Nick Clegg isn’t due to address the Lib Dem conference until 2:30pm, but here’s one striking line from the advance excerpts. The Deputy PM will tell party members: “we work every day to keep this Government anchored in the centre ground.” Given the coalition’s abolition of the 50p income tax rate and its reckless reform of the NHS (the two policies that have done most to damage its poll ratings), it’s a questionable claim. But, in fairness to Clegg, a Guardian/ICM poll earlier this week showed that a plurality of voters (48%) believe the government is “staying centre ground”, while 27% believe it is shifting to the right and 7% believe it is heading leftwards.
What is less clear is how Clegg’s decision to reposition the Lib Dems as a centrist party, one that attracts as much “vitriol and abuse” from the left as the right, will be received by his party’s supporters. As Fabian Society general secretary Andrew Harrop noted on The Staggers earlier this week, polling by YouGov shows that 43% of remaining Lib Dem voters place themselves on the left, while just 8% place themselves on the right. In electoral terms, a centrist strategy makes little sense when, to avoid a disastrous defeat, the party needs to attract tactical Labour votes in Lib Dem-Tory marginals (of the 20 most marginal Lib Dems seats, 14 are Lib Dem-Tory marginals).
It is to Ed Miliband’s party, not David Cameron’s, that the Lib Dems are in greatest danger of losing further support. While 54% of their voters would consider switching to Labour, only 36% would countenance voting Conservative. And if the Lib Dems even want to begin to win back some of their former supporters, around 40 per cent of whom have defected to Labour, a centrist strategy will not cut it. Clegg’s heart may tell him to remain in the centre, but his head should tell him to return to the left.
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