Swallowed whole

By Emma Burnell / @scarletstand

It is becoming clearer and clearer that anti-Labour tribalism is swallowing Liberal Democrat activists whole. Now I’m no one to talk, I am a proud and partisan Labour tribalist. But at least I have the self knowledge to recognise it. Lib Dems have pretended to be different and above Left/Right tribalism for so long, that picking a side has had an extraordinary effect on them.

Mark Ferguson has written excellently about Labour’s adjustment to being our of power and our recognition of the long hard slog we have ahead of us. There are also often written screeds about how well individual Lib Dem ministers are or aren’t adjusting to power. But what is little remarked on is how poorly the Lib Dems as a party are reacting to being in power – or more realistically, to not being in opposition. And the truth is they are adjusting very, very badly.

What seems to be lacking in the Lib Dem machine is any understanding of medium to long-term strategy. This is totally understandable in a party that only ever saw itself as opposition, as there was only ever a need to be reactive. But as soon as it became clear that that a hung parliament was on the cards there should have been better moves to bring in fresh blood that would understand how to be in power and how to maintain long-term equidistant prospects while temporarily forming an alliance. They haven’t and have combined a strategy of there being not a cigarette paper between the Lib Dems and the Tories on policy with a continued policy of vitriolic attacks on Labour at every level from activists to President Tim Farron.

This combination – along with the fact that those Lib Dem voters and supporters on the left who can’t stomach the coalition with the Tories are likely to have drifted away from the Lib Dems by 2014/15 – mean that the Lib Dems have permanently readjusted themselves to the right in the minds of both voters and supporters. This isn’t true for all supporters but is a strong enough to be the absolutely dominant narrative of Lib Dem thinking at the moment and for the next few years.

So here’s my marker:

If at the next election a there is a hung Parliament with Labour as the largest party, you will see articles in the Guardian and Independent and pieces on blogs like Lib Dem Voice etc outlining the following argument:

Voters have passed their record on the coalition government, and as such have returned a coalition majority. While it may be true that Labour may win the most seats/votes they will not have achieved enough to win the full confidence of the country as the coalition parties have. Therefore, if there is a hung parliament, the Lib Dems should stick with the Tories as that’s what voters who supported us expected us to do.

Labour needs to do two things to counter this threat.

Firstly – and frankly of course we should be doing this anyway – we should be fighting elections as if we are up against the whole coalition. This means that while the polls at the moment are good, they aren’t enough. We are only rarely beating the combined Tory/Lib Dem numbers. Our strategists (I should be one, me me me) should be looking seat by seat at our resources to maximise seat gain at the expense of the Lib Dems and the Tories (perhaps at the cost of seats where we might be fighting Plaid Cymru for example).

Secondly, our politicians need to take every opportunity to back the Lib Dems into a democratic corner, where they make a committment (a pledge perhaps? Perhaps not…) that in the event of a hung parliament, once again they will deal first with the party with the most seats. It won’t stop them from regneging (and when/if they do, expect further David Laws style fairy tales about how unwilling to deal the Labour team were (though our team should have a deal thrashed out that we can be happy with in advance so we aren’t stupidly and pointlessly caught on the hop again)) but it could shame enough delegates to their triple lock conference into not allowing an undemocratic government to stand.

Hopefully, I will never need to pull this post out in a future game of “I told you so”. Hopefully Labour will win a majority and start to undo the damage the government is doing. But this must be an eventuality we expect and for which we are prepared.