Tuesday, September 17, 2024
What's next?
Andrew Rawnsley in the Guardian is clear that the path ahead of us is littered with difficult choices that could make or break the party.
He says that we will have to sober up and do some intelligent thinking about how we use and retain our much enlarged parliamentary presence. That will include fortifying our gains so they don’t turn into losses come the next general election when the context will be very different.
He points out that when voters who plumped for the Lib Dems in July were asked why they made that choice, less than a tenth of them said they always supported the party, while among those who had previously voted Conservative, just 9% said they could not see themselves voting for the Tories again in future. So we are far from impregnable in our new constituencies. And the big question is how we will position ourselves in the next four years:
Will they oppose Labour from the left or the right? Here they have a dilemma. Sir Ed regards himself as a man of the centre-left. Most Lib Dem activists are left-leaning. Yet their MPs now represent swathes of Buckinghamshire, Hampshire, Oxfordshire, Surrey, Wiltshire and other parts of prosperous southern England.
Some of the country’s wealthiest constituencies have a Lib Dem MP, including Witney, which used to send David Cameron to the Commons, and Maidenhead, held for 27 years by Theresa May. A Lib Dem MP represents Henley, previously Tory since 1910 and responsible for putting Boris Johnson in parliament. Not every voter in these seats is well-off, but they do contain many more of the affluent than the average. They’ll feel the increases in taxes related to wealth that Rachel Reeves plans to announce in her first budget at the end of October. Sir Ed and his party demand more funding for their favoured causes, especially care. To be consistent, you’d expect them to be supportive of some tax increases on those with the broadest shoulders. But that will mean getting behind revenue-raisers, which aren’t likely to be terribly popular among many of the well-heeled folk they now represent.
Sir Ed tells friends that he sees it as part of his role to push Labour “to be more ambitious”. Thus far he has tended to have a go at the government not from the right, but from the left. One of the perks of replacing the SNP as Westminster’s third largest party is that the Lib Dem leader gets the automatic right to put two questions to the prime minister at every PMQs. He’s used them to cajole Sir Keir Starmer to make the carer’s allowance more generous, raise money for public spending by increasing taxes on banks, and attacked taking the winter fuel payment away from 10 million pensioners. Sir Ed calls this the government’s “first big mistake”. A lot of Labour MPs would nod along to that. The Lib Dems also oppose retaining the two-child limit on benefits. Should they want to take them, there will be more opportunities for the Lib Dems to take a jab at the government when it reveals the tough choices it says it will have to make about spending on public services and welfare. Is it a viable long-term strategy for the Lib Dems to press Labour from the left while aspiring to take more seats from the Conservatives? There has to be some doubt about that.
A fundamental question the Lib Dems have to ask themselves is whether they want the Starmer government to succeed or fail. History suggests that they should prefer it to do well because their electoral fortunes are often linked. When Labour governments become unpopular with Middle England, their defeats are usually accompanied by falling support for the third party. That happened in 1951, 1970 and 1979. One veteran Lib Dem says: “If you ask me, in hard political terms, ‘do we want them (Labour) to fuck up?’, the answer is no.” How to be an impactful opposition when the Lib Dems probably need Labour to do all right? That is one of the tricky conundrums that will face Sir Ed and his party when they float back down to earth.
The party cannot keep walking a tightrope between left and right. We need to plan for the inevitable return of Tory voters to the fold. More importantly we have to understand that we cannot replace the Tories as an opposition while tacking to the left.
In my opinion, our place on the political spectrum is as a radical centre left party. We need to find a way to make that work while holding onto all that we gained in July.
