Is this the end for the Lib Dems?

By Darrell Goodliffe

The Guardian today tells us that the Liberal Democrat leadership was planning to slay various sacred cows well before the election result was announced. This is hardly surprising; especially on tuition fees the leadership had wanted to rid itself of the pledge to abolish them for some time and, although Nick Clegg made some critical noises against the Conservatives’ economic policy during the election campaign, it’s fair to say that he was being true to his own views when he had talked of ‘savage cuts’ and spoke in praise of Margaret Thatcher. Clegg has a systemised world view that identifies the Labour Party as the main barrier to progressive politics, and far from being a natural ally is the natural enemy. Ipso facto an alliance with the Conservatives, especially their so-called ‘progressive’ element i.e, the ‘Cameroons’, makes sense from the Clegg perspective. If you want proof then look no further than his opus: the Liberal Moment.

Some aspects of our policy in government did not help (civil liberties, Iraq, a seeming total lack of concern for people’s lives) and alienated a substantial section of naturally Labour support that has now, repulsed by the Lib/Con alliance, partly returned to the fold. This is the reality of the shift in the polls. Labour has not made substantial gains in one sense, what we have done is return people to the fold; be they ex-Lib Dems or non-voters who were Labour but feel motivated by fear of the ConDems to now actively support their party. Clegg’s fundamental mistake is that the Liberal Democrats are much diminished without the protest vote. He has failed to build them into a party with a strong enough core to stand on their own two feet at any substantial height without the support of protest votes.

His one hope of doing this was electoral reform but as a cause even that now looks dead. Either AV will lose because Clegg quite frankly spat on the pro-reform alliance of Labour and Lib Dem voters or even if it wins it looks highly unlikely to benefit the Lib Dems. Even if the Yes campaign prevails against the odds reform will stop at AV because the Lib Dems will be too weak to push it further and even those who are pro-AV within the Labour leadership have made it quite clear it’s AV and no further. Since electoral reform hardly lights the electorate’s fire at the best of times it is hardly likely to when they are under the cosh so badly economically. So, Clegg has quite neatly tied himself and his party in an impossible paradox from which they cannot escape intact.

The polls are decisive in their verdict: the Liberal Democrats under Clegg are tainted indelibly in the public eye and there will be no return from this position. Electorates don’t forget something like this; they will be more forgiving of Labour over time because our faces have changed; but Clegg’s remains, permanently blemished, as the public one of the Liberal Democrats. Council by-election victories mean nothing because they are determined on minuscule turnouts and on the basis of local, not national sentiment. Even if the Lib Dems triumph in Oldham East and Saddleworth it will be a false dawn (because of the extenuating local situation). Nothing can change the long-term process or the overriding pattern.

Liberal Democrats who point to an increased paper membership are missing the point. It’s quite obvious why many of these people have joined; because they offer a slightly less competitive (than the Conservative Party) route into the corridors of power until the next election at least. Watch those paper members disappear like dew in the morning sun as the electoral problems begin and the party fractures apart. It would be a bit simplistic to say this is the end of Lib Dems on one level because parties invariably do not just vanish into thin air. However, through a complex process of electoral defeats, splits and fractures it is the end of the existence of the party in any meaningful sense.