I've come across a paper on the Liberal Democrat experience of being in coalition with the Conservatives and of defending that record at the 2015 general election.
It is written by Dr Matt Cole from the University of Birmingham, who interviewed Liberal Democrat campaign teams in 12 constituencies that the party had won at the 2010 general election. His research was conducted after the 2015 election and published in September 2016.
The whole paper is worth reading, but I shall pick out three areas of particular interest here.
First there is the Fixed-term Parliament Act. Ending the ability of prime ministers to call an election when they thought it would favour their party has long been Liberal and then Lib Dem policy, and it was thought that we could not enter coalition without such an act.
The thinking was that we needed to be sure the Tories could not pull the rug out from under us as soon as they judged it would be to their advantage.
But was the act really to Lib Dem advantage? Because it left us unable to cut short the coalition too.
In the unexpectedly perspicacious words of David Davis, we had "the best seats on the plane but no parachute".
As Matt Cole points out, when the Liberals left the Lib-Lab Pact in 1978 it marked the start of a period in which the party’s poll rating rose from 6 per cent to 14 per cent before the 1979 election. No such strategy was open to the Lib Dems before 2015.
Then there was our attitude to finding ourselves in government. Cole quotes one MP as saying that we "spent the first two years apologising for being in government".
That is a succinct summing up of the approach of Richard Reeves, Nick Clegg's director of strategy until 2012:
In a presentation to Lib Dem MPs then, Mr Reeves mapped out three phases for the Coalition. The first had to be about unity on cutting the deficit, to show that coalition works and put down firm foundations. Phase two would be "differentiation" to show voters the Lib Dems were not the same as the Tories, before a natural divergence ahead of the 2015 election.
As it turned out, we should have been showing voters that we were not the same as the Tories from the first day of the coalition. A a large chunk of our voters concluded that we were the same and withdrew their support as a result. By the time we were thinking about differentiation they were no longer intereted in us.
Reeves, if he is remembered at all, is remembered for social liberals that they should join the Labour Party, but he is a notable interpreter of John Stuart Mill.
Finally, the views Matt Cole gathered on the 2015 election campaign are depressingly familiar because people have been saying much the same thing about that of 2019.
Try:
The national campaign accompanying the manifesto was widely and severely criticised amongst interviewees for its failure to integrate with their constituency campaigns or to win support from the public.
and:
Some complained … that materials prepared for delivery in the constituency … had to be abandoned as unsuitable.
More generally, there were tensions between the campaign teams in the constituencies and an overbearing Liberal Democrat HQ. To illustrate them, Cole included this artwork from the cover of the February 2015 Liberator.
3 comments:
"As it turned out, we should have been showing voters that we were not the same as the Tories from the first day of the coalition. A large chunk of our voters concluded that we were the same and withdrew their support as a result. By the time we were thinking about differentiation they were no longer interested in us."
It doesn't get as much comment as it should but there was a chunk of voters who believed the Lib Dems and Conservatives were not the same, that the former had influence in government and voted accordingly in 2015.
The problem was that these were Conservative-Ukip floating voters who thus voted to get the Lib Dems out.
The comment about the impact of leaving the Lib/Lab Pact on the party's poll findings suggests that leaving the Pact helped the party recover. If you pick the range of polls carefully, you can just about squeeze out an argument that the party picked up about 1.5 percentage points between leaving the pact and the party winning the Liverpool Edge Hill by-election. That win and/or the general election campaign (it's hard to separate the two due to the timings) are what did almost all of the party's recovery.
So the alternative lesson to draw from the data is that leaving the Lib/Lab Pact didn't on its own do much, if anything, to restore the party's fortunes. That's the one that seems to me much the more plausible given the polling data (and I'm not aware of other data, e.g. party membership or council by-election results that contradict the polling data).
The lesson that bailing before a general election doesn't really help was one of the lessons that the party took into 2010-15, as Duncan Brack and I discuss in our forthcoming podcast looking at David Steel. Out soon :)
It was not so much the FTPA that kept Clegg bound to Carmeron, but the coalition agreement. After all, the Conservatives could have sought a maintenance and supply agreement in a continuing parliament if the coalition had broken down.
I would argue that LDs would have been perfectly justified in leaving government in 2011 because Osborne's austerity measures went beyond the understanding of 2010 and the Tories had already broken the letter of the agreement with their reorganisation of the NHS in England.
Leaving the Lib-Lab pact did not so much boost the party's fortunes as prevent the party being dragged down with Labour in 1979.
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