There is a gaping Emmanuel Macron-shaped hole in British electoral politics, but no one to fill it. When I wrote this recently, I got a cheerfully indignant email from a Liberal Democrat ex-MP. How could I dismiss Tim Farron’s claims so easily, he complained. Like Macron, he said, Farron was young, liberal, progressive and pro-Europe. And in this general election Farron is campaigning on Brexit, “the overriding national and international issue” of the day, “rather than on mending pavements and saving post offices”. Watch this space, he wrote.
Is he right to be optimistic? It’s certainly true that the mood of the Liberal Democrats is bubbling as the 2017 general election gets under way. Farron is fighting a genial and feisty street campaign among real voters, as he showed during a visit to Oxford West this week. When the results of yesterday’slocal elections are digested, the party is likely to be even more chipper.
But can Farron really overturn the status quo in the way Macron is doing in France? The emphatic answer is no – though that’s hardly Farron’s fault. Principally it’s because, less than two years ago, the electorate left the Lib Dems out cold on the canvas with all the clinical efficiency of the upper cut with which Anthony Joshua dispatched Wladimir Klitschko last weekend. That 2015 result was shattering: just eight Lib Dem MPs left from the 2010 total of 57. Votes down from 6.8m to 2.4m. The party’s 8% share was the lowest since 1970. Merely to recover those losses would be a triumph.
Yet the Lib Dems are climbing back off the floor. And with every fresh lungful of election publicity, their sights are being raised higher. The Richmond Park byelection last December suggested that the party’s clear anti-Brexit stance could bring big wins in favourable places. There was growing excitement that the Lib Dems were in with a shout of overturning Labour’s massive majority in the now-aborted Manchester Gorton byelection. Theresa May’s hard Brexit campaign on the right, and Jeremy Corbyn’s idealistic pledges on the left, leave a genuine space for them.
When I met the party’s former leader Paddy Ashdown in Gorton last month, he was characteristically positive. Metropolitan “remain” areas such as south Manchester were shifting his party’s way, he claimed. Like an old sailor sniffing the wind, Ashdown said he could sense the gathering force of support. He even made the comparison with Macron. “What we need now is a British ‘En Marche!’ (Let’s go!)” Ashdown said as he surveyed the quiet lunchtime streets of Levenshulme. “There are thousands of people who want a progressive alternative and a new voice.”
That is surely correct. But even an Ashdown would struggle to argue that the Lib Dems are likely to provide it this time around. Their more realistic goals are simply to get back in the game and stop being patronised. The brutal result in 2015 swept away every English Lib Dem MP south of the M4 and outside greater London. Citadels such as Ashdown’s in Yeovil, built up over decades, were simply swept away. Realists are looking to pick up two or three seats in the south-west at best.
On the other hand, there is definite renewed Lib Dem strength in the university-dominated and pro-remain seats from which they were mostly ejected in 2015. The recapture of Cambridge is high on the list, with Oxford West and Abingdon a possibility. In Manchester Withington, the former MP John Leech, who is running again, says Brexit and Corbyn are the chief grievances now.
In Scotland and Wales – often the mainstays of the old Liberal party’s fortunes in the lean years – gains of any kind would be a welcome surprise. Holding on in Orkney and Shetland would be a minor triumph. Other hopes include North-East Fife, the university seat based on St Andrews, Edinburgh West and East Dunbartonshire, where Jo Swinson will try to overturn the SNP’s second smallest majority.
Throw in a few less easily predictable gains, such as Kate Hoey’s Vauxhall, heavily remain Tory seats such as St Albans or Winchester, troubled Rochdale and perhaps even Emily Thornberry’s Islington South and Finsbury, and 30 Lib Dem MPs – among them a group of new women MPs – would be a good result. It would be especially valuable if big figures such as Vince Cable and Ed Davey, both with cabinet experience, could regain their seats, bringing more authority to the party benches alongside Nick Clegg, Norman Lamb and Farron.
It’s all a far cry from Macron’s audacious bid for the Elysée, however. That disjunction says several things. France and Britain march to different drums. The French electoral system favours a disruptor better than the British. May is not Marine Le Pen. And above all our party system, including the Lib Dems, is more resilient than France’s has proved to be.
The real goal for the Lib Dems is to put themselves in a position, after 9 June, to be able to play a dynamic part in the opposition politics of the new parliament. For the next five weeks that’s all they must concentrate on. The evidence and the political dynamics favour them so far.
But, as Ashdown says, a strong force of Lib Dem MPs in the new parliament is a necessary but not sufficient condition for change. He wants a social movement of the open liberal centre, perhaps something like the embryonic More United, which calls itself “a Momentum of the middle ground” and is backing non-tribal candidates with crowdfunded campaigns.
Yet disruptor parties have a poor record in Britain’s first-past-the-post system. Look at the Greens and Ukip. That’s why everything about opposition politics in the next parliament still depends on Labour. The Labour party that survives on 9 June is likely still to be the largest opposition party, even if it is reduced to 150 seats.
The crucial issue is thus whether it can be rescued by its members and leaders from its current, self-destructive, Corbyn fan club irrelevance. If that happens, and if May’s Brexit ambitions hit the rocks and the economy begins to turn opinion against her, then opposition politics in the UK might begin to look promising again. If it doesn’t, a British Macron movement could become the only alternative.
