While the Liberal Democrats are busy digging their own grave, Labour needs to dig one for the Tories

By Sebastian Michnowicz

I was once told this joke: a Conservative and a Liberal Democrat are standing on the edge of a cliff. Who do you push first? The Tory, of course…business before pleasure. I think it sums up the current mood, particularly after the tuition fees vote. In all of the gloom of cuts, VAT rises, corporate tax-breaks and everything else the coalition is dropping on Britain, the Lib Dems have become an easy target and relentless Clegg bashing is one of the few pleasures we can enjoy in opposition.

I campaigned in Runnymede and Weybridge at the general election (someone had to). The Liberal Democrat candidate worked in the careers office of Royal Holloway College, part of the University of London and where I was studying at the time. He vociferously pledged not to vote for any increase in tuition fees. This, combined with the televised debates, turned a generally apathetic campus into one largely supporting the Liberal Democrats. For the first time, the Labour candidate had come third. As a CLP, we were absolutely livid; we thought it notoriously unfair a candidate should have courted support by making hypothetical pledges on a vote that may or may not happen. If only we had the benefit of hindsight.

This isn’t to say that the Liberal Democrats are mortally doomed because of their stance on one issue, but nobody could have predicted the ferocity of the student backlash against the tuition fee hike and all of a sudden the tide of public opinion is turning against them. Next year will see votes on changes to housing benefit and other services that make up the welfare state, something the Liberal Party of old laid the foundations of. With the Lib Dems already down at 9% in the polls, if they continue to vote in favour of Tory proposals, it’s likely they will do themselves decades of irreparable damage.

Who will stand to gain from the crumbling support of the Liberal Democrats? We will, of course. We already have, with such a sharp influx of disillusioned, left-leaning former Lib Dem members into our party. So too, will the Tories, which is why we have got resist the urge to attack the obvious target and focus on our natural enemy. If the Liberal Democrats remain hell-bent on destroying themselves then there is no point in our adding fuel to an already raging fire.

The reasons for taking this stance are manifold. Any progressive Liberal Democrat policies that made it into the coalition agreement are small in comparison to Tory proposals and media coverage of the big issues is likely to overshadow the occasional positive reform. The Lib Dems, who have all but lost their perception as a progressive party, will bear the brunt of negative press and will have few opportunities to try and reverse that.

Every time something positive happens, we have a beaming, rosy-cheeked David Cameron bringing us the good news. People will remember the announcement of the royal wedding, with Cameron emerging from Number 10 bearing the expression of a teenager who had just passed his driving test, lost his virginity and won the football pools – and all in time for lunch, too. If it’s bad news, then it’s brought to us by a sour-faced Nick Clegg or a mortified Vince Cable, tediously explaining to us why things are ‘fair’ and ‘necessary’. As the writer Charlie Brooker put it, if the Chilean miners had to be sent back underground, Clegg would be the one to telling us why it had to happen. As time goes on and things get worse, people are going to begin associating Conservatives with ‘good’ and the Liberal Democrats with ‘bad’.

For these, and other reasons, this ‘coalition’ government is only a coalition by name, a fact not lost on the Tories who, effectively have got the Liberal Democrats tied to a whipping post. With obvious exceptions such as Sarah Teather’s Brent Central seat, the Conservatives stand to gain the most from a Liberal Democrat demise at a general election, particularly in the South West where there are seats Labour has no hope of ever winning. Labour can’t win without taking seats off the Tories and this is why it so important to get the anti-Tory message out to the electorate; because even if Labour makes significant gains at the next general, these could be eroded by Tories capitalising on the Lib Dem blood harvest.

Labour did extremely well to win back control of as many councils as it did in May, but it has turned out to be a double edged sword. Although it is very likely more jobs will be saved in Labour councils than Tory ones, up and down the country people are demonstrating against cuts to services outside Labour town halls. The axe has been handed down to us from above and if we don’t make it plain to the people who rely on these services that these are Tory cuts, Labour will diminish, in the eyes of the electorate, as a strong, opposing, anti-cuts force and we could run the risk of spending another term in opposition, against a Tory government and not a coalition one.