Things are looking up for the Liberal Democrats and Ed Davey, who arrived at the Liberal Democrat Conference in Bournemouth at the head of a marching band. Ten years ago, after the disaster of the 2015 general election when the party returned only eight MPs, some Lib Dems were asking whether their leader needed to be an MP at all. But now, following last summer’s general election, the party has 72 of them – the most Liberals elected for a century. At the conference a friend complained to me: “I went to the session, but there were so many MPs they dominated the debate.”
The media are so obsessed with Reform UK Ltd that they all but missed one of the big stories of the general election: the collapse of the Conservative Party in southern England. Now Boris Johnson’s Henley, Theresa May’s Maidenhead and even that legendary home of disgusted writers to the newspapers, Tunbridge Wells, all have Liberal Democrat MPs.
This success has brought the party new opportunities and new pressures. After returning from the Lib Dem conference, here are some of my thoughts.
The Liberal Democrats are the real opposition to Reform
The headlines the party wanted from the conference were all about its opposition to Nigel Farage and Reform UK. And it got them. BBC News had: “We’ll stop Farage turning UK into Trump’s America, says Davey”, while The Guardian sketch went with: “No more Mr Nice Guy: Ed Davey rebrands Lib Dems as the real opposition to Reform”. This is the way Liberal Democrats love to see themselves and the other parties have more or less left the role to them. Labour has convinced itself that its voters agree with Farage, while Conservative activists really have been won over by his clickbait politics.
As the commentators observed, this way of presenting the Lib Dems had more to do with consolidating the party’s appeal to moderate Conservatives than trying to win over Reform voters, though at the next election there could well be seats in the West Country that turn out to be Reform/Lib Dem marginals. And it’s an odd fact that until recently Liberal Democrat candidates could pile up 20,000 votes in the Lincolnshire seats that now constitute Reform’s heartland.
A double Liberal Democrat U-turn on ID cards
If the attack on Reform was expected, the Lib Dem leadership’s treatment of the issue of ID cards was puzzling. On the eve of the conference, Lisa Smart, then the party’s spokesperson on home affairs, wrote an article for the semi-official blog Liberal Democrat Voice saying it was time for the party to “update our thinking on digital ID”. An early-morning consultation meeting held at the conference showed little enthusiasm for such an “updating”, but Ed Davey returned to the subject later that day. He told a question-and-answer session “times have changed” and the party should look at the issue again and not be “knee-jerk” in its opposition. The journalist chairing the session then obligingly called for a show of hands on the question. Someone who was there reckoned that about 40% of the room had supported Davey, but an enthusiastic BBC report told readers that two-thirds had supported the leader’s new line.
Then, immediately after the conference, came the announcement that the government was to proceed with a compulsory digital ID scheme. Within no time, the party had launched an online petition against it and Ed Davey announced the party would “fight this tooth and nail just like Blair’s ID cards”. This is the side of the argument where most Lib Dem activists feel happier. They are proud that it was the refusal in 1950 of the Liberal councillor and parliamentary candidate Harry Willcock to show his card when stopped by police – “I am a Liberal, and I am against this sort of thing” – that led to the abolition of the ID cards that had been introduced during the Second World War.
Lib Dems explore the new political landscape
Home from the conference, I have been wondering what the future holds for the Liberal Democrats. At the last general election, a combination of the collapse of the Conservative Party and ruthless targeting of winnable seats led to 60 Lib Dem gains from them. The party now finds itself representing swathes of prosperous southern England. Its reaction to this has sometimes looked like a tack to the right; the Lib Dems opposed the addition of VAT to private school fees, while their campaign against the ‘Family Farm Tax’ looks very like opposition to any tax on the transfer of agricultural land at all. Mostly though, the complaint from within the party, and sometimes from within the parliamentary party, is that Liberal Democrat MPs have abstained too much.
There are signs that the party is planning for this new political landscape. The Liberal Democrats defied all received political wisdom by fighting the last election without having much of an economic policy at all and it seemed to do them no harm. But in a reshuffle held just after the conference, Ed Davey appointed a second economic spokesperson to his frontbench and in Bournemouth the party adopted a new economic policy document called, with their new-found confidence, Leading the Way.
Ed Davey and his amazing stunts
The way Davey fought the last election showed he had learnt from Remain’s defeat in the EU referendum. The Leave campaign consistently provided the media with interesting footage and photographs – think of the flotilla of fishing boats they brought up the Thames to Westminster. All Remain had, by contrast, was George Osborne wearing a suit and threatening to put people’s taxes up.
Ed Davey’s stunts were also a reaction to the media’s reluctance to report on the Liberal Democrats. They were carefully designed to give him the opportunity to talk about the party’s favourite policies; all those wetsuits and waterboards meant Davey could talk to regional television news afterwards about sewage in rivers and that was an issue that really hurt the Conservatives.
The national newspapers always tell the Liberal Democrats they should lose the stunts and concentrate on policy. But if Ed Davey decides to fight the next election in a similar fashion, you can be sure those same papers will ignore the party’s policies but gleefully report his latest stunt.
