Dear Tim,
Congratulations on your election as leader of the Liberal Democrats. Now you must decide what kind of party you want to lead. Naturally the disaster of the general election weighs heavily on your mind; but, on the principle that one should never let a crisis go to waste, it also liberates you to think radically about the purpose of the Lib Dems in the years to come.
I suggest you start with a long view. In the past ninety years, since Labour overtook the Liberals as Britain’s main progressive party, you can point to a small number of leading lights who have made a difference. In conventional terms, Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy succeeded in breaking through in the House of Commons. Away from Parliament, William Beveridge and John Maynard Keynes shaped Britain’s post-1945 economic and social settlement.
As an MP, your instinct, and that of your colleagues and party activists, will be to work out how to rebuild the Lib Dems in terms of elected councillors and parliamentarians – in London, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Strasbourg. This won’t be easy; and, as I suspect it may take ten years or more to achieve significant gains, you could be setting yourself up for failure.
I would propose an alternative strategy. Keynes and Beveridge were intellectual giants who thought big thoughts and said big things about our economy and society. Their influence was enormous and owed nothing to conventional politics. (Few people know that Beveridge was briefly MP for Berwick-on-Tweed – because this was probably the least important position he held in an illustrious career.)
One can add the post-war era when the Liberals had a dozen MPs or fewer, but still influenced politics by adopting views on Europe, taxation and social policy that led the way in making Britain a fairer, more open and more outward-looking country. For example, David Steel’s private members bill in the late 1960s legalised abortion: a humane and long-overdue reform.
My suggestion that you strive for influence rather than more normal electoral measures of success (and, yes, of course, it would be great to have both) is made not just because I fear that votes will be hard to come by for the next few years. It’s also because the progressive project is in profound trouble – just as it was in the Thirties, before Keynes and Beveridge came to our rescue. The big prize is to fashion a new progressive settlement for the 2020s and 2030s: one that…
- Actively promotes private-sector wealth creation while curbing its excesses
- Reshapes welfare and public services in an era when voters want more and more of them but won’t vote for higher taxes to fund them
- Revives the dream of a tolerant, diverse, green, pro-European, globally generous country that voters from all backgrounds will support
These things are worth doing for their own sake. Capture the moral and intellectual leadership of those debates, and success will follow – not, perhaps for some years and maybe not until the next leader, or even the next but one. But, in the long run (and despite Keynes’s warning that in the long run we are all dead), you will join the pantheon of Liberals who are remembered for making a difference.
Meanwhile, here’s one more immediate suggestion. Go back to being a “Liberal”, rather than “Liberal Democrat”. The second word was necessary 25 years ago to secure the merger with the Social Democrats. Those days are long gone. “Democrat” dilutes the nobility of “Liberal”, without saying anything really distinctive. (Whatever their failings, Labour and the Tories, Ukip and the SNP, sit within the world of democratic politics.) So revert to the name that was associated with profound social reform in the glory years of the old Liberal party, and the measures that produced some of the better policies of post-1945 Britain, and send a signal that your real ambition is to win the great battle of ideas, not just the grubby skirmishes of harvesting votes.
Good luck: you will certainly need it!
