The Lib Dems have had a much more enjoyable campaign than their rivals. Sir Ed Davey has been splishing and splashing all over the country. On Monday he jumped off a crane attached to a bungee cord while imploring people to ‘do something you’ve never done before: vote Liberal Democrat!’ A few days before he was at a theme park. We will see in the early hours of Friday morning if his stunts have paid off.
We can see where the Lib Dems’ comfort zone is, and the party still retreats there when it can
It hasn’t all been bungee jumping and rollercoasters. Alongside all that, the Lib Dems have remained disciplined in the seats they are targeting. One senior Lib Dem source told me: ‘[it] still feels like the Conservative campaign just hasn’t turned up in many of the seats we’re fighting seriously. That’s partly about them realising how grim their prospects are and moving resources to safer seats but also seems to reflect complete financial bungling over their election plans, without enough funds to run the sort of target seat campaigns they are used to. It’s perhaps a fitting metaphor that having wrecked the nation’s finances, they’ve now wrecked their own finances too.’
Polling puts the party somewhere in the region of 11-13 per cent. They will surely be disappointed if they don’t get close to the 50-seat mark. Indeed, if there is a Reform surge and high levels of anti-Tory tactical voting, it is not impossible that they will become the official opposition with all the benefits (short money, parliamentary time) and downsides (greater scrutiny) that would bring. However things play out, we can expect Sir Ed’s party to have a significantly greater number of MPs than they do now. It means they are going to have come up with an answer to the question: ‘What is the point of the Lib Dems?’
There is a natural tendency within the party to position itself to the left of Labour, or at least in the same ballpark. That is certainly where most of its activists and voters feel more comfortable. New research from YouGov uncovered both high levels of anti-Tory tactical voting and almost no difference in the views of Labour and Liberal Democrat voters. It put 24 policy and sentiment statements to backers of the two parties and found no statistical difference in responses to 20 of them.
This included 83 per cent of Lib Dems and 86 per cent of Labour voters agreeing that ‘utilities like energy, water and railways should be run in the public sector’. To the statement ‘When it comes to taxing and public spending, the government are taxing too little and spending too little on public services,’ 51 per cent of Lib Dem supporters agreed, while 50 per cent of Labour backers did.
We can see where the Lib Dems’ comfort zone is, and the party still retreats there when it can. For instance, it could not help but call for a British arms embargo towards Israel. Only they can explain why a party called the Liberal Democrats would in any way want to jeopardise the Middle East’s only liberal democracy from defending itself and defeating a terror organisation. This tendency does not seem appropriate when we are set to be confronted by a decimated Tory party likely to be completely overtaken by the populist right and a Labour government that will surely move more to the left than Sir Keir Starmer is currently prepared to admit.
The Lib Dems should carve out a space in the classical liberal centre by pushing back against the statist tendencies that Starmer already displays and against the increasingly nasty Tory rhetoric. If growth is going to be the name of the game for the next few years, and it needs to be, Davey and his economic spokesperson (currently the not all that impressive Sarah Olney) must shout from the rooftops about the benefits of liberal, free-market economics.
Members of the party used to advocate for such things. Twenty years ago, some of them published The Orange Book, an attempt at ‘reclaiming liberalism’, as the subtitle put it. One of the contributors was Davey. He called for a liberal approach to localism, writing:
Freedom to experiment has proved to be one of the greatest attributes of free-market societies. Yet Britain’s centralised state is not well designed to mirror the private sector’s ability to innovate.
Pleasingly, the party manifesto this year vows to ‘decentralise decision-making from Whitehall and Westminster by inviting local areas to take control of the services that matter to them most.’
The section on the economy also offers some hope too:
Our priority for tax cuts, when the public finances allow, will be to cut income tax by raising the tax-free personal allowance, benefitting the vast majority of families and taking more low-paid workers out of paying income tax altogether.
We all know that even after all the stunts, the reality is that Davey and his party will not be in power to implement their manifesto. However, with more numbers on the green benches they have an opportunity to advocate for classical liberal ideals. They should seize it.
Comments