Cross-posted from the International Business Times:
Forget a week being a long time in politics. In this hyped-up, ultra-connected world 90 minutes on television can see your electoral fortunes transformed. And so it is that, as I write, the Lib Dems have just been placed in the lead in the opinion polls for the first in the party’s modern history, with 33% of the vote, leading the Tories on 32% and Labour slipping back to just 26%.
This is heady stuff for a party accustomed to being sidelined by the national media as a distracting irrelevance from two-party politics. All Lib Dems are acutely aware it might not last; we have witnessed too many false dawns not to worry that this might be another. And yet there is a sense that this time it might just be different.
Here’s why. Though all the media focus has centred on Nick Clegg’s winning leaders’ debate performance, it’s clear that the Lib Dem surge had already started before he reached the ITV podium. An ICM poll mostly conducted before the debate showed the Lib Dems climbing to 27% on the back of a manifesto launch which earned generous plaudits from the media. Mr Clegg’s confident showing, besting his Labour and Tory rivals, was the icing on the cake.
What is it then about the Lib Dem campaign which is striking home with the public, earning the party unprecedented news coverage and even more unprecedented public support?
Partly it’s timing. Though the immediate controversy over the expenses scandal has subsided, the British public remains cynical, jaundiced – and yet, ironically, all the more open to a party which preaches the optimistic message that politics in this country can change. Nick Clegg has understood that mood better than his fellow leaders, and is sticking to his twin, key themes: Britain can change, Britain can be fairer.
Partly, too, it’s that the Lib Dems are in a stronger position now than at any time in the last 80 years. We currently have 63 MPs, but are in second place in another 190 constituencies: which means in some 250 seats up and down the country the Lib Dems are a viable choice for voters who might previously have worried about wasting their vote.
But this polling surge is also a reflection of positive support for Lib Dem policies. It isn’t just that the party had the courage to oppose the war in Iraq while Labour and the Conservatives were lining up behind President Bush. It isn’t just that Vince Cable was far ahead of his political rivals in espying the economic troubles, and in proposing radical, workable solutions. And it isn’t just that the Lib Dems have long advocated root-and-branch reform of this country’s broken political system to restore public trust in our democracy in the very teeth of Labour and Tory opposition.
That the Lib Dems are at last seeing a polling dividend is a reflection of all this, yes. But, more than that, it is a very public recognition that just because the two old parties have alternated government for the last 65 years is no reason why they should have the automatic right to do so for another five years. And it is a very public recognition that Nick Clegg’s party has much to offer Britain, and deserves the opportunity to become a major force at this election.
If that happens, politics in this country will never be quite the same again.
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3 Comments
Isn’t this election the final vindication of killing FPTP softly with bar charts?
Probably the former, maybe the latter. Or somewhere inbetween!
You should have said more clearly that a big part of this is due to the groundwork done by thousands of Liberal Democrat activists, some of us who have put a lifetime of work into maintaining an active third party, not because we expected any personal reward from it apart from satisfaction, but because we did it as a service to democracy.
I’ve been doing this for over 30 years, others for more than that. When I joined the party, there were still some members old enough to remember the last Liberal government. People have joined the party as youngsters, spent a lifetime as active members, and died, knowing only that the party was still alive thanks to them. If this time we do win through, and is still a big if, we owe a HUGE amount of gratitude to them.
The Westminster bubble writes off local activity as a useless side issue, but what do they know? They’re still making their predictions on the basis of a national swing based on national image, but it doesn’t work like that. We’re winning now for a large part because the other two parties did not maintain their activist base. Labour has destroyed it, few of the people who once put in the work locally want to do so when it’s become Tory Plan B nationally. The Conservatives think that “modernisation” is parachuting in Westminster bubble people to the sticks, just another sign that almost everything they do and say is one big contradiction – which is now obvious and so falling to pieces. Smash up society and moan about how “broken” it is. Render people into useless dummies because big business ad-man run free-market turns them into passive consumers, and then go on about “big society”. If you’re a public school millionaire who knows nothing about how 99% of the population live maybe this looks realistic, but the Tory campaign this year looks weirder and weirder than ever, just so out of touch, so many silly theoreticians putting forward ideas anyone on the ground knows won’t work. A big reason it won’t work is because past Tory governments smashed up all the little social things that used to bring people together.
We still have plenty of cheerful people running things on the ground, and they are in touch with ordinary people because they have to be, otherwise how would they have ever win votes when (as David Yelland tells us in an amazingmea culpa in yesterday’s Guardian), the national media has a deliberate policy of pretending we don’t exist. As I’ve already said, with the drop in donkey-vote party loyalty and less national media coverage of politics, the local campaign counts for much more than it has for many years.
The big thing we always hit in local campaigning is people fearing they shouldn’t really vote for us, especially in national elections because maybe it’s a bit silly as it still doesn’t quite fit in with what the national media tells them politics is all about. This credibility problem has been considerably broken by what has happened in the last week. Not only will people remember, where we do, that yes we do work for them all year round, now they’ll be looking out for our material as it comes through the door.
So I think actually, it’s the national image success that is aiding the local campaigning rather than the other way round. This will be seen in the election results, where we work we will win.