The Liberal Democrats have had a good summer. The party has grown so much that party leader Jo Swinson claims she is “losing count” of their newly elected representatives. That’s 16 MEPs, 7 new MPs from various Conservative, Labour and Change UK defections, 1 new MSP and 700 extra councillors.
Swinson wasn’t shy about her aspirations in her first conference speech as leader of the Liberal Democrats today. The membership and MPs are clearly energised by their recent successes and hopeful for a future election. But Swinson might have set her sights too high.
“There is no limit to my ambition for our party,” she told the room, just after declaring her desire to be prime minister. She was met with raucous applause. But while there may be no limit to her ambition – she has talked of winning 300 seats in a general election – her party is certainly limited by political reality.
Winning 300 seats would require a seismic shift in the electoral landscape ahead of a general election. Currently the Liberal Democrats sport just 18. When it comes to wild political predictions, we are all, in these volatile times, fond of reminding each other that “stranger things have happened.” But in this case, stranger things really have never happened.
The party will pick up votes in a general election, of course. They’ll come from a section of would-be Conservatives voters, thanks to the Tories’ evolution into a Brexit party in all but name; and from some Labour voters who deem it to be a party too radical under Jeremy Corbyn. When Swinson quipped that she was neither an “entitled Etonion” nor a “1970s socialist” it might have seemed too obvious of a point to make. But emphasising that she is a far cry from Boris and Corbyn is designed to pick up exactly those voters who now find themselves politically homeless.
There’s a problem though. The big revelation of the conference was that the Liberal Democrats are now officially the party of revoking Article 50. The policy received wide support from conference attendees – but it has rightly resulted in raised eyebrows. The concern for the party must be that they won’t pick up any new voters – they are already the party of Remain – but they will certainly lose support from everyone else on the Remain-Leave spectrum. It seems, for now, like a wildly risky and poorly calculated strategy.
The defence is that the purity of the policy is refreshing. Swinson’s speech needn’t dwell on the complexities of holding a second referendum, nor meander over striking a deal with the EU that “protects jobs, the economy…” etc out of the playbook of Theresa May, nor rehash the Brexit “do or die”, “come what may” slogans now nearly synonymous with Boris Johnson. “Stop Brexit” was the message.
“The first task is clear. We must stop Brexit. There is no Brexit that will be good for our country…Brexit will put lives at risk. Brexit will hurt our economy.”
Beyond that the speech was light on detail. Climate change, mental health provisions, a distinctively Cameroonian “wellbeing” fund, more effort into reducing knife crime were all on the agenda. None of it was ground breaking. Nor election winning stuff.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter though – they aren’t going to win an election, they won’t win 300 seats – far from it in fact. The party is energised – but that has translated into Icarean levels of over confidence from Swinson.
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Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.