It's the fees, stupid

(Yes, that's my real signature)


Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems ran an admirable European election campaign. It is clear what they stood for in leaflets and in broadcasts: "the party of in", in their well-honed words. Clegg was even prepared to take Farage and UKIP on directly in two TV debates. For people who believe, the disaster of the Euro project notwithstanding, that the EU is a good idea, here was a party prepared to make that case bravely and forcefully.

Labour, by contrast, had nothing to say on Europe. Literally nothing: their election leaflets were concerned only with domestic issues, and they bizarrely chose not to attack UKIP at all, despite the open goal that their "Thatcher on steroids" worldview presents, not least in areas in the North where they are now challenging Labour's traditional strongholds. I admire Ed Miliband in many ways, but it's hard to argue that their campaign this time round was anything other than dismal.

And yet I couldn't bring myself to vote for the first lot.

A cursory glance at Lib Dem Voice suggests that many, if not most, of their activists think they are being punished for making the case for Europe. This couldn't be further from the truth: the European case resonates well with the ex-LD voters they desperately need back. They've been stuffed despite their European stance, not because of it.

Others think it is an inevitable consequence of being in coalition. Wrong again. While the Lib Dems undoubtedly did lose a swathe of protest voters the moment the government was formed, most reasonable people understood that the maths didn't support a hook up with Labour and were willing to give this new-fangled coalition thing a chance.

The real problem dates back further than that, to the infamous tuition fees pledge that Clegg and the rest of the leadership signed in the full knowledge that they didn't believe in the policy and would drop it like a stone during coalition negotiations. You don't get a second chance when you do the dirty on the public like that.

Now a group of Lib Dems are calling for Clegg to be replaced. They are absolutely right that they will not get a fair hearing for as long as he is in charge, and they will undoubtedly do better at the next election if they get their way. I live in a marginal Lib Dem seat held by an excellent MP who has rebelled in all the right places. I for one would be far more inclined to vote for him at the next election if he is not led into battle by the likes of Clegg, Alexander, Laws and all the rest of the economic liberal brigade.

For the greater good of the left, though, I hope Clegg stays on. The only way we will get a left-wing government next time round is if Labour hangs on to its Lib Dem switchers while the right splits between the Liberals, Tories and UKIP. I've previously argued that Clegg is an undercover agent for Labour, and long may he continue his noble calling.

And if Labour really piss me off, well, there's always the Pirates...

Comments

  1. I'm really not convinced, I'm afraid. I agree that there were plenty of people (which I like to think constitute "reasonable", but then I would; I was one of them) who were willing to accept a coalition was the most sensible response to the 2010 results, but there's an obvious and cavernous gap here: you argue we can't blame the 2014 failure of the Lib Dems on their EU message because their EU message makes sense in 2014, and then argue we can't blame the 2014 failure of the Lib Dems being in coalition because being in coalition made sense in 2010. Thus are the four years the Lib Dems have spent in coalition quietly swept under the carpet, whilst you go searching for still earlier problems you can hang this defeat on (I realise that your formulation is technically correct, in that this catastrophe wasn't an inevitable result of coalition, but that makes figuring out what went wrong over the last four years more important, not less.)

    What's frustrating here is that it would be really useful to read a spirited defence of the Lib Dems choices and actions whilst in the coalition. It's beyond obvious that a large number of former LD voters state they've given up voting for them because of the coalition, and whether that's reasonable or not, the phenomenon needs to be engaged with instead of shoved into a cupboard. Indeed, the very fact you bring up the tuition fees debacle - which only became as serious a problem as it did because of the coalition - demonstrates the importance of sifting through the last four years and figuring out how many of the actions the party has taken were errors, and how many of those were unforced ones.

    Great to have you back, though! The blogohedron can be a lonely place.

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  2. Thanks although it is probably a one-off, at least for a while. I don't think blogmobiles have ISOFIX points...

    Perhaps my argument about inevitability wasn't clear. You are absolutely right that all of their actions while in government will have affected the public mood in some way, and many of them have not exactly rebuilt trust with their old voters: NHS dismemberment, junking their more moderate economic plans in favour of Osborne's Austerity Max, and selling Royal Mail off on the cheap come to mind straight away, none of which had been pre-ordained by the coalition agreement.

    Nevertheless I don't think those missteps have proved to be anywhere near as disastrous for their electoral fortunes as their ur-mistake on tuition fees. That is the one policy (besides electoral reform) the public associated above all with the Lib Dems and the one thing they should have ensured was negotiated properly. Once it had been thrown out of the agreement - and the Lib Dems negotiating team had no qualms about that, because they didn't support the policy in the first place (*) - their subsequent comeuppance was impossible to avert.

    This was of course a problem that came up because of the need to form coalition. What I was arguing against above is not whether being in coalition has damaged them - that much is indeed obvious - but precisely that all-important word "inevitable". It was not at all inevitable that they would have to give up their tuition fees pledge, screw up the NHS etc. etc. and a different course would have led to a different outcome. Imagine a coalition in which they had fought for the abolition of fees: every time anything else went wrong, they could go back to that as the place they've really made a difference. Instead they point to raising the income tax threshold, which while doubtless well-intentioned hardly even registers in the public imagination.

    So I completely agree with you that a thorough analysis of where they have gone wrong in coalition is important. I just think that such an analysis will point more than anything else at tuition fees.

    From time to time there have been well-argued defences of the leadership's actions on Lib Dem Voice, though it might take a bit of digging to find them. At the moment it's more a forum for debating whether Clegg is for the chop. They also tend to have a blind spot about tuition fees, which is what I am primarily railing against.

    * See e.g. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/nov/12/lib-dems-tuition-fees-clegg


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  3. I think I understand where you're coming from: the tuition fee screw-up was a sufficient condition for disaster, and everything else, whilst relevant, couldn't have ensured defeat the way doing that did?

    In which case I'd say I'm rather more convinced that the fee issue was a deal-breaker than I am that sticking to that pledge would have saved them. I'm not able to coherently defend that suspicion, though, beyond saying you have rather more faith in people understanding the difficulties in coalition government than I do. I think the Lib Dems were pretty close to automatically being screwed the day they shook hands with Cameron. But that's just habitual cynicism on my part; I've got no case studies or nuttin' to back it up with.

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  4. Yes, it is ultimately a matter of faith in the counterfactual. But at the risk of playing amateur statistician, we can perhaps glean some insight from opinion polls from 2010.

    Looking at the data from UK Polling Report, there appear to be three stages to the Lib Dem decline:

    1. A brief but distinct honeymoon period running from the day of the election until Osborne's emergency budget of 22 June. During this period the LDs were consistently polling around 20% or higher.

    2. A period of falling support beginning in the aftermath of the budget and continuing throughout the summer and autumn as the tuition fees debate ramped up.

    3. Hitting rock bottom around the time of the fees vote of December 9, from which the LDs have never shown any signs of recovering.

    From stage 1 I take it that most Lib Dem voters were not instinctively opposed to the coalition, and did not start to desert until it was clear they had signed up wholesale to Osborne's economic agenda. From stage 2 it seems to me that the decline, although triggered by the budget, wasn't sealed until the fees debate had run its course. And from stage 3 it's clear that nothing they've done since has helped them to recover in any way - though you could argue that negative things they've done may have caused their support to remain suppressed at a core vote level.

    Of course this doesn't prove that sticking to the pledge would have altered the stage 2 trajectory. I do think Clegg and co. have played a bad hand badly but I accept it is just speculation that another path was possible.

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