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Review
How the Lib Dems became a bizarre, toxic embarrassment
From opposing Brexit to backing tuition fees, Britain’s third party have lost their political instincts. A new book ponders their future
What a frightful pickle the Liberal Democrats are in. True, a potentially historic collapse in Tory support has the Westminster lobby aflutter that the banished party of the Celtic fringe could tear down the “Blue Wall” of the south. But in reality, the Lib Dems’ prospects remain dire. At the next election, the party are in the running to contest fewer than half a dozen seats. Their leader, Ed Davey, is an inanity. Nobody can say what they stand for besides nimbyism, tuition fees and Remain. Cleggmania remains the victory from which they never recovered. Far from injecting new life into Britain’s third party, contact with the corridors of power mortally wounded it. Nor has its closeness with death led to the kind of ruthless introspection that might rouse it from its vegetative state. It seems destined to remain the zombie party of Britain, never quite falling over for good, but redundantly stalking the margins forever.
The Liberal Democrats: From Hope to Despair to Where? is a welcome investigation into where it all went wrong. Despite being the work of two Lib Dem-sympathising political-science professors from the Universities of Birmingham (David Cutts) and Liverpool (Andrew Russell), as well as the party’s former “Deputy Head of Insight and Data” (Joshua Townsley), it’s an in-depth examination of some of the Lib Dems’ biggest blunders to date. While the fallout of their naïve and confused period in coalition with the Conservatives has been picked over to death, this book covers new ground in tracking their struggles to regain their footing ever since.
The authors are unapologetic, for example, in scrutinising the Lib Dems’ strategically spurious decision to style themselves as “The Remain Party” in the wake of the 2016 referendum; they don’t shy from pointing out that the party’s traditional strongholds in the Celtic fringe are “bastions of anti-EU sentiment”. They also show how support for ex-leader Jo Swinson’s policy to “revoke” Brexit spectacularly backfired, and that many voters who did support the policy in any case voted Labour. Interestingly, a multinomial regression model undertaken by the authors also finds that the Lib Dems’ anti-Brexit stance actively drove a number of supporters into the arms of the Conservatives. These are important, balanced contributions to an episode of political history that too many experts struggle to analyse without succumbing to their own political biases.
From Hope to Despair to Where? makes some incisive observations about the Lib Dems’ weaknesses, not least their obsession with quick-fix solutions and their desperation to present themselves as “distinct” from the two major parties. From opposition to the Iraq war and the doomed campaign against tuition fees to their unwise assault on Brexit, the Lib Dems have repeatedly opted for JCR protest politics over the more arduous intellectual task of figuring out what a liberal party should stand for in a country such as Britain today.
There are other interesting tit-bits. The authors attempt to demolish the myth of the Lib Dems’ legendary supremacy in the arena of pavement politics. Its investigation into the birth of a new Tory “decapitation” strategy, which entails intensive and well-resourced activism coupled with messaging that stresses the task of electing a national government rather than simply a local MP, is must-reading for MPs and election boffins.
That said, as a political science book, this is a painstaking, not a pacy, read. Perhaps owing to their number-crunching backgrounds, the authors are clearly more comfortable picking over the granular detail than fleshing out a wider picture. This is a shame, and reflective of a deeper crisis in contemporary political discourse, so often conducted in pollsters’ prose rather than the poetry of competing principles.
As a result, while groping in the right direction, From Hope to Despair to Where? falls short of capturing the epic story of the mega-trends that have plunged the Lib Dems into existential crisis. While it lays out the collapse of the party’s non-conformist Celtic heartlands, it doesn’t fully articulate its symbolic significance: is the spirit of organised liberal dissent, traceable back at least to 19th-century opposition against the established Church of England, not now officially dead? And shouldn’t that send a shiver down the spine of anyone who believes in freedom, irrespective of their feelings about the Lib Dems? Meanwhile, in its passages on Brexit, the authors touch on, but don’t quite fully encapsulate, how the party has fallen victim to the cataclysmic tensions between liberalism and democracy that are now threatening to rip Western civilisation apart.
While the authors do deal with the Lib Dems’ struggles, with mixed successes, to win over young and educated middle-class voters beyond the party’s traditional strongholds, it may have been too much to expect a frank discussion of the major underlying reason why the party continues to perform woefully, in comparison with Labour, at luring such voters. That reason is the educated bourgeoisie’s drift towards Labour’s traditional brand of authoritarian statism, in response to rising populism, economic stagnation and heightened anxiety over super-catastrophic risks from climate change to pandemics.
In the end, From Hope to Despair to Where? discreetly neglects more pressing points than it discusses. The authors don’t quite dare to state explicitly that the party’s Remain stance may well turn out to be its most colossal error to date – even more electorally costly in the medium-term than the tuition-fees U-turn debacle. Nor can they quite see the bitter paradox that the Thatcherite voters the Lib Dems have decisively alienated through its anti-Brexit politics are, theoretically at least, a natural target group for a purported party of liberty. Nor do they elucidate the awful irony that despite finally having a firm reason to live, with both major parties decisively turning their backs on economic and civic freedom, nobody understands this less profoundly than the Lib Dems, whose political instincts remain dead as a doornail.
Facing up to such revelations, of course, would be all too much for the Lib Dem Westminster bubble – the tribe at whom this book is primarily aimed. For now, the selection of delicately-presented home truths dished up by this trio of liberal intellectuals will have to do. It’s a start, I suppose.
The Liberal Democrats: From Hope to Despair to Where? is published by Manchester University Press at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books