The new Lib Dems were delighted when Swinson promised to “cancel Brexit”, but the old cockroaches weren’t so sure. British history might have been rather different if Swinson had listened to Lib Dems like Norman Lamb, then the MP for North Norfolk, who warned that the “cancel Brexit” stance would help to polarise politics and “open the door” to Boris Johnson to win big.
But the Lib Dems didn’t listen, and actually rushed to open that door: it should not be forgotten that the 2019 election only happened because Swinson believed it was in her party’s best interest to allow Johnson to go the country.
Today, Brexit is not done but, endorsed in a referendum and a general election, it is a settled fact of British politics. That has left the Lib Dems, once again, searching for a purpose. That brings us back to transphobia, and the identity politics that seem to be all the party has to offer.
Log on to the Lib Dem website today the first thing you’ll see is a crowd of earnest young people holding rainbow flags and #LoveisLove placards. It’s the site of a Pride rally, not a political party.
Again, to be clear, this isn’t an argument that the Lib Dems should take a different position on gay rights, trans rights or any other part of that rainbow-flag agenda. For a party targeting younger, degree-educated urban voters, there’s a certain sense in that positioning, especially when Starmer is so carefully trying to avoid Tory attempts to draw him into a culture war where he can be painted as the head of a “woke liberal” party.
Nor is that different position really an option for Ed Davey, the Lib Dems’ sober new leader and a cockroach who first worked for the party in the early 1990s. One of the things that makes the Lib Dems different is their insistence on internal democracy and rules. The party machinery is a network of committees and boards, all with real internal power. If a small group can control an official “Specified Associated Organisation” such as LGBT+ Lib Dems, they can and do help set party policy and priorities. Weaning the Lib Dems off identity politics probably isn’t an option for Davey.
A better approach would be to put the rainbow flags in perspective: make them part of the Lib Dem offer — but not all of it. Once, not too long ago, the Lib Dems were the most effective think-tank in British politics, an outfit relentlessly churning out policy ideas that were perfectly sensible but just a little too far ahead of their time for bigger parties to embrace.
Yet Davey has taken the leadership of a party that has little to say about the bread-and-butter issues of politics and government that still motivate the typical voter. The party did develop some sound policies last year — insulating low-income homes; a £10,000 training allowance for all adults — but these were inevitably drowned out by noise about Brexit.
The irony of Lib Dem irrelevance on policy today is so sharp you could shave with it.
If it were to be revealed that Dominic Cummings was a card-carrying Lib Dem who used to sit on the Federal Policy Committee in the early 2000s, no one familiar with the party in those days would be remotely surprised. Industrial Strategy, regional policy, unpicking pension tax perks for high-earners and obscure local government reform: these are all things Lib Dems spent years talking about, to no avail. Anyone looking for the policies that flesh out the Johnson-Cummings promise of “leveling up” could do worse than look at the unread policy papers that Cable and others used to churn out.
Likewise on the green economy. It has been reported recently that the PM has become fascinated with the role that hydrogen could play in a new low-carbon economy.
If only he’d attended a few Lib Dem conferences in the cockroach days, when Lib Dems enjoyed nothing more than a day dreaming about the carbon-free economy of 2030. When I chaired a fringe meeting on energy policy at last year’s Lib Dem conference, everyone enjoyed it when a very detailed row broke out between audience members about the precise size of hydrogen molecules; Davey, a panelist, cheerily joined in. This is a party that takes the detail of policy seriously.
What happens to the Lib Dems next will depend in part on who is left in the party. The FBPE crowd were largely not “proper” Lib Dem cockroaches; many of them were happy to have a membership card and a direct debit, but not for them pounding the pavements delivering Focus leaflets or going to conference for Glee Club. There are still some very serious Lib Dems in local government, however, and I suspect many of the old cockroaches are still there, even if some younger types with blue hair and pronouns now make more noise.
Will that be a solid enough foundation on which Davey can start to rebuild? And if so, what will he construct? What is the role for the Liberal Democrats in a political system that is starting to look at least partially post-liberal? A fair bit depends on what Starmer does, but all the signs are that he’s listening to his very clever policy chief Claire Ainsley and trying to reconnect Labour with the values of the voters it lost to Johnson last year: Rule Britannia, VE Day and even Get Brexit Done.
Some Lib Dems may think that leaves a gap in the market for a truly progressive party: more rainbow flags and BLM slogans, and rejecting voters who believe the “wrong” things. In other words, offering sort of politics that Americans call “liberal left”.
As an outsider who runs a centrist think-tank, I’d suggest the Lib Dem aim should be something else: to make the case for a rather older idea of liberalism, one where personal freedom and responsibility go hand-in-hand and people are trusted to make their own choices within a clear set of rules.
The two big parties are quietly agreeing a broad consensus that the size and power of the state should grow: assuming Johnson leads his party into the next election, don’t be surprised to see him battling Starmer over who can promise to do the most, spend the most, in the Red Wall and elsewhere. After all, money is cheap and the huge challenge of the pandemic demands a new paradigm, right?
Economically, we have already entered the new world: the Conservative Party is waging political war on allies and institutions in order to obtain the power to use state spending to support companies favoured by ministers and their super-bright advisers. Likewise the rules and instructions rolled out in response to Covid-19, some of which constitute a remarkable extension of state power in daily life.
Who speaks for the dissenters, for those who’d like some more checks and balances on the people in charge? Who will make the case for rules on the role of the state in markets and in people’s lives? I am no liberterian but the absence of a clear liberal voice in British politics unnerves me sometimes. And as someone who still thinks Mill’s On Liberty is probably the most important book I’ve ever read, it saddens me to see “liberal” attached to causes and ideas that are keener to smother dissenting opinions than protect them.
Is there yet a role for a liberal Lib Dem party? Do the Lib Dems want to be that party? Here, Davey might want to pay attention to the detail of some recent YouGov polling on those Covid interventions, which asked people if they would follow ministerial encouragement to shop their fellow citizens to the police for meeting in groups of more than six.
No fewer than 43% of Conservative voters would report strangers to the police, and 29% would make a similar call about neighbours; 15% of Tories would even call the cops on family members. Lib Dems, meanwhile, were the voter-group least likely to snitch: only 26% would call the police on strangers, 21% about neighbours, and 7% on family.
https://twitter.com/cagyarrow/status/1306920845911224321?s=20
Britain may be heading down the road of post-liberal politics and a bigger state, but liberalism is neither dead nor doomed to irrelevance. Lib Dem cockroaches need to decide if they want to keep scuttling on.
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