The Liberal Democrats gathered this weekend for their final spring conference before the general election. You may be forgiven for not knowing this.
The fourth-largest party barely feature in current political discussions lately, and are flatlining in the polls even as the government sinks ever lower. Only one in three voters has an opinion on party leader Ed Davey, and even fewer have much idea what his party offers. The costs of Brexit are mounting up, yet its most steadfast opponents are struggling.
Instead, it is the most pro-Brexit party of all, Reform UK, which is making the political weather: making headlines, surging in the polls, and last week winning their first MP following the defection of Lee Anderson. It is tempting to write the Lib Dems off as irrelevant to the great Tory-Labour contest to come.
Resist the temptation. National polling and national coverage are the wrong metrics to judge a party whose electoral fate turns on local organisation and local support. The Lib Dem picture is much rosier viewed through this lens. Their disappointing 2019 election gifted a valuable legacy – dozens of target seats across the home counties where the Lib Dems are the strongest local challenger to Tory incumbents.
Three rounds of strong local election results, with a fourth likely in May, have built on this legacy. The Lib Dems are also a force again in local government, with many of the biggest gains coming in their home counties battlegrounds. They now often control the local council in their target seats. This is the kind of launchpad that has in the past propelled Lib Dem MPs into parliament.
Several have been propelled there already in this parliament’s byelections, which have featured four Lib Dem gains from the Conservatives, the most in one parliament since 1992-97. The huge swings in seats like North Shropshire have underlined the return of the Liberal Democrats as a formidable campaigning force, and provided new strongholds to defend in the general election. A Conservative party facing electoral collapse on a broad front may well give these seats up as lost.
National obscurity is also helpful for a party whose intensely local approach to politics works best when they can function as political chameleons, shifting their colours to fit local conditions. The Liberal Democrats struggled most when their national profile was highest, first in the coalition and then as the party of radical remainers in the Brexit years.
A lower national profile is helping Lib Dem activists tailor their local campaigns. The party is becoming an acceptable outlet for discontented Conservative moderates, who are no longer held back by the spectre of Jeremy Corbyn. The Lib Dems are also benefiting from a sharp rise in tactical voting among Labour partisans, who have come to see defeating Tories as their top priority.
The rise of Reform UK is also, paradoxically, beneficial to the party which is their antithesis, as Reform siphon off Tory votes out of reach to the Lib Dems. It was the risk that a split Leave vote would help elect Lib Dem remainers that persuaded Nigel Farage to stand down his Brexit party in Tory seats in 2019. This risk doesn’t seem to bother Farage’s successor, Richard Tice, who has pledged to stand candidates in every Conservative seat. Ed Davey will be the biggest beneficiary if Tice sticks to his guns.
The Liberal Democrats enter this election season stronger than they look. The hunger for change that drives Labour’s current lead in national polling will also power local Lib Dem campaigns in the Tory seats where they are the only viable alternative. But if the winds of change blow too hard, they become a problem. The prospect of a Labour landslide will alarm Tory moderates, who want their party punished but not destroyed. It will reassure Labour partisans that a second-best tactical vote isn’t needed. Conversely, Lib Dem MPs will have more influence in a narrowly divided Commons. A desire for change, but not too strong. A Labour win, but not too big. For the Lib Dems, moderation in all things is the road to success.
Rob Ford is professor of political science at Manchester University
