An anatomy of Liberal Democrats’ contested strategy

Good morning. The Labour party’s position on the Israel-Hamas war led to one of the most difficult moments in Keir Starmer’s leadership, cost Labour votes in the local elections and essentially gave all its opponents a stick to beat it with.

But while the Conservatives, the SNP and the Green party have all been happy to do so, Ed Davey has opted not to. The Liberal Democrat leader’s decision on this front has been internally contentious.

Although the Lib Dems called for an immediate bilateral ceasefire back in November, the national party has not sought to attack Labour for only gradually shifting its position towards supporting a ceasefire in Gaza. (Some local campaigns have made this criticism.) One senior Lib Dem recently described the national party’s silence as the “worst mistake of Ed’s leadership”.

To understand why Davey hasn’t attacked Labour on the issue, you have to understand another internal debate in the party: why did the Lib Dems do so badly in the 2015 general election? The question is not just one of historical interest but one that illuminates many of the arguments within the party today about its strategy.

When all is Ed and done

Here were the results of the 2015 general election:

— Con: 331 seats (+24)

— Lab: 232 seats (-26)

— SNP: 56 seats (+50)

— Lib Dem: 8 seats (-49)

— Ukip: 1 seat (+1)

— Others: 22 seats (0)

Why did the Lib Dems do so badly? The short answer is “because they went into coalition with the Conservatives in 2010”. There are essentially two arguments within the party over what went wrong: the first puts the blame on the party’s decision-making from 2010 to 2015, and the second says that it was about choices made before 2010.

Personally, I think the problems came before 2010. The Lib Dems’ poll rating began its collapse the moment they went into coalition. It had fallen to about 10 per cent before Lib Dem ministers voted to increase tuition fees to £9,000 or any of the spending cuts they signed up to had been felt. Although the opinion polls in the 2010 to 2015 parliament were off, we have a pretty good indication that the polls showing the Lib Dems had collapsed early doors were exactly right. The local elections in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 all showed the party’s level of support bobbing along at the same pretty low level.

I’m not saying every decision the Lib Dems made was damaging for the party’s prospects, or from a policy perspective. I think Nick Clegg was right to say it was a mistake for him to attend Prime Minister’s Questions every week, which forced him to sit as an unhappy mute next to David Cameron, and to regret not insisting on a stronger deputy prime minister’s office to fight the Lib Dem corner. And sometimes the party just had completely the wrong priorities in internal negotiations.

But all of that was secondary to the fact that going into coalition was a shock to the party’s voters that the party’s standing never recovered from. Essentially there are two things you can conclude from that. The first is the argument that Wera Hobhouse, the MP for Bath, made during the party’s 2020 leadership election: the party shouldn’t have gone into coalition with the Conservatives at all.

The second — which is the one I agree with — is that the mistake the Lib Dems made wasn’t in going into coalition, but in what they did before going into coalition. It was the party’s policymaking processes saddling Clegg and Vince Cable with a tuition fee pledge they didn’t think they could possibly keep in office. It was the Lib Dem leadership embracing that policy publicly in the run-up to the 2010 election. It was the suggestion made throughout the 2000s that the Lib Dems were to the left of Labour, which flattened the party’s traditions and made it inevitable that a bunch of voters would see going into coalition with the Tories as a betrayal.

Ed Davey’s explicit argument is that it is unproductive for the party to attack Labour in ways that might puff up the party’s poll share, but would do so largely in Labour-held constituencies where the Lib Dems are not going to win. Such a move would shape perceptions of the party that don’t help it win in the places where it can get MPs. I think that’s right. But more importantly, doing so would herald a return to all the old habits the party had that made going into coalition so electorally painful: habits that the party should want to avoid precisely because they should want to go into coalition again.

Now try this

This week, I mostly listened to Fergus McCreadie’s lovely new jazz record Stream while writing my column.

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Below is the Financial Times’ live-updating UK poll-of-polls, which combines voting intention surveys published by major British pollsters. Visit the FT poll-tracker page to discover our methodology and explore polling data by demographic including age, gender, region and more.

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Letter in response to this article:

Cameron-Clegg agreement was like same-sex marriage / From Lord Rennard, Liberal Democrat Peer, House of Lords, London SW1, UK