BBC deputy political editor James Landale is a noted trend watcher and his recent focus on the Lib Dems’ identity crisis – or probably more aptly a multi-personality disorder - is an analysis capable of drawing nods from several quarters.
His overall assessment, regardless of the recent collateral damage sustained at the polls and over AV, is that Clegg and his party must stay in government. The “brutal truth” as he puts it, is that the Lib Dems have nowhere else to go. They are locked into a government whose fate depends on economic recovery in four years time. There are no other alternatives and the only hope is hang in there whilst banging on that the that Lib Dems remain a mitigating factor within a pragmatic coalition arrangement.
But the underlying dilemma which Landale observes to be constraining the third force in UK politics, and the reason why Lib Dems cannot afford to disengage, is that by finally defining themselves as a party of government, the party has managed to lose its fuzzy appeal which once enabled them to successfully influence diverse sections of the electorate for different reasons. He writes:
For years they have won votes from a variety of voters, many of whom have had vastly differing ideas of what the party is about and for.
Those who thought the Lib Dems were a soft-left, anti-war alternative to Labour have long gone.
Those who thought the Lib Dems were a party of civil liberties and electoral reform alone have been left puzzled and disappointed by their coalition with the Conservatives.
Some who thought the Lib Dems were a respectable centrist alternative to the Tories in the South West have either drifted away to UKIP or been attracted by David Cameron's social liberalism.
And of course, many who voted Lib Dem just to protest against the government of the day can no longer do so.
At one level, this extensive and rapid disaffection is evocative of the scene in the B-movie where the mind-ray used by alien invaders to disguise their presence on earth is finally deactivated - although equating Lib Dems with reptilian insurgents is probably stretching things a bit. Well, perhaps not if you’re a tory cabinet minister.
What continues to puzzle observers however is that Lib Dems collectively don’t appear to have an inkling as to why people have stopped voting for them. Some blame the spending cuts, others blame the broken promises, and others just blame the fact of their being in coalition with the Tories. Few put their hands up to the state of affairs whereby they can no portray themselves as all-things-to-all-voters role and expect to be given the benefit of the doubt.
And whilst Landale talks about the “straitjacket of government”, enough electors spotted the significance of Lib Dems ministers and their parliamentary familiars consciously deciding to back a hike in tuition fees rather than resign over reneging on a manifesto commitment.
This is not so much an identity crisis for the party as a serious need for Lib Dems to regain their reputation as a nice if rather misguided bunch of well meaning people who seem to have lost their way a bit but have their our overall best interests at heart – and lots of luck with than one.
Sooner or later, the Lib Dems will be forced to decide what they are for and how they intend to make it happen. But they are running out of time. As the first anniversary of the coalition deal approaches, Clegg needs to convince his party that the long haul does not equate to a slow death. At the moment, most activists see an arrangement which gained five years in government in exchange for decades of subsequent electoral obscurity. At present, very few see it as a good deal.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment