Countering the coaliton: A few Lib Dem legends

The “Countering the coalition” column

By Hadleigh Roberts

In the days following the general election, the Liberal Democrat Party changed drastically. In part four, I looked at how Labour should treat the Lib Dems in a temporary coalition, now in part five I intend to look at the party in the longer term.

In a Politics Show debate between the three prospective chancellors, Andrew Neil asked a flailing Vince Cable “Isn’t the greatest myth of this election your reputation?” In some respects, he was right, because when the Liberal Democrats joined the Tories in government several myths surrounding the party were proven and others were dispelled.

It has now proven beyond doubt that the party is a broad grouping of people from across the political spectrum, or a rag-tag mob of unprincipled opportunists, depending on your register. Clearly, however, it can no longer be suggested that the Lib Dems are somehow more to the left than the Labour Party because with the exception of a few collaborators like Frank Field a Lab-Con pact is unthinkable let alone a full-blown grand coalition like in Germany.

Gone too is the myth that the Liberal Democrats are “equidistant” between Labour and the Tories as Paddy Ashdown had hoped. They best they can hope for now is to be known as watered down Tories, but considering that they are making up the numbers in a Tory government (as I set out in part four) this will be unlikely to comfort Labour tactical voters or anyone who voted Lib Dem to stop the Tory candidate.

Most importantly, we can no longer say that it doesn’t matter whether you vote for them or not because “they’ll never get in.” We now know that they can get ‘in’ and after all the interfering in the electoral system, it is quite possible that a permanent feature of government will be having the Lib Dems ‘in’. Fortunately, though, it is still true that whether you vote for them or not, their policies will never be implemented, just those of the party with which they side.

This presents an extraordinary opportunity for Labour. As the one and only party of opposition (ignoring ‘others’) we can legitimately and effectively steal what made the Lib Dems unique as a party, which is to take away the catchphrase of “the other two parties.” Throughout the debates, Nick Clegg tried continuously to emphasise or create similarities between Labour and the Conservatives. With the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives together, both of which will be defending their identical record in government (taking credit themselves for successes and blaming the other party for failures) the work is already done for us.

The Lib Dems threw away their independence as the third party; they are no longer a protest vote and can no longer claim to be an alternative, real or otherwise. It is now clearer than ever that it is up to Labour to resist the damaging austerity of the new conservatives, and the ones Cameron is leading as well.

The idea of the Lib Dems as an alternative to the Tories and as a kind of Labour substitute is an important one. It leads me to explain in more detail a point I made briefly in part four, which is to examine the case of the MoDem in France.

The MoDem is almost identical to the Lib Dems, from its orange/yellow colours, to its centrist rhetoric to its composition of left and right factions. It also provides an interesting precedent for what might happen to the Lib Dems in Britain from which we may draw some conclusions.

In the Presidential elections in 2007, the MoDem leader Francois Bayrou won a surprisingly large 18% of the vote. This gave the party a certain element of confidence before the local elections in 2008, at which he tried to assert his party’s independence as the ‘third force’ in French politics. The strategy was to refuse ‘bipolarisation’ and make deals on a case-by-case basis. Depending on local factors, the MoDem decided either to go it alone, campaign alongside the socialists or campaign alongside the conservatives. Consider the difference between what Lib Dems say and do in the North with the words and actions of Lib Dems in the South.

The strategy was confusing and opportunist, and showed just how little independence it really had as a third party, provoking internal dissent (notably in Lyon, a large socialist city) and their vote fell considerably.

The decline continued in the European Union Parliamentary elections in 2009, where the MoDem vote dipped from 12% to 8%, and it officially lost its ‘third force’ status to the Greens. There were two main criticisms that explained such a failure. The first was the MoDem’s lack of an ideological spine; the second was that the campaign focused itself too much on the personality of its leader. The parallels for Britain should be evident. Finally, in the Regional Elections in March 2010, the MoDem secured its worst score ever of 4.2% leaving the movement essentially moribund.

The MoDem lost because they failed to win credibility. The question we have to pose is whether the act of being in government makes the Lib Dems more credible, to which I would say no. Though they have a small amount of experience for a handful of ministers, they have lost or thrown away everything the party had tried to establish since the 1980s. They abandoned their position on tuition fees, they abandoned their position on cuts and it can only be a matter of time before the voters abandon them.

If Labour lost its soul during its period in office, the Lib Dems have sold theirs for a few ministerial cars (which Cameron then took away). Our job now is to make sure Labour remains credible in Opposition, which I shall discuss in my sixth and final article.

You can read Hadleigh Roberts’ blog at hadleighroberts.co.uk