Liberal lateral thinking

In view of the FDP’s success in the recent German elections, I thought it might be worth flagging up some articles that have appeared in the UK liberal corner of late – one on the Times from Rachel Sylvester, and one on Liberal Vision. The gist of them is that the Lib Dems in the UK drastically need to rethink their approach to UK electoral strategy – specifically that, in order to have a meaningful political party, Lib Dems must be prepared to consider more than just ideological alliance on individual issues with one or other of the main two parties. As Ms Sylvester says, the ‘c-word’ that Nick Clegg must start thinking about is not ‘cuts’ or even ‘charisma’, but ‘coalition’. In view of Mr Clegg’s recent comments, which implied that Lib Dem aggression will be aimed at the Conservatives more than Labour, the ‘obvious’ route would be a Lib-Lab pact along the lines of the one supposedly discussed by Paddy Ashdown and Tony Blair pre-1997.

But in the current political climate, would the Lib Dems really be prepared to prop up a moribund Labour government in the case of a hung parliament? Doing so would not only betray all the voters who had switched to yellow through disappointment with red and aversion to blue, but also associate the Lib Dems with more of the sort of wasteful un-joined-up policy short-termism that Labour has embodied since 2007, if not since well before that. The alternative is obviously an alliance with the Tories – but Mr Clegg’s constant attempts to differentiate himself and his party from Mr Cameron and his Conservatives (despite an increasingly similar social-democratic flavour to their respective agendas) seems to rule that out as well.

In other words, the Lib Dems are resolute in wanting to stand alone as a third party, preferring the independence that opposition to the main parties gives them to the slight policy enslavement that could result from adopting a ‘kingmaker’ coalition partner status. Perhaps this is a valid choice as things stand, since the prospects of a major political upheaval at the next election are very real. But if Labour fail to disintegrate as much as the polls currently suggest they will, and the Lib Dems remain the third party, their frontbench leadership should bear in mind the following exchange when Herr Westerwelle visited them in 2006:

[A] LibDem frontbencher ask[ed] Westerwelle whether he wanted the Free Democrats to remain in opposition to the grand coalition of Christian and Social Democrats, or whether he sought to return to government. The German liberal leader was pretty incredulous. With a friendly frown he said that he wanted to return to government as soon as possible, what was the point of being in permanent opposition? A heavily pregnant pause followed.

Quite.

~ by Marius Ostrowski on October 1, 2009.