Poor Vince Cable. A decade ago, when he was the interim leader of the Liberal Democrats, he led a contingent of 62 MPs. Now, as his party’s real leader, he leads just 12. For five years he was a cabinet minister, pronouncing with authority from the despatch box. Now, he cannot even be sure of being called to ask anything at Prime Minister’s Questions. Despite winning, net, four more seats this year (including Cable’s own seat, Twickenham), the Lib Dems’ share of the vote across Britain, 7.6 per cent, was the lowest since 1959.
So: should the Lib Dems finally admit defeat and disband? At his party’s annual conference in Bournemouth, should he tell his activists, “go back to your constituencies and prepare for oblivion”?
He won’t, of course. But, actually, I don’t think he should, either. The Liberal Democrats still have an important purpose. But to define it, they need to rid themselves of the illusion that they have hit rock bottom, that as the Brexit negotiations stumble, they are bound to become popular once more.
The rock-bottom, only-way-is-up hypothesis sounds plausible. This year’s share of the vote was just slightly down on 2015, so it looks as if there is a core vote of around two million loyal Liberal Democrats who share the party’s outlook on liberalism, Europe, decentralisation, the environment, electoral reform and so on.
"When the Lib Dems have done well, the surge in support has had little if anything to do with their policies"Sadly for the Lib Dems, that’s not true. The polling evidence suggests that this year, as in every election going back decades, there was a huge churn: the party lost more than a million of the people who voted for it two years ago, and gained a million-plus new voters this June. Theirs is a story of easy-come, easy-go that hasn’t changed for half a century.
Moreover, when the Lib Dems have done well, the surge in their support has had little if anything to do with their policies. Many of their “supporters” have been anti-EU and anti-Immigration. In other elections (for example to the European Parliament), many of them have voted for Ukip. Theirs has always been essentially a protest vote, especially when they have harvested five million votes or more. Sometimes the protest has been mainly anti-Conservative (as in the Blair landslide in 1997, when the Lib Dems gained seats as a result of ferocious tactical voting); sometimes it has been a more general anti-big-battalion protest (such as in 1983, when the Liberal-SDP Alliance tally reached seven million, with Margaret Thatcher and Michael Foot equally unpopular with many voters).
The trouble is, the party will now find it hard to engineer another protest-vote surge. Having spent five years in coalition with the Conservatives, and famously ditching their promise to abolish student tuition fees, the Lib Dems cannot plausibly present themselves as an honest, anti-establishment, plague-on-both-your-houses party. It follows that even if the Tories stumble, and Labour struggles to present itself as a credible alternative, the Lib Dems may not be able to gain many votes.
If the protest-vote route is blocked off, Lib Dem hopes must rest on generating a clear political identity that can attract, say, three or four million more voters to add to their core support of under one million. Now, many of the activists gathering in Bournemouth will insist that this is what their party has always done. The trouble is, these activists may have known, and enthused about, their party’s policies down the years, but most of their voters either haven’t known (because they were simply showing two fingers to the bigger parties) or have known and voted Lib Dem despite, not because of their policies. The publication of policy documents with forward-looking proposals for, say, green taxation is one thing. Persuading hard-pressed families to fork out for dearer petrol and foreign holidays is quite another.
"There can be no guarantee that a bad Brexit outcome will benefit the Lib Dems—but in the short run it looks like the party’s only chance"So, to say the Lib Dems must win votes through a clear, positive and specific endorsement of their programme for Britain is to say they must do something they have not achieved since the First World War.
Can they do it? Possibly, but not definitely. After all, their stance as Britain’s main, unambiguously pro-EU party was insufficient to attract many of those who voted Remain in last year’s referendum. Too many of the 48 per cent were a) strong supporters of other parties, or b) not actually that bothered about Europe and more concerned with other issues, or c) resigned to Brexit and saw little virtue in reopening the matter.
Cable’s best hope is that his exit-from-Brexit line will start to work next year, even though it didn’t work this year. That would require the Brexit negotiations to fail, and for this to generate a public backlash against both the Tories (for threatening to drive Britain’s economy over a cliff) and Labour (for slithering about indecisively). If all that happens, then the Lib Dems might, but only might, benefit electorally for their principled and consistent stance.
So, although there can be absolutely no guarantee that a bad outcome to the Brexit negotiations will benefit the Lib Dems, it remains the party’s best chance of reviving its fortunes. Indeed, in the short run it looks like the party’s only chance. But, by golly, if it comes off, and if a Lib Dem revival in the opinion polls and by-elections helps to persuade parliament to block a hard Brexit, then not only will Cable’s political virtue be rewarded; he will deserve the gratitude of a nation that is saved from catastrophe.
