Labour and the Lib Dems: What now?

Today, we will find out who will be the leader of the Lib Dems. Personally, I envy their short and – at least from the outside – seemingly quite collegiate contest. The Lib Dems are in a very bad place electorally and organisationally (as – of course – are Labour) but with new energy, under a new leader they could well bounce back.

It is widely expected that they will elect Tim Farron. On the left of their Party, Farron is a charismatic figure. He’s also a genuinely nice bloke. I’ve met him on occasion and always been impressed. He also has one of the best Twitter presences of any politician from any Party (which I hope he will maintain, but will probably be too busy to reply so often). He’s a very good modern politician. I expect him to do well for a battered and bruised party that needs a shot in the arm.

The Lib Dems will be fighting to come back from a very, very low base. I am unconvinced that as a collective, they have yet properly understood quite what happened to them in May. How soundly they were rejected and why (again, all things that could be said of Labour).

If they continue to duck the hard yards of self-examination needed, they may not come back as an electoral force. Few in Labour would shed a tear at their demise. For years they attacked us from our left, and then spent five years enabling a right wing Tory government. But perhaps we should think more nuanced and carefully about celebrating the demise of a Party who once held back the Tories in far greater numbers than they fought us.

The election result of 2015 was a disaster for both the Lib Dems and Labour and we should not be complacent or find comforting excuses for that. But equally, it was once again a disaster for the first-past-the-post voting system. While I was not a supporter of AV, I do now feel that some form of PR will be inevitable and rightly so. Labour should champion this. Not because it would be to our electoral advantage, but because we as a Party that believe in the championing of equality in so many other areas, the impact of one’s vote should be something we also regard as an equality issue.

Whether this happens or not, it is certainly the case that a Labour majority government is possibly a long way off. We have an enormous mountain to climb to achieve it. In the meantime, we may well need to think differently about how we work with other parties (and this has to include a more grown up conversation about the SNP than we are currently having, but that’s another post for another day). Both Labour and the Lib Dems are culturally very tribal parties. We cling closely and proudly to the specific values that make us different. Those are what we choose to emphasise.

When we are fighting each other – as we will again in some of the seats we took off them in excellent and hard fought battles such as those in Bermondsey and Old Southwark and Cambridge – this is perfectly right.

But it is worth remembering on both sides that the Lib Dems will be fighting for Tory seats far moe than Labour. In their top 50 target seats, 31 are currently Tory held. In the top ten, only one seat is Labour held. Lib Dems will need to re-convince those anti-Tory Labour voters who could not bring themselves to vote for them this time that they should once again lend them their votes. They won’t do that by targeting their attacks on Labour at a national level. So while we can still expect all the fierce campaigning in key seats at a local level – something we will need to push back just as hard on – we should not expect an anti-Labour strategy as part of their national messaging.

If the Lib Dems learn that lesson and concentrate their fire on the Tory government, how should Labour respond? Well locally, we must make our case for our candidates and against our closest opposition. But nationally, we too need to be focused on giving the country a strong and viable alternative to the Tories. Bashing the Lib Dems was an appropriate course of action when they were in the coalition and implementing cruel policies like the Bedroom Tax. But they have been punished for that by the voters. Brutally. Continuing to attack them at this level does not do us any good, and in fact makes us seem irrelevant at best and bullies at worse.

The Tories – despite their actions – have only a wafer-thin majority. This week’s antics over the Hunting Bill proved it’s fragility. For Labour to take proper advantage of that we will need to look again at how we interact with other parties and the people who have voted for them.

This is not an argument to continue believing in the Progressive Majority – a theory that at least in the short term has probably been tested to destruction (in the long term, it must surely be the aim of all Labour members to create a permanent majority of support for progressive ideas and Labour as the best vehicle for expressing them). It is however, a call for a different approach to how we do politics.

To rebuild our Party we must cast a critical eye over every aspect of ourselves. Our policies, our organisation, our messaging. And our approach to politics. There will be no “one more heave”. If we can understand that and prepare properly for what that means to how we comport ourselves in public life, we will have a better chance of coming through this time stronger, fitter and better able to take office and once again implement the changes we know the country needs.