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Former senior Lib Dem researcher Gareth Roberts rues the right-wing swerve of Jo Swinson’s General Election campaign.
Let me declare my interest. Between 1994 and 1997, I was the Liberal Democrat Senior Researcher in Parliament.
It was a time I look back at with great fondness. There I was in my mid-20s doing a job I loved, swanking around Parliament like I owned the place. It was a time of Brit pop, Mandela, the Irish peace process, and the end of more than a decade of Tory Government. Things felt great.
It helped that I was lucky enough to be in that role at a time when the Lib Dems were in a good place. Paddy Ashdown’s party was a happy synthesis of the social democracy brought by the likes of Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams and the social liberalism of David Steel and Archie Kirkwood.
Things Could Only Get Better
The Lib Dem manifesto for the 1997 General Election, which I helped draft, was all about “unleashing potential” and included commitments to the NHS, state education, social security and full employment. There were proposals for a hypothecated taxation system, a Human Rights Act and devolution.
It was all good.
In the two years prior to 1997, Ashdown had been in careful talks with Tony Blair. Ashdown’s vision was for a centre-left coalition which would reverse much of what had happened under Margaret Thatcher and John Major and provide a rather hefty and natural buffer against any potential future right-wing government.
He envisaged, with Blair’s acquiescence, that in return for throwing the Lib Dems behind a Blair Government, the Lib Dems would be given proportional representation – which would ensure, in perpetuity, a greater Lib Dem presence in Parliament going forward.
In the event, even though the Lib Dems did well in 1997, the Labour landslide was such that Blair didn’t need the inconvenience of a deal with Ashdown and the proposals were quietly shelved.
Most of us understood this. Indeed most Lib Dems – certainly the ones I knew – were perfectly content at the prospect of a Blair Government, as most of us had grown up under the Tories and just wanted them gone.
I left Parliament shortly after the 1997 General Election. I felt I’d done my shift and needed a new challenge.
The Orange Bookers
The party I left did not see itself as a natural replacement for the Labour Party, but rather, rightly or wrongly, as its social and liberal conscience. On some issues, such as tuition fees and the invasion of Iraq, the Lib Dems would outflank the Blairites on the left in the years between 1997 and 2005.
But, as Charles Kennedy – who had replaced Ashdown – struggled with his own particular demons, the party started to change.
The Orange Bookers published their pamphlet in 2004 – a manifesto for the economic liberalism espoused by David Laws, Ed Davey and Chris Huhne. The Ashdownian acceptance of the dominant and necessary role of the state was replaced by a neoliberal belief in the supremacy of the market.
I didn’t really take much notice of this shift. The party had always been a fairly benign coalition of social democrats and traditional liberals and, although I didn’t agree with the sentiments of the Orange Book authors, I liked them personally. I was not awake to the fact that the new political strategy was to supplant the Labour Party as the main opposition to the Tories.
Which is why, in May 2010, I confidently, though wrongly, predicted to anyone who would listen that the Lib Dems would not under any circumstances enter into a coalition with the Tories. I even went so far as speaking to some of my former bosses who assured me that such an alliance was unlikely.
Things Can Only Get Bitter
It took an hour for the Lib Dem parliamentary party to overwhelmingly back the idea of going into coalition with David Cameron in 2010. One hour. Only Charles Kennedy voted against.
Not that it matters but I left the party that day – and I have not been back since.
I wrote at the time that getting into bed with an ideologically motivated party would only end badly for the Lib Dems. Austerity, I asserted, was an ideologically driven position, not an economically driven necessity. It doesn’t give me great pleasure, but I think I called that right because, as we all know, in the 2015 General Election the Lib Dems were decimated. The Tories brutally destroyed them as a political force as David Cameron pursued his ultimately doomed plan of achieving political dominance.
Since then, the Lib Dems have struggled to be relevant. The party’s performance in the 2017 General Election was poor and seemed to be epitomised by its leader, Tim Farron’s, inability to reconcile his Christianity with his politics.
But, fortune has been kind to the party and it has been handed a couple of lifelines in the form of Jeremy Corbyn and Brexit.
Remaniacs
Brexit has been good for the Lib Dems. As an unashamedly pro-EU party, it has had no problem presenting itself as the party of remain. Meanwhile, the Marmite nature of Jeremy Corbyn has proved fruitful for it as many ex-Blairites and moderate Labour Party members have jumped ship.
This year’s European Elections saw the Lib Dems enjoy a 13% swing in their favour, with the party polling 19.6% of the vote, second only to the Brexit Party.
Buoyed by this, it started its 2019 General Election campaign in a sprightly fashion. Its policy to revoke Article 50 – though seen by many as an affront to democracy – did make sense as it included the caveat that the party would do this only if it won the most seats and formed a Government, which even the most ardent orange jumper-wearing Lib Dem knows is unlikely.
Then there was the deal with the Greens and Plaid Cymru, to enter into a reciprocal arrangement to stand down in certain seats in pursuit of a remain alliance. This is sensible and progressive move.
However, worryingly, it appears that, as the campaign has progressed, the Lib Dems have started to lose their minds.
Political Correctness
First, there is the continued outright antipathy towards Jeremy Corbyn.
I can understand why the Lib Dems might be reticent about suggesting any kind of pact with another party – particularly a party that is led by a man who is seen by many in his own party as being an electoral liability. But, the party’s unequivocal rejection of Labour doesn’t sit comfortably with its slightly warmer attitude towards Boris Johnson’s Tories.
It would seem utterly devoid of logic if, in the event of a hung Parliament, the Lib Dems decided that they would prop up a minority Johnson Government which is avowedly Brexit, rather than the Labour Party which, despite the efforts of Corbyn, is significantly more remain.
It suggests that the Lib Dems are falling foul of their own hype and failing to grasp the realpolitik of this election – a suggestion that has only been enhanced by the leadership’s decision to stand a candidate against Labour’s Rosie Duffield in Canterbury, despite the original candidate’s decision to stand down in her favour.
The party’s new leader Jo Swinson has defended the decision by suggesting that Jeremy Corbyn is too radical, but this doesn’t really hold water given that it is happy to form an electoral pact with Plaid Cymru, which has at the heart of its very existence a desire to break up the Union; and the Green Party, which wants a seismic shift towards sustainable economics.
Market Ideology
Perhaps more telling is the recent unveiling of the Lib Dems’ economic plans, which would apparently ensure that the Treasury runs a permanent surplus.
I almost choked when I heard this. Just when everyone else is distancing themselves from austerity, the Lib Dems have pretty much declared that we will always be in a state of austerity – because the only way to achieve a permanent surplus is if the Government is taxing like it’s 1977 or cutting like its 1981.
There’s no need for the Lib Dems to place themselves, or the nation if it ever came to that, into such a fiscal straight jacket. It means that, almost certainly, it will break its promise or fail dismally to impose any kind of social change that involves expenditure. It’s economically unnecessary and politically inept.
And the only reason that I can think of as to why they party has pursued it is that, ideologically, those at the helm of the Lib Dems are still in thrall to the George Osborne vision of economics that was in nightmarish fashion 10 years ago.
Since the Lib Dems have decided to move themselves to the right in this campaign, their polling has gone down the pan.
Are the two connected? Without doubt.
As they did in 2010, the Lib Dem Orange Bookers have forgotten that most of their natural constituency of potential support does not adhere to neoliberal orthodoxy of Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek. Rather, they are the type of people who want to see pragmatic solutions to the problems we face. They do trust institutions, such as local government and the EU, but they are wary of ideologies. Most importantly, most of them are instinctively not Conservative.
My greatest fear now is that, come 13 December, if Boris Johnson phones up Jo Swinson and asks her to prop up a minority Tory Government, she will listen to his nonsense and agree to do so.
I can see them both now in the Rose Garden with Jo banging on about the “national interest”. Four weeks ago, I would have said that no political party is so monumentally stupid that it would shoot itself in the head twice, but now, suddenly, I fear that the Lib Dems may be about to do just that.