Business
By BAGEHOT
ONE can read too worthy into the Liberal Democrats’ storming performance at yesterday’s by-election in Witney, the nicely-heeled Oxfordshire seat vacated by David Cameron’s resignation from the Dwelling of Commons. In interviews this morning a visibly ecstatic Tim Farron hailed the result—a rise in his party’s vote-share from 6.7% to 30.2%—as proof that his lot are “back in the political gigantic time”. “We are the comeback teenagers!” he gushed.
Steady on, now. The Conservative vote was always going to fall: Mr Cameron had built up a gargantuan personal vote and the flightier parts of it have been no longer probably to swap to Labour below Jeremy Corbyn, to a at indicate leaderless and shambolic UKIP or the detached-marginal Green Party, even one fronted locally by Larry Sanders, brother of Bernie. That left the Lib Dems, who had lavished the seat with attention in a fashion very no longer probably for such a small party in a general election: the ideally suited other by-election held yesterday was in Batley and Spen in Yorkshire, whose Labour MP, Jo Cox, was murdered in June, and where all the rival mainstream parties declined to stand candidates as a mark of appreciate (Labour duly won the seat with a landslide). So for weeks the whole Lib Dem machine may perhaps level of interest its attentions on Witney, where fortunate voters purchased five visits from Mr Farron alone. Tellingly, in national polls the party’s rating lingers stubbornly around the 7% to which it fell early in the last Parliament.
Aloof, the party is legal to take some solace from the result. At the start because the 19-level swing in its favour is the first stable ticket that the party’s long hasten, at some level of and after its unpopular participation in the last coalition government, is bottoming out and perhaps easing off. A “comeback” in itself it’s miles not any longer, nevertheless it may perhaps herald the tentative beginnings of one.
Secondly—and extra significantly—the result represents the first fruits of the party’s new strategy. When Labour was in Downing Avenue, the Lib Dems realized a characteristic as a pacifist, civil libertarian and somewhat extra left-sail alternative to the government. Underneath Carve Clegg, in energy with the Tories, they often appeared adore a break up-the-distinction party; offering merely to curb the excesses of the Conservatives to their legal and Labour to their left (as he acknowledges in his latest memoirs). But the election of Mr Corbyn as Labour leader, the Brexit vote and Theresa May’s statist, generally authoritarian tone in her first months as top minister have delivered the Lib Dems a three-fold opportunity to sharpen their liberal, centrist identity.
The pondering in the back of here is made up our minds out in a paper revealed last year by Mark Pack and David Howarth, two party strategists. They argue that the Lib Dems did so badly in last year’s general election, tumbling to eight parliamentary seats, partly because they lack an irreducible core of voters who identify with the party, whose allegiance is such that it can be mobilised even in no longer easy electoral occasions. Labour, they level out, has the remains of the industrial working class to fall back on; the Tories have their bear deep institutional community: churches, golf clubs and the adore. The Lib Dems did no longer, so plunged via their old electoral floor and saved on falling.
The task sooner than the party, argue the two, is to originate that sort of base: a core of perhaps 20% of voters—socially liberal, internationalist, pro-European, tech-savvy and nicely-educated—who identify with the party’s pro-openness reformism. Accordingly the Lib Dems may detached level of interest their research, campaigning and recruitment efforts extra fastidiously than in the past and in particular search out factors that appeal to and passion this neighborhood of voters (nevertheless small they rouse other parts of the electorate). Underneath Britain’s first-past-the-put up electoral system, this approach offers alternatives for the Lib Dems, in their diminished state, to concentrate sources on certain metropolitan constituencies where they may perhaps conceivably near first: prosperous enclaves of southern England, university cities and the extra comfortable corners of the gigantic cities. Mr Farron’s speech at his party’s main annual gathering last month, pledging to stand up for Britain’s characteristic in Europe, was a sort of appreciate letter to these places.
Hence the relevance of Witney, a rolling, nicely-to-achieve archipelago of smart villages and hi-tech enterprise parks accurate outside Oxford; a place where most folk voted to Remain in the EU on June twenty third. Whereas the Lib Dems have been doing nicely in council by-elections in such places in latest months, this was the first parliamentary check. Their campaign focused heavily on Brexit. Residents have been advised to reject Mrs May’s nativist overtures at her party’s conference and to ship the government a message about the want to maintain Britain in the single market and avoid a “hard” break with the European membership. And while these messages did no longer propel Liz Leffman (pictured above, legal), the local candidate, across the profitable line yesterday, she obtained a larger-than-anticipated vote share (the Tories had warned it may perhaps reach 30%, which discounting the usual expectations management advised they anticipated something nearer 20%). A similar swing in a general election would watch the Lib Dems take 26 seats from the Conservatives.
So treat Witney as a proof-of-idea. A extra starkly liberal personality, deftly conveyed via relevant factors and particularly the ongoing battles over Brexit, offers the Lib Dems a way—albeit a long and treacherous one—out of the political wilderness. One by-election would not a pattern make and an early general election subsequent year (publicly disregarded by Mrs May however no longer absolutely no longer very no longer probably, given her vast poll leads over Labour) may near worthy too quickly for a widespread revival. But they have made a start.
