there is no point in lecturing a corpse

There seems to be some to-ing and fro-ing about how the Lib Dems should be treated by the opposition. There’s a simple answer to this: they should be treated as if they no longer exist. This is, after all, how Nick Clegg is treating them, and he should know. 

People think of the Lib Dems as an institutional party in the same sense as Labour and the Tories. That was maybe true when the Liberals were one of the big two. Since then, they’re probably better regarded as a series of projects designed to get a share of power for their senior managers. As such, they’re quite a fissile bunch. Over the last century, you’ve had Liberal Unionists, Coupon Liberals, National Liberals, and now Liberal Democrats. This isn't to say that individuals who cluster around whatever formation is currently trading under the liberal marque don't have convictions and loyalties in the same way Labour and Tory members do. It's just that if your convictions and loyalties don't build up over the years to much more than a bargaining position after a tight election, you have to decide whether to soldier on or cash out. And as it happens, when the opportunity comes to cash out, the leadership of the various Liberal projects has always broken to the Tories, whatever the general sentiment among the people they recruited might be. 

I think that was more a question of the way the numbers broke, rather than a matter of conviction. Back in the eighties, the Liberals, as was, made quite an audacious attempt to replace Labour as the main party of the left in Britain in conjunction with some Labour defectors, thus kicking off the whole process which eventually got them in government as a stick-on Tory left. And if if the Tories had got thirty fewer seats at the last election and Labour thirty more, we’d be seeing Nick and Vince saying that they’d taken a look at the real books and were horrified by all the warrantless Tory scaremongering about the size of the deficit, and yay the progressive coalition.

Anyway. The third party project named Lib Dem is now over. Its mission is fulfilled. That’s not to say that the Lib Dem apparatus will now simply dissolve. There has to be a period of cooling out the marks, as the saying goes, and for the Tories to embed as many as they can of the voters Clegg and Co have delivered to them. That process can last quite a long time. I don’t think the National Liberals formally vanished until the 1970’s – hell, I think Michael Heseltine was first elected as a National Liberal. At the very least, the Lib Dems will go forward as a hollow institution until we get some evidence of which of their voters simply revert to Labour, which of them find their current political environment quite comfortable and decide to vote for the organ grinder rather than the monkey, and which make a break for it and start all over again. 

As for how Labour should respond, it could do a lot worse than adopt some of the policies that led a lot of left leaning people to find the Lib Dems attractive in the first place. All that’s left of them of interest to anyone else is a pool of voters, and it makes sense for the opposition to grab its share. But treating the Lib Dems themselves as a formation with content and meaning is irrelevant and potentially distracting to the job of opposing the government.

Comments

[Alex]

And as it happens, when the opportunity comes to cash out, the leadership of the various Liberal projects has always broken to the Tories, whatever the general sentiment among the people they recruited might be.

Well, except when Asquith put Labour in in 1924 and when Thorpe turned down Heath in 1974 and signed the lib-lab pact in 1977. But one in four is almost 25%.

Not that I'm defending the buggers. Note that they eventually kept all the Mandelson industrial investments with the sole exception of the two in Sheffield - presumably to make a monkey of Clegg and expedite the process of digestion.

[jamie]

I meant "cash out" in the sense of "end that particular liberal project" rather than support one side or other, but fair point.

[Phil]

I dealt with "don't call them Yellow Tories, it's nasty and tribal and not helpful!" a bit back. Paraphrasing slightly from that post, what good would it do to call Clegg a Tory traitor? Well, it might drive Lib Dem voters away from his party, which would weaken it; it might attract liberal Tories to his party, which would create conflict and hence would also weaken it; it might prompt Clegg to move to the Left to prove the label wrong, which wouldn’t weaken the party but would make it a less reliable government ally and hence make it less harmful; it might even prompt him to move so far Left that he ended up splitting the party, which would weaken it and make it less harmful. Really, it’s all good.

I think where Sunny goes wrong is that he assumes the situation we want to create involves the Lib Dems, engaging constructively and shifting the centre of political gravity and doing all those bold yet talky things they like doing. Whereas actually the point we want to arrive at is one where the Lib Dems are doing less harm, if possible by ceasing to keep the Tories in office. If the Lib Dems as a party get broken in the process, I'm afraid that's not our problem.

[ejh]

How would you break a party of chancers?

[CharlieMcMenamin]

No argument from me on how best best to treat the Lib-Dems, but your prognosis rather assumes that Labour sort of automatically becomes a default pole of political attraction for the non Tory vote again. I'm not sure that's automatically true even in England, and I'm fairly certain there's nothing automatic about it at all in in Scotland and Wales.

New Labour shows very little sign of actually learning from its own howling errors in govt and " adopt[ing] some of the policies that led a lot of left leaning people to find the Lib Dems attractive in the first place"

[Alex]

I've actually taken all reference to the Liberals off my CV.

[twitter.com/matt_heath]

Hezza ran as a National Liberal in Gower in 1959, but was only ever elected as a Tory. I looked it up. On the internet.

[Chris Brooke]

Another way of thinking about it is that whenever the Tories are on the up, they suck in the people just to their left: the Chamberlainites, then Lloyd George Liberals like Churchill, later Sir John Simon's crew, and so on. And the reason we haven't seen so much of it more recently is that for most of the postwar period there weren't enough Liberals to make it worth trying to suck them in; and when the centre was a bit bigger after 1981, OTOH this was because of people splitting off from Labour who weren't ready to be absorbed by the Tories just yet, and OTOH Mrs Thatcher found she could win elections by running to the right and ignoring the traditional centre-ground of British politics. But now we're back to politics as usual.

[Phil]

ejh - good question. But if the party as such is basically indestructible (and it's certainly survived a lot over the years), all the more reason not to go easy on them.

[Cian]

Not that I'm defending the buggers. Note that they eventually kept all the Mandelson industrial investments with the sole exception of the two in Sheffield - presumably to make a monkey of Clegg and expedite the process of digestion.

Presumably Clegg has been made an offer of a safe Tory seat if he can deliver a full term. This was merely showing him what would happen if he didn't deliver.

The only way I can make sense of this, given that the sums involved were trivial, is that part of the deal we didn't see was a safe Tory seat for Clegg if he delivered for the full term. And this was

[Alex]

Or, alternatively, it's tribalism. They just hate the idea of Sheffield. This may sound silly, but when you look at the budget, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that a major motivation is pure spite.