The nation barely noticed that the Liberal Democrats elected their fourth permanent leader, Sir Ed Davey, in five years. Yet Sir Ed is in charge of an important party representing a broad continuity of liberal values, ideas and principles. The party’s 2019 election campaign was marked – said an internal review – by hubris, incompetence and a disregard for electoral reality. It is polling just 7% nationally. Sir Ed might prefer being ignored rather than being mocked.
In his acceptance speech, the new leader warned his party that it had “to wake up and smell the coffee … our party has lost touch with too many voters”. This is a good start. The Lib Dems went into the last election seeking to revoke the result of a Brexit referendum – without another plebiscite – because they didn’t like the result. This was a mistaken policy, which was indifferent to leave opinion and split the anti-Tory vote. Sir Ed says he won’t make the same mistake again.
While the Lib Dems’ share of the vote went up last year, its representation in parliament fell. The party received 30%-40% of the vote – a crucial electoral block in the first-past-the-post system – in 33 constituencies, but won only two of them. Sir Ed must find an agenda that can translate broad support into winning seats. If Layla Moran had been elected leader that might have been easier. She only became an MP in 2017 and could have cast herself as a fresh start.
But Sir Ed won convincingly, by a margin of almost two to one among party members. A pro-European with strong green credentials, the new leader is a heavyweight. Sir Ed says he won’t do a deal with the “rightwing” Tory party, a pointed rebuttal of those who doubt his politics after three years as a cabinet minister in David Cameron’s coalition government.
The new party leader is also ambitious. He wants to end the party’s stance of equidistance and bring it closer to Labour. This is undergirded by electoral logic. If parties could work together, they might be able to defeat Boris Johnson at the next election. To defuse Labour’s mistrust, Sir Ed praises a “very smart” Sir Keir Starmer, words that are in marked contrast to the strident tone the Lib Dems took with Jeremy Corbyn.
Labour won’t easily be charmed. But without a comeback in Scotland, Labour will struggle to win power alone in 2024. Neal Lawson of the thinktank Compass suggests that if the Lib Dems were to take seats from the Conservatives in sizeable numbers (they are second to the Tories in 80 constituencies), then a Labour-led government is possible. Mr Lawson writes that “the electoral maths demands cooperation, whether it’s tactical campaigning or something more formal”. It may not happen, but the thought underlines the importance of the Lib Dems.
The party’s traditions add considerably to UK political life. Its defence of civil liberties is rooted in the distrust of a cold and impersonal state, but this is balanced by a belief in the government’s role to disperse wealth and power. It pushes for electoral and constitutional reform when others fall away. The Lib Dems need to retain their pragmatic distinctiveness – especially if the prospect of a realignment of the centre-left in British politics comes into sight.
