Want to know what the Liberal Democrats stand for? The answer is that leaving Europe isn’t inevitable. The party’s big election message is that when a Brexit deal has been agreed, there should be a second referendum. This unblushing defence of Lib Dem principle shuns concessions to those who voted leave, even though that might include as many as a third of Lib Dem voters. This is an attractive strategy, but flawed.
Challenge number one is the polls, which suggest that around a half of last June’s remainers are now reconciled, however reluctantly, to leaving. For them, resistance to Brexit is not a vote-defining issue. The second is that the cleavage that runs through the British electorate, dividing liberal, outward-looking voters from the inward-looking, more authoritarian other half, also cuts through all the main parties. Analysis of the seats Lib Dems once held and must win again if they are even to begin to bounce back shows that in 14, more than half voted leave, and in another 11 it was just less than that.
But a manifesto is more than a piece of political positioning, and this is a manifesto that speaks faithfully to Lib Dem principles. As a party, the Lib Dems have always had Europe engraved on their heart; but the headline proposals go wider than that. They include a return to another central tenet of liberalism, that tax is the membership subscription to a civilised society. That is why, in order to find more cash for the NHS and social care, they would rather raise income tax for everyone by 1p than raid the pay packets only of high earners, as Labour does. The Lib Dem proposal disadvantages less well-off families but it raises £6bn a year, arguably more reliably than increasing tax for the top 5% of earners. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies points out, the compensation for lower earners is to reverse almost all the benefit cuts of the past two years. On the other hand, the party proposes to balance the budget by 2020, while also doubling down on successful coalition-years innovations like the pupil premium. That sounds as if there will be little spare cash at the margins. There are ambitious plans for infrastructure investment to build 300,000 new homes a year, mobilising state finance if necessary, and for spending on roads, rail and broadband. Most eye-catching is the idea of raising £1bn a year by legalising cannabis. Like Labour, the party would reverse cuts in corporation tax and capital gains tax, and end the marriage allowance.
And just like Labour, in the end the success of “there is an alternative” depends on credibility. That may be why the party leader, Tim Farron, whose personal poll ratings are low, announced that he is not even thinking about government, only opposition. He may be wiser to concentrate on survival.
