The Lib Dems haven't learned the right lessons from the coalition

Last week, a self-declared group of ‘senior Liberal Democrats’ co-signed a letter to The Guardian calling on the party to be more distinctive in its policy offering.

This brought about this intriguing response from Mark Pack, arguing that the party has a bold strategy that is working well electorally. I can only hope that Mark, for whom I have a lot of respect, is merely playing the role of Party President by defending the party’s strategy in public but in fact is acting as more of a critical friend in private. For the evidence is that the Liberal Democrats’ strategy is neither bold nor, is it working.

Let us start with the second point. The party should be alarmed that according to recent polls, just 4% of 2019 Conservative voters are now supporting the Liberal Democrats. Given that the Conservative Party has hemorrhaged support in recent years, and it is well-documented that Labour have struggled to solidify support from former Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats’ inability to attract more of these voters is an abject failure.

According to Mark Pack’s letter, the current Liberal Democrat strategy is working as it will lead to an increased Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Party who can push for a proportional voting system that will have longer term benefits both for the party and for achieving a fairer society. If this is the essence of the party’s current strategy, I have several concerns.

There is a banter timeline where in a hung Parliament scenario the Liberal Democrats manage to secure PR and then get annihilated, since with their current strategy voters don’t know what they stand for and the most compelling reason currently being offered for vote Liberal Democrat - that they are most effective at representing you locally - becomes less relevant in a proportional system (depending on how large the constituencies would be under any future PR system).

Indeed, this lack of a clear national identity is a large part of why the Liberal Democrats have always under-performed at PR elections at a Scottish, Welsh, London and European level (except for the European elections in 2019 where they took a bold stance on the biggest issue of the day). It is also why they are largely irrelevant in the ever increasing directly-elected Mayoral contests. For the party to successfully pivot from surviving under first-past-the-post to succeeding under a PR system, voters will need to have a far better awareness of what the party stands for than they do now.

The party is openly briefing that rather than running a national campaign, they are planning to run by-election style campaigns in its target seats, focusing on issues of greatest concern to voters in those areas. This may increase the size of the Parliamentary Party at the next election but one consequence of this is that outside of target seats with an active ground campaign, the party is offering little reason for voters to support them. Given the likely national swing to Labour, this means that the party’s support outside of its target seats is at risk of going down, as it has in all but one of the parliamentary by-elections this term which it hasn’t fought to win. Where are the second places that the party can build on in future elections going to come from? Further, what happens when the Parliamentary boundaries are next updated and sitting Lib Dem MPs have to generate support from a standing start in wards that have been added to their constituency? There is good sense in targeting resources, but little sense in ignoring every voter that lives outside of a target constituency.

Optimists might believe that the party has gotten over the ghosts of the coalition, defaulting to being everyone’s second favourite party, but this is not the case. If anything the Green Party have taken over this mantle, finding an ability to beat complacent or unpopular Labour and the Conservative Parties in various parts of the country regardless of the local demographics. Without a clear national message the Liberal Democrats will struggle to expand beyond areas where they already have a strong ground campaign presence.

One rationale for not running a national campaign is to avoid taking too strong a stance on anything that might lose votes in target seats, as happened with the positions that the party took on cannabis legislation in 2017 or on the proposed mansion tax in 2010. In his response letter, Mark Pack claims the party is being bold on climate change, international aid, proportional representation and Europe. On climate change, the Liberal Democrats will always struggle to be more associated with the issue than the Greens. The party’s position on international aid is not worlds away from Labour’s and anyway, international aid and electoral reform are not big priorities for voters. Whereas on Europe even if the Liberal Democrat policy is more radical than Labour’s current position the party has failed, either accidentally or deliberately, to summarise it in a pithy enough fashion that voters can identify what it is.

Actually being bold means taking positions that clearly illustrate the differences the party has from both the major parties. A timely new book about the party reminds us that in the past the party was very successful at this, e.g. raising the top rate of tax, no like-for-like Trident replacement, opposing the Iraq war. The wider problem that the authors identify is that building up support on a short-term tactical basis means that the party’s supporters are never strongly attached to it and are prone to abandon the party at the slightest discontent.

Indeed, what most damaged the Liberal Democrats’ electoral standing between 2010 and 2015 was the mismatch between what voters expected the party to deliver on in office and what it actually did. Firstly many voters did not expect the party to countenance coalition with the Conservatives, nor to back austerity so brutally. Then there’s the debacle of tuition fees, a policy which the party promoted for (at least partially, if not mostly) electorally expedient reasons, which key figures in the party like Nick Clegg, Vince Cable and David Laws had little motivation to prioritise once they had to make choices in government. I have argued before that the electoral justification for the U-turn was based on a flawed assumption that voters supported the party for what was on the front page of the manifesto when if you had stopped a voter on the street in the 2010 election and asked them to name a Lib Dem policy, tuition fees and Iraq would have been far more associated with the party than raising the income tax threshold.

The main lesson that the party should learn from coalition then, is the need for congruence between what it wants to do when it gets the opportunity to wield power again and what the party’s supporters expect it to do when it has the opportunity again. Running highly individualised messages in different target seats at election time makes this all the more difficult.

Given their bruising experience in government, after Brexit ironically offered the Liberal Democrats an electoral lifeline by providing the opportunity to build up a core vote in parts of the country with greater numbers of graduates, you might have thought the party would take a little time to think more strategically about what it wants to achieve when it ever gets the opportunity to wield power again. Instead the party still seems to bounce between whichever electoral tactics prove most expedient in the short-term.

When I worked for the party as a campaigns organiser, in training sessions we were often made to think about ‘building fortresses’, the idea that you could make held Liberal Democrat seats electorally secure by running campaigns all year round, constantly communicating with voters. But during the coalition we discovered that many of these fortresses were built on foundations of sand, and the party appears to be undertaking the same flawed construction process now. Indeed, in the years following that Mark Pack himself was the leading voice for the party to adopt a core vote strategy to build a more solid voter base. Of course, the party will always need some transactional voters to succeed under first-past-the-post. But the greater the proportion of transactional voters to core voters, the less solid the party’s foundations. And the less easy it is to build beyond areas which currently have a strong ground campaign.

The strategy of running local campaigns in areas where the party is polling well (e.g. the ‘Blue Wall’), where it has won parliamentary by-elections, and where it has a strong ground campaign presence (often in former held seats) has long-term consequences. It is difficult to find messages that appeal equally to the voters of Esher and Walton, North Shropshire and Eastleigh. This disincentivises a core vote strategy and incentivises continued local campaigns to hold on to these seats. This is a clear echo of the  electoral strategy prior to the coalition which set the party up for failure. If the party wants to get it right next time and achieve radical change in office whilst holding onto its support it needs to adopt strategy and tactics which have that end goal in mind.