Five years in the wilderness is enough

By Sally Keeble

If you’re trying to make up your mind about who to vote for as our new leader, then take a look at what is happening at the Lib Dem conference.

They don’t look like a party that’s going to relinquish easily their new found power.

However vocal their grassroots have been on education, their influential rebels are mute on the critical issue – the economy. Even the more free-thinking of their ministers give logic-defying assurances that the cuts will be fair on the poor.They support their leader, despite the speed with which he’s ditched his own manifesto commitments, backing his judgement on the deal with Cameron.

This may be a coalition made in hell, but unfortunately for us, it seems to be holding. The Tories have got the Lib Dems mantle over the budget, the Lib Dems are integral partners in government. Whose fingers would be easier to wrench from the levers of power – Nick or David’s?

It’s a whole different ballgame from the electoral pact that we had with the Liberals back in 1974. We can’t assume that it will collapse as quickly. In any event, when that coalition collapsed, the party of government was the winner.

So to beat this coalition our new leader will need a radical agenda that takes on both the Tories and Lib Dems and wins back votes from both sides.

David Miliband has been building the broad public consensus that centre left government best serves the interests of the mass of the people. His campaign has been making Labour’s case in seats like my own that we need to win back from the Tories: where a collapse in the Lib Dem vote does not necessarily come to us. Polls show that David is the leadership candidate best placed to win over waverers, best placed to win back people we lost to the Tories and Lib Dems in 2010 and three times more likely to get us back into government at the next election.

David’s work with the Movement for Change has been inspirational in developing community campaigning skills with activists. They will be important in defeating the public fatalism that is building up over the October cuts.

And the Tories fear him. Not because he’s the most touchy-feely of our leadership candidates, or the most traditional Labour, or the most left wing. But because he’s the one who has the strongest critique of the Tory hegemony (which includes the Liberal Democrats) and can best beat them.

The Liberal Democrats had 80 years in the wilderness before they got a chance of government again. We had 18. Five is enough this time round.