With the Lib Dems plunging ever lower in the opinion polls, it’s no surprise that other parties should be making their appeals to disillusioned Lib Dem voters. If the polls prove to be accurate, and if those who voted Lib Dem in 2010 don’t simply decide not to bother voting again, then clearly they will find another home somewhere.
I’m not sure, though, about some of the arguments being advanced, particularly the way in which the word ‘progressive’ is again being bandied about. ‘Progressive’ is a label to which all the parties want to stake a claim, but its meaning is increasingly obscure – it seems mostly to mean whatever those using it want it to mean.
Putting such semantic objections to one side, can Lib Dem voters be described as being supporters of ‘progressive’ policies? Can they even be treated as being anywhere near a homogeneous group? I tend to think not.
One of the main factors which has driven the party’s parliamentary representation up from a long period of single figures has been their effective branding of themselves as being ‘none of the above’. Taken further, their little ‘only the Lib Dems can beat Labour/Tory/Plaid (delete as required) here’ graphs show that they have tended to define themselves not in terms of what they are for, but simply in terms of not being the incumbent.
It is, in essence, an approach which encourages people to vote negatively rather than positively, and which seeks to mobilise antipathy to others whilst avoiding alienating any sector themselves.
The result is that their voters have, more often than not, just been voting against someone else rather than for the Lib Dems – and that means that they won’t have come from one particular part of the political spectrum. And by extension, they will not simply return to one particular part of the spectrum – their votes are likely to be distributed amongst all the other parties; probably not based on any particular policies put forward by those parties (let alone any ‘appeal’ made to them by those parties).
I wonder if the real moral of the story isn’t that encouraging people to vote negatively works fine for a party which campaigns at pavement level and remains in opposition, but will inevitably unravel for a party of government, which has to start showing what it is, rather than what it is not.
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