New Year round-up: Liberal Democrats
So to the last of my three start of the year posts (sorry for those you wanted an SNP one, I really don't want to parade my ignorance of Scottish politics!). What do the polls say about the Lib Dems? Well, the brutal answer is not a lot. To an extent that's because no one bothers asking, most of the newspapers either actively support or lean towards Labour or the Conservatives and it is they who commission the polls. Hence the Telegraph commonly carries out detailled polls about how the Conservatives are doing and how they are seen, the Guardian will commission polls about Labour as will third party Labour party affiliates like the Fabian Society (and besides, as the governing party everyone in the media is interested in how Labour are seen). There really isn't anyone out there interested enough in how the Liberal Democrats are seen to cough up the money for a poll.
The only time questions are really asked about them is in Populus's annual poll for the party conference season, which asks some questions on every party - this year 69% thought the Lib Dems were just a protest vote party, and 68% thought they "seem decent people, but their policies probably don't really add up". The polls occassioned by the Lib Dem leadership election underlined why polls don't have much to say for them - invariably showing that most people didn't have any opinion whatsoever over whether it should be Huhne or Clegg, and often had no idea who they were.
For the last year the Lib Dems have languished in the polls - though exactly how bad things were differed between pollsters. The level of Liberal Democrat support in the polls is the most variable between the pollsters, while Populus tend to be the most favourable to Labour and ComRes to the Tories the differences aren't actually that great - everyone had the Tories up around 40% or so, everyone had Labour down to the low 30s. With the Liberal Democrats it's different, looking at the average of the monthly polls this year from February till November - months when I have comparable figures from 4 pollsters - YouGov had the Lib Dems at 15.2%, Populus at 17%, ComRes at 17.6% and ICM at 19.4% (Ipsos MORI didn't have their regular monitor for two of these months, but for the record the average in the remaining months was 16.1%). I posted a while back about what I thought some of the reasons might be. In recent months though even ICM have showed them falling to the mid-teens, so while it might be open to debate how bad things got, it's pretty indisputable that things were bad.
What happened? There is an absence of polling evidence here, so I am afraid what follows is largely my own personal opinion and is far shorter than the other two posts. Having looked at Labour and the Conservatives though, I didn't want to start the year without also looking at the Lib Dems.
The casuality of the Lib Dems' poor performance was Sir Menzies Cambpell. To some extent he wasn't really the problem, at least, he wasn't a negative for the Liberal Democrats, only the an absence of a positive where they needed one to alleviate a problem that was not their own doing. Polls didn't show anyone disliking him, and if they did show that people thought he was too old for the job, it probably wasn't dragging the party down: a Lib Dem leader doesn't have to be a potential Prime Minister, people know he isn't going to be one.
Ming's problem was that he didn't have any impact at all, and he was filling a role that needed to be carried out by someone who did.
In the last post I wrote that the Conservative advance in 2007 was largely down to Labour's failings, rather than anything they did for themselves. That goes double for the Liberal Democrats. Lib Dems anxiously worrying about ratings and blaming their leader for not doing better should accept that they are not necessarily masters of their own fate - a certain proportion of Lib Dem votes are always going to be negative votes against the two main parties, if the reasons for the protest against the main parties receeds, so will that vote.
A large proportion of people who voted Lib Dem at the last election were people who identify themselves as Labour supporters but who voted Lib Dem either for tactical reasons or in protest over Iraq or something else that Tony Blair has done. While the former may remain, Iraq and Tony Blair as recruiting serjeants for Lib Dem protest votes have faded. Equally, whereas in 2001 and 2005 many people would have wanted to vote against Labour but would have found the Conservatives too toxic to contemplate, as David Cameron improves the Tory image the Liberal Democrats now have to share an anti-Labour vote they would once have been the obvious home for.
One strategy for the Liberal Democrats could be to try to hold back the tide, reblacken the Tory name or fight to keep Brown linked to Iraq and the Blair government. More realistically though they need to adapt to the changed circumstances. Their positioning at the last election was perfectly in tune with the political environment of the time - an unpopular government with an opposition that was distrusted - the Lib Dem slogan was "the Real Alternative", a narrative that was values and mission free, it didn't involve standing for anything, just not being the other two parties. It worked well for them and meant they could win on both fronts. With a detoxified Tory party it won't chime in the same way, not least because in a more competitive election the very real alternative to a Brown government will be a Cameron one.
To prevent themselves being squeezed the Liberal Democrats need to present a new narrative that tells people what their purpose is, they need to differentiate themselves far more clearly as standing for something distinct from the other two parties. Rather than claiming to be the "real alternative", they need to paint a coherent picture of what a "liberal alternative" is, so they can build more of a positive vote for them, making up for the inevitable loss of some of the negative vote they got last time round. Nick Clegg's initial comments after being elected leader about Britain being a Liberal country that doesn't yet vote Liberal perhaps points towards this sort of strategy - a view that while there are people who would vote for liberal politics, the Liberal Democrats haven't necessarily managed to clearly identify themselves with it in people's minds.
Nick Clegg appears to be a far more media-savvy and charismatic leader than Ming Campbell. Just by being leader he isn't going to suddenly make the political environment any friendlier for the Liberal Democrat party, there are tough market conditions out there for them, but he does at least have the potential to be better at keeping them in the public eye and that alone would improve things somewhat. Putting forward a coherent and distinct narrative that gives people a really positive reason to vote Liberal Democrat, rather than them just being the nice people who aren't one of the other two, will be harder - the other parties will copy popular policies and say 'me too' to popular values - but that's what the Lib Dems need to do to avoid being sidelined in the first really competitive election since 1992.
