The Liberal Democrats are used to scorn. One of Margaret Thatcher’s most famous quips was a joke at their expense, comparing their bird logo to Monty Python’s dead parrot. The Liberals’ first taste of power since World War II, in the Cameron-led coalition, became a poisoned chalice. The party’s collapse in the 2015 general election, which saw it fall from 23 percent of the vote and 57 seats to 7.9 percent and a paltry eight seats, added the possibility to oblivion to the party’s problems.
The Liberals’ fall from grace was vertiginous; many also thought it terminal. But even at its lowest moment, the parrot did not quite expire. The party membership began to recover slowly even while it was in coalition, and it added 15,000 members in the immediate aftermath of its catastrophic 2015 defeat. The party announced that it had recruited 7,500 new members in the four days after Brexit, and another 7,500 on top of that in the week after that. The autumn 2016 conference season saw another 1,000 sign up.
Of course, membership figures aren’t everything. That said, the party has been showing some life at the ballot boxes too. party made modest gains in the 2016 local elections in England, winning 45 seats, and recorded a number of impressive gains in local council by-elections in July, shortly after the Brexit vote, as well as picking up a seat on Sheffield Council from Labour in September. Perhaps most impressively, the party managed a 23 percent swing in its favour in the October 2016 Witney by-election, picking up 30 percent of the vote in David Cameron’s former, Brexit-opposing Oxfordshire seat.
Altogether, however, these are fairly modest gains, and every poll taken in October 2016 has shown the Liberals on between 6 or 9 percent of the vote. It also made little headway at the Scottish Parliament elections in 2016, and lost all but one seat in the Welsh Assembly. So do these flickers of life amount to much? Do the Liberal Democrats have a future? And how does Brexit – which the Liberal Democrats opposed perhaps more staunchly than any other party – provide the Liberals with new chances for revival?
To answer this, we have to take a look at two of the main cleavages in British politics right now. By cleavage, I mean a social division or conflict which structures political identification and choice. The first is the socioeconomic or class cleavage, the traditional measure of “left” (pro-redistribution and intervention) and “right” (pro-free market, pro-status quo).
Historically, the Liberals/Liberal Democrats have been seen as “centrist.” On the one hand, they are clearly not socialist, or working class; on the other, they are not nearly as committed to free-market absolutism as the Conservatives, and were always more associated with the promotion of welfare (it was the Asquith and Lloyd George who introduced the first public insurance schemes; both John Maynard Keynes and Lord Beveridge, father of the universal welfare state in Britain, were Liberals). British voters treat the Lib Dems accordingly; as Jack Nagel and Christopher Wlezien showed in a 2010 article (see also here), historically, when Labour moves to the left, and/or the Conservatives to the right, the Lib Dems benefit electorally from the increased space in the centre. A note of caution – Nagel and Wlezien measured left and right based on a measure of party manifestos, and not public perceptions in and of themselves.
We cannot know if this relationship will still hold after 2010; Nagel and Wlezien looked at the period between 1945 and 2005, and there was no event akin to the Coalition during this period. Many trace the party’s decline to its decision to renege on a 2010 electoral pledge to eliminate tuition fees. Given that the Tories had embraced stiff austerity, and Ed Miliband moved Labour to the left, the Lib Dems should have benefited in 2015 according to Nagel and Wlezien’s model: Instead, they lost voters both left and right. Even if the Lib Dems were to benefit from Labour’s sharp move to the left under Corbyn, the Conservatives are also moving left on this scale, pledging more worker control in corporate governance and pay decisions and easing austerity.
Politics, however, is more than just a matter of left and right issue stances. These have a complicated relationship to class – although people on lower incomes do tend to favour redistribution, much of the middle class is, and long has been, left wing (see Kitschelt and Rehm – also discussed here). There are also the widening cleavages focused on values and identity, pitting social liberals against social conservatives and cosmopolitans against communitarians. In the United Kingdom, this cleavage overlaps heavily with class as well as with geography, but it is now synonymous with Brexit. It is in this mix of class identities and values politics that the Liberal Democrats might have their best hope of revival.
Brexit outlined a growing divide between the winners and losers of neoliberal globalisation – the model of deregulation, privatization, fiscal restraint and free movement of damn near everything that emerged and became dominant in the last quarter of the 20th century. The winners tend to be middle class, cosmopolitan, Europhile and well educated; the losers tend to be working class or lower-middle class, nationalist, protectionist, authoritarian, hostile to immigration and lacking in formal education. The globalization winners are more numerous and perhaps less homogenous than the losers; there are left-right divisions among them on socioeconomic and values issues. In Britain, these run quite prominently through the Conservative Party, as demonstrated by the vote on the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Bill 2013, and more clearly by the party’s long, long history of internal conflict over membership in the European Union. The Conservatives are not the only middle-class party divided on values or post-materialist issues, or on immigration, but they are unusual in Europe for also being divided on the benefits of European Union membership.
Prior to Cameron’s resignation, the most vocal exponent of the protectionist-nationalist-communitarian view was, of course, UKIP. However (as I have observed elsewhere), Theresa May’s Conservatives are increasingly embracing elements of this anti-globalization and even market-critical discourse – perhaps the first time the leadership of a centre-right party in Western Europe has abandoned the common ground of the modernization winners. However, about two-fifths of Conservatives (as defined by their 2015 vote) chose Remain on June 23. May’s retreat from Cameron’s social liberalism may provide the Liberal Democrats with an opportunity to consolidate the social liberal, cosmopolitan, anti-Brexit vote on the centre-right. Indeed, the Liberal Democrats made exactly this pitch to Witney’s electors. They will have a chance to make it again in a few weeks in the Richmond Park by-election sparked by Zac Goldsmith’s resignation in protest of Heathrow expansion. Notably, the Lib Dems plan to ignore Heathrow and talk about Brexit, while UKIP has decided not to field a candidate and back Goldsmith, who favours “hard Brexit” (prioritizing immigration control and sovereignty over access to European markets).
This focus on the liberal/cosmopolitan side of the values divide might also win it some voters from Labour – remember, it was Corbyn’s failure to stop Brexit that provided the cause (or pretext) for the attempt to remove him after the referendum. Corbyn proved less popular among Labour party members/electors who voted Remain (who still backed him 57-43) than those who voted Leave (who backed him 76-24). Corbyn lost Labour members aged 18-24; Peter Dorey and Andrew Denham suggest this may have been because his opponent Owen Smith called for a second EU membership referendum.
The Liberal Democrats are well placed to campaign as the party of liberal, pro-European values, and to occupy the centre ground of the “modernisation winners” camp. No one can doubt the party’s Europhilia, which will allow it to leave behind the accusations of untrustworthiness created when Clegg reneged on tuition fees and backed austerity. By focusing on an issue that is not directly or entirely economic, like EU membership, the Lib Dems can appeal to Labour moderates without having to debate the party’s record or position on spending. Conversely, the party’s association with Cameron and his fiscal policies actually works to its advantage among Conservative moderates.
This does not mean that the Liberal Democrats are destined to become the chief vehicle of the anti-Brexit centre. One by-election win does not a recovery make, and Labour, were it ever to overcome its internal divisions, would probably have much more success as “the voice of Remain.” The party came in first or second in only 71 seats in 2015, and the upcoming redistribution of seats will scramble the bastions it has left. But those challenges aside, the Liberal Democrats have one clear advantage: They are, right now, the largest party outside Scotland that is clearly and vocally led by cosmopolitans and Remainers. They should use that advantage – not least because it’s also pretty much the only one they’ve got left.
Ben Margulies is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the ERC Diasporas Project at the University of Warwick. He tweets @ChequeredFuture.
Image: Liberal Democrats CC BY-NC-ND
