Why the Liberal Democrats are responsible for Brexit
Ignore the marches and polls, the best argument against Remain is the party representing it
There’s been a loud claim that Labour is responsible for Brexit from the moment David Cameron lost the referendum to Boris Johnson.
As much as I have issues with Jeremy Corbyn and his team, this is unfair. Labour has, at every stage where a vote has occurred, whipped on the side Remain needed it to. If it has not driven legislation to prevent Brexit, that is hardly unfair, given that it is not a committed Brexit party, and knows it cannot count on the gratitude of ex-Conservative Remainers at the next election.
Which brings us to the party that should be driving Remain forward, and isn’t.
Now, I am currently a member of said party, although this article may be what gets me turfed out. But the party desperately needs to re-evaluate what it’s doing, because its chronic under-performance remains Remain’s biggest liability.
The Party of Grudges
The key problem for the Liberal Democrats is that they are still fighting a battle they lost in 2015 and went on to lose even more desperately in 2017. They have lost their anti-Labour voters.
Of the 20 seats the Liberal Democrats have the most hope of regaining at a national level, only four are against Labour. Three are against the regional parties, which have a virtually identical policy. That leaves 13 against the Tories, most of which have substantially smaller majorities.
Has that affected which party the Liberal Democrats are campaigning against?
… No.
But everyone has a bad ad campaign, right? It’s not like they’re letting it affect their actual jobs?
You can quibble over some of the details in that thread you should definitely read. But Bloonface is absolutely right that the Lib Dems took a sensible compromise amendment and put forward something that would wreck it for political advantage.
And then they did it again.
You can’t stick “Labour Conference” in the amendment and claim you’re “just opening debate” or “promoting options”. This should have been condemned by sensible commentators, not just by randoms on Twitter.
There are two reasons this is disastrously bad politics:
- It convinces Labour Remainers that the Liberal Democrats are not serious about any form of political alliance to stop Brexit
- It convinces the Tories that they can get away with Blue Murder, and the Liberal Democrats will continue to assist them and only them in Labour/Tory marginals
Here is what the Tory Party looks like in 2018.
There is almost no path to preventing Brexit that does not require the Conservative Party to at least re-evaluate the impact of Brexit on their political prospects. And all that the People’s Vote and the Lib Dem wrecking amendments are convincing the Conservatives is that they have 40% of the vote sewn up, and that they just need to undermine Jeremy Corbyn.
And the only path that doesn’t require a Tory U-Turn? THE GENERAL ELECTION THAT LABOUR IS PUSHING FOR. And even then you’d need to focus campaigning against the Tories, which is, as I show above, tactically correct to do, but which the party seems resolutely opposed to doing.
At this point, it’s hard not to assume that Jeremy Corbyn ran over the Liberal Democrats’ pet cat.
The Party of Coalition
What is equally nonsensical about this is that if there is one group in this world that the Liberal Democrats have not alienated (and indeed, there may only be one), it is Remainer Tories.
The Liberal Democrats are not going to win back left-wing voters. You can’t out-corbyn Corbyn on spending, and a party that compromised over the Hostile Environment act and traded plastic bags for benefit sanctions is not going to “out-pure” Labour.
Hot tip: If Richard Burgon can put your better performers on the defensive, you’re in a lot of trouble.
Let’s get something out of the way about that clip. Richard Burgon is a overstuffed toad, whose presence in the Shadow Cabinet is explained but not justified by his loyalty to Corbyn. He is the Chris Grayling of Labour, and that is the most damning criticism of a politician I can make.
But what I also noticed is that Jo Swinson is completely unable to defend the coalition effectively.
In essence, the Coalition is the greatest achievement of the Liberal Democrats. They managed to prove that they could form a stable coalition government that could execute on policy, mitigate the worst excesses of their partner and promote socially liberal policies that not only stick, but become accepted orthodoxy.
But, as Stephen Bush puts it in his excellent PMQ’s review:
The Liberal Democrats still don’t have a strong, unified line on their time in government and it really shows at times like this when it gets thrown in their faces by all sides.
From my position just inside the tent, this holds up. Half the activist base see coalition as deeply embarrassing, and the other half are massively defensive about it.
For myself, as a mere voter, I think Clegg did the best job he could, under difficult circumstances. I remember 2008–2010. I was just starting work, and the prospect of no government seemed unpromising for anyone’s future at that time. Also, bluntly, when you look at the results, it’s pretty clear the country voted “against Brown”, and the coalition was the logical result.
The Liberal Democrats’ main problem was that they trusted to gratitude from the Tories. Cameron and Clegg worked well together, and perhaps Clegg, naively, assumed that would mean the Tories would be less keen to hammer them at the next election.
This was a disastrous miscalculation. Labour used the coalition to hammer the Lib Dems in their marginals, and the Conservatives used it to turn the Lib Dems into a “target of opportunity” for angry voters, and to take credit for socially liberal ideas that, lest we forget, the majority of the Conservative party opposed.
The result was the utter devastation of the Liberal Democrat’s voter base and eventually the collapse of their political infrastructure as well.
Brexit offered a chance to repair the damage. Personally, I think the party actually swung too far Remainwards, at a time when the majority of the population were still hoping for Norway. None of that mattered, of course, compared to the fact that they alienated social liberals on a totally catastrophic level.
But at least it left the party with a clear path to recovery, by targeting dismayed socially liberal but pragmatic Conservatives, like Matthew D’Ancona who, in his article about how the Conservative Party has lost his support, doesn’t… mention… the… Lib… Dems… at… all…
The Party of Failure
A lot has been made of the fact that Labour is stuck on 40% of the vote “despite facing the worst government of all time”. Mostly, it has to be said, by people who have spent upwards of 3 years telling us, with only some justification, that Jeremy Corbyn will be an inadequate Prime Minister. So, you know, that might be the reason people aren’t supporting Labour, surely?
A far, far better question that we should be asking is:
Given that both parties are in full-on meltdown, why would the Lib Dems be lucky to pick up a single constituency in 2019?
When Labour was struggling with Iraq and the Conservatives were a mess, the Liberal Democrats grew in strength. Now Labour is struggling with anti-semitism and the Conservatives have a government that is literally in contempt of the Commons, and what are the Lib Dems good for?
There are a lot of potential reasons for this; the party lacks resources because of the 2015 devastation. Tim Farron’s decision to triangulate towards gathering Remain voters drove some people away, along with his inability to spot that the LGBT community might need more reassurance than “I didn’t actively block your marriage”. The absolute vitriolic hate between the two parties means that “wasting” your vote is too scary. Loads of things.
But the People’s Vote campaign shows that there are both backers and support for a pro-migration, pro-Europe party. Not a week goes by without hearing something from them. They have their own controversial hashtags. Why can’t the Liberal Democrats pick up and mobilise that support in the way they did in the early 2000's? There are plenty of potential reasons, but what is clear is that even if they can, they have failed utterly to do so.
In fact, what is worse, the party itself appears to have been absorbed into the People’s Vote campaign. Even those who remember the party exists would struggle to name another Lib Dem policy initiative.
Contrast Labour, which is able to triangulate around Brexit far more comfortably, in the face of strong opposition from the pundit class, and to be honest, common sense, because it has extremists on both wings, and other things to think about.
Where’s the Liberal Democrat policy on legalising drugs so we can actually regulate amounts and lethality? Or on green belt regulation? Or, heck, on expanding Free Movement to include CANZUK?
Nope, they’re just the core Parliamentary Wing of the People’s Vote, constantly being overshadowed by Dominic Grieve, Nicola Sturgeon, Anna Soubry, David Lammy, Caroline Lucas, Debbie Abrahams, Tony Blair, Roland Rudd… You get the picture.
Every time a political commentator talks about a new centrist party, a feather falls off a little yellow dove, like the rose in Beauty and the Beast. But who can blame them?
There’s a really strong political party around Remain, that appeals to a particular form of “US Democrat” or “centrist” voter. It’s just spread out across three different political parties, none of which are the Liberal Democrats.
The Liberal Democrats have successfully become less relevant to a People’s Vote than Caroline Lucas, sole Green MP in a seat that only survives until the next boundary review, or Dominic Grieve, a leading Conservative who thus campaigned on “No Deal is better than a Bad Deal” clear through the General Election of 2017.
Where Is The Professional Party?
To be clear, I am not a Corbynist. Corbynomics holds little appeal for me.
But I am prepared to lose that argument in a democratic vote. What I resent heavily is feeling pressured to vote for it, because the alternative is being represented by a party that deports pensioners for being Afro-Caribbean without a licence, and whose reaction to potentially severe medicine shortages is “it’ll be fine, Remoaner”.
There is a space now open in UK politics, for a part of the “sensible centre”.
A Professional Party that can cover that group of politicians from Johnny Mercer to Jess Phillips, for people who want a sensible government that treats politics as a responsible endeavour of management, rather than a thrill-seeking exercise in ideological buccaneering. At one time I thought the Liberal Democrats were perhaps the best seed for that.
These days, I’m less convinced than ever. And if I’m not convinced, who the hell would be?
