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There is a long-standing mutual wariness between the Liberal Democrats and the continuing Liberal Party that anyone who has spent time around either organisation will recognise. What is perhaps surprising is that the sense of grievance seems, on balance, to run more strongly from the Liberal Democrat side than the other way around. This has sometimes led to accusations which, examined in the cold light of day, don’t quite survive reasonable scrutiny. They also seem to focus on one side’s behaviour rather than understanding that it is a two-way street.
It would be churlish, in the first instance, not to begin by acknowledging the remarkable contribution of Lord Rennard to Liberal Democrat electoral success. As the party’s chief election strategist through its most successful years, he was the architect of an approach to targeting, community campaigning and squeeze messaging that transformed a struggling new party into a genuine parliamentary force.
The Liberal Democrat breakthrough of 1997, and the subsequent gains in 2001 and 2005 that took the party to 62 seats (its best performance since the 1920s) owe an enormous amount to his intelligence, energy and tactical genius. That record deserves genuine respect and is far more impressive than the recent ‘success’ under Mark Pack which is mainly the product of fractured voting on the right.
It is precisely because Lord Rennard is so formidably capable that his occasional interventions about the Liberal Party are worth examining carefully. His frustration is understandable; he devoted his professional life to building something, and he believes a small rival organisation has on occasion cost his party dearly. But the argument, as he states it, contains a tension that is worth unpicking gently.
The core contradiction
The claim, essentially, is that only one organisation has the right to describe itself as liberal, to field candidates and to seek votes in a democracy – and that anyone else who does so is engaged in something fraudulent. For some that might feel true, but classical liberalism rests on precisely the values of pluralism, freedom of conscience and freedom of association that would make such a claim difficult to sustain. Asking a group of people with sincere liberal convictions to abandon their own political organisation, or simply to stay silent, sits uneasily alongside the liberal tradition of protecting dissent and minority views from the pressure of majorities.
There is something of the “my country, right or wrong” spirit in the argument – a phrase widely understood as an invitation to suspend independent moral judgement in favour of tribal loyalty. Lord Rennard, of all people, will understand that liberalism has historically positioned itself against exactly that kind of thinking.
The Liberal Democrats’ own pluralism
It is also worth noting that the Liberal Democrats themselves have not always presented a single, settled expression of liberal values. The internal story of the party is one of genuine and sometimes painful ideological dispute.
Charles Kennedy, the most electorally successful Liberal Democrat leader until the coalition years in 2010, and who presided over those 62 seats, who led the only major party in Britain to oppose the Iraq War – was so uncomfortable with the direction his party took after 2010 that reports emerged of him considering leaving for Labour. He voted against the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, warning publicly of “the risks of subsequent assimilation within the Conservative fold.” If even the former leader felt the party had moved away from his values, it becomes harder to argue that those outside the party had forfeited any claim to the liberal tradition.
Under Nick Clegg’s leadership, the party deliberately repositioned itself, moving away from the social democratic emphasis of the Kennedy years, rebranding on taxation and softening its previously strong pro-European stance and in fact campaigning FOR an EU membership referendum during the coalition.
The so-called Orange Book tendency pulled the party in a direction that many who had joined on social liberal grounds found incompatible with what they had signed up for. Those people did not abandon liberal values. The party moved, and they found themselves left behind.
The tuition fees episode
The tuition fees episode remains the sharpest illustration of this. Every one of the 57 Liberal Democrat MPs elected in 2010 had pledged to vote against raising fees. Ed Davey was among those who signed, even though he knew he could not keep that promise. Many of the young voters the party attracted held genuinely liberal convictions about education, opportunity and individual freedom. When the pledge was broken, those voters were effectively ejected from their political home through no choice of their own. It would sit oddly with any argument, to suggest that those people now have no legitimate claim to liberal representation elsewhere.
More recently, other members have been bullied out of the Liberal Democrats for challenging some illiberal and authoritarian tendencies that have emerged. The case of Natalie Bird, who stayed and fought back, is merely the tip of an undemocratic iceberg.
The democratic point
In a first-past-the-post system, every smaller party will sometimes draw votes that another party might have thought they had claimed. The Greens affect Labour. UKIP affected the Conservatives. The SNP transformed the Labour position in Scotland, and even in my patch in Devon, “Newton Says No” displaced both Tories and Lib Dems much to the annoyance of the local parties.
Nobody seriously argues that these parties should “desist” on the grounds that their voters rightfully belong to someone else. Voters belong to themselves, and the assumption that Liberal Party votes are Liberal Democrat votes by right is, at its core, an undemocratic one, however understandable the frustration that produces it.
A final reflection
Perhaps the most generous interpretation of Lord Rennard’s position is that it springs from the same fierce loyalty to his party and its achievements that made him such an effective champion of it for so long. That loyalty is admirable. But loyalty and liberal values are not always the same thing, and the evidence of what happened to the Liberal Democrats’ own supporters, members and internal culture through the coalition years suggests that the party’s claim to be the unique custodian of the liberal tradition requires a little more humility than the argument allows for. The Liberal Party is small, and its electoral impact is at best modest. It is a party that provides a home for those holding liberal values that the Liberal Democrats have (seemingly) mislaid at the moment. Those in the Liberal Party have a democratic right to try and make their voice heard. A conversation about the relationship between the two traditions, conducted with the generosity that liberalism at its best has always shown toward principled dissent, might ultimately serve both better than accusations of fraud and demands to desist.
