‘When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame/One hasn’t got time for the waiting game’. So sang Frank Sinatra on September Song and it is hard not to mirror his impatience. In many ways the June general election was a disappointment for Liberal Democrats, but the way that politics has fragmented in the fallout from the vote does offer some points of reflection- not all of which are negative.
One theme of the summer was a revived interest in a new ‘centrist’ party that could lead the fight against Brexit. I’m sceptical about the need for another party, but it was interesting that few responded with the line ‘What about the Lib Dems’? As hard as it may be, Liberal Democrats have to face up to why- as a pro Remain and centrist party- they are not seen as a natural answer to this question.
A major problem for the Liberal Democrats is an inability to get a foot hold into the news cycle and its associated commentary and review platforms. The Liberal Democrats will need to start punching above their weight in order to get noticed and Vince Cable’s ‘I can be the next prime minister’ rhetoric was clever in this regard. The party also needs to stop feeling bashful about its role in the coalition government; much good was done and some mistakes were made, but owning it and being proud of that time and the good things achieved will be crucial.
One big opportunity for the Liberal Democrats is also a potential problem; namely Brexit. The party has managed to forge itself as the predominate political party opposing the UK’s exit from the European Union. While this did not result in an increase in votes at the last general election, there is good reason to believe this may change as the government’s handling of Brexit and the Labour Party’s mixed messaging starts to become apparent to the public. However there are two major negatives in the Liberal Democrat’s pro EU line. The first is the danger of being seen as a single issue party, there will need to be an offer to the public that goes well beyond the narrow arguments about the Brexit process. The second issue is that- after the financial crisis of 2008 and the following ‘austerity’- many voters see the EU as part of the ‘status quo’ that has seen people’s pay and opportunities diminish. Insisting the Liberal Democrats are the sensible and moderate party who oppose Brexit may well reinforce the view that we are the ‘business as usual’ party.
Indeed challenging the status quo must be a driving mantra for the Liberal Democrats throughout the next parliament. Much is taken- a lot misguided- from Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the French Presidential Election, but one thing that is striking was his ability both to marginalise the old guard and the new populists of both left and right on a centrist platform built on reforming and challenging the status quo.
In trying to develop a broad base and reaching out to a wider audience, the Liberal Democrats are going to have to look across the political spectrum for ideas and shared values, building walls based on tribal party loyalties will only reduce the scope for creativity and new ideas. Particularly, Liberal Democrats need to understand the appeal of the Corbyn phenomena and why swathes of people- not just the young- who are interested in values such as fairness and social justice.
Centrist politics finds itself in a peculiar position at the moment where many people articulate a desire for evidence based, pragmatic politics that are subject to the whims of ideological excess, but also feel that moderate politics is too timid to meet the challenges the country faces.
* Steven Duckworth is treasurer of the Social Democrat Group, which is being formed to celebrate and develop our social democrat heritage, and to reach out to social democrats beyond the party. He writes in a personal capacity.
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18 Comments
As I have said before, what do the Liberal Democrats have to say to London cabbies being undercut by Uber who do not need the same knowledge or even the ability to speak English properly, Port Talbot and Redcar steelworkers under threat by cheap foreign steel, the IT workers facing constant job offshoring, BBC and council staff outsourced to Capita having their jobs offshored, Southern / Northern and Merseyside railway guards under threat from government policy to axe them, and the drivers having to take on legal liability for their duties as well, prison officers facing the prospect of cuts and being outsourced to G4S, the tradesmen having to compete with foreign labour, Deliveroo workers on zero hour contracts facing attacks when out on their bikes, NHS / teaching / police / fire brigade facing cuts, the workers at Ford or Cadbury who have had jobs sent overseas and so on.
It is easy to see why the above are pro Corbyn / UKIP and / or Brexit voters / against liberal economics / against globalisation / against free trade deals / against free movement and immigration / against privatisation.
To many people the Lib Dems these days are seen as reflecting the least popular aspects of Conservative economic policy and the least popular aspects of Labour social policy – i.e. privatise everything, let everyone compete globally with the world, let everyone into the country and be soft on criminals.
That for many is the general perception of the party, rightly or wrongly.
Being defined as centrist pro-remainers? How inspiring. No thanks.
The first things to understand about Corbynism are
1 It is not essentially “far left” as we have unsuccessfully tried to ape the Tories by suggesting it is (in a sense, Thatcherism and its economic “tail” is far right).
2 It has successfully opened a big swathe of public opinion, possibly especially young people, to the view that post Thatcher neo-liberalism is not a successful and equitable form of politics and economics long-term.
Any attempt by us to come back, therefore, needs to acknowledge that, and far from “owning and being proud of” events in the Coalition years, we should in fact be acknowledging that facts have moved on. Steven is wrong in fact about the EU being the only argument in our recent election campaign and manifesto, and there were points where we were more radical than Corbyn, eg reversal of benefit cuts, and the need to strengthen public finances on a broader base for increasing taxes than a somewhat meaningless concentration on the “top 5% – or 1%” (or whatever Labour actually said). In fact “centrism” is not a very reliable position, when it seems the majority are not felling the status quo is particularly good.
As “Brexit reality” rolls out – possibly starting with TM in Florence today – it will become clearer that our position in the EU does not generally buttress inequality, and it should be our role to explain the international democratic advantage of what happens there, and the way that that democratic cooperation can and should help our people (there are numerous examples of Westminster / Whitehall denying UK people advantages that other peoples in the EU have had from European guidelines, as a for instance of things being Government’s doing rather than the myth of the EU stopping us doing things, or making us do them!)
The SDP was founded, in part to press the case for remaining pro European, and I would hope and assume that Steven maintains that case.
Centrism – one big yawn. A little but of this and a little bit of that adds up to a little bit of nowt.
Talk about another major policy first, then add Exit from Brexit, but say, what, the 1d on Income Tax for the NHS first for example, highlight it, take some of the pressure of E from B.
Keep hammering something else, it will get picked up in the publics perception.
corbynism/ labour largely represents those who have little capital/ investment in society, sell their labour power, rent, have precarious work. while Tories represent the owners of land, housing, organisations. Broadly, tories are in favour of neoliberalism, everyone else is against it, even if they don’t articulate it like that. So who and what do the lib dems represent? Middle class well off professionals who regret the brexit decision? that looks like it might well be around a 7% vote share.
The idea of a referendum of the deal falls down – there is no status quo to compare it with. Come whenever, if there’s a deal on Brexit, and it’s rejected, what happens? No deal, wto rules, everything gets difficult? Stay in the Eu on existing terms? what?
Centrism can be steady as she goes, but can also be radical centrism as in France. Much change, reform and preparation for the future. Vince get it.
The problem we face is summed up in Steven’s comment about our party’s “role in the coalition government; much good was done and some mistakes were made.” That may be how he wants to see it, but it is not true as far as the vast majority of voters are concerned. Until we accept that most people regard our role in coalition as at best “some good was done, but many mistakes were made,” we will continue to fail to connect with voters.
Nick was a prime example of this problem in his interview at conference, where when he was asked should he have been harder with David Cameron and left him to sort out his right wing extremists rather than simply have the Lib Dems as David Cameron loyalists riding to get him out of his mess, Nick effectively gave us a nice long humourous chat and concluded the only thing he could have done better was not to sit next to David Cameron during debates in the House of Commons.
It may be comforting for Nick and his supporters to think that was all that went wrong, but the evidence shows Liberal Democracy went catastrophically wrong from 2010 – 2015 and we paid. The problem is that we are still going downhill in the public’s mind and, until we realise that our unwillingness to face facts and change is the cause of our problems, things will just continue to get worse.
I agree with the essence of this article that it can’t be “business as usual” for the Liberal Democrats. We need to come up with policies that address the problems experienced by most of the population . Radical but not soft centre mush. We ran a campaign on Brexit and got fewer votes than we got in 2015.
As an aside, the September Song was written by Kurt Weil and first performed by his wife Lotte Lenya. Worth checking out on YouTube for their other songs as well.
It was Labour of course who won the Remain vote despite supporting Brexit – something that is even clearer today and yet they are even more popular. All the pro EU parties lost vote share; the Lib Dems, Greens, SNP and PC. Our reputation may be tarnished by the Coalition but the same does not apply to the others.
It all goes to show that mobilising the Remain vote will be very hard.
Geoffrey
A very good reference to great artists , Frank was one too but does not deserve credit for a song that belonged to Weil and Lenya and then Walter Huston and a host of others before the great singer from the suburbs of Hoboken !
ps
I like the views of Steven more than many here , we need to be at the centre of things again !
As Lord Tony Greaves stated on LDV as recently as June (and regularly does so);
“..we need to re-establish our credentials as the progressive centre-left Liberal party of British politics, not just an airy-fairy party of small-l liberalism which increasingly means all things to everyone apart from the populist right and hard left, and so nothing much at all.”
I have got so bored with recent repeated threads on this site, which speak of nothing but ‘Centrism’ or the oxymoron ‘Radical Centre’. As Shirley Williams famously observed:
” A centre party would have no roots, no principles, no philosophy and no values”
I joined the Liberal Party in the late 1960s because it was a party just as Tony Greaves described in his June thread. If this party is no longer a progressive centre-left party (as the themes of recent threads seem to suggest), then I wonder if I have a party to call ‘home’ in the current political scene. I have always been of the libertarian left, not the socialist left and have never seen the Labour Party as my natural home, or voted, or campaigned for them.
Personally, every time I hear or read the word ‘centre party’ a little bit of me dies inside. I don’t want to be a member of a centre party, I want to be in a Liberal party. Progressive, modern, radical, green and internationalist.
Why are we stuck on 7%? Because of the coalition and tuition fees. Vince said it in his speech: we still have work to do to scrub that stench off us. We have to serve our sentence. It will take time. But in politics the wheel does always turn. If we keep working hard on the ground, showing who we are and what we stand for, they will come back to us (two excellent examples last night in Chesterfield and Oadby/Wigston).
Centrism was always an iffy concept. In British politics usually amounted to party leaders impersonating Tony Blair’s presidential style, variations on the “third Way” and whenever the pesky electorate got in the way of a policy claiming that “we need to listen to people’s concerns and then do exactly what we were going to do anyway”. Those days are gone. It’s going to come down to adjusting policies so that they have enough appeal to the electorate to actually gain votes. In other words something more akin to grassroots politics.
I prefer centre-left to centrist myself, because centrism implies supporting the status quo. But frankly, neither the terms centrist or centre left mean much to the electorate, so we shouldn’t get too hung up about either. Besides, these terms mean totally different things to different people: some in the party who call themselves centre-right, are, in my opinion, actually centre left, in that social justice is a priority for them.
Instead we need to strengthen our actual brands: Liberal Democrat, and Vince Cable.
Politics over the next few years will be defined by Brexit. But that doesn’t mean we have to talk just about it. We can tie Brexit into many issues.
For example, we can talk about spending the £300m/wk dividend of Exiting from Brexit. (Note, this figure is from government figures) We could propose redirecting that money to, say, life long learning accounts. That shows our commitment to helping those for whom the system isn’t working. Also that, unlike Labour, we’ve identified a realistic way money can be raised.
We can also talk about the underlying reasons why so many voted for Brexit: the cost of housing, underfunded public services and fear for future employment prospects. We don’t yet have complete answers to these questions, which is why Steven (and Vince) are right to say we should look across the political spectrum for ideas. But we need to say, loud and clear, that the status quo isn’t good enough.
I hope the discussions that the Social Democrat Group will try to foster will help in that process.
Agree very much with TonyH except that, as someone who joined the SDP in 1983, I want to be a member of the sort of radical Liberal Democrat Party I was a founder member of in 1988 -not the Economic Liberal version we got between December 2007 and 2015 and which near completely destroyed us.
appealing to ordinary people appeals to me. The thing is the media like extremes, they make better stories and are easier to explain. there is such a huge gap in the middle of politics that sooner or later the opinion polls will reflect it. We need to make the centre ground sexy.