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Saturday 22 November 2008

Politics

Nick Clegg or Chris Huhne: no one can change the Lib Dems’ failure to find a niche

Stephen Pollard on the Lib Dem leadership race

British politics is in equilibrium when a moderately left-of-centre party is opposed by a moderately right-of-centre party. The only plausible reading of the past three decades is that voters’ default preference is for a sensible social democrat government and that they turn to the Conservatives only when the Labour party presents itself as unelectable. There was no mass embrace of Thatcherism in the 1980s. But there was a collapse in support for Labour, with the unilateralist, isolationist party managing just 27.6 per cent of the vote in 1983, and the barely improved version getting 30.8 per cent in 1987. Once it started to move to the centre, Labour re-entered the fray. Had it gone into the 1992 election with a leader seen by voters as fit to be Prime Minister, rather than with Neil Kinnock, then it might have closed the gap still more. But it still managed to reduce the Conservatives’ majority to 21.

As for the past three elections: if the Conservatives had been led by a combination of Solomon, Aristotle, Churchill and Bobby Moore, the party would still have been crushed. Labour was not merely electable under Blair; as a modern social democrat party, it really was the political wing of the British people, and so those election results reflected the voters’ default preference. The Conservatives did not have a prayer.

The Lib Dems’ fundamental problem is demonstrated by the one election in which the party did have a realistic hope of touching power. In the unique circumstances of 1983, the Alliance secured 25.4 per cent. In 1979, the third party vote had been 13.8 per cent. But this near doubling of the vote had almost nothing to do with any perceived merits of the Liberals. It was because the party had jumped on the coat tails of the breakaway Labour party, the SDP. The Alliance vote reflected merely the preference of the electorate for social democracy. Even in near-triumph, the Liberals’ weakness was exposed.

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