“Elections,” Charles Kennedy declared in 2001, “are usually about forming the government. But this election, uniquely, has been just as much about forming the opposition.” He probably takes the same view today, since once again his party is the only one to have increased its vote substantially. The Liberal Democrats will see themselves as the real victors of the election.
Euphoria, however, would be premature. The party is still securing a smaller percentage of the vote than the 25% that the Liberal/SDP Alliance led by Roy Jenkins gained in 1983 — the high point of third party achievement since the war. Its vote is roughly the same as that secured by the two Davids — Owen and Steel — in 1987, a result thought of as disappointing. Moreover, conditions could not have been better for the Liberal Democrats, facing a widely distrusted prime minister and an opposition leader who did not, to put it mildly, inspire much love.
Admittedly the Liberal Democrat vote is now more effectively concentrated than in the past, thanks to the strategy of concentrating resources on key seats. The problem, however, remains, as it has been since the Liberals became the third party in the 1920s, that of discovering a strategy that might propel it to power.
Targeting seats and thereby gradually increasing Liberal Democrat credibility implies a long march to power whose culmination will occur in about 2050. There might, of course, be a hung parliament or two on the way, but that depends less on the Liberal Democrats than on the vicissitudes of the electoral system.
Moreover, targeting could easily come to yield diminishing returns. While the party in 1997 saw its representation rise from 20 to 46, two further elections have seen this rise to just 62. More importantly, perhaps, it requires adopting the party’s message to the interests and needs of specific constituencies — hostile to the Conservatives when the Tories are unpopular as in 1997; hostile to Labour in 2005. For targeting is in essence a localist strategy.
The danger is that the party comes to appear as a repository for grievances, without any overarching aims. Take away that pudding, Winston Churchill once demanded of a waiter, it has no theme.
Moreover, as the Liberal Democrats acquire greater credibility, their policies, and in particular their economic policies, are bound to come under greater scrutiny. The party did not present a coherent view of how the economy should be managed, and Vince Cable, its Treasury spokesman, was conspicuous mainly by his absence. Kennedy impressed voters by his instinctively decent reaction to political issues and by his refusal to engage in mudslinging. But it was difficult to discern any distinctively Liberal Democrat strategy or vision.
This absence of strategy or vision might in part be deliberate. In his underestimated 2000 book The Future of Politics, Kennedy presents the Liberal Democrats as a party suited to the age of the end of ideology, in which the great issues that dominated politics for much of the 20th century — socialism versus capitalism, public versus private ownership — are dead.
Moreover, the class and occupational blocs that sustained these ideologies have broken up under the impact of consumer affluence, home ownership and social mobility. Success, therefore, will come to the party most at home in a more fluid society.
The Liberal Democrats, who sought to transcend the ideological conflicts, ought to be that party. The break-up of tribal politics ought to benefit a party based not on class membership, but on a politics of rational consent. To take advantage of such conditions, however, a party must represent more than a ragbag of discontents. It needs not an ideology but a sense of direction.
Insofar as any such thing could be discerned from the Liberal Democrats, it was of a party that sought to subsidise middle-class beneficiaries of the welfare state through state funding of care for the elderly, abolition of tuition fees and higher pensions. They were promising, in the words of Ralf Dahrendorf, a former Liberal Democrat peer, a better yesterday. When challenged by Peter Riddell in The Times, Kennedy said he could not see what was wrong with encouraging the aspirations of the middle class.
That, however, was to miss the point. For the consequence of Liberal Democrat policies would be to raise the proportion of public expenditure as a percentage of GDP and to increase the size of the state. Yet traditionally liberals have feared a powerful state and believed instead in individual choice. They did not see themselves as a pressure group for the beleaguered middle class.
There is a deep-seated divide among Liberal Democrats between the traditionalists such as Evan Harris and the reformers such as David Laws, the editor of the Orange Book, published last year, which calls on the party to adapt itself to market economics and to ideas of individual choice and responsibility — to accommodate itself, in short, to the new political economy of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. The party must decide between these visions if it is to become a credible instrument of government.
The temptation is to try to render these incompatible visions consistent through vague formulas. Before the 2005 campaign the party argued that the conflict could be resolved provided public services were run by democratically elected regional authorities. That was an evasion; moreover the referendum defeat last year for regional government means that regionalism is off the agenda.
In the 1920s Keynes declared that the Liberals were split between the Whigs and Radicals. Challenged on what these terms meant, he said: “A Whig is a perfectly sensible Conservative. A Radical is a perfectly sensible Labourite. A Liberal is anyone who is perfectly sensible.”
Yet, being “sensible” was not enough to halt the decline of the Liberals in the 1920s; nor would it be today. In the 1960s Harold Wilson sought to heal the wounds in the Labour party by developing fudged formulas to mask the division between old-style socialists and what would now be called new Labour. The result was ineffectiveness in government. Since 1997 Conservative leaders have also sought to be “sensible”. But they too have found that unity is no substitute for a clear sense of direction.
The Liberal Democrats are right to celebrate the end of tribal politics and the revival of the politics of ideas, the kind of politics that marked the Victorian age but which for much of the 20th century was submerged by the politics of class. But they now face the urgent task of determining whether they are to remain the last representatives in British politics of the discredited statism of the 20th century, or whether they are to become a genuinely liberal party, emphasising choice and the rejuvenation of democracy.
During the 1980s Margaret Thatcher opened up the economic system through labour market reforms and wider home and share ownership. In the 1990s John Major opened up public services through the citizen’s charter, ridiculed at the time, but imitated since by many other democracies. The task today is to open up the political system.
We should not be content with a society of active consumers who remain passive citizens. Yet the active citizen will thrive only under a constitution that disseminates power from the political professionals to the people themselves. Liberty, it has been said, is power cut into pieces.
It is to the Liberal Democrats that we must look if we are to rejuvenate our political system, once an example to be copied, now a warning of what to avoid. During the heyday of liberalism in the two general elections of 1910, turnout was 92% and 89%. Today it is just 60%. The real victim of the 2005 election has been the very politics of engagement and participation that the Liberal Democrats should be championing.
It is time therefore for the Liberal Democrats, in Cromwell’s words, to know what they are fighting for and to love what they know.
Vernon Bogdanor is professor of government at Oxford University
