKIP – which says a great deal about the liberal credentials of some erstwhile supporters.
There is, I think, a core vote of Centrists and Kind Young Capitalists (see Electoral Calculus) who really could be natural Lib Dems most of the time through thick and thin. I do respect the idea that we need to listen, but we also need to lead. That means proclaiming liberalism loudly. Ashdown and especially Kennedy’s Party too often eschewed this because definitive statements sat awkwardly with being everyone’s second choice. When the time for unpopular choices came, it turned out we were very few people’s first choice. Let’s not make that mistake again. If we want to make it different next time let’s enter government as a liberal Party supported by Liberals.
I’m sad to say but James Fowler is quite simply wrong in his analysis what went wrong in coalition, as are many of our senior figures including Mark Pack. The problem wasn’t that there was no core vote, because there clearly was a core vote, but that Nick Clegg decided he didn’t like that core vote and instead chose to betray it once in power and instead dreamed he could create a new pure liberal core vote. But, despite support from people like David Laws and Mark Pack, he couldn’t.
Being blunt, there aren’t enough pure liberals to win a seat anywhere. There never were, and never will be. The Lib Dems succeeded because they moved on from the repeated failure of pure liberalism and allied with Social Democrats who historically were part of the old Liberal family, but had steadily drifted into the Labour camp as the old Liberal party became ever less relevant to needs and desires of ordinary people (i.e. the 90%+ who are not pure liberal).
So James, please don’t pretend that there is a core vote of anything more than tiny size which is pure liberal. That idea nearly destroyed the Liberal party from the 1920s to the 1950s, and Nick Clegg nearly destroyed our party in just five years chasing after it. It isn’t there.
All you will achieve is the final disappearance of our party from parliament, probably within two or at most three elections, and for those of us who believe the party exists to build and safeguard that fair, free and open society that will be a final tragedy. Of course for those of us who just like to talk about it with those few people who agree with them, they can go on achieving nothing for ever.