This morning, I saw in my Twitter feed a tweet from George Eaton, the political editor of the New Statesmen, which read:
“The Lib Dems are on 6%. It’s almost like centrism isn’t what voters want.”
It reminded me of one of my pet peeves of this current political era: people extrapolating from the low poll ratings the Liberal Democrats constantly get that centrism is dead or at least in serious trouble. What it could mean instead is that the Lib Dems alone are dead, for reasons that have nothing to do with the popularity or otherwise of centrism or liberalism or political moderation or any combination of any of these political buzz words.
Let’s start with centrism. Although I would disagree with Lib Dem activists on any number of things, I agree with most of them about the fact that the Lib Dems aren’t even particularly centrist in approach. A couple of years ago I spent some energy trying to get people from the right of Labour, the left of the Tories and Lib Dems in the same room to talk about public policy. My take away from these sessions was that the right of Labour and the left of the Tories had much more in common with each other than I had anticipated – and the Lib Dems were nowhere near either of them. Large scale infrastructure projects? The Labour and Tory people argued about the timing, cost and public/private mixture of funding, while the Lib Dems said we just shouldn’t have any large scale infrastructure projects at all. This sort of thing came up on every bread and butter issue, with the Liberal Democrats in the room always the extreme outliers. The Lib Dems are not in the middle of any current political thinking and further more, are not trying to be in the centre of it.
Where most Lib Dem policy thinking is rooted is very firmly on the left. In fact, in several areas – education springs to mind – Lib Dem policy thinking is notably to the left of Labour.
Perhaps that’s really why the Lib Dems are stinking up the polls: who wants vague Corbynism-lite from a party that was in government with the Conservatives just a little over three years ago? It’s the same ground I’ve gone over previously, but I’ll briefly recap: the Lib Dems want to return to where they were in 2004, to go back to being the prime choice of lefties fed up with New Labour. Only it’s 2018 and New Labour doesn’t exist anymore, and in the interim, the Lib Dems were in a coalition with the Tories for five years. The left isn’t going to return to the Lib Dems any time in the short to medium term, if ever again. The party will not be considered a party of protest at anything other than local level for a very long time either.
Where there are votes is in the centre and the centre-right. People who liked the coalition, wished it had continued past 2015; people who voted for the Tories in 2015 and regret it, particularly in light of the Brexit vote. Centre-right Remainers and floating Remainer voters, basically. But this isn’t where the Lib Dem activist base is politically at all. Where they are is on the soft-left or even hard-left. They think Brexit will eventually bring people, particularly young, pro-European people, to the Lib Dems, away from Labour. Yet it isn’t happening. At all.
To return to George’s tweet: this does not prove in any way that centrism isn’t in trouble, or that centrism actually is what people want, if only it was packaged in the right way. It just means you cannot deduce whether that is the case simply from the Lib Dems bad poll ratings.
Yes interesting take. I’ve struggled to understand why the LDs are doing so badly given they are the one party that’s totally anti-Brexit unlike the other two. With the remainer ranks being swelled by the government’s incompetence one would have thought we’d see a boost in their poll ratings. I guess people have longer political memories than is sometimes thought.
It’s quite simple: whether Leavers or Remainers, for very few people is the EU actually that significant an issue. When forced to come down on one side of the fence or the other — by the referendum or by a pollster asking — they will, but that doesn’t mean that they consider it the most, or even an, important consideration in voting.
According to the British Social Attitudes survey, when given a free choice of how to describe themselves, just 15% of people picked ‘European’ as one of the descriptors. I would suggest therefore that that is a good estimate for the proportion of people who care enough about EU membership to make whether a party is Leave or Remain a deciding factor in their voting intention.
The Lib Dems have been hovering around 10%. That to me suggests that they are basically now the party of about two-thirds of the people for whom Remaining is an important enough part of their identity that they will base their voting decision on it.
If I’m right, this means that the current Lib Dem strategy is totally misguided because while they think that it means they have a vote ceiling of 48% because they are fishing in the pool of ‘Remainers’, in fact they only have a vote ceiling of 15% because they really are fishing in the much smaller pool of ‘people who really care about Remaining’. And even if they were to capture everyone in that entire pool, they will still remain essentially, electorally, irrelevant.
With FPTP your only vote usually goes to the paty best placed to keep out the one you hate.
With a democratic vote your first choice could be a ‘centrist’ party without weakening your ‘hate’; with FTP never.
FPTP is rarely mentioned in these debates. I’ll continue to say this, but when I speak to people (and not just in my “bubble”) most people who want to vote Lib Dem (or Green for that matter) regard it as a wasted vote because it’s between Labour and Conservative in their constituency. They hold their nose, vote for the Red or Blue party that is likely to get rid of the more unpleasant Blue or Red party and wish they could vote for the party they agree with. In some constituencies, they don’t even get a choice: the Red or Blue party can do no campaigning and still win with a huge majority. I always knew it was an absurd system, but it was explaining to my Aussie sis-in-law for her first UK election that made me realise just how utterly indefensible and wrong it is.
Contrast to local elections where, last I checked, the Lib Dem vote polls almost double that of GE polling. It’s not all be down to local issues, but a better chance of voting for the party you want.
This is good news for the Lib Dems! The time normally to “buy” a party is when clever commentators write them off. Clearly the Lib Dems will not increase significantly in the polls until they win a by-election – see 72-74 or the early 1990s. The omens for this are relatively good if the right seat comes along. They had their best ever by-election performance against Labour in opposition in Lewisham East.
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The poll is a bit of an outline in their average has been heading up to 10% – whether it is accurate or not time will tell. Survation have yet to publish their detailed results but August polls can go a little wonky with people on holiday.
Up to 11% now in some of the most recent polls.
Nick –
Your observation: “This sort of thing came up on every bread and butter issue, with the Liberal Democrats in the room always the extreme outliers” gives a clue to the Liberal Democrats’ predicament.
The Lib Dems have a lot to say on values and constitutional issues – for example, gender equality or green issues on the one hand and electoral reform and European issues on the other. For most voters these are second order, (if not third order), issues. But on first order issues – the bread and butter issues – that actually swing voters and elections, What do the Lib Dems offer in the fields of social and economic policy – whether in, say, education, health, housing or taxation – that are not already on offer, and more credibly, from the two main parties? Frankly, I don’t know the answer to that question.
In a way, we have been here before. In Lord Morgan’s excellent book “Consensus and Disunity: The Lloyd George Coaltion Government 1918-1922”, published in 1979, he notes some of the old pre-first world war Liberal obsessions of that time – home rule, church disestablishment, temperance, land reform. After the war, they were seen as obsolete matters in an age of a new mass electorate wanting new answers to the pressing social and economic problems – those pesky bread and butter issues again – of a modern, post-war industrial society.
Such revisionist thinking led to the failed attempt in 1920 to ‘fuse’ the Lloyd George Coalition Liberals and Unionists into single centrist ‘United Reform party’ promoting free enterprise, class harmony and social improvement in the new post-war political environment. Coming out of a terrible war, the intention was to foster national unity and to marginalise the divisive threats coming from the extremes: militant trade unions and an untested socialist Labour party on the left and die-hard reactionary Toryism on the right. Fusion failed largely because the party traditions on both sides of the Coalition were too strong to overcome. But the intention was (fairly) noble in those troubled times.
Instead it was left to wily Conservative politicians like Stanley Baldwin, Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan to achieve what Lloyd George and his colleagues failed to do some years earlier: that is, they enlarged the centre ground electorate by adding the moderate and Liberal vote to that of the Conservatives’. This is what Fraser Nelson was getting at last week in the Spectator magazine, when he likened Britain’s Conservative party to a Macron style-centre party.
The Lib Dems have a lot to say on values and constitutional issues – for example, gender equality or green issues on the one hand and electoral reform and European issues on the other
Don’t forget legalising prostitution and weed!
Crikey, it is even worse than I thought!
Correction: “… last week in the Spectator magazine …” should read “… last week in the Daily Telegraph (31.08.18) …”. PW
The Conservative Party may have been “a Macron style-centre party” once, but it certainly isn’t now, as it is in the process of being taken over by the alt-right.
Hello mates, how is all, and what you want to say on the topic of this piece of writing, in my view its really remarkable in favor of me.
Nick: your characterisation of the pre-Coalition Lib Dems is a caricature of a certain type of activist on the fringe of the party; it does not, and never did, represent mainstream Lib Dem thinking. In case you hadn’t noticed, the Lib Dems are highly critical of Corbyn and Corbynism, such that Labour activists continue to try to paint the party as being in bed with the Tories. For your information, as a radical liberal and mainstream Lib Dem, I absolutely detest the authoritarian infantile leftism represented by Corbyn and the followers of his cult. I have no desire to be Corbyn-lite, any more than I want to be Boris-Johnson-lite.Anyway Corbyn is anti-EU, so to be Corbyn-lite one would have to be mildly Eurosceptical, which Lib Dems are obviously not.
Where the party is well organised, it DOES court and get “Centre-right Remainers and floating Remainer voters”. You need to get out of your bubble and stop thinking that a few nutters (the ones who buy into the Labour activist portrayal of the Lib Dems) represent the party as a whole.