I’ll admit it. I simply don’t “get” the Liberal Democrat campaign.
I understand their ground strategy; to rigorously and ruthlessly target their resources on the seats they think they can hold, mostly within those areas where they remain in control at a local and national level.
It may be at this point that they’ve simply decided that nothing they say at a national level will get a fair hearing but, for appearances’ sake if nothing else, they have to maintain the impression of a full-fledged campaign. Because as an attempt to win voters it simply doesn’t make sense.
Nick Clegg tells the Guardian:
“The looming question in the next phase of this campaign is whether there is to be a coalition of grievance, or of conscience. The last thing the British economy needs is the instability and factionalism that those coalitions of grievance of right and left represents.”
For anyone who found that impenetrable, a “coalition of grievance” equals any coalition backed up by Ukip or the SNP. A coalition of conscience is one supported by the Liberal Democrats. Now Ukip take more votes from the Liberal Democrats than you might think – around 20 to 30 per cent of Ukip voters backed that party in 2010 – and while the SNP won’t take that many votes from Clegg’s party they are on course to win ten seats from the Liberals in Scotland. But the votes that they have lost to Ukip are the votes of people who don’t want to support a governing party at all; that Ukip are shut out by the electoral system is a feature, not a bug as far as these voters are concerned. They cannot compete with Nigel Farage’s outfit on that.
The votes they have lost to the SNP, meanwhile, are voters who are either disgusted with their alliance with the Tories or who want to leave the United Kingdom. The Liberals cannot compete with the Nationalists on Tory-bashing and they don’t want to leave the United Kingdom.
And the central message – vote Liberal Democrat to avoid a coalition with the SNP or Ukip – is, if anything, a better argument for voting for one of the big two than it is to vote Liberal. If you prefer a Labour government free of SNP influence, your best bet is to vote Labour, almost regardless of where you live. If you prefer a Conservative administration shorn of Ukip, again, there’s little reason to vote Liberal Democrat.
It comes back to that question from Jeremy Browne that the Liberals still can’t seem to answer:
“Every political party and every politician has to be able to answer the question, ‘If you didn’t exist why would it be necessary to invent you?’ I’m not sure it would be necessary to invent an ill-defined moderating centrist party that believed that its primary purpose was to dilute the policies of other political parties.”
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