Today, a bruised Liberal Democrat party, feeling punished – and with more apparently to come – for going into coalition with the Conservatives in 2012, have lost their wits.
Instead of campaigning proudly on the positive record of a successful coalition government that ran the full five year term with no instability – and has returned the UK to growth with the strongest economy in the EU – they are wrapping themselves in the cloak of apology, wringing hands to the fore – like the betrayers they were not.
Yes – they gave in on the issue of tuition fees for higher education – but they could see the budgetary realities from an insider perspective. Do not forget that this election – and these budgetary realities – came only 18 months after the major and multinational financial breakdown in the autumn of 2008.
These were always going to be hard times. The surprise is that we have been led out of them much sooner than anyone expected. And the IMF publicly conceded that its own pessimistic judgment was wrong and the Chancellor’s correct.
If the Liberal Democrats had the wit and the necessary backbone, strategically they should have campaigned robustly on that record – in which they participated to a degree way beyond, proportionately, what their modest 57 seats might have brought them; but, to David Camerons’s credit, reflected better their proportion of the national vote.
The 2010 results
The 2010 UK General Election result saw:
- Conservatives take 31.1% of the vote, with 306 seats – 97 seats up from the previous election.
- Labour take 29% of the vote, with 258 seats – a loss of 91 seats on the previous election.
- Liberal Democrats take 23% of the vote, with 57 seats – 5 seats down on their previous total, although up 1% on vote share..
Neither of the ‘big two’ had an overall majority but the Conservatives, with 306, were the party with the greatest number of seats.
Election protocols for hung parliaments established during the Heath-Wilson see-saw governments in the early 1970s see the party with the greatest number of seats given the first chance to form a coalition; and if that party is led by the sitting Prime Minister, they are given the opportunity to govern as a minority administration.
We are not aware of any precedent for the second placed party governing as a minority administration – and indeed, if this were the case, the country could see a serially rejected party nevertheless take power in this capacity.
It is the job of the senior civil servants and the Monarch’s advisers to satisfy themselves that any proposed administration has a decent chance of being able to govern for an acceptable percentage of a full term.
What was the picture the Liberal Democrats were looking at?
After the results of the 2010 General Election, the Liberal Democrats were the hottest ticket in town, in demand by both Conservatives and Labour.
They were seeing the previous party of government decisively rejected by the electorate. Labour had lost 91, or 26%, of its former 348 seats.
The Lib Dem’s 57 seats would carry the Conservatives securely past the 326 seats which represents an overall majority in a 650 seat chamber.
These 57 seats, added to Labour’s 258 would still see them together unable to form a government – with a combined total of 315 seats, 11 short of the necessary 326 for an overall majority.
These seats could have been found but the complex internal tensions make a multiparty coalition full of endemic risks to its potential durability.
Being part of such a risk-ridden enterprise to restore to government a party the electorate clearly did not wish to see back in power, would have been anti-democratic – however much Labour has always been the easier fit for the Lib Dems. It would have destroyed the credibility of their political integrity.
So after five days of playing the field, the Liberal Democrats chose to form a coalition with the Conservatives. They made the only decision they could make – and they got into power – which is the core purpose of the existence of any political party.
This was unequivocally the corect action to take. How could they possibly have put back into power a party the country had roundly sacked and which had been responsible for one of the worst financial crises Britain has known?
And of course they were going to take a disappointed Labour-led hit for what they did, with that party then fuelled by the sense of entitlement no one on this earth possesses. We are all as good as the last thing we did – and the last thing Labour had done was enable a once-in-half-a-century financial catastrophe.
And now?
The 2011 Scottish election disembowelled the Liberal Democrat presence to five seats. Only two of these are constituency seats and those [Orkney Isles and Shetland Isles] are about as peripheral as you can get in Scotland, separated from each other by a considerable distance and in the far Atlantic north. The other three are Regional List seats and are not even contiguous – one in the far northern mainland, one in the Central Belt and one in the borders.
For Argyll has said, from our detailed contemporary analysis of the results of that election, that we could see no way the party could possibly rebuild in Scotland from that new foundation. All they had left was five seats, each removed from the others. They are erratic outcrops, not a presence of any kind.
Across the United Kingdom polls today put the Lib Dems on 8%.
The party’s response?
Recently, the party was advised by one of its sages to take time out and not go back into government at this state, not with either of the Conservative or Labour parties.
The suggestion was that a period in the political equivalent of a rehabilitation clinic, would be instructive – to reflect, refocus and ‘regroup’ [most mindless word - with, today, even an individual seeking to 'regroup']
Yesterday, party Leader,Nick Clegg declared that the party would not go back into coalition with the Conservatives unless they abandoned their planned welfare cuts.
How, exactly, would that action give the Liberal Democrat voice any influence whatsoever?
They’re neither big enough – and will be smaller in May – nor sufficiently respected to be listened to, unless they are in government.
As a rump party, the Liberal Democrats will be swept to the periphery by the resurgent – insurgent – SNP, whose antics the bored national media will be very eager to report and will be given plenty to engage them.
The SNP will also replace them as the third largest party in the UK, taking the ‘Short money’ funding awarded to that rank.
Unless the Liberal Democrats are in government, they will sink below the level of perception and that will be the end of a distinctive party with a historic presence and a balanced progressive philosophy with which this country – and this party – needs to become reacquainted.
In coalition with, the most likely outcome – the Conservatives, they may not win just now on the cuts, which are designed to be a sharp correction to see the country in a very different place in three years time. However, if they are in government they will be in the best possible position in three years time to argue for the most enabling and humane and fairest national stance on funded welfare.
If they’re off the radar in a rehab no one will care whether or not they emerge from, they will be quite perfectly useless.
The Liberal Democrats started to grow up in 2010. Now they have to mature, not retreat to some ersatz permanent juvenescence.
