10 Comments

• Hugh p 30th Dec '12 - 5:37pm

  Here, from the pen of Edmund Burke (no less), some six months after the fall of the Rockingham government of 1765-6, is the case for the attractions of being in opposition :

  It may possibly … come again to our turn [in government]. But I see this Event, (if I see it at all) at the End of a very long Visto. The View is dim and remote, and we do nothing in the world to bring it nearer, or to make it more certain. This disposition, which is become the principle of the party, I confess, from constitution and opinion, I like : Not that I am enamoured of adversity, or that I love opposition. On the contrary it would be convenient enough to get into office ; and opposition never was to me a desirable thing; because I like to see some effect of what I am doing, and this method however pleasant is barren and unproductive, and at best, but preventive of mischief ; but then the walk is certain; there are no contradictions to reconcile; no cross points of honour or interest to adjust; all is clear and open; and the wear and tear of mind, which is saved by keeping aloof from crooked politics, is a consideration absolutely inestimable.
  (letter from Edmund Burke to Charles O’Hara, 23 December 1766)

  Yet Burke was, to my mind, wholly wrong in preferring the comfort of opposition to the “crooked politics” of being in government, for the fact that Burke and his Rockingham Whig colleagues were out of government in the crucial years leading up to the American War of Independence meant that the relationship between Britain and our American colonies was comprehensively mishandled, and on any view things would have gone better if the Rockingham Whigs had been in office.

  Are there lessons to be learned from this today ?

• Labour member 30th Dec '12 - 6:07pm

  Well, the shocking thing would be if the poll said Lib Dem members were opposed to the coalition – party members are essentially loyal to their leaderships. Think of my party (Labour) under Gordon Brown or even Michael Foot.

  The 9% who think the coalition will be good for your electoral prospects next time round are deluded though – but then so are those that think you can cut and run. You have to stay the course now, I think. (Although I am a Labour member I don’t think you had any choice about going into coalition, what has gone wrong since is your party’s failure to know what it wants and/or to believe its populist propaganda from opposition that governing was easy and there were loads of silver bullets just lying about.)

  What is missing is any sense of a strategic goal – that used to be constitutional change but frankly, the coalition has made the Labour government look like star performers on that front. The “fairness” narrative doesn’t cut it in my view – tax allowances are too ethereal. You try having something to say on public services, where nobody in the government seems to have any sort of message at all.

• Jack 30th Dec '12 - 7:44pm

  You realise this are a largely meaningless set of numbers, right? Your poll was not randomised, the sample set you’re working from was self-selected: lib dem members who wanted to join your forum and were then willing to answer your poll. Do you think that sample gives you useful information about any wider population? That it’s telling you important or useful information about the Lib Dems? Lib Dem voters? Lib Dem members? But I can tell you with total assurance that if it does it’s more by luck than judgement.

  Seriously leave the toy “polls” to bad tabloids, it’s embarrassing to see such effort devoted to reading runes from such worthless data.

• Stephen Tall 30th Dec '12 - 7:58pm

  @ Jack – feel free to dismiss them if you like. But it’s probably worth reading the links included in the post about the surveys’ reliability/credibility first.

  For further information on the reliability/credibility of our surveys, please refer to FAQs: Are the Liberal Democrat Voice surveys of party members accurate? and polling expert Anthony Wells’ verdict, On that poll of Lib Dem members.

• Andrew Suffield 30th Dec '12 - 11:14pm

  what has gone wrong since is your party’s failure to know what it wants and/or to believe its populist propaganda from opposition that governing was easy and there were loads of silver bullets just lying about

  The thing about these two points is that neither of them are true. However, the statement as a whole is representative of an actual problem. The party does have a lengthy list of clear policies and a bright, shining statement of its fundamental beliefs – something which neither of the other two parties has. (What do the Tories stand for, beyond tax cuts for rich people? Does Labour stand for anything at all, beyond power to union cronies and bureaucrats?) Every opposition politician claims that easy solutions exist when they really don’t – it’s annoying, but that’s what voters demand to hear, and they won’t listen to anybody in opposition who says otherwise. A few party members may have believed this and ranted about it on the internet, but neither conference nor the MPs ever really did.

  The actual problem lurking around the statement is the media narrative that has sprung up, which is entirely unrepresentative of the party. The media is willing to take it as a given that Labour and the Tories stand for mystical opposing views where all of the nation’s bikesheds shall be repainted blue or red according to which one is currently in power, and never feels a need to examine their policies closely, but after years of ignoring the LDs the media is suddenly asking “Do they want to paint the bikesheds in red and blue stripes, or to mix the colours and paint them purple?”, and when LD politicians respond that they aren’t interested in bikesheds at all and would like to talk about income inequality, education, environmental issues, and housing…. well, there’s only 30 seconds left in the segment set aside for this soundbite so the presenter just shrugs and closes up.

  On silver bullets, the problem is almost exactly the opposite of the one you describe. We just came down off 13 years of spin-based Labour government. Blair and Brown responded to any problem with a flurry of noise and a claim that it was solved. One of those strongly-held fundamental beliefs of the LD party is that this does not work, and we need to get to grips with the real, hard problems. That’s what LD ministers have been trying to do, with some success – but when a problem comes up, the media (and, sadly, a few noisy party members who aren’t involved in the government) pop up to say “Where’s the silver bullet? What are you going to do now?” – and the truth is that they aren’t going to do anything now because what the situation calls for is to spend several days studying the problem and figuring out what to do about it, but it has become unacceptable to say this. We’re stuck with increasingly unrealistic expectations about how much our government can actually accomplish in a given year, and the media is unwilling to accept that one person with a staff of three can get maybe a couple of projects done each year.

• Leekliberal 31st Dec '12 - 9:58am

  @Labour Member says ‘The “fairness” narrative doesn’t cut it in my view – tax allowances are too ethereal. ‘ I say that a supporter of the party that scrapped the 10% income tax rate thus hitting the lowest paid should be very quiet on this subject. Our achievement in taking millions of the lowest paid out of income tax is our finest achievement done at a time when resources are very lacking. To me it is immoral that Governments should tax people on minimum wage at all and this commitment should be in our manifesto for 2015. Labour Member should be ashamed that the Labour Party over 13 years in majority Government managed to WIDEN the gap between rich and poor while attacking civil liberties and fighting an illegal war! Labour also left an appalling financial mess for the Coalition to tackle. I find his faith in Labour touching!

• Eduardo Reyes 31st Dec '12 - 10:30am

  I think I’ve made this point before about criticisms of the data set in LDVoice polls. Polling outfits continue to lack the ability to properly poll us as a group, and engagement with the membership of LDVoice is pretty good. As with previous polls, it’s a mistake to try and dismiss difficult issues raised for the party by these findings.

  The findings feel authentic, and certainly track my changing attitude to the way we’ve played the coalition – I was always a sceptic, but I’m now actively disenchanted with the performance and judgement of most of our leading figures.

• Peter Hayes 1st Jan '13 - 5:11pm

  The polls are more relevant than some posters might think. It is a measure of how those of us who still go out delivering yet another Focus in the rain are likely to continue. In my case for the local MP and council rather than the party leadership, yes we have done a little to stop a few Tory excesses BUT we have done an abysmal job of explaining the limits of what we can do.

• Tom Wilde 1st Jan '13 - 7:40pm

  I don’t agree that the poll was unrepresentative. The 500+ votes cast on the members-only forum must surely represent a very significant slice of the party’s current membership?

• Labour member 3rd Jan '13 - 7:52am

  ” Labour Member should be ashamed that the Labour Party over 13 years in majority Government managed to WIDEN the gap between rich and poor ”

  Not actually true. But shouting about Labour’s record doesn’t help you in your current predicament anyway, even if it makes you feel better.

  The issue here is what are the Lib Dems going to do to save themselves from a verynasty beating at the hands of the voters. My point is that I think an argument about tax thresholds is not one that voters connect with.