THIS GENERATION of Liberal Democrats believes it has a rendezvous with destiny. After the party’s by-election successes last month, Charles Kennedy declared that the rules of engagement for the next election had been overturned; the Liberal Democrats were poised to overtake the Conservatives. His senior adviser, Lord Razzall, publicly spoke of a Liberal Democrat government by the end of the decade.
These comments are a calculated risk. The Liberal-SDP Alliance of the early 1980s suffered lasting damage from David Steel’s call for Liberal activists to “go back to your constituencies and prepare for government”. Labour’s regional concentration of support ensured that even under the leadership of Michael Foot the party was able to retain more than 200 seats. By the mid-1990s, the historians of the SDP, Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, were reflecting on the Alliance ’s “total failure” to overcome the resilience of the party system.
Mr Kennedy reasons that the Conservatives are more vulnerable now than Labour was then. the scale of anti-Conservative tactical voting in successive elections has begun to make the electoral system work in the Liberal Democrats’ favour, creating a bedrock of safe seats, while protecting the more marginal ones (in almost all of which the Tories are the main challenger). Meanwhile, the threat from the UK Independence Party prevents the Tories from arriving at a workable compromise on the European question, let alone a pragmatic centrist programme.
A realistic minimum expectation of 70-80 seats is a remarkable position for a party that for much of the postwar period held no more than half a dozen. The Liberal Democrats hope that this will represent a tipping point, unlike any other augury of Liberal revival for 75 years, where not only tactical votes but also underlying loyalties shift decisively. Finally, after all these years, a Liberal government will be on the way.
This is a seductive prospect for the Liberal Democrats, and it has only one flaw: unless the party changes fundamentally, power will remain a fantasy.
The reason for this is simple. The emergence of the Liberals as a serious force changes the way politics is reported and conducted. The greater the plausibility of the Liberal claim to be a government in waiting, the more intense will be the scrutiny of its programme and record. That examination will reveal a party divided. The very act of becoming a contender for power would force a political realignment that might even split the party altogether.
Charles Kennedy has unquestionably done much to enhance his party’s claims to be taken seriously. He has rectified the most glaring deficiency, a weak Treasury team expounding an incredible economic programme, by appointing the former Shell chief economist Vincent Cable to the brief, with David Laws as his deputy. The most obvious change that Cable has brought to the party’s official policy has been to wean it off a corporatism that could have been fashioned in the 1970s — “the begging-bowl culture of an industrial, or agricultural, welfare state”, as he has described it.
But the difference between Cable’s economic liberalism and his colleagues’ instinctive populism runs much deeper. Under Cable’s immediate predecessors, Malcolm Bruce and Matthew Taylor, the party condemned the Government’s fiscal stance of the late 1990s — when the economy was several years into its post-ERM expansion — as “fiscal flagellation”, identifying a supposed “windfall of the extra funds” that it urged the Chancellor to spend. The old approach is still deeply embedded in party thinking.
The contrast between the current Treasury team’s approach and the instincts of the party was illustrated at last year's Liberal Democrat assembly. David Laws used the occasion to challenge party activists. He asked them to consider whether scrapping user charges for services was the best way to use scarce financial resources. Meanwhile, the assembly voted to abolish all NHS prescription charges, and charges for dental checks — a spending commitment of £900 million — and confirmed its opposition to tuition fees.
The policy on prescription charges was revealing in another way. The party’s then health spokesman, Evan Harris, maintained that scrapping charges would in part be self-financing, as there would be efficiency savings from scrapping also the costs of collecting the charges. Yet the party proposes increased income tax and intends to spend all the revenues. It assumes, in other words, that removing health charges will dispose of a “deadweight loss” associated with collection, while increasing tax rates — and therefore collecting the extra revenues — will be costless. Too much Liberal Democrat policy remains incompatible in this way.
On foreign policy, the party has clearly benefited from its opposition to the Iraq war. But Charles Kennedy — in Boston last week to observe the Democrat convention — should be aware that his party’s arguments will not be welcome in any US Administration. President Bush’s doctrine of pre-emption is not an idiosyncrasy of hardline unilateralists — “throwing a lighted match into a barrel of oil”, as Baroness Williams of Crosby, the Lib Dem leader in the Lords, has put it — but a widespread recognition that threats to the security of the Western democracies require a more decisive response than international institutions are likely to provide.
Mr Kennedy’s insistence that the role of a British government is to be a “candid friend” to the US, providing a cautionary “tap on the shoulder”, is liable to be taken in Washington for the undiplomatic presumption that it is. A more serious commitment to advance the values of liberal democratic internationalism will, as a matter of course, require greater openness to American arguments for choking off support for terrorism by confronting the autocracies that foment it.
In economic, social and foreign policy, the Liberal Democrats are, in varying degrees, confronting the dilemma of a third party presenting itself as more than a repository of protest votes. Yet where the Liberal Democrats have made most progress in providing a distinctive and coherent liberal position, they has done so on a narrow base.
Dissent is usually vocalised by those on the fringes of the party. Lord Greaves, the Liberal Democrat environment spokesman in the Lords, has castigated Cable, Laws and the Home Affairs spokesman Mark Oaten as “pseudo-Blairites with little following in the wider party”. But no one at a senior level seriously believes that real dissent is confined to these fringe people.
This was demonstrated clearly during the recent Iraq conflict. The party’s opposition to the war was articulated lucidly by its foreign affairs spokesman, Menzies Campbell. Other MPs demonstrated a disconcerting extremism. One frontbencher even began deploying comparisons between Britain and America and the Axis powers in the Second World War.
To the extent that the Liberal Democrats improve their electoral standing, these fissures will become more obvious. If the party is to make the transition to an alternative party of government it will have to confront them.
Yet even if such boldness is displayed, there will be a problem. For the exertions will not have a unifying effect. Former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown wrote to Tony Blair in 1998 to urge a “reshaping of the Centre Left as the first step in a more general reshaping of politics in Britain”. He omitted to mention, though surely must have anticipated, that as well as isolating the extremes of Left and Right, such a venture would necessarily detach him and his senior parliamentarians from the party they led.
The irony of the party’s long campaign for the realignment of British politics is that it may rent the Liberal Democrats asunder. For years the Liberals have dreamt of being taken seriously. Now that their moment may be arriving, being taken seriously may prove to be the last thing they want.
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