What next for the LibDems in Scotland?

No getting away from it but the results for the LibDems last week were an unmitigated disaster!

In England and Wales it takes them back to the early 90s but in Scotland it takes the Scottish Liberal Democrats back to where they were in 1979 - if not before.

That is over 30 years of incremental steps flushed down the toilet - disappeared like snow off a dyke, destroying all the advances under Ashdown, Charles Kennedy and Chris Rennard!

Someone in the blogosphere said to me before the results, that In Scotland it looks like we are finished – no-one is listening! And sure, I have already noticed the BBC completely marginalising the LibDems from their political discussion - perhaps given our derisory result this is fair!

But, there are a few crumbs of comfort.

Where we had established MPs in the UK as a whole the LibDem vote held up.  The wipe out came where we had made very recent advances in Labour areas – perhaps that is entirely understandable.

In fact, we held on in many parts of the south and the south west.

I am conscious that a 15% vote is a whole lot better than our poll ratings and not far off our typical between election ratings – albeit at a local election where we always do tons better than at a General.

Scotland is where it is most dire and where I am worried about the future.

But even here let us think some more about where we are.

This is a low water mark with a freak tide.

In these conditions there are still several seats where we achieve a large vote. Much like we had in 1979! It is imperative for the LibDems to stay engaged and active with the electorate in these areas and make sure we hold as many Westminster seats as possible and can come back at a subsequent Holyrood election.

This is of course no mean feat because some of this ground once lost could be gone forever.

A new leader will bring with it a chance for renewal.  At time of writing I am expecting this to be Willie Rennie.  We need him to have all the charisma and intellectual rigour he can manage.

The UK context

We must also remember that in the UK context - and yes Scotland is part of the UK - we are still a big party – and in a UK context bigger than the SNP.  We are also in government.

We need the LibDems to be distinctive within a coalition of two parts! We need Clegg to be our leader.

We must also beware! Beware of looking too English.  It doesn't always do us much credit here in Scotland, but to look too English is political suicide.

The LibDems at Westminster need to realise this.  We need Charlie Kennedy and Ming as an elder statesman.  We need our stronger performers like Jo Swinson and Alistair Carmichael.  We need Danny Alexander to look as bright and able as he is - and he doesn't always get this over. And we need Michael Moore to step up to the plate more than he has done. 

Our fortunes are very tied in with the coalition and the perceived performance of the LibDems and of Nick Clegg in particular.

What of Nick Clegg?

Clegg has had a torrid time - and there is a fair amount of absolute bilge written about him.  However, he has not always seemed sure footed with political nous.  Last year I was very impressed with the preparation for and the run up to the election campaign.  The website was good, the positioning was good, the party platform was good, Cable played a blinder, the launch was excellent, Clegg showed real quality in debate, and the Daily Fail et al trying to kill him off was seen off well - not least with the internet trumping the print media!  I was a little unsure of how Clegg handled the close of the campaign allowing himself to be too drawn on the who would you support afterwards question.  I felt he handled that less well than his predecessors.

Since the election I felt they handled the coalition negotiations well - but, with hindsight some mistakes have been made and Clegg seems to lack political nous at times.  The way tuition fees was handled was a huge mistake.  The way the coalition operates and the way Clegg appears as an ambassador for the Coalition rather than the Liberal Democrat's leader appears not quite right.  Someone has suggested some of this may come from working in Europe where the fighting is done behind closed doors more than our public bear-pit adversarial tradition.

Whatever the case I am glad Clegg is coming out fighting, as are others.  They need to think this through and to change perceptions.  And, I would say that Ashdown, who was an enormously successful leader, was wooden and unsteady in the early days.  So all power to Clegg who, I think, as more steel and more intellectual depth than his enemies realise.
  
LibDems defecting to the SNP

The SNP gained lots of previous LibDem voters.

We need to remind this group of why they liked the LibDems in the first place if they are going to come back to us. 

We lost badly because of the loss of credibility over English tuition fees and going into coalition with the Tories - still an unforgivable sin in Scottish politics.

I knew the writing was on the wall for the Scottish LibDems when three things happened in that final week. 

First, a co-worker announced they had voted LibDem last time and no-one would be voting LibDem again.  No hostility just for him a complete lack of credibility because he perceived we had gone back on our platform and gone with the Tories which he could never accept.  We had become irrelevant to him.

Second, a close relative who is also English (unlike me) announced they would vote SNP!!!  They don't like the SNP, as an English person they don't really realte to them.  But to them the LibDems couldn't really be trusted to do anything they said if in a coalition situatuion and they liked the SNP stance on tuition fees given they have kids coming to that stage in the next two years.

Third, when I read Tory Gavin Brown's good morning leaflet which very effectively put over that the LibDem vote had collapsed all over Scotland over the campaign.  It was so effective and spoke to the polls and the national mood - we had no credibility even as an electoral force in our strong areas.  This meant all those pretty bar grapphs and betting odds were de-bunked with a few words.

I knew then that even our rump support and LibDem fanboys would be washed away by an electoral tsunami.

We need to rebuild


We need to reassert who the Liberal Democrats are and what we stand for - and we need to particularly do this in Scotland.

We have been down before - the late 60s when we had only 6 seats in the entire UK.  The late 70s when we fell back from the success for the 74 elections, again in the late 80s following the bust up of the Alliance when the Greens outpolled us at the Euro-elections and the national poll ratings weer worse than now!. 

Then, as I hope now is the case, we came through because there was market demand for many to vote for a moderate left of centre party! 

There is however a problem in Scotland - that is EXACTLY how the SNP present themselves! They also have a charismatic and polical genius of a leader in Alex Salmond.  They have the credibility of being in government and being perceived as doing ok.

This is of course an easier gig.  They are the government not the junior partners.  They don't have the fall-out from a global financial storm of the century to deal with directly.

So cracking Scotland will be very hard.

We could build credibility using the local elections.  We are after all in power, with the SNP, in Edinburgh.  But this will prove difficult as the ill fated trams project threatens to derail this as the vehicle back from the brink - as local government did for us in the 1990s.  

Our future is bound up in how the public perceive the SNP over the next few years every bit as much as our future is bound to how the LibDems perform and are perceived to perform at Westminster.

The future

The SNP will have their challenges over the next few years.  However, Salmond is clealy a political genius.

The SNP were nowhere in 80s, slowly stumbled forward in 90s and early 2000s but over the last 5 or 6 years they have got professional.  I always think you can tell the party that has mementum at an election count because they have lots of young people in suits! Last Thursday the SNP had a lot of young people in suits! 

The LIbDems need to pin a lot of hope on the SNPs fortunes over the next few years or otherwise.  Will they prove to be a house of cards?

There is a tough time ahead.  While they can hope to deliver some low hanging fruit in terms of policy initiatives the deficit cuts will bring challenges.  The Scottish government will have to deliver cuts and the expenditure environment will restrict their room for manoeuvre, and possibly their room for deivery on their agenda. 

They are also Nationalists, hitherto most of Scotland is not.  Much of what they do and the national discussion will be seen through a prism of the relationship with the rest of the UK.  There is a risk that some of them will start to sound shrill! (Even if in election mode they have done so well to sound positive)

The Times on Saturday put it very well - the vote for the SNP was a vote for an aspirational Scotland, not a vote for independence.

Of course in the wave of enthusiasm and optimism the SNP may be able to change hearts and build confidence in this matter.  Time will tell.

However, I am sensing a fair amount of tosh been written about the constitutional question at the moment.  The election of an SNP government with a majority means this question will be to the fore and we will debate this a lot in the next few years - and all the options of developing autonomy.

I look forward to it.  I hope we get it right.

LibDem positioning

The LibDems have always been a non socialist alternative to Tories - and in Scotland we have been a non nationalist alternative to Labour. 

We must be clear of this and rebuild on this basis.

Never mind anyone else - we need to communicate who we are and what we are about from first principles upwards.

I believe we understand the needs to have a have a successful business environment to empower Scotland as a country and to prosper.  We also believe in having first class public services free at the point of delivery.

We are Internationalist in outlook and believe in reform and looking forward.  We are modern and aspirational and open minded.

Being green is part of our DNA and has been since it was less fashionable - we have a passionate interest in developing renewables and alternative forms of energy for the future.

We are also great believers in community politics, of decentralisation - and I think empowering micro groups out in society doing things.  The big, blunt statist solution is not for us.

We want Scotland to grow and to prosper - both as a society and as an economy.

The SNP may be similar but Salmond, rather like Tito and the old Yugoslavia, holds a disparate group together – they are doing it rather well but it may not always be so.

We have to be us.

One good thing is that Scotland's political world has been turned upside down with the debunking of Labour.  It opens up the chance to have a new politics that is not ruled by a Labour single party state.

The old tribal loyalties are dying as the generations move on.  As in the rest of the UK the electorate is far more volatile.

These changes have delivered growing success to Salmond’s SNP

In the recent past they delivered success to us in the suburbs of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, in parts of rural Scotland - an aspirational open minded electorate.

Scotland has always done well as we our outlook in terms of science, ideas and trade look beyond our borders – and our dreams and ideas are allowed to soar.  The SNP, ultimately, may not be the best vehicle for this.

Holyrood is about to see the return of two party politics and a stale fight of little differences between SNP and Labour.

In that fray we need to take our part in the thought leadership of the nation.  We need to be clear about who we are and what our ideas are that will allow Scotland to prosper. 

I think we also need to be clear that we are very much part of the UK - the time has come to remember the things that hold us together because I believe they are rather more than the things that tear us apart.

And we must play our part in Europe - because globalisation will not go away whatever UKIP or some Tories may think.

In conclusion

There we have it.

The LibDem future in Scotland depends very much on the pereception of the LibDems at Westminster and the SNP at Holyrood.

But we must also work hard at playing a full part in the thought leadership of ideas to take Scotland forward - and then establishing a simple and clear positioning.

We need Willie Rennie to be good and our Westminster MPs to be strong and visible.

None of this will be easy but I hope we succeed - I know we will try!

On being a punch bag - part 2

In the first post of this title I reflected on the torrid time the LibDems have faced in the last few months.  I noticed with dismay the kicking we have taken from some quarters and the way in which the LibDems have become at times toxic.

I argued that going into coalition with the Conservatives was courageous and probably right for the country and going with Labour was not really possible.  And I argued the coalition agreement at that point was essentially sound!


1  THAT WAS 2010, WHAT DO I THINK OF WHAT HAS SUBSEQUENTLY HAPPENED?

Lets start at the deep end - It seems to me the no university tuition fees pledge plus photographs in leaflets was a mistake and will go down in the annals of UK politics as one of the great electoral mistakes and cautionary tales!

I think the public seem to understand that if you go into coalition you have to compromise but expect you to deliver something on your key policies.

By campaigning with a pledge and a photo LibDems made tuition fees a key point.

It was about the young, it was about a flagship policy and an essential part of our brand, aping what had been incredibly effective politically in Scotland.  It was about progressive politics, our belief in education, social inclusion and mobility and also loved by middle class voters and mums and dads and grannies and grandpas too for that matter!

It seemed good politics humanising the rather dry business of key points and a costed programme - this was the vital emotional ingredient that told our story!

But, as Ed Milliband later said - it was naive to go with an out and out pledge!

What went wrong? 

The LibDem leadership did scenario testing quite well in pre election preparation for potential coalitions.  They considered the possibility that it the free tuition fees pledge may not be deliverable.  From what I understand Clegg realised too late that it may not be deliverable and Danny Alexander felt there was
enough there of the policy they could deliver in spirit to go with.  This means it was a mistake they ought not to have made.

Are they liars - no, of course not!

They achieved wider social inclusion and have improved the deal for more students from disadvantaged backgrounds than Labour or the Conservatives were proposing.  And they got more resources put into early stage and pre-school education that wasn't there before.

There were too many dependencies to deal with to unravel tuition fees.  The money wasn't there.  The universities had been deprived of too much funding. The Brown commission came to recommend tuition fees.  The Vice Chancellors want it.  Labour and the Conservatives want it.

They tried, they made a difference for the good, they got rid of them in Scotland before - but they couldn't deliver on this this time.  It is a slightly perverse irony that such a pile of excrement has fallen on the LibDem's head for fighting and failing - all because of the political mistake of making a policy a pledge and those photographs!

Clegg's mistake - which may indeed have been difficult to avoid as the difficulty in delivery became apparent at the 11th hour - means that being the FibDems is now part of the brand!

I fear in coalition you get associated with one thing.  In Scotland this was Free tuition fees and then Free personal care for the elderly.

I fear that with this government the one big thing we are remembered for may be the tuition fees fail.

We need this one thing to be something else!

2  WHAT HAVE THE LIBDEMS DONE IN GOVERNMENT?

Well quite a lot it would seem!!

http://www.whatthehellhavethelibdemsdone.com/

Raising the Income Tax threshhold to reduce tax for the lower paid, take 880,000 of the poorest out of income tax altogether and to fundamentally shift our tax and benefits system to make work pay is a major achievement.

Introducing the Green Investment bank and mapping out our route to renewable energy and low carbon sources of energy is important and I hope will become a more substantial achievement as this parliament unfolds.

I rather like the achievements on prioritising Dementia research and expanding talking therapies for mental health illnesses.

But there needs to be more delivered.

We must be seen to make a difference with reining in poor NHS reforms - of acting as a check and a balance.

We must be seen to move to limit cuts if things go well and tax receipts improve and progress is made with reducing the deficit.  We believe in public services and community after all.  Cuts are a necessity for us to put us on an even keel - not an article of faith like with some Tories.

But what will our one big thing be?

"Read my lips, no new taxes" was the mantra quoted by George Bush Snr on the stump.  I'm sure that was his intention but he couldn't deliver and this came back to crucify him 4 years later against Bill Clinton.  I fear Free Tuition fees and the failure to deliver on that pledge may haunt the LibDems and Nick Clegg through this election cycle.  I fear that may be our big thing we are remembered for!

We may yet make a difference!

Dr Eoin Clarke, historian, academic, and someone who is building quite a reputation as master of the data in his comments on Anthony Wells' UK Polling Report website reckons the LibDems will come back to poll ratings of 18%.

This would mean holding a lot of key seats but losing a few as well.

I feel we will eventually come back in this election cycle but damage will be done.  Eoin is pretty objective as a psephological commentator and has an uncanny nack

No he doesn't have a crystal ball but he is Irish so may be in league with the faeries!
http://eoin-clarke.blogspot.com/2011/02/liberal-democrat-wipe-out-at-next.html

Where did we expect to be in the polls after deciding between red and blue and going into coalition with a tough agenda involving inevitable cuts.  I thought in 2010 maybe 15% - not around 10-12% (and worse in Scotland and Northern England)

I hope we get over what we have done on tuition fees.

I hope we find 1 big thing that the LibDems are recognised for delivering in government.

Better still, I hope we find a classic list of 3 big things the LibDems are recognised as having delivered.


3  SCHADENFREUDE

I have been rather amused at the schadenfreude (love that word) or joy at the LibDem's misfortune permeating the blogosphere.  You see it on Twitter and on the comments of blogs like UK Polling Report.

"The LibDems are liars and getting what they deserve".  The natural order of progressive politics is being restored with Labour on 45% and rising with the LibDems facing oblivion.  The reds can man the barricades to fight the evil old Etonians who care not for ordinary people preferring to persecute them while feathering their nests. A bit of a caricature perhaps but sometimes I wonder!  It certainly seems to be a role some of the reds love to play!

Don't forget about 1/3rd of Labour's current doesn't particularly believe in Labour policy yet! Partly because they are split between those who would tackle the deficit and those who see no need to cut anything!! See my previous posting about the paradox of Labour and some of the polling on the Labour support.

The LibDems may yet get some of these people back

Spare a thought for the LibDems courage and what they are doing. See beyond tuition fees - which was a political mistake not dishonesty or having the wrong idea!

In Scotland the Scottish election platform from the LibDems is actually rather good!

The centrepiece of the plans is a £1.5 billion windfall, coming from making Scottish Water a public benefit corporation. It retains public ownership, by selling off the debt it owes the taxpayer so that it pays the public back for the money it's borrowed. This restructuring would give an immediate cash windfall of around £2.75 billion.

  This would be invested for the long term - to create 100,000 jobs,

In addition:

• abolishing the Council Tax for pensioners on less than £10,000, paid for by reducing the pay bill for the highest earning public sector employees
• introducing a pupil premium to ensure that kids from poorer backgrounds don't lose out at school
• making sure business has the help it needs - with regional development banks providing investment 
• plans for getting superfast broadband out there to all of Scotland - to make Scotland the most connected country in Europe
• investment in science
• keeping the free higher education, which the LibDems won in 1999 in Scotland!!
• opposing the political power grab to the centre, especially a single Scottish police force.

This programme has been well received by analysts and independent commentators.

There remains very much a market demand for third party - a centrist party.

From what I read about the SNP, if Independence were achieved and the SNP broke left, right and centre, about 30% would break centre to Green or LibDem.

Some of the current Labour support could go LibDem if we remind them of why they used to like us.

However, we must beware the formulation of a special interest groups rainbow coalition - or of so called blue Labour - don't let Labour be receptacle for that - if we do Ed Milliband will have outflanked us and built his own Blairite coalition.

As LibDems we need to remember core ideas and be clear what we have done through government.  This includes what we have stopped being done.  This includes putting the brakes on the likes of Bill Cash and the Euro Sceptics!

Take me to the ball game!

It is a new ball game.  There has been no coalition since the war - and that was wartime national unity. It is a new game with new rules.  We should perhaps not get into a slavish adherence to cabinet responsibility.  We owe a duty to be clear about what LibDems are arguing for in government and against.  Yes, in government we must support the decisions that are made but I believe it is ok to have the party running arguments - on say whether we should have such high VAT - it is an honest approach.

We should not worry about being a punchbag by Labour supporters or the Daily Mail, or by getting lost in the quagmire of tuition fees - what's done is done!

We must now focus on deliverables and by getting out there with what we are trying to do!  Olly Grender, Paddy Ashdown's Director of Communications, has argued as much in the New Statesman recently!

It is also important that we don't look like poodles and that Clegg doesn't look like Cam's fag!!

Remember the LibDems like us. The Conservatives think we are ok.  It is Labour who hate us and they never supported us before!

As for ex LibDems - there must be some inevitable loss but if we deliver in government we will remind some of these voters why they liked us in the first place - at the next election cycle if not this one!

I still can't see the Greens on a reading of their current platform being a mass party.  The market demand for the centre is very much there as is the scope for doing well with a leader who catches the popular imagination!

We must toughen up, not listen to those who partisanly wish our demise and deliver stuff!