There is always something more important to write about in any given week than the Liberal Democrats. Even when the party was thriving under the late Charles Kennedy, a cartoon by Matt in the Daily Telegraph nailed the Lib Dem problem perfectly. He drew his cartoon in the intense autumn days after the 9/11 attacks, which happened to coincide with the start of the party conference season. Two men with beards, turbans and rifles are standing at the mouth of an Afghan cave. One asks the other: “Any news from the Lib Dem conference in Bournemouth?” Squish.
So even in a week in which a new Lib Dem leader is elected to replace Nick Clegg, it still requires some chutzpah to focus on what is now at best only the fourth party in the land. For Clegg’s successor confronts a desolate political landscape with years of hard-won, steady incremental growth now laid waste. The BBC’s head of political research, David Cowling, recently turned to Milton to express the party’s situation: “Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.”
So why bother? Partly because that sobering line from Paradise Lost points to one reason why it still nevertheless makes sense to think about the Lib Dems. That is because there is only one way out of the party’s predicament, and that way is up. And, just maybe, there are embryonic signs of that happening: Not only the more than 10,000 new party members since polling day, but also an interesting local byelection capture of a Tory council seat in Vince Cable’s old constituency at the start of this month. Small stuff, sure, but proof perhaps that the Lib Dems aren’t quite dead and buried yet.
There is a much more profound reason why the Lib Dems should be taken seriously, however. That is because, in spite of everything that has happened since they went into coalition with the Conservatives in 2010, the Lib Dems are still what it says on the tin: Liberals and democrats. Not many other parties are either of these things, let alone both of them, and still less with any consistency. If the voice of liberalism and democracy is to be heard in politics, it is still to the Lib Dems that we must most often turn first. Obviously, if you look narrowly at the situation of the Liberal Democrats, the picture is almost unspeakably bleak: Two-thirds of their votes gone in five years, six of every seven MPs, and 341 lost deposits (compared with no lost deposit at all in 2010). They have gone from reaping the benefit of being “none of the above” to paying the penalty for being “just like all the others”.
And because of that there is no easy restart button for the new leader to press that can return the party to the prelapsarian past. Yet if you think more widely about the society in which the Liberal Democrats exist, you see something very different and a bit brighter to consider.
Post-industrial Britain is in many respects a more generally liberal and democratic country than industrial Britain ever was. Here, and today, liberal values rule. The argument about human rights is no longer about whether they should exist. It is about whether they are best embodied at the national or the international level. Concern about abuse of power and authority is almost universal. Belief in the rule of law is pretty much rock solid. Sexual tolerance and racial equality have never been more widely entrenched. Extremism is rare. Internationalist, localist, environmental and humanitarian impulses are strong. This is newer than some may think.
As Nick Clegg has pointed out, these are lean times for liberal parties in many countries, not just Britain. The contrast in fortunes between the growing entrenchment of the liberal society and the growing weakness of the liberal party is a big one, but that contrast surely also points to the party’s possible path out of hell. It needs to prioritise the things that liberal citizens care about most and wish to defend. It needs to make itself the political voice of those for whom liberal values are decisive aspects of identity. It needs to make itself — unequivocally and at the expense of other things, if necessary — the party of liberal values. When Britain was an industrial society, when it was based on class solidarities and interests, its parties reflected those interests. In those days, liberalism spoke for an interest, the urban and aspirational middle class. But not now, and not for a very long time.
Now that Britain is a digital and increasingly postindustrial society, class interests are weaker determinants. Today values and identity matter far more. That is why nationalist and green parties have established themselves in the arena. Today the political loyalty of the liberal, educated, rights-focused, internationalist and environmentally aware section of the population is up for grabs. Who better to speak for it than the Liberal Democrats?
Since the election, some defeated Lib Dems have argued that their party needs to learn the lessons of the Scottish National Party or of United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip) and agitate for some sort of “populist liberalism” on issues such as climate change and the electoral system. This is to draw the wrong lessons from both modern populism and modern liberalism. It is also to misunderstand the opportunity that the increasingly rapid disintegration of the Labour project presents for a values-based liberal movement.
In a recent pamphlet, David Howarth, a former MP, and Mark Pack, a prominent online activist, argued that their party should have a strategy of building a value-based, centre-left core vote from the current single figure up to about 20 per cent. They identify their target voters as: Disproportionately female, young, educated to above degree level, inhabitants of London, on moderately higher than average incomes, serious newspaper readers, not religious and not white.
Some of the Howarth Pack argument stretches belief. Their core vote approach is essentially an appeal to a minority. Under the first-past-the-post system, it may win the party one or two student-heavy seats, but it may not do much for the Lib Dems in the seats they are left with, never mind in places like the south-west where they were so strong until recently. But they are surely correct that the right place for a liberal party to pitch its tent is among liberal-minded voters, not least because these voters are a distinct and engaged minority — as is shown by this newspaper, which was itself a product of traditional liberal values.
As Clegg has pointed put, these are lean times for liberal parties in many countries, not just in Britain. But these are fat years for liberal values and identities. The new leader should provide a party for those values. It may not take him to a government office, But it could make him the authentic voice of opposition that so many clearly crave.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
