Recent Libdems Articles
If Labour doesn’t listen, the Libdems could make a comeback in 2015
There is near-certainty on the Left that the Libdems will be wiped out at the next election. There is also near-certainty within the Labour party that many Libdem voters who don’t identity with them any more won’t go back to them.
I think these assumptions are flawed for various reasons.
One is that the Libdem vote has started to become more clustered in areas where they have a significant local presence. So even if their share of the vote collapses nationally, they may hang on to a fair number of locally popular MPs.
Secondly, I suspect there are quite a few ‘shy-Libdem’ voters – people who may vote for them but won’t admit this to pollsters because Nick Clegg is so culturally toxic (there is a Tory precedent from the 1990). I don’t think it’s huge but I suspect it’s there.
More importantly, I think Libdems will be able to tempt back a significant share of voters that have abandoned them. How?
I imagine that by 2014 it will become painfully obvious to the Libdems that Nick Clegg remains a toxic figure. A leadership challenge will be mounted on the argument that he’s pushing away a lot of potential Libdem voters, and Vince Cable or Tim Farron will be crowned leader.
Then they could craft such a pitch below to soften up voters and tempt them back.
Dear voters,
If you voted for us in 2010, or didn’t, here is why we think you should vote for the Liberal Democrats.
We had little choice
In 2010 we had little choice to go into Coalition with the Tories. We said before the election we would work with the largest party, to deal with the national debt crisis, and we did. We were a minority partner so a lot of policies we advocated for in the past did not get pushed through. But we did push a range of Libdem policies nevertheless.
We also criticised the Tories relentlessly for their ‘Tea Party tendencies’ and inserted Liberal values into the national conversation [attempts to differentiate themselves began in 2012 and is full-blown now]. We made progress on key issues such as taking lower-paid people out of tax, on green jobs, infrastructure spending and more.
Yes we made mistakes, and unlike the other parties we had the guts to apologise.
Why vote for same New Labour?
The Labour party you see in opposition is the same party you rejected in the past. They haven’t changed. They are now pledging to match Coalition’s cuts – showing that we were right to pursue that strategy [this is a sleight of hand but they’ll say this anyway].
Ed Miliband’s Labour party are the same as Gordon Brown’s Labour party. They have said nothing about protecting our civil liberties. They have little about the environment, while we took on Tory climate denial. They say nothing about reducing taxes on low earners while we fought in govt to make that happen. They offer the same vision of society as Gordon Brown did in 2010. Why vote for them? Are they really offering you something new? They opposed Lords Reform. They opposed AV. They aren’t reformers at all.
Restraining influence on other parties
If the Libdems get enough seats we can be a restraining influence on the Conservatives or the Labour party. Do you really want either of them in power with a majority, with no one to check their illiberal tendencies?
Supporting us is no longer a protest vote. It is a vote to ensure that neither of the major parties do not realise their wild excesses in government.
All those three pitches will soften up the ex-Libdem vote. A change in leader will too, the polls already show it.
My point is that Labour tribalists assume left-Libdems will obviously move to the Labour party. But this can’t be taken for granted at all. I was sympathetic to Labour before I even joined the party (I even delivered leaflets for a Labour candidate in 2010 despite voting Libdem).
But there are plenty of left-Libdem voters who are highly suspicious of the Labour party. They may indicate to pollsters now that they don’t intend to vote Libdem, but closer to the election they could quite easily re-think that decision if they hear nothing genuinely new from Labour.
Taking their collapse for granted is not just complacent but somewhat arrogant. The Labour party will have to fight hard for their votes. And it must start doing so now.
Nick Clegg isn’t hated by Britons – his problem is something else
In the TV show The West Wing, the deputy chief of staff Josh Lyman once said, “I make it a point never to disagree with Labour blogger Hopi Sen when he’s right, Mr President.” (I may have paraphrased).
While I probably should never ignore such sage advice, this time I do disagree with Hopi. In particular I disagree with his assertion that the Lib Dems absolutely have to get rid of Nick Clegg because, as he puts it:
“PEOPLE HATE NICK CLEGG.
REALLY HATE HIM.
REALLY. REALLY. HATE. HIM.
They are not kidding about this and are not going to change their minds.”
But I think Hopi – and everyone else who makes the same point – are misdiagnosing the problem for Nick Clegg. Because the polls suggest, as politicians go, he really isn’t particularly unpopular.
According to Lord Ashcroft’s May poll (which I use as it has a huge base size), Clegg’s average score, in terms of “how positively or negatively” people feel, on a scale of -100 to +100, is -11.7. This is slightly worse than Cameron’s -1.7 and Miliband’s -2.4, but is roughly on a par with -15.8 for Osborne and -10.6 for Balls.
So on average, Clegg is relatively low though not bottom. But this doesn’t tell us about the spread of opinions.
If Hopi’s right that a meaningful number of people really (really) hate Clegg, we should see a high number giving him extremely negative scores – but we don’t. The proportion that give him scores in the bottom 10% (-80 or below) is pretty much the same as for Cameron and Miliband:
What’s more, the people who give him such negative scores are far more likely to be 2010 Labour voters than 2010 Lib Dem voters: compared with the 31% of 2010 Labour voters who rate Clegg so badly, only 13% of 2010 Lib Dem voters give him such low scores.
Comparing the 13% of 2010 Lib Dem voters who give him such a low score with the 2% of current Lib Dem voters who do the same, we can work out that, among those who voted Lib Dem in 2010 but now wouldn’t do so, about 22% give Nick Clegg a score of -80 of below. So even among current Labour voters and defecting Lib Dem voters (which are overlapping groups), less than a third appear to really dislike Clegg.
It’s far from a good performance, but not in itself a sign that Clegg couldn’t do all right in an election again.
So if he isn’t hated, what’s the issue for Clegg? There clearly is a problem that needs explaining given 76% of people think he’s doing badly.
His difficulty isn’t that he’s seen as loathsome, but that he’s seen as pathetic. These Populus numbers are now 16 months old, but I suspect still hold true:
So Clegg’s seen as out of his depth, weak and indecisive, yet also likeable and not arrogant.
If these are the drivers of his unpopularity, we may wonder about the consequences of a music video that shows Clegg’s humanity and humility – but also the fact that he misjudged what he’d be able to achieve in government, for which he felt he had to apologise.
Lib Dems: will the real Nick Clegg please stand up?
Review of ‘Nick Clegg: the biography’ by Chris Bowers (Biteback Publishing, 2011)
Under Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrats stood against the Iraq war, did not want a replacement for Trident, opposed tuition fees, and favoured a 50p tax band for Britain’s highest earners.
I was not a Labour Party member in 2005, and while socialist principle precluded me from even considering support for a party with no connection to the organised working class, it was readily understandable why that particular set of policies appealed to many leftists rather more than what was on offer from Blair at the time.
Why the Lib Dems should not become ‘radical liberals’
With Liberal Democrat conference coming up, there has been a spate of ‘to survive at the next election, the Lib Dems should adopt my politics‘ articles.
Two of the most interesting have been from Richard Reeves, who used to be Nick Clegg’s Director of Strategy (don’t laugh), and from Lord Rennard, former Chief Executive of the party.
This is a debate of interest even to those of us who are not Liberal Democrats. If they get their strategy wrong over the next two years, then they could end up handing over most of their seats to the Tories, leading to a majority Tory government at the next election.
If they get their strategy right, then they could confound predictions of their demise and emerge from the next election holding the balance of power and still in government.
Let’s start with how they could get it wrong. I know this will be hard to believe, but it turns out that Nick Clegg’s ex-Director of Strategy is offering some not very good strategic advice.
Richard Reeves argues that the Liberal Democrats need to keep Nick Clegg as their leader and become a party which appeals to ‘radical liberals’ such as Richard Reeves. The Lib Dems should seek to fill the ‘Blair shaped hole’ in British politics, backing free schools, taking on the vested interests of public sector workers on public services and the forces of conservatism on social issues, supporting civil liberties, relaxing drugs laws, fighting for civil liberties and lowering taxes on ordinary people.
This policy platform is not all bad, but it suffers from two fatal flaws. The first is that many of the people who might be attracted to it will note that it doesn’t correspond very well with what the Liberal Democrats have been doing in power. Their ‘obsession’ with lower taxes for ordinary people, for example, has involved putting up VAT and council tax.
The other problem is that becoming the party of the 10% who support radical liberalism might work in a proportional voting system, but not in our current electoral system.
In seats which the Lib Dems hold, they get the votes of the social conservatives that Reeves would like to brand as ‘bigots’, public sector workers who he dismisses as ‘vested interests’, people passionately hostile to relaxing drugs laws, and people who see the radical liberal policy offer as, at best, irrelevant to their lives.
In contrast, Chris Rennard’s article focuses on the key point which Reeves doesn’t mention, that ‘the fate of our MPs and candidates will depend much more on what they do in their constituencies, than what polls suggest is happening in other seats’.
He emphasises community based campaigning, which ‘should have started long ago’. He notes that ‘in parliamentary seats we hold against the Conservatives, we made net gains in the council elections in May’.
At the time of the last Liberal Democratic leadership contest between Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne, one person who’d met both of them described it as a choice between someone who enjoyed spending time discussing pluralist, liberal ideas, and someone who preferred to stay up in their bedroom designing leaflets with barcharts on them.
The Reeves vs Rennard strategies represent this same choice – whether the Lib Dems should be clear about their ideology and seek to make the case for radical liberalism, or should they aim to fight ’65 by elections’ based on the themes of ‘your Lib Dem MP is very nice and hard working’, and ‘the party that you really like can’t win here, and we’re better than the alternative,’ with, ahem, carefully tailored local messages rather than one national ideology.
If they choose the Reeves strategy, then I think they will find that radical liberalism fronted by Nick Clegg will not appeal in the seats where their former Tory allies are challenging them, paving the way for the Tories to gain an overall majority.
If they follow Rennard’s advice, and pick the right time to change leader before the election, then they will give their MPs the best possible chance of getting re-elected.
Nick Clegg’s apology wasn’t aimed at the public
There is a twisted logic to Nick Clegg’s apology for the tuition fees debacle, I think.
Keep in mind two things: first, the u-turn over tuition fees happened over two years ago. Secondly, Nick Clegg said only last year that he had nothing to apologise for.
He’s apologising now to pre-empt criticism from his own party. He is doing it because he knows that the party is jittery after languishing in the polls for two years, with no respite in sight.
With growing realisation there won’t be a stronger economy in 2014 to boost them at the election, Clegg can turn around to his party and say: look, I’ve made the apology now, what more would you like me to do? Haven’t I humiliated myself enough?
Essentially, it buys him more time. But it is also the last desperate throw of the dice by a marked man.
If it looks like the public haven’t cut him some slack within a year (its unlikely they will) – he has no more options left.
Let me offer another comparison. Ed Balls has apologised repeatedly (Ed Miliband too) in the Commons and the media for getting too close to the banks while being in power, and for being at the helm when the economy crashed.
But voters don’t forgive and forget easily. The Coalition govt and the public have collectively shrugged at Labour’s apology. There isn’t much hope for Nick Clegg either.
This is why I say the main aim was to shore up support within the party, not the public. It buys him some time, which is fair enough, but he is still doomed.
Watch the auto-tune remix
Do the Libdems really want to penalise ‘undeserving patients’?
Joe Farrington-Douglas tweeted last week an article on Lib Dem Voice posted at the time that Norman Lamb took over the Lib Dem health brief.
Lamb wrote a paper about his thoughts and followed up with interviews with newspapers. In particular Lamb said:
If you get rat-arsed on a Friday night and get taken to A&E where you are foul and abusive to staff, is it right for the taxpayers to fund your life-saving treatment?
The implication being that it isn’t and we shouldn’t and hence there should be a charge for A&E in these circumstances.
The Guardian said:
He called for wide public debate on whether the community should pay for the excesses of the individual. There was a strong case for charging drunks for stomach pumps or treatment of injuries, and pubs and clubs should also be made to contribute if their complicity could be proven.
This is not only wrong, but it is very unliberal.
Lamb was suggesting that we create a concept of deserving patient and undeserving patient. Under Lamb’s plan the undeserving patient has to pay for their treatment. Where does it stop? Do we charge smokers for their treatment? Do we charge drunk drivers for the injuries they receive, or the injuries they cause?
What happens if someone is foul and abusive but sober? Is Lamb concerned with people’s behaviour, or their condition? If a person does something illegal (they are foul and abusive to A&E staff) then the legal system can be used: they will be punished for their behaviour.
But what if they are drunk but polite, do those drunks get a discount, or get the treatment free? Who decides what is foul or abusive, will there be national standards or will some areas be allowed to be more sensitive? What if the patient has mental health issues which is the cause of the abusive behaviour and is unrelated to the alcohol they consumed?
The whole idea was poorly thought out.
It didn’t matter that this policy was unworkable because Lamb wanted to get a different message out to the public. The message came straight out of the Lib Dem’s Orange Book. Lamb wants to deliberately break the cherished free-at-the-point-of-delivery principle of the NHS.
Once you start charging for treatment, regardless of the reason, that principle has been broken and charges will spread throughout the NHS. Imposing charges will encourage the development of an insurance market. Insurance companies will produce products so that you pay a small premium every month (say, for the cost of 5 pints) and the insurance company will pay your A&E bill if you get injured when rat-arsed.
Such ill-thought-out policies are fine for a spokesperson for a party that will never be elected, but these were the policies of Norman Lamb, who was just appointed Minister of State in the Department of Health. It is a cause for concern for health policies in the future.
As a Libdem councillor, I think it’s time to end this Coalition
contribution by Nick Barlow
I voted for the coalition at the Special Conference in 2010 and given the circumstances at the time, it was the least worst option available to the Liberal Democrats.
However, what we’re seeing now is not the coalition we were promised then, and errors made by the leaderships of both parties has contributed to the situation we’re in now.
This week’s announcement of the Government reshuffle has finally tipped me off the fence and into writing this.
It’s a shame a Libdem was shuffled out of the Ministry of Defence
contribution by Kate Hudson
As the cabinet lurches – or should it be shuffles? – to the right, it’s a shame to say good-bye to Nick Harvey MP, now former Minister for the Armed Forces.
One of the casualties of what is widely interpreted as an attempt to please grass-roots Tories, Nick Harvey was a breath of fresh air in the MoD. He was open to discussion with campaigners and then the only LibDem minister within those hallowed portals.
continue reading… »
How the Libdems could revive their efforts
contribution by Tim Wigmore
With the coalition planning its roadmap until the next election, this represents the last chance for the party to reshape the terms of the coalition.
It is a critical juncture in the 24-year history of the party, especially coming at a time when 25% of members deserted in 2011 and they have their lowest ever number of councillors.
What is to be done? The party needs to develop flagship areas in which it can boast of victories and, moving ahead to the next election, clearly differentiate themselves.
continue reading… »
In praise of Nick Clegg over his recent antics
I’ve rarely said many nice things about Nick Clegg since the election, but I think the opprobrium heaped on him by many lefties, after the tit-for-tat with Cameron, is uncalled for.
I’m not being sarcastic – I think Clegg did the right thing. Tories have inevitably complained and fulminated, but they broke an agreement over this so they should be ignored.
But I think Labour MPs should be nicer to Clegg for saving them an immense amount of trouble over the Boundary Review.
continue reading… »
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