What do the Lib Dems want out of life? It’s hard to be sure. They’re buzzing at the moment, assembling last weekend for a seaside conference two months after the most successful general election performance in their history. This maritime location gave their leader, Ed Davey, the perfect opportunity to show off his famed enthusiasm for water sports, a phrase which, in his case, could not be less sexual.
He arrived by jet ski to mild applause and some low-energy whoops, but he didn’t fall in the sea and nobody took the piss because, according to the new wisdom, you can’t argue with the electoral effectiveness of Davey’s splashing about. The party won more than six times as many seats as it had at the previous election and its leader’s otter-like frolicking, and the fun way it reminded the public that there are even nastier objects bobbing in our waterways than politicians, was what made the difference. Perhaps if Keir Starmer had deigned to put on a wet suit, he might have been as successful – which, pro rata, would have increased Labour’s complement of MPs to 1,322 rather than the paltry 412 it’s having to make do with.
But what are the Lib Dems’ hopes for the future? Does Davey plan to remain the UK’s most amphibious MP or was it just the sewage that drew him to the water? He announced last weekend that he wants the Lib Dems to become the party of rural voters who, he says, “need a party that understands them and is willing to stand up for them, and that’s what we’re going to do”. It would provide ample scope for visuals. He could become a sort of one-man Last of the Summer Wine, careering down hillsides in wheelbarrows and getting flung into silage pits, and then solemnly reminding the media of the challenges farming communities face, while having mud hosed off his face.
I suppose this is fine. At first hearing, the rural thing sounds a bit random. Then you realise it’s anything but. The party has gobbled up a lot of affluent county seats where the Tories had become a bit too shitty and mad even for voters used to coping with enraged livestock, and there are more seats like that in its sights. Apparently just 117,000 key votes redeployed to the Lib Dems at the next election would see them become the official opposition and a lot of those votes need to be won in constituencies such as East Hampshire, North Dorset and South Shropshire. So it might be worth Ed’s while sitting in a few duck ponds.
There’s an irony here. While this technique has the potential to turn the Lib Dems into one of the two main parties, it’s at the expense of an attribute that the two main parties always possess: standing for something. Labour and the Tories really do – so much so that they spend a lot of their time concealing what they stand for to avoid putting voters off. Labour is currently pretending it doesn’t, in its heart, want to tax and spend in order to use government to engineer a more equitable society. And the previous government was a relentless, and ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to pretend that Tories don’t, in their hearts, want to defund the welfare state and slash taxes because, fundamentally, their vision of freedom is of people solving their own problems. Those two parties shift towards and away from the centre, they row within themselves about emphasis, but they both have an underlying viewpoint.
What is the current Lib Dem viewpoint? Protect rural communities, clean up the rivers, invest more in the NHS and care sector, put up taxes for the rich – those are the issues they’re talking about. They all sound nice, but they don’t amount to a coherent political philosophy. It’s just saying stuff that will be well-received either nationally or in the particular places they’re targeting voters.
They used to stand for something but they’ve stopped mentioning it. The Lib Dems always used to be pro-EU and in favour of proportional representation. I’ve sometimes voted for them because of those things. They used to talk a lot about them, and never mention rural communities at all, and now it’s the other way round. Have they made their peace with the first-past-the-post system now they’re doing all right under it? For the first time ever, a PR voting system wouldn’t win them significantly more seats, though it would transform the parliamentary representation of the Greens and Reform. It would also give the Tories about another 35 MPs.
If Ed Davey did become leader of the opposition after the next election, would he start to feel, like the two main parties always have, that turkeys don’t vote for Christmas? That it’s foolish to change a system under which you prosper? The Lib Dems have been exceptionally deft, of late, in targeting their resources so that, despite a vote share that hasn’t much increased, their representation in the House of Commons has sextupled. Having mastered this technique, are they still going to push for electoral reforms that would render those skills obsolete? Perhaps they’d be fools to do so. But what are they if they don’t?
Meanwhile, look at what has happened to the other major aspect of what used to be the Lib Dems’ political agenda: their pro-EU, and until recently explicitly anti-Brexit, standpoint. These days they’re almost as unlikely to suggest reversing Brexit as Labour is and, in their case, it’s even more absurd. But many of the former Conservative voters who delivered them seats in the English shires – and even more of the 117,000 converts they’re courting – voted leave. The Lib Dems can’t pretend they supported Brexit but they can avoid mentioning it, soft pedal it and claim “it’s not the issue we’re hearing on the doorsteps”.
So far it’s working. Who knows, they could become the UK’s number two party thanks to a tiny number of votes from people who fervently disagree with one of the two pillars of what used to be their political vision. And the other pillar was the principle that one vote shouldn’t count more than any other. It’ll look nifty if it comes off but it will also, even viewed with the tiniest bit of political or historical context, be utterly worthless.
