Lib Dems in a flap about becoming endangered species

Martin Harper of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds sat on an armchair on stage at the Liberal Democrats’ conference in Glasgow yesterday, pleading the case of an endangered species.

“Stand up for those species that don’t have a voice,” said Harper, as he praised Somerset MP Tessa Munt for her efforts to save the previously endangered bittern.

Seven months before next year's British general election, and following years of abuse for entering coalition with the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats know what it is like to be a threatened species.

The Liberal Democrats have 56 MPs. The question for the party is whether it will suffer heavy losses next year, or a catastrophe.

Looking ahead, one MP planning for the elections said: “It’s a Noah’s Ark strategy. We wait for the flood and save a handful of the species in the hope of repopulating the land when the waters recede.”

On Tuesday, hundreds gathered at a fringe meeting for a reasonably frank, public discussion about their chances, still believing that miserable national poll ratings tell only part of the story.

Since the Liberals/Social Democrats merger in the early 1980s, the party has got between 17 per cent and 25 per cent of the national vote in general elections, but never more than 10 per cent of the seats – and usually far less.

Today, however, the party is no longer the receptacle for the protest vote that has benefited the party in every election since 1997, Tony Blair’s first triumph.

Everything depends on the maths. Election 2015 is the most unpredictable for years; one that could see the fracturing of the Labour/Conservative stranglehold.

The Conservatives will struggle because of the rise of UK Independence Party and Labour will struggle in Scotland against the Scottish National Party.

Such turmoil on the political landscape would normally benefit the Liberal Democrats, but the signals for the party, after four years in government, are not good. Today, for example, Labour looks set to hold the Heywood and Middleton byelection – despite a Ukip challenge that worried it just a few weeks ago.

The probable Labour hold comes, however, on the back of a collapse in the Liberal Democrats’ vote in the constituency – where it took more than one in five of the votes in 2010.

Despite such portents, party delegates gathered in Glasgow – now reduced to a hard-core following a significant number of departures – believe that 35 seats or so can be held.

Local success

That number, though, could fall to just 22 if the tide turns heavily against the party at the election next May, or even a miserable 13 if they are swamped by a Biblical flood.

However, national polls rarely capture the Liberal Democrats’ true state, since it has doggedly campaigned street-by-street in places where it has dug in over the years.

This time, however, its national vote share could more accurately reflect its percentage of House of Commons seats than ever before, mused YouGov pollster Peter Kellner.

“You won’t get that because you are a party of power and government. You get that from people who believe in what you say and do,” he told the fringe meeting.

Such thoughts are shared by Nick Clegg, who spoke of the party's values of tolerance and openness in his leader's address before the curtain fell on the Glasgow gathering.

"Something very un-British is taking root in our politics. A growing movement of people who want to pull us apart," he said, pairing the Scottish National Party's Alex Salmond and Ukip's Nigel Farage.

They, and others, are pressing "pick-a-side" politics, where immigrants, the English, benefit claimants, or the European Union get blamed for all sins, depending on who is making the case.

“It is seductive and it is beguiling. That much may even be proved, if the people of Clacton give the UK Independence Party an MP [in today’s byelection in Essex].

“But resentment, the politics of fear, doesn’t pay the bills or create a single job. Claiming to address people’s acute anxiety about the modern world, it provides nothing but the false comfort of grievance,” he said.

Seeking to position the Liberal Democrats as the lynch-pin of British politics, Clegg had to return, again, to its failure to honour a promise to abolish tuition fees.

College fees

Instead of abolition, the fees were tripled: an act that did incalculable harm to its reputation with students, teachers and intellectuals – traditionally core elements of its support.

Pointing to its record in office, Clegg asked: “How will you judge us? By the one policy we couldn’t deliver in government, or by the countless policies we did deliver?”

Four years on, the people who still go to Liberal Democrat conferences are, mostly, people who want it to stay in government, rather than retreating back into the comfort zone of opposition.

However, coalition options depend on numbers. Instinctively, the grassroots would prefer Labour. However, Clegg and those around him prefer the Conservatives.

Both routes are strewn with obstacles. David Cameron, even if he wants to, would struggle to get another deal with the Liberal Democrats past his MPs.

Labour are no more keen, while Clegg’s head is the price most often talked about by those in Labour ranks who are prepared to contemplate such an outcome.

Early this week, there were smoke signals from some around Clegg that he could accept a referendum on EU membership – an absolute red line for Cameron.

Clegg’s people denied he had put the rumour about, but the signal will have been noted – even if its emergence deeply annoyed some senior Liberal Democrat people.

There will be many more signs of political manoeuvring in the months ahead, as Clegg’s party makes its pitch to voters. They have an argument to make. The question is whether voters will grant them a hearing.