This week in Brexitland, June 20, 2024
What happens to the Lib Dems after the general election?
It is looking likely that the Liberal Democrats are going to do well on July 4th. Worst projections have them ending up on 35-40 seats, while more positive ones have them as high as 80. There is even talk of them becoming the official opposition if the Tory wipeout occurs. Some of this still strikes me as a little dubious - I’ve been through several iterations of “The Lib Dems are on the rise!” before - but it is worth talking about what happens to them after the general election.
Whatever takes place, the Lib Dems will be forced to define what they are about. In this election, being the “none of the above” candidates, defined mostly by Ed Davey’s stunts, has been perfect. The collapse of the Tories combined with the Lib Dems’ fun, all things to all people approach looks set to create electoral magic for the yellows. Yet they can’t pull that trick off again - at least, not without significantly worse results being likely. They are going to have to be about something at some point very soon.
What faces them after the election is the classic Lib Dem ideological conundrum. On one hand, you have Ed Davey as leader, a solidly classically liberal guy who happily served in a coalition government with the Conservatives and contributed a chapter to the Orange Book. Added to this, almost all of the Lib Dem seats are Tory facing and further, a huge chunk of their voters will be former (and if the Lib Dems don’t get this right, future) Conservatives. In one sense, on paper at least, the Liberal Democrats moving slightly to the right on a lot of things, becoming a fairly wet centre-right party, makes a huge amount of sense.
Yet on the other hand, you have the party membership, a lot of which is to the left of Trotsky (I’m exaggerating for effect, but not by as much as you might think). They really want to be to the left of Labour. A lot of them either felt some affection for Corbyn, disliked Corbyn on a technicality, or resented Corbyn for depriving them of the space they thought the Lib Dems could slide into post-coalition.
If the Lib Dems did become the official opposition, the majority of the activist base would want the party to attack Labour from the left. What this would result in would be an odd inversion of the coalition years - the Lib Dems taking a position that was against their future electoral interests, only this time the activist base would love every minute of it instead of hating it. The main thing both scenarios share is that the Liberal Democrats get wiped out in each of them at the end.
The one way I could see the Lib Dems definitely moving to the right would be the following: the Tories end up with more seats than them, but only by a small margin. So, ten more seats, let’s say. Then if Farage became Tory leader, it isn’t inconceivable that enough Tory MPs on the left of the party would quit and become Lib Dems. If that happens, a certain amount of rightwards momentum of the party might become inevitable, particularly when you add in that all of the new intake of MPs will be thinking about how they hang onto their seats. If the Reform/Tory/Farage party becomes definably and fixedly hard right, that leaves a huge gaping hole for centre-right politics that the Lib Dems could melt into. There would be a clash with the party’s activists at this stage, but all that would mean is that most of them would take the journey so many on the left have before them, quitting the Lib Dems for the Greens (where, come on, they would be so much happier).
One thing is certain about what the Lib Dems should do, whether they want to tack right or left after the general election: become a full-throated rejoiner party. Be unabashed in wanting to take Britain back into the EU. It’s where all of their potential voters lie, and being coy about this will only be to their detriment. Particularly if they are the official opposition, because this is the one area where all of their voters, in all of their seats, will agree with them. It is also a way to scare Labour into taking a more pro-European position. And then, you know what, the whole country wins. A country that might thank the Lib Dems at the ballot box for that come the next general election.
Thanks for reading. Hang in there, only a fortnight to go of this circus. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do, because I’ll be back here next week.
A very thoughtful and timely piece. I had been thinking along these lines.
All the main parties are internal coalitions, albeit the LibDems are a narrower big tent that the other two. I have not looked lately, but quite recently, conference votes on issues were typically split 2/3 to the centre left and 1/3 to centre right. I have been a member on and off since the 80's, but only active for 2-3 years in the early 90's when I saw how dirty and pro Tory the local newspaper was in Epping Forest, which made getting a pro LibDem piece of news into it, nigh on impossible. So I concentrated on being in a folk rock band instead.
I have never detected any hard left elements in the LibDems, but they can be pretty right on, on social & culture war issues. these are best kept quietly private or played down from around the public for now, in my opinion.
If the LibDems came second, it would be at least a minor revolution in British politics or even if close to the Tory representation, I can see the Tory wets coming over rather reluctantly to escape the Farage populist menace. I think the LibDems are flexible enough to absorb those, after all Labour have done worse recently. There was surprisingly almost no opposition to going in with the Tories. Activists were far from keen, but felt it had to be done for the good of country, considering the financial crisis and enormous deficit and recession. Also to see where it would go after decades in the relative wilderness.
Where the coalition went was a clutch of measures pushes through against Tory gritted teeth and being bounced into various and endless unpopular cuts. Then being blamed for austerity and student finance by the major party that insisted on them and held the purse strings. They then cynically targeted LibDem seats and blew most of them away, overturning some LibDem policies enacted and failing to overturn others on renewables, due to clever contracts written by Davey, until 9 years later. I see this as payback time with bells on it. Nasty Party fools acted as if they could be in power forever and could trash a potential future coalition partner and walk away as if that had been in a vacuum. The Tories now have no substantial potential partners in Parliament and Davey has said "never" to that. Even the DUP are suspicious, in trouble and shrinking.
There is a history of Centre parties on the continent and elsewhere, with more radical memberships who are pulled by a right wing magnet of business interests and electoral maths, eventually splitting and forming new parties. You can see some of this in the excellent Danish drama Borgen. It also happened in the Netherlands with the breakaway D66, the Party LibDem activists salivate over.
What we can't all have is a political party that perfectly reflects each of our beliefs, so the best compromise is all you can do. I would have been fairly happy to have a Heseltine wet pro EU tory party in government, but their activists would never allow that and the Tory wets nearly always side with their right wing in the end, which is decidedly not acceptable or any good for the country they have literally wrecked.
If we got PR through, parties would split and new ones would form in a dynamic and competitive process that can only be good, but the coalitions would tend around the centre and public ownership and long term planning could be maintained without the Tories getting unwarranted monopoly power and selling it off or closing it all down. If you look at Germany, having PR voting has not resulted in them having any more representative parties than in Britain.
Lets welcome a broad tent LibDem centre party able to govern Britain, alternate with ( hold your nose) Labour and push the right wing populists and liars into the wilderness, out of power for the distant future and get on with rebuilding Britain.
What a lovely world it would be if all shades of political opinion could belong to a party that really represents their beliefs. A big IF here but if the current volatility in UK politics can lead to an introduction of PR then smaller parties would not find it impossible to have a role in UK politics... which would also allow the majority who want closer ties to Europe ,and even to rejoin, to have their voice enacted.