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Cosy up to the Lib Dems? No thanks…

June 25, 2012 9:36 am

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In recent weeks there have been various discussions and speculation about the future of the Liberal Democrats and their relationship with Labour. Some have made a comparison between Labour’s position in the 1980s and the Liberal Democrats today.  The theory goes that those who remain as Lib Dem members will be inspired by the failings of their leaders to do better in the future.

For that reason, some say we should cosy up to the Lib Dems and avoid conflict with them in case we want to form a coalition after the next election.

But that presupposes Labour cannot win outright on its own.  I don’t consider myself complacent but I do not share that defeatist view.  Labour is in great shape to win an overall majority next time.  Under Ed Miliband’s leadership, Labour is reinforcing its historic purpose as the only credible vehicle to deliver progressive legislative change.

Since being elected MP for Derby North, I have been struck by the determination and unity of purpose inside and outside Parliament to win back the trust of the British people. Surely Labour’s task over the next three years should be to consolidate its support all over the country?  The party’s membership is growing and large numbers of those new members and new Labour voters are former Lib Dem supporters.

Furthermore, there are enough Tory seats with a majority smaller than the Lib Dem vote to give Labour an overall majority at the next election.  Labour’s message is resonating with growing numbers of the electorate and we are now the only party with a genuinely nationwide appeal.  So why should Labour offer a lifeboat to the Liberal Democrats after they scuttled their own ship by facilitating the most vicious, ideologically-driven rightwing Government since the second world war?

They have betrayed virtually everything they claimed to stand for and have obliterated any suggestion that they are a progressive political party.  Let’s face it, if Cameron and his cronies are Thatcher’s children, then Clegg and his cohorts must be the nieces and nephews.

Nobody forced the Lib Dems to jump on this ride and nobody’s making them stay on board, but they are hanging on like grim death.

People are now asking: just what do the Liberal Democrats stand for?  Indeed, what did they ever stand for?  The truth is they are essentially a franchise with no underlying value-based ideology and don’t actually stand for anything.  They win votes by claiming to be an alternative to Labour in Tory seats and an alternative to the Tories in Labour seats.  In reality they’re not a genuine alternative to either.

In the last two years, for the first time, the Lib Dems have had a chance to make a difference, to implement their policies and show some political leadership.  Instead, they have shown their lack of competence, lack of policies and lack of values by jumping through Tory hoops and doing exactly as they’re told.

From the moment Nick Clegg stood with David Cameron in the walled rose garden of 10 Downing Street, the Lib Dems have been all too willing agents of Conservatism.  As a consequence they are as culpable as the Tories for every shameful decision made by this Government and are deservedly on their knees right now.  So it makes no sense for Labour to offer them any salvation when most people who lent the Lib Dems their votes regard them as fraudulent tricksters. The Tories chose to go into coalition with the Lib Dems because they were desperate for power and it was their only route to claiming it.  I don’t believe for a moment the majority of Labour members would consider it palatable to share a table with the Lib Dems now.

Moreover, so long as Labour remains focused on the values that the party has always held dear, values which are driving up membership and increasing support, fate will decree that we will not be reliant on the support of others in any case.

Chris Williamson is the Labour MP for Derby North

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  2. A warning for the Lib Dems
  3. Chancellor’s ‘cosy’ deal with the banks unravels
  4. Lessons from Europe: Should Ed cosy up to the St Paul’s protestors?
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  • Steven T Green

    Come on now Chris! Either the LibDems “have betrayed virtually everything they claimed to stand for” or they “don’t actually stand for anything” – which is it? Their problem seems to me they were (in the past) standing for two different things and their orange-bookers seized their moment leaving their centre-left lot in tatters. Just for the moment we don;t need to cosy up to the latter – they’ve nowhere to go. And the former are on a roll and won’t be interested in us.
    Anyway – this is all a bit optimistic!”Labour’s message is resonating with growing numbers of the electorate” If only. I’m a member and I have no idea what it is. I know the spin (as in a depression made in Downing Street etc etc) but for the life of me I’ve no idea what sort of party we are except in the most general sense. We might be beginning to think that possibly we could be slightly stronger about empowering ordinary people and turning the state into a vehicle to support people rather than the finance sector and capital in general – but I’ve no idea where that is leading or what it means in concrete terms. And the ever-present social democrat right is fighting back.Ed M is doing some very interesting thinking in public and we have time for that – but we haven’t positively engaged or enthused the public yet (or ourselves for that matter).

    Actually I quite like where we are in terms of developing our thinking. We now need to be brave, think the unthinkable and find a way to capture our 1945 radicalism in 21st century terms – tailored for  the calamity that will face the UK post 2015. People are ready to ditch the old (small c) conservative thinking but we have to offer them a real alternative.

    • treborc1

       Well said, I think a lot of people are not to sure of what and where Labour is going, Miliband speech at conference did not help  much either.

      In the end labour has to get enough people interested in voting when the vast majority I expect will think well vote for this one you get the same kind of politics vote for the other and you will basically get a carbon copy.

      labour Tory, Tory labour, where is the difference.

  • http://twitter.com/RF_McCarthy Roger McCarthy

    Except that the Lib Dems do have an ‘underlying value based ideology’.

    As Liberals they always supported free market capitalism and possessive individualism as that is what liberals do.

    Joining with the SDP did not convert them into Social Democrats of however right wing a persuasion – it converted the relatively few SDPers who stayed active in the merged party to liberalism.

    Those values and that ideology were clearly laid out in The Orange Book – but our commentariat (who unlike the rest of us are actually paid very good money to read such things) not to put too fine a point on it actually LIED about the Lib Dems right up to the Guardian’s recommendation for us to vote Lib Dem.

    So that scene in the Number 10 rose garden was not in any sense a betrayal – rather it was a consummation of a marriage based on common values and interests.

    What would have been a truly unnatural union would have been a coalition of the Lib Dems and Labour as the price Clegg and his clique would have demanded would have broken and divided our party – and been intended to do so.   

    • Daniel Speight

      So the ‘commentariat’ lied about the poor old Liberals. OK, but are you sure the Liberals didn’t tell a few porkies of their own? Or maybe the Liberals didn’t mind the voters thinking they were something different to what  they are?

      I wonder what those students who voted Liberal on the promise made in that pledge think?

      • http://twitter.com/RF_McCarthy Roger McCarthy

        Of course  the Lib Dem boosters in the media and academia were also lying to themselves – Polly Toynbee for instance was certainly well aware of the existence of the Orange Book and it’s ideological significance but wilfully chose to pretend to herself and her readers that in coalition with Labour this free market fanaticism would be toned down while the things she really cares about – constitutional reform – somehow wouldn’t.

        Had she and her confreres ever taken Marx seriously (and the signatories of the what should be infamous letter I attached as an image to my comment above included at least two writers who have published popular books on Marx and Lenin….) they’d have known that the economic always trumps the political and that faced with the choice between their free market economic and reformist political agendas the Lib Dems would quite rightly go for the economic one.

        As for the LDs own lies nobody (least of all themselves) actually took seriously their manifesto commitments as they knew full well that they could only enter government as junior partners in a coalition.

  • Adam Hewitt

    I think we’d probably have a majority Tory government right now (scrapping housing benefit for under-25s and bringing back a two-tier education system to favour the elite – instead of just talking about it) had the Lib Dems not gone into Coalition. They thought it was the right thing to do, and that as a third party, they couldn’t turn down the first chance of actually influencing Government for decades. Obviously most people and former voters disagree or don’t see it that way, or haven’t thought through the consequences of a supply-and-confidence agreement in mid-2010.

    As a left-of-centre Lib Dem voter, though, I still don’t know where Labour stands on all sorts of issues, because of your own internal tugs-of-war, and because of a lack of trust regarding the events of 1997-2010: Immigration. Welfare. Crime policy. Ed Miliband sounds better on foreign policy and civil liberties and the environment than Labour did in government, but those are all areas where it’s particularly easy to sound good in Opposition. I think you’re making good political capital out of the cuts, but in reality your top team know they’d need to make a huge amount too, and I’d like to know where.

    Obviously a sitting MP can’t talk about possible future coalitions very easily, that’s clear, and I know there are a few senior Lib Dems who Labour could never work with. But the sheer tribal-ness of Chris’s post is disappointing: it shouldn’t be seen as ‘offering salvation’ to the Lib Dems, it should be about working together in the interests of the country and anti-conservative values. Anything else is just, dare I say it, putting party above people.

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Pelton-Level/100001426773952 Pelton Level

       As a left-of-centre Lib Dem voter, have you EVER known what the LibDems stand for? Where I live (predominantly Tory) and where I was brought up (predominantly Labour), they seemed to stand for bogus statistics and the slogan Labour/the Tories (respectively) can’t win around here.
      At the last election it seemed that the LibDem cookbook instructed their candidates to attack incumbent Tory and Labour MPs about their expenses claims, as if they were squeaky clean themselves (as exemplified by the soon-to-be rehabiliated David Laws).

    • robertcp

      I agree.  You would think that the Labour government was a wonderful left of centre government.  It was not and it was also clear that many Labour MPs would not have supported a left of centre coalition in 2010.  Mainly for silly tribal reasons.  

      The Lib Dems are now Labour’s political opponents and we should show them no quarter before the next General Election.  After the General Election, the mathematics might mean that Labour will have to work with the Lib Dems. 

  • Brumanuensis

    I’m going to propose a rather more cynical justification – although I’m sympathetic to what Chris Williamson writes.

    In the run-up to the last election, Cameron and Clegg were unremittingly hostile towards one another in public and traded some fairly heavy blows about policy and personality. But when an opportunity to form a government arose, they happily made a virtue of necessity.

    If Labour is in a similar position of being the largest party and needing Lib Dem support, the Lib Dems will come to us and we can bend them as the Tories have bent them. In terms of crude power politics, we will always find a way of accommodating them to our needs, regardless of what we say about each other before polling day.

    But let’s hope we don’t need to.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Mike-Homfray/510980099 Mike Homfray

    I think we should definitely go for an overall majority – the way things are going the Libs will have few MPs in any case
    Because they are progressive on foreign affairs and equality issues, I think people did not take note of just how much they had returned to economic liberalism. There is really no difference between Laws, Alexander and the average Tory on economics

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