Lib Dems – Page 5 – thinking liberal

Life in the tunnel. Being a Liberal Democrat

I just want to ask: when will the party face up to the fact that whatever it is doing isn’t working even in the slightest?

This was from Lib Dem blogger Nick Tyrone before the recent local elections, after a London opinion poll showed weak figures for the Liberal Democrats. The party’s appeal to Remain voters had pretty much failed, he thought, with the party lagging even the Conservatives in this group, never mind Labour.

Then came last week’s local election results. If you are going to take a cold, hard look at them in the round, they were nothing to shout about. They were perfectly consistent with that poll. In equivalent vote share they even marked a slight fall from the rather dismal 2017. And yet. Look at the London results (as a Londoner, I have an excuse for being London-centred – though my story works just as well outside it). The two most spectacular results for any party on the night were the Lib Dem gain of 25 seats from in Richmond, and 21 seats in Kingston, mostly at the expense of a Tory party that collapsed to a rump in both boroughs. And at last the party started to win seats from Labour, gaining seven in Haringey, for example. And the party had its Wandsworth moment too, fending off a sustained and confident campaign by Conservatives in the one borough it controlled in Sutton. Minds aren’t swayed by dry statistics but by stories – stories that show what is possible. In London, and across the country, the Lib Dems had plenty of good stories to encourage them. That made them a much better set of results than the party has had for a long time, even in 2017 when the equivalent poll share was higher.

Not that you would have guessed this from the media coverage. Even in its later coverage (when the Kingston result was known, giving resonance to the Richmond story) the BBC chose to highlight the relative failure of Labour in Wandsworth to the spectacular écrasement of the Conservatives in two neighbouring boroughs, which went unmentioned. Why were the non-events in Wandsworth and Westminster more important? Because, apparently, they are a “flagship” boroughs. Actually I think the Wandsworth result is an important story, but this prioritisation is an interesting window into the current journalist mindset, even at the politically balanced BBC. This may not be bias; it may just be a bid to cover up the humiliation of the editorial team of not getting the story right in advance, and sending its big guns to the wrong places. News is made on expectations, not real events.

Which, I think, is the issue at the heart of Nick Tyrone’s critique. Whatever the party does, nobody in the media, mainstream or otherwise, is listening. The only stories that are of interest are the sorts of stories that Ukip still manages to pick up: ones that point to the parties final, humiliating death spiral. I don’t think it is fair to blame that on the party’s leadership or messaging.

Life as a Liberal Democrat supporter is like being in a long, dark tunnel. Things are miserable; nobody can see you; and too often any small flickers of light vanish, rather than grow into that light at the end. But last week’s small chink of light just could be what we hope it is.

The point is this: the problem isn’t the message, it is getting people to listen to it in the first place. It is nearly hopeless achieving this through the media. It is just possible that a moment of genius or massive good luck suddenly does the job. But waiting for such a moment does not amount to a strategy. The other way to get noticed is to go out and talk to people directly – through door-to-door canvassing and attractive literature pushed through letterboxes, and with videos promoted through paid-for advertising. This is inevitably very localised, and it tends to happen in the run-up to elections, when people have a good reason to take notice. The good news is that when the party was able to do this, it, by and large, raised its share of the vote. And sometime spectacularly – in Remain-voting Richmond and South Cambs, in Leave-voting Kingston-upon-Hull, and in the somewhere-in-between Kingston-upon-Thames. That suggests that Nick Tyrone is wrong. What the party is doing is working at least a bit more than the slightest.

And the hope is that if the party keeps going, the general public, and the media that follows it, will start to notice. Even now, the BBC must start to question its policy of giving the party so little coverage compared to Ukip, which has now virtually ceased to exist.

But why soldier on in the cold, dark place, where hope is but fleeting? Because we believe in our liberal message. That humanity is more important than the nations and religions that divide it. That all humankind benefits when we listen to different points of view with respect. And that we should look at facts and evidence rather than let our prejudices run riot. No other party is doing that as much as the Liberal Democrats in British politics. It is worth pushing on through the tunnel.

The Budget shows that the Tories are in a political cul-de-sac

I will break my self-imposed silence because yesterday’s British Budget is one of those great set-piece occasions which can be used as a moment of reflection. Predictably, most in the news media squander this in a silly game of speculation about the short-term prospects of political leaders. But the Budget poses more profound questions.

The government faces two profound economic problems, which it must either learn to live with or expend political capital to solve. These are low productivity and housing. There are other big problems, of course: Brexit, austerity, regional disparities and income inequalities, for example. But Brexit is more about means than ends; austerity is symptom of the productivity problem; and the other problems are not so high on political agenda right now, though they are important to both housing and productivity. Broadly speaking, the government is being forced to embrace the productivity problem, and is doing its best to confront aspects of the housing problem, without being able to do enough.

Let’s look at productivity first. This is about production and income per hour worked. Since unemployment is now low, and immigration is looking less attractive, increasing productivity is the key to raising incomes, and, above that in my view, to raising taxes. Weak tax revenues lie behind austerity – the cutting of public spending to levels which are now unsustainably low. The government is forced each year to spend extra money to fix some crisis or other brought about by austerity. This time it was Universal Credit and the NHS. Next year it will be police and prisons, after that it will be schools and student loans. And so it goes on – this is no way to build for the future. The government could try to raise taxes, but this is so politically unpopular that not even the Labour Party is talking about it – they persist in thinking that there is easy money to be raised from big business, rich people and confronting tax evasion. So growth it must be, and productivity must rise. But productivity is stuck in a rut. The big news for this Budget is that at long last the Office for Budget Responsibility has given up hoping that there will be a bounce back, and so reduced its forecasts of income growth, which are used to set tax and borrowing assumptions. The Chancellor, Philip Hammond, talked about fixing this, as all politicians do, but in practice has done very little about it. Labour, for all their huffing and puffing, are no better. Both parties propose a number of sensible small things, like increasing public investment and education, but nothing that gets to the heart of the issue.

So the political class have chosen to embrace slow productivity, by their actions if not their words. They are right, though they need to think through the consequences. My take on the productivity puzzle is different from pretty much everybody else I have read. I think that the primary cause is what economists call the Baumol Effect. The problem is not the failure of British businesses to embrace improvements, but the limited demand for goods and services that are susceptible to advances in productivity, such as manufacturing. There are things that can be done to raise such demand, but these mainly have to do with increasing incomes for those on low incomes – people with high incomes consume less as a proportion of income, and spend more on low-productivity items that confer status. Also if demand for exports could be raised, and imports diminished, that would help – international trade is mainly about high productivity goods. But nobody really has much idea how to deal with these problems beyond tinkering at the edges with minimum wage adjustments and such.

So what of housing? What, exactly, is this about? It is about high costs to both buy housing and to rent it. This is a very complex problem with deep roots. Most analysis is superficial, but this article in the FT by Jonathan Eley is a good one. Among a number of interesting points he makes is that the low number of new housing units being built in recent decades compared to earlier ones is a bit misleading. In those earlier decades a lot of housing was being destroyed: slums and temporary housing for victims of bombing in the war. It is not necessarily true to suggest that the problem is that too few houses are being built. In fact there are deep structural problems with the housing market. One is that private borrowing has been made too easy; another is that changes to housing benefit has subsidised demand for private rental accommodation. The result of this and a number of other things has forced up the price of land relative to the housing built on it, and made trading in land central to economics of private sector developers.

The upshot of this is that it is hard to see any solution to the housing problem without a substantial intervention by the state to directly commission house building, and social housing in particular. Another issue is building on greenbelt land outside cities, which is now forcing suburbs to turn business premises into housing, and turning suburbs into an unhealthy housing monoculture. Caution on greenbelt building is warranted, of course, as suburban sprawl, as demonstrated in so many countries in the world, is not desirable either. Mr Hammond did practically nothing on either of these critical issues. He did try to tackle the housing problem, but mainly through the private sector and private markets which are structurally incapable of making things better for the growing proportion of the population weighed down by excessive housing costs.

That is entirely unsurprising. Solving the crisis, especially in an environment of low economic growth, means that current levels of house prices and rents have to fall. That is a direct attack on the sense of wellbeing of the Conservatives’ core constituency: older and better off voters. And if that isn’t enough, property developers and others with a vested interest in the current system are showering the Conservatives with money. A politically weak government is no shape to take this on.

And that, I think, is the most important political fact in modern Britain. Housing costs are not an intractable problem that we must learn to live with, like productivity. One day it will solve itself in an immense period of pain as land prices, and much of the financial system, collapses. The sooner it is tackled the less the pain will be. Labour may be useless on productivity, but they are much stronger on housing. They have a much better prospect of doing something useful. That does not mean they will win the next election – the forces of darkness on the right should not be underestimated. But it does mean that Labour is looking to be the lesser of two evils.

For my party, the Lib Dems, this is important. It means its stance of equidistance between Labour and the Tories needs to be modified. The turning point, in hindsight, should have been that moment in coalition with the Tories when the then Chancellor George Osborne said that he could not support the building of more council houses because that meant more Labour voters. The coalition should have been ended then and there. Just as in the 1990s when the Lib Dems leaned towards Labour, the party needs to accomplish the same feat now. It is much harder because Labour has abandoned the centre ground. But that is where the country is at.

Have the Lib Dems reached a Battle of the Marne moment?

Following the fortunes of Britain’s Liberal Democrats is a niche interest these days. So much so that this Lib Dem blog spends most of time commenting on other things. But the party conference in Bournemouth has just ended, and I was there. Something needs to be said.

The party’s fall from mainstream politics has been dramatic. It peaked when the party was in coalition, with four cabinet ministers, in 2010 to 2015. At that time the party was scarcely out of the news. This year the party’s autumn conference rates hardly a mention. In yesterday’s London Standard, on the day of the the leader’s closing speech, the party got no coverage in the news pages. Absolutely nothing. This is not especially surprising. The party has but 12 MPs, a a tiny scattering of council leaderships, and single-figure poll ratings. In much of the country it can’t even scrape together enough votes to retain its deposit. Still, its position is much stronger than other minor parties that have hit hard times: Ukip and the Greens.

Why is that? The party’s infrastructure is much diminished, but it still dwarfs that of the other minor parties. It has even seen a membership surge, meaning that the conference was well-attended and lively, even if all the lobbyists and sponsors were absent. The party has been here before and progressed – notably when I attended my first conference in 1990, when it polled at a similar level to the Greens, the continuing SDP and the continuing Liberals. Furthermore its team of MPs has more government experience than Labour’s entire front bench. And its ideological space, internationalist liberalism, is unchallenged in Britain’s political system. And yet it is very hard to deny the pessimistic conventional wisdom, nicely summed up in this Economist Bagehot column.

But the party’s leaders remain determinedly optimistic. Could this be a Battle of the Marne moment? This was the early turning point in the First World War, after the Germans had driven the French and British armies into headlong retreat, and the fall of Paris beckoned. The French general Ferdinand Foch was promoted to lead the fightback, and famously said: “My centre is yielding. My right is retreating. Situation excellent. I am attacking.” The tide was turned, and France saved. The wider point here is that retreat can bring opportunity. Your opponents become overstretched and exhausted; meanwhile your own communication lines are tighter, and you become more cohesive. There are at least some elements of this for the Lib Dems.

The party’s main opponents, the Conservative and Labour parties, do show signs of overstretch. The former are stuck with a mediocre leader because they can find nobody better; they are saddled with implementing Brexit, and with being on the wrong side of demographic trends. The easiest votes for Lib Dems to win these days are disillusioned Conservatives. Labour are in many ways in much better shape but remain a fragile coalition with incompatible views; I will write more of them after their conference next week. And the Lib Dems’ main competitor on the political fringe, the Greens, look in even worse shape. They made a serious strategic error to occupy more conventionally left-wing social justice territory, and have been crushed by Labour’s revival, after briefly threatening to eclipse the Lib Dems in the coalition years.

Also the party itself is more cohesive. It is not constantly undermined by the pleas that this or that policy line will upset this or that local community in a Cornish Lib Dem seat. Those conservative rural voters have now gone elsewhere. As have inner city voters. The party is now more tightly focused in Britain’s suburbs, allowing it to sharpen its appeal and take greater risks.

And the party has its General Foch too, under its new leader, Vince Cable. As even the Economist admits, he is easily the more intelligent that the main party leaders. That intelligence was on display in Bournemouth. There was practically no question thrown at him to which he did not have an intelligent answer. Unlike his predecessor, Tim Farron, he is no tub-thumper; you would not call his speeches rousing. But he is facing up to some of the most difficult issues that confront the party. The biggest of these is the party’s stance on funding higher education. Up to 2010, the party did well amongst students by promising to abolish tuition fees, including a dramatic pledge by almost all MPs not to vote for any increase. The party promptly ditched this in coalition, and Labour has exploited this ruthlessly ever since. Vince’s fingerprints were very much on the volte-face, unlike Tim. At the time he argued that the new policy was a graduate tax by another name, but to no avail. This demographic of younger voters will be vital to the party, and it fits well with its liberal-international outlook. It will hardly be easy to turn the corner and win them back, but at least Vince is tackling it head on.

Vince’s speech yesterday was quite remarkable in another way. We see a lot of dumbing-down in modern politics. This was evident in the deliberate obfuscations and lies in the campaign to leave the European Union (not really made better by claims that the Remain side were hardly better…), and above all by the triumph of Donald Trump in the United States. And yet Vince Cable persists in treating his audiences as if they are intelligent human beings. Surely the politics of misleading sound-bites, fake news stories and hyping victimhood must play itself out? Vince is betting that it will.

Still, the challenges for the Lib Dems remain huge. They need to rebuilt the party’s base in local government – but with a new membership who so far are showing little interest in such patient and painstaking politics. The party’s internal organisation remains weak, and it is not clear that the new leadership know how to address this. And, of course, the other political parties’ commanding position is based on the ruthless logic of Britain’s first past the post voting system.

I can offer sceptical observers no hard evidence that the Lib Dems can change their fortunes. But I do know that I will continue to work for it.

The Lib Dems must look beyond Brexit towards 21st Century liberalism

Last week I wrote about the strategic cul-de-sac that Britain’s Conservatives find themselves in. I will write of Labour, whose strategic grasp is well ahead of all the other parties, later. But we are coming up to the Lib Dem annual conference. What of them?

Alas the Lib Dems seem no better at political strategy than anybody else. They (I could also write we, as I am a party activist) had some real momentum at the start of 2017, with the strange quiescence of Jeremy Cobyn’s Labour party. But the general election in June changed all that. The party organised itself around a clear message on the main issue of the day – Britain and the European Union – but to very little effect. While the party held up reasonably well against the Tories, it folded wherever it came under any pressure from Labour. Where I live, in Battersea, the Lib Dem message could have been tailor made to succeed, and yet it was Labour that reaped the reward of locals’ anger at the Tory Brexit strategy – they took the seat with a lightweight campaign and an unknown candidate. I did not receive a single piece of Labour literature.

But was the party’s weakness merely tactical? People who suggest this say that Labour made irreconcilable promises to different groups of voters and will be found out. And the party’s advocacy of a second referendum on Europe was simply an idea ahead of its time. As Brexit rage rises (and pretty much anything that goes wrong can be blamed on Brexit), the public will look again at the party’s consistent line on the matter.

For a different perspective read former leader Paddy Ashdown. This is a pair of articles (I link directly to the second) moaning about the lack of direction in the party. Paddy is not particularly coherent (he doesn’t pretend to be), but I do think he is on to something. Here is the penultimate paragraph:

I have concluded that all this is so, not because we have really lost our intellectual curiosity, but because of the dead hand of Brexit. I admit second place to no-one when it comes to fighting for the best Brexit we can, and preferably no Brexit at all. I am proud of our Party’s clear position on this defining issue. But is our obsession with Brexit in danger of distracting us from what kind of country we want Britain to be, whether in the EU or out of it? For me the heart of liberalism is our crusade for the empowered citizen, not the powerful state. This is a radical disruptive and insurgent idea. But where is it? When did you last – at Conference or outside it – hear us arguing that case, debating new ideas to make it happen or proselytising it before the court of public opinion?

Liberal Democrats are united by an open view of people and cultures, and a suspicion of nationalism and strong state power. These values point to sympathy with the European Union, if you view it as a restraint on state power rather than an extension of it. But the EU is a pragmatic solution to the problem of European states needing to cooperate more closely. It is not an ideology – or a new nationalism. While I do feel a certain pride in European identity, it developed long before the UK joined the union, and it is not a nationalistic pride, that seeks to diminish Americans, Russians or Chinese. Campaigning over EU membership is a tactic and not a strategy – and this is something that Labour, whether by accident or design, have grasped more clearly than either the Conservatives or the Lib Dems.

So what is the point of the Lib Dems strategically? Are the party’s values best promoted by a separate political party, or by factions within larger political groupings, i.e. the Conservatives, Labour or the SNP in Scotland? Few liberals can see a future in the Conservatives these days. One Lib Dem I knew who moved to them a couple of years ago has dropped out, unable to take the strain. I don’t know the SNP well enough to comment on them – they have tempered their nationalistic defining theme with inclusiveness. The real problem for Lib Dems is Labour – because that is where most political active liberals are now going, especially the younger ones.

The critical issue here is the question of state power. The point that unites almost all successful Labour politicians, from Tony Blair to Jeremy Corbyn, is that they view a centralised state, under democratic control, as the solution to most problems. This is one of the critical debates of our time. And liberals are not pulling their weight.

One the one side we have advocates of a strong state. The most important of these worldwide is the Chinese Communist Party – and they are picking up a substantial following throughout the world. Democracy is viewed with suspicion at best. On the other you have nationalists, who seek to create culturally homogeneous nations where individuals suffer minimal state interference – and the state’s main role is to keep the rest of the world at bay. Established political parties in the developed world, such as Britain’s Labour and the Lib Dems, belong to neither camp, but they are struggling to put forward a coherent alternative.

Paddy Ashdown does point towards the sort of places where liberals should be looking to develop a compelling vision for the 21st Century – centring on information and technology. While I struggle to make sense of his “four dangerous ideas”, they are all attempts to push the debate on in this direction.

And there is an opportunity for the Lib Dems here. While Labour is picking up some of the 21st Century agenda (not least in the way it organises itself, especially its party-within-a-party Momentum), much of it either has a statist mindset, like the Chinese Communists, or harks back to the 20th Century and its swathe of secure jobs in manufacturing and administration. I have not heard much from Labour on critical issues of privacy, ownership of data and ways that state power might be restrained.

If the Lib Dems can win the race to develop ideas for a 21st Century state that is truly liberal and democratic, then the party will have a clear purpose. But if all it does is bang on about Europe, it will, eventually, vanish.

Can Vince Cable broaden the Lib Dems appeal?

Last week Vince Cable was elected unopposed as leader of the Liberal Democrats, following Tim Farron’s resignation. This is not a situation many Lib Dems expected to be in a month or so ago. I don’t think I would have voted for him if the selection had been contested. Yet I dare to hope.

Let’s start with my reservations. The first is his age at 74. This is the least serious. Age has different effects on all of us, and Vince has clearly been looking after himself, physically and mentally. He will have bitter memories of 2007, when he was advised not to run for the leadership vacated by Ming Campbell, who was only slightly older. Ming was widely bullied for being too old – I remember some vicious cartoons. And yet the reasons for his failure were clearly something else – age was just a convenient proxy, reflecting the prejudices of the time. By picking the relatively youthful Nick Clegg, it is far from clear that the party was better off. Meanwhile there have been a number of successful older politicians – including Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump. Age does mean that Vince’s tenure is likely to be less than a decade. But that may not be a bad thing.

My next reservation is more serious. It is that Vince is not known for grassroots campaigning. His constituency organisation in his Twickenham seat was notoriously weak between elections – and that ultimately lost him his seat in 2015. In the jargon, Vince is a man of the air war, not the ground war. That is a worry because the Lib Dems weakness in ground organisation is one of the bigger issues that the party has to face. Tim Farron, by contrast, was much stronger on the ground activity. But am I worrying too much? Vince’s constituency campaign this year was one of the better organised – and the result was spectacular. Tim came within a hair’s breadth of losing his seat, which had been the “safest” in the country (there’s no such thing as a safe Lib Dem seat). For all Tim’s enthusiasm for grassroots campaigning, he did not strike me as a gifted organiser. We may be no worse off.

And finally there is policy. I have advocated fresh thinking on economic policy for the party, in particular to unlock under-used potential in poorer areas. I am also deeply suspicious of monetary policy as a method of managing aggregate demand. Vince is much more of a traditional economist – he seems more interested in using neoliberal ideas more effectively than looking for the next revolution in economic thinkin. Again, I am probably making too much of this. He has a lot of common sense, and does not strike me as a man that pushes policies that aren’t working because he thinks they work in theory. And innovation needs to be small-scale at first if it is to win public confidence.

Against my reservations, though, I am finding quite a lot to like. He is very impressive when being interviewed on the radio. He answers the questions being asked, and confidently, displaying a great deal of expertise and honesty. He has enormous credibility, built up over many years – not least his five years as a senior cabinet minister. He can overdo the honesty and get himself into trouble – but this is a net benefit. Former London Mayors Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson have learnt to pull this trick – being a bit too honest – off very successfully (though Mr Johnson’s shine has now worn off), as has the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. When it works it is a priceless gift. Vince has much more impact on the media scene than did Tim Farron. He makes headlines effortlessly – and not by making gaffes.

And Vince’s evident experience and expertise puts him ahead of almost every other front bench politician in the country – especially since Labour have been forced to promote inexperienced MPs into front line roles. This makes the Lib Dems look like a player in the grown-up game of politics, which hasn’t been the case since the party’s catastrophic defeat at the 2015 general election. Especially since there is now a back up team of experienced politicians in Norman Lamb, Ed Davey and Jo Swinson. This is important, because if the major parties do start to break up under the pressure of divisions over Brexit, the Lib Dems are starting to look like a credible alternative for refugees – or at least a vital alliance partner for any new grouping.

So that is why I dare to hope. But meanwhile the party is very weak. Many of the sixty or so parliamentary seats where the party used to be in close contention now look gone for good. It is not clear how the party is to replace them with new ones. The party might have some success in tapping angry Conservatives, but it is remains pretty hopeless against Labour in the pitch for younger voters. I am seeing quite a lot of manufactured kerfuffle about how Labour is supposedly breaking promises on student debt. Any Lib Dem who thinks that the party is going to make traction with that line of attack should think again. It’s best hope against Labour remains its firm position against Brexit – but as yet Labour remains coated with Teflon on the topic.

Recently I read an article in the Guardian by Deborah Orr that lambasted the party as a waste of time. What is striking is that this liberal, well-informed journalist only ever thought the party stood for electoral reform – and so the party’s failure on that in coalition leads her to claim that it “lost all it stood for”. That shows how much work the party has to do. Most people think that the party stands for very little – they associate it with a single policy, like electoral reform, or, before 2010, free university tuition. When the party fails to deliver on this policy, it is reduced to emptiness in their eyes and it has start all over again. Meanwhile the Conservatives and Labour can chop and change policies at will, because they are seen to stand for something much broader. At the moment the big policy for the Lib Dems is opposing Brexit, with legalising marijuana as a second string. This is far too narrow.

So the Lib Dems need to be seen as standing for a broader range of ideas, and not tied to a single headline policy. There may be an opportunity for this. Most left-inclined liberals still think Labour stands for them – but Mr Corbyn and his allies want to take their party somewhere different. And many Conservative supporters think that their party stands for pragmatic liberal economics – but Brexit ideologues in cabinet don’t seem to care what happens next as long as it is Brexit. If anybody can convince these people to look, or to look again, at the Lib Dems, it is Vince Cable.

Modern liberals have a religion problem

Shortly after the General Election Tim Farron resigned as leader of the Liberal Democrats. He said that it was impossible to maintain his Christian faith and be party leader. He was echoing a complaint from many practising Christians that they feel excluded from the party and in wider liberal circles. Muslims feel exclusion too, though often from different people. Is this true? And if it is, does it matter?

Opposition to discrimination is one of the defining principles of liberals. This started with religion, and in particular, in England, discrimination against Catholics and various non-conformist sects, such as the Quakers. It then moved on to issues of sex, race and sexual orientation. Now the problem seems to be between secularists and those practising religions with a universal claim to truth, such as Christianity and Islam.

At the heart of this is a genuine problem. Many adherents of these faiths claim that their faith requires discrimination against sex and sexual orientation, and opposition to such modern practices as abortion. These are important battlegrounds for liberals. Christians who believe that the state should discriminate in these fields clearly can’t be liberals. But how far should liberals lay claim to private beliefs? It is quite common for people to say that they don’t believe in abortion personally, but that they do believe that the state should permit it – that it should be a matter of personal conscience.

It is over such issues that Tim Farron tripped up. He was seen to prevaricate. Famously he tried to evade a question about whether gay sex was a sin, with the statement that “we are all sinners”. I have some sympathy with him over that one. I have a church upbringing, and though I am no theologian, I know enough to tell that what Christians mean by sin is quite a complicated thing. The point is not to avoid being a sinner, but to forgive sins. I could add that many Christians feel that hetorosexual sex is a sin – or at least taking pleasure in it is – although this has softened in recent times. Tim was trying to say that it was the wrong question. Much later he clarified to say that he didn’t think gay sex was a sin, but the damage had been done. To many “sin” meant “wrong” and that he therefore could not be trusted to uphold liberal values. The party’s opponents made useful weather of this (unofficially, of course). It did real harm to the party.

That makes me very uncomfortable. It seems to exclude a large number of religious people from the movement. It draws the line in the wrong place. Liberalism is becoming equated with aggressive secularism. The response of many people (such as the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee) is evasion. Religion was not the reason that Tim resigned, they say, but political ineptitude. Well there are plenty of reasons for saying that Tim was not up to the job (including his evasive response to that interview question – and his rambling email when he resigned), but this type of reaction reminds me a lot of the ways that people try to escape accusations of race or sex discrimination by pointing to other reasons for their views. It’s the “I’m not racist but…” position.

Tim is hardly the first person to claim that liberals discriminated against him for his religious faith. It strikes me that secularists have no idea when they are being discriminatory. Again there are parallels with race and sex discrimination. Workplaces that accept women as equal provided they behave in exactly the same boorish way as the men are discriminating against women. I found advancing sex equality when I was working in the City of Londonwas really hard work in many roles, especially senior ones, as many men had no idea what the problem was. They did not see that a whole range of behaviours and assumptions were discriminatory. The Lib Dems themselves are wrestling with why so few women advance to elected office, and why so few people from ethnic minorities join it. I think there is a similar problem with religious faith amongst liberals, but it is worse because it is unacknowledged.

This is exacerbated by a certain intellectual arrogance amongst aggressive atheists, who form an important minority amongst liberals – people like Richard Dawkins who are apt to talk of prayer as “talking to your imaginary friend”. This stems from a rather old-fashioned logical-positivist outlook. They say that you should only believe things if there is sufficient evidence for them. But you have to have a nul hypothesis – you have to have a working assumption that you hold to until something with more evidence comes up. The battles of religion can be seen as asking what shape that nul hypothesis should take, and how much it should be based on handed down wisdom and shared understandings. To more thoughtful religious people, the classic aggressive-atheist viewpoint is an incomplete, like trying to drive a car through the rear-view mirror, and it is often device to evade discussion of important spiritual and moral issues. The point here is not to have debate on the virtues of religion, but suggest that many atheists suffer from arrogance and could do with a bit more intellectual humility.

Which would a good place to start when working out how to treat religious people in politics. So I want to make a number of points:

Political movements should be about changing public life, and not private beliefs. There is much that liberals want to change, and to protect, in public life. It hurts that political cause if you exclude potential allies because of differences in private faith. This is happening with people of religious faith, and liberals need to be more tolerant.
Being a liberal may still be quite challenging for many in particular religious traditions, especially those that set store by traditional teaching and interpretations of texts. Liberals need to give such people more space – without compromising on liberal public values. I don’t think they did with Tim Farron, or others like the former Lib Dem MP Sarah Teather.
Liberals also need to be careful about promoting their own religious interpretations in the political sphere. This is a particular issue for Christianity. People like me who were brought up in the faith have strong views about some religious traditions. Pushing these views should not be part of political discourse – though, of course, that doesn’t mean that those views should not be aired. I might think that there is no serious theological objection to women priests – but I need to be careful about where and how I air that view, especially since I am no longer a practising Christian.

It strikes me that there are two things going on here. The first is that we should be more conscious of our religious or anti-religious biases, which could lead to discrimination in public life The second is that is important to bring people into the liberal political movement even where their religious faith creates tension.

So we should be worried that Tim Farron’s religious faith proved such an obstacle to being part of the liberal movement. And we shouldn’t pretend that it wasn’t.

Why the Lib Dems must keep going

As a Liberal Democrat I started the General Election full of optimism. Labour looked down and out; people would surely want another alternative to an uncompromising Tory leadership? Those hopes soon vanished, as the party failed to spark, and ended up with even fewer votes overall than in 2015. Existential questions arise. If two party politics is here to stay, is there any point to the party?

There was a silver lining to the gloom. The party has increased its number of MPs from 8 (or 9 counting the by-election win in Richmond Park) to 12. And not just that; the new parliamentary team looks a lot stronger. Three former ministers (including two at cabinet level) return, for the loss of Nick Clegg, who, for all his virtues, does have a bit of baggage. One third of the MPs are now female (none were in 2015), redressing a long imbalance. And I took an extraordinary amount of vicarious pleasure in the election of Layla Moran in Oxford West and Abington. She first stood for parliament here in Battersea in 2010, when I was her agent. That brings to two the number of MPs that know who I am (the other is Ed Davey, whom I’ve known, though not well, since 1990). From a motley collection of surviving old hands in 2015, we now have something much more diverse and dynamic.

But three of the gains resulted from the peculiar shifting of multi-party politics in Scotland. In most of England and Wales, the party failed, losing five out of its eight seats, even if they regained another five. In particular, the party was unable to handle the rise of Labour amongst younger voters, except in Bath and Oxford. There is bitter disappointment. The party had been showing momentum in local elections, and even in an ongoing by election in Manchester, until the election was called. Its membership has grown massively, and it could call on a much larger army of enthusiastic activists than the demoralised bunch in 2015.

What went wrong? Some commentators have blamed the party’s policy of a second referendum on Europe, once the exit terms are known. Most electors weren’t interested in this, but it was critical to the party keeping faith with its core vote, especially those new members, who mainly came from a Brexit rebound. The Lib Dems have done enough betraying of its core support in coalition. And I don’t think the policy actually put many potential voters off – nobody expected the party to be able to actually implement its policies, after all. The problem was that the party had little else to say. It claimed to be the only opposition to the Tories and hard Brexit. As Labour surged, that proved nonsense – Labour had no difficulty in winning votes from people supporting a soft Brexit or even no Brexit at all. The Lib Dem manifesto was quite a decent stab at a programme for government – but it looked like an undistinctive split-the-difference programme when compared to the others. Labour went uncompromisingly for the protest vote, in a way the Lib Dems used to, and found that it worked – perhaps because nobody expected them to win either.

On one issue in particular did Labour manage to skewer the Lib Dems: student finance. By promising free university education, Labour picked up a policy that was popular with younger voters, and which had been a Lib Dem flagship until 2010. The Lib Dem reversal on this in coalition continues to haunt the party, and Labour’s policy was the most dramatic possible demonstration of this. That this policy presents major headaches for any government trying to implement it (Labour’s manifesto is comically vague on this) is beside the point when nobody expects you to win. Digging their way out of that hole will be a major headache for the Lib Dems.

The party’s leader, Tim Farron, did not help. He lacked gravitas – he was prone to overblown rhetoric and did not look like a cabinet minister in waiting – even compared to the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Labour campaigners successfully employed distraction tactics over his religious beliefs, and how these might or might not affect his views on gays and abortion. Tim has now resigned as leader – based on the issues around his faith. It was the right decision for the wrong reason – and I will come back to the issue of liberals and religion in a future post. Tim had a solid grasp of the party’s long term strategic priorities (core votes, more women and ethnic minority MPs, community campaigning and so on) but he had too many other weaknesses.

A further problem was weak organisation. There are honorable exceptions, but there were many horror stories from the campaign trail about disorganisation and opportunities lost. For example in more than one seat inexperienced campaign managers exhausted themselves organising the Royal Mail free delivery at the start of the campaign, while neglecting the advance organisation required for polling day, which they then became too tired to do properly. It is likely that organisational errors like this, and gaps in communication between local and national campaigning, cost the party as many as four seats (including seats in Wales and Cornwall, which would have given the party a better geographical spread). This is particularly disappointing given that the party had a head start on candidate selection. This points to serious organisational weakness in the party that successive leaders have failed to address. It has is an out-of-touch national management, chaotic local management and weak middle management, all reinforcing each other’s ineffectiveness. I exaggerate – there are islands of brilliance – but strong organisational leadership needs to be a priority.

But is it worth it? Does the party contribute value to British political life? I still think it does because the party has two historic functions that the election has not changed.

The first is as a beacon for liberalism and democracy. Both major parties are taking these for granted. They are fragmented coalitions only interested in seizing a parliamentary majority by whatever means, and then using it to impose a divisive policy agenda. The Conservatives have taken pragmatism past the point of bankruptcy. They continue to peddle failed ideas because they know no better. Labour have collapsed completely into a party of protest, pretending that hard choices do not have to be made.

The second historic function of the Liberal Democrats is to bridge the tribal divide between the two main camps, and attract support from both. It looks as if neither of the major parties can establish a decent governing majority – they are just cancelling each other out. The deadlock can only be broken by a third party. This is what happened in 2010 with the coalition government. Disastrous as that was for the Lib Dems, rebuilding a new coalition is probably the only way that Britain will achieve a government that is “strong and stable” in the language of the Conservative election campaign. That poses a major strategic problem for the Lib Dems – but that is surely the party’s destiny. By the time the party is next given the chance – perhaps after Labour attempts a minority administration – public attitudes may have moved on.

There is a further possibility – that the party becomes part of a new movement that governs without Labour or the Conservatives – in the manner of Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche movement. That was my hope when I joined the predecessor party, the SDP, in 1981. It failed then, but who knows?

Meanwhile the party needs to pick itself up and move on. It must continue to fly the banner for Remain, and tap the growing anger over Brexit – even if the end game is unclear. But the party also badly needs to move on to explain what it is for beyond Brexit. With problems for Britain piling up in all directions, the voters surely need to be offered liberal solutions.

Is Theresa May the new John Major?

Well if I was ever under the illusion that I had any special insights into Britain’s general election campaign, it is now banished. Last week I described the improvement in Labour’s poll ratings as a “dead cat bounce”. It is clearly much more than that. As the election goes into its last lap, it is going to be a lot more interesting.

So what happened? The truth is that we don’t quite know. After the pause caused by the Manchester outrage, we now have a series of new opinion polls, confirming an improvement in Labour’s position. It has advanced to an average of 35% according to Wikipedia, a remarkable achievement when you consider they started the campaign at 25%. Where has this come from? The Conservative poll share has eased by a couple of points to about 44%, but it is still better than where they started, before they mugged Ukip. The position of both the Lib Dems and the Greens has fallen back, as has the SNP in Scotland, though Ukip has struck bottom now. The headline figures are easy enough to see, but what really lies behind the shifts is much harder to say, as is their impact on individual races for seats.

But confidence in the Conservative campaign has been shaken, and Labour is being given more credit. It is particularly striking that Manchester has not helped Theresa May, as most campaigners from both sides thought it would. Indeed the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, seized the initiative on Friday by pointing to the alleged failure of British foreign policy to make the world safer, and how police cuts have made things worse. Both points are spurious. Jihadi terrorism has struck Germany and Belgium, countries with a notably more pacific foreign policy than Britain’s. Britain’s interventions are an excuse for the terrorists, and not the real reason – which is hatred for the godless western way of life and a liberal attitude to women. And the security services have been lavished with funds – it is friendly neighbourhood policing that has been hammered – and the effect of that on terrorism is unclear. Never mind; Mr Corbyn delivered his speech in a measured, sober fashion (prime ministerial, I am tempted to say), and both arguments resonated with the public, who are not inclined to trust the political establishment. The Tory response was unmemorable.

This points to an important weakness in the Tory campaign. It is completely and utterly centred on the person of Mrs May, who they then proceed to shield from public interaction. While Mr Corbyn was delivering his speech, Mrs May was hobnobbing with world leaders at a couple of world summits. In itself this sort of distraction is considered to be a positive by campaigners, a chance to look like a world leader in power, but she had nobody of stature left on the home front. And the media were not inclined to give her party an easy ride.

That has to do with a second weakness. Mrs May is not a collegiate leader. Her pronouncements emerge from a small cabal of trusted advisers, without the ground being prepared amongst her colleagues and their media contacts. So it doesn’t take much for the grumbling to start, and this makes good copy. And the grumbling is in full flow. One columnist said that Mrs May had the charisma of an Indesit fridge-freezer. More than one has suggested that this is the most dismal Tory election campaign ever.

I wouldn’t say that. To me that record is held by John Major, both in 1992 (which won unexpectedly) and 1997 (the worst Tory defeat in history). The 1992 election is the better comparison to now. Mr Major was an uncharismatic sort, and he tried to make a virtue of it. He was never able to stamp his authority on his party. I remember thinking in the early stages of the 1992 campaign that the Tories did not look as if they even wanted to win. They were saved by events. The first was a triumphalist rally in Sheffield by the Labour leader Neil Kinnock, which was a disastrous misreading of the zeitgeist. And second was combative last minute switch in the Conservative campaign based on “Labour’s tax bombshell”, one of the most effective general election moves I can remember – which stops me rating the campaign as a whole the direst in Tory history (1997 takes that prize).

That gives two clues as to how the Conservatives can pull the campaign back to the massive landslide we expected at the start. First is the public not liking the prospect of Labour as a government rather than as a protest vote. Mr Kinnock was not considered Prime Ministerial. Second, is through a well-designed and aggressive drive by the Conservatives and their media allies against Labour weaknesses, perhaps on economics or perhaps on national security, in the remaining ten days.

We’ll see. Things could go well for Labour if we see a repeat of the anti-establishment mood evident in the Brexit referendum last year, or in Donald Trump’s victory in the US. “Strong and stable” could have been a campaign slogan for Hillary Clinton – but Mr Trump was able to project enough of an aura of competence to persuade enough people to give him a try – based on his supposed success as a businessman, and his success in getting to be the Republican nominee. Mr Corbyn is exceeding expectations in his campaigning skill, and he comes over as the more straightforward and honest politician compared to Mrs May. So you never know…

And what of my party, the Liberal Democrats? There is good an bad news. The good news is that knocking the shine off Mrs May helps in contests against the Conservatives. The bad news is that in the general polling the party has faded, and the gap between it and the Conservatives is as large as ever. The idea that the party is a more credible opposition than Labour has gained no traction. A good election for Jeremy Corbyn may be good for the Lib Dems strategically, but a failure to progress will pose some very challenging questions for the party.

Meanwhile I will be scouring the media for any evidence I can find as to how the election is developing. I have not got a clear picture yet. But if Theresa May fails to get a convincing majority, she will have nowhere to hide, and her authority would be damaged irreparably. And deservedly so.

Labour’s dead cat bounce

In my weekly survey of Britain’s general election, it does not look to have been a bad week for Labour. Their poll rating has hardened from the lower twenties to the upper twenties, and the leak of their manifesto moved the election agenda away from “strong and stable”, the Tory slogan, to policy choices. Can Labour claw back further? I think not.

I hold fast to my predictions of last week that the Tories will achieve about 400 seats to Labour’s 170 or so. The Conservative vote is holding up well; the Lib Dem challenge is in the doldrums; and Tory prospects in Scotland look positive.

Labour in fact have done little to address their fundamental weakness – their lack of credibility. Take the manifesto. The final version is published today, with a lot of the media attention focused on the costings and how spending commitments are to be funded. Unlike the news media, I don’t like to use this medium to speculate, when those speculations can be turned to facts in a very short time. But it is clear is that this manifesto will be unchallenging. The leaks showed a lot of popular policies but very few new ideas. Labour spinners referred to it as “radical”. In only one sense could that said to be true: their idea is to raise levels of public spending substantially, and also taxes on businesses and people with higher incomes (I nearly wrote “the wealthy”, but actually that isn’t true – I am wealthy in the Labour conception, but have little to fear from their ideas of higher taxes). And, indeed, the whole enterprise is a challenge to the public policy consensus that the left likes to refer to as “neoliberalism”.

But this is radicalism by default. What we have heard so far of Labour’s promises is “no lobbyist left behind” policy formation. Every Labour supporting interest group seems to have come forward with their wishes, and these have been granted. When challenged about how this is to be paid for, and the answer comes: “somebody else”. There seems to have no serious question of choosing or prioritising. This is in stark contrast to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in 1997, before Labour’s greatest ever electoral triumph. They had decided to hold to Conservative spending plans, and had spent most of the previous year or two saying “no”, while confining themselves to a quite limited and focused set of promises.

And that gets to the heart of the matter. Messrs Blair and Brown were not opponents of public spending. Indeed they oversaw a massive expansion of the public sector in their three terms. But they understood the need to appear to be credible managers in order to win public trust first. The public don’t like entrusting politicians with spending decisions if they can’t say “no” to their friends from time to time.

There is, in fact, quite an interesting debate to be had about what scope there is to increase public spending, and what sorts of taxes are needed to support this – and even the extent to which it has to be backed by direct tax funding. And since I believe that public spending must be expanded (if only from the logic of the late, great economist William Baumol who died recently), it is a discussion I really want to engage in. But Labour’s manifesto is not the right place to begin that debate. That would give it too much credit for coherence. Effective management is always about making choices between things that you want to do – Labour’s leadership shows no inclination to confront that truth.

So what explains Labour’s slight bounce? I have not seen much evidence to explain it, so I’m back to speculation. I suspect that it reflects weakness. Labour-inclined voters don’t have any sense that Labour will actually win, so they have little to lose by voting for them. They are open to be swayed by their local candidate, or the general principle of disliking the Tories.

This factor should help the Lib Dems too. The perception that the 2015 election was a close one was a disaster for them, as the Conservative national campaign were able to promote fears that they might let Labour in by the back door. This is still a problem that Lib Dem strategists have done little to address – and I have my doubts whether they will ever have the courage to do so. But that is a problem for another day. And yet Lib Dem poll rating are at best stuck, and may be slipping. The surge of new members when the election was announced has slowed to a trickle. What the party lacks is enough compelling reasons for voters to support it. They have one: an expression of anger at the result of the last year’s referendum on Europe. That plays well here in Wandsworth in London, where I’m expecting the party to do quite well. But only about 20% of the electorate at large now want to reverse the result of the referendum. Other Remainers are trying to move on, and are in the depression stage of grief over the result, or perhaps even acceptance. This leaves too small a pool of voters to fish in and win the seats the party needs to.

The Lib Dems next message that “we are the opposition”, based on the shambles of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, has some traction, but it is not enough in itself. It is yet another variation on the theme of “vote for us because we are not one of the other two” which is superficially attractive (and seems to play well in focus groups, given how popular it has been amongst the party’s professionals) but doesn’t get enough people across the line in the end. It may yet gain traction. If Labour do succeed in getting more people to think about Conservative policies (and their manifesto was successful in doing that), and if they are unable to maintain discipline themselves, then who knows? But I fear that the election has come a bit too early in the party’s revival for strong electoral results – though it will be a useful learning experience. I would urge all Lib Dem supporters who want to help to go to one of the small number of target seats.

In my Facebook bubble, I see growing support for anti-Conservative tactical voting. I place little credence in this. It is not clear what all this for. It may limit the Tory majority a bit, but that will change little. There is no credible coalition of anti-Tory parties. If there ever is one, it needs to be put in place long before an election with an agreed platform. Labour show no interest; they observe how the Conservatives have absorbed Ukip voters by crushing the smaller party, and they want to carry out their own version of that manoeuvre. And the critical task is to persuade people who want to vote Conservative to vote for somebody else – and talk of a “progressive alliance” does not help here at all.

And so I conclude that Labour’s relatively good week is what City traders used to call “dead cat bounce” – the sort of bounce you get when you hit rock bottom. There is no game-changing happening.

Must democratically-run political parties be lousy at elections?

Three weeks after Theresa May announced a snap General Election in the UK, the Conservative dominance shows no sign of abating. Mrs May looks as if she will achieve a majority for her party of between 150 to 200, with over 400 seats, compared to about 150 for Labour. Tory success is primarily a product of Labour failure. That poses some challenging questions for how you run a political party.

That prediction of Conservative success is somewhat higher than many are making. It reflects two things. First the Conservatives have stamped on Ukip and picked up the lion’s share of their votes, taking their overall vote share up to about 45% or more, their best since the 1990s, and presenting all the opposition parties with a formidable challenge. The second thing is an analysis by Alistair Meeks of politicalbetting.com, which shows particular difficulties for Labour in a swathe of seats that voted Leave in the EU referendum. Meanwhile the Lib Dems have lost some of their early momentum, and my prediction for them of 20 seats counts as optimistic in the current betting market.

Part of the Tory success is the result of ruthless competence in the art of electioneering, led by their strategist Lynton Crosby. A compelling national message, based on Mrs May’s personal brand, is crushing all before it. Labour is chaotic and confused by comparison, and the Lib Dems’ lack of media weight is telling. Rage over Brexit appears to have limited appeal – though an attempt by the Lib Dems to broaden the message into NHS funding is a valiant attempt to broaden out. The Lib Dems’ best hope is to exploit the inevitability of a Tory landslide, concerns about Tory policy and Labour’s hopelessness into a vote for an alternative. That may yet happen.

For now I am interested in something else. Labour is clearly the principal author of its own demise, after they elected a clearly inadequate leader in Jeremy Corbyn. This immediately punctured their chances; the party then fluffed the EU referendum, letting Leave win by a narrow margin. That gave Mrs May her chance to put the boot in. But how did Labour get into this mess? The answer is “democracy”. The party opened up its methods of choosing its leader, and then its policy making processes. This led to record numbers of people joining the party, and taking part in selecting their leader. Contrast this with the Conservatives. Mrs May won selection by systematically destroying each of her opponents before the party’s weak democratic procedures could get involved at all. Meanwhile the process of creating Tory policy is completely dictatorial.

Which leads to a thought: internal party democracy is toxic for political parties’ electoral success. Labour’s troubles started with their selection of Ed Miliband as leader in 2010, in the most open selection process until then. Mr Miliband was responsible for a series of catastrophic misjudgements, including the further opening up of the party’s leadership selection process. Mr Miliband looked inwards for salvation; he thought he could win simply by picking up Lib Dem voters disillusioned with the coalition government, and by stoking up his political base. This had the virtue of avoiding hard choices within Labour’s ranks, and of rallying behind the left’s supposedly superior “values”. These are the sorts of mistakes that leaders make when they think that appealing to their own supporters is more important than challenging political opponents. Mr Corbyn is repeating this strategy in a ghastly death-spiral.

We might also reflect that something similar is happening in France. The two established political parties, the Socialists and the Republicans, opened up their leadership selection processes, and were then both knocked out of the race for president by one party leader who challenged her own party to make it more electorally appealing, and another who simply created a new political party in his own image. Internal party democracy is not real democracy at all. It is about building up appeal amongst the like-minded, and not about appealing to the sceptics. Labour may have involved record numbers of people in its processes, but they are numbered in hundreds of thousands, and not millions.

It is worth casting a glance over to the USA at this point. Their internal party politics is clearly highly democratic, and challengers to the system from outside the established parties fail to get going. But they have a state-sponsored system of primaries not tied to party membership that brings in millions of people who aren’t necessarily loyal to the parties’ core values. Donald Trump succeeded by involving formerly Democratic working class voters.

This poses an interesting challenge to the Liberal Democrats, my political party. Time an again I hear activists praising its democratic processes, and asking for these processes to be given even more say over policy. This, of course, helps draw in new members and keep them. As a member of this political party you aren’t just treated as cannon fodder, as you are in the Tories, but you are given a say. And as the party struggles to build a core vote, it naturally tends to look inward, or at least towards the like-minded.

But to succeed the party has to broaden its appeal to beyond the like-minded to voters who are sceptical of the party, and will never be very loyal to it. As the party tries to hold and win seats in a general election, it is getting a taste of how hard this is. Still, the party is what it is. The members and activists will have to take on the challenge of broadening the party’s appeal themselves, and choose leaders and policies that will fulfil that aim. Since inclusivity is one of the core liberal values that the party treasures, that might help. What the party must avoid is the trap that Labour members have fallen into: the feeling that like-minded people are natural majority, and that elections can be won by motivating this group rather than challenging it.

That’s for the future. Meanwhile the catastrophe that is engulfing the Labour Party should be warning to all political activists.