Headline: “Libdems prefer Labour deal”

Article: “78% of party members approve of the decision to enter into coalition with the Conservatives”

I’m so glad that the blogosphere came along and rid us of tabloid journalism.

@1

Try reading a bit further on:

But in a hypothetical hung Parliament situation where the Liberal Democrats could form a majority government with either party, and both offered equally good deals, 46% of Lib Dem members would prefer a deal with Labour. Only 26% would go with the Conservatives.

@2 Yes, I read that. So, fewer than half of the Lib Dems surveyed would even consider grouping with Labour – in a situation which never actually even occurred, no less – and more than three quarters are happy with the decision which was actually taken.

Ringing endorsement for Labour, there. On reflection, yes, I can see how the article totally justifies the not-at-all one-sided headline. It’s far more appropriate than ‘Lib Dems turn out to have a fairly diverse and pragmatic outlook’.

Jeez Stu – having problems reading properly? Please don’t blame us for it.

So the proper headline would be “LibDems happy with LibCon colaition; would prefer LibLab coalition on other occasion if other parties were equal.”

Not quite so snappy.

Desperate stuff – looks like the conference fireworks aren’t happening!

I know some people want to keep saying the Lib Dems are left – but c’mon – clutching at straws like the hypothetical scenario question which doesn’t even show a majority prefering a deal with labour simply can’t disguise that the Lib Dem membership is perfectly happy with being a right wing government.

There is massive support among their membership for working with the tories. There is massive support for the coalition deal agreed. There is solid if not overwhelming support for the cuts – and Lib Dems seem to absolutely love David Cameron. (Does anyone think Tony Blair ever achieved a 64+ approval rating among Lib Dems? Mostly he was far short of that in his own party)

And on top of that a fifth of them already want an electoral pact with the tories – a movement likely to grow – effectively merging their parties into a single electoral option.

Can we please therefore stop pretending the Lib Dems are left? Can we please write them off as a part of left-leaning prospects for the future. It is done. It is dead in the water. They are very very comfortable as a party of the right. Their supporters are too.

Am I the only one who still thinks the LD’s sold themselves short?

I do sort of sympathise with those LD’s who feel they had little choice, and are making the best of a bad job etc, etc. And yet….. I still have this sneaking suspicion that given the % of the vote they got (they shouldn’t apologise for the fact they didn’t get many seats given that’s a product of an electoral system they have sworn to change) they should have played their cards differently.

Would the Tories really have balked at having at least one, if not 2 LD’s in majot cabinet positions? If the price had been ditching Trident and a referendum on STV, would the Tories have whined about it and given in…or tried to govern as a minority leading to another election in short order.

Given the way things seem to be going now, I reckon a lot of LD’s would have preferred to watch a minority Tory government fail, and have found themselves in a better position in that circumstance than they will come the next election!

No surprises here, I would be more interested to see a poll of Lib Dem voters. The problem for the Lib Dems is that many, if not most, of their voters are not as anti-Tory or left-wing as their activists.

Obviously the proper headline should be “LibDems approve of LibCon coalition but only half think it was the best option; would prefer LibLab coalition on other occasion if other parties were equal; only just have a majority thinking coalition will not collapse and are mostly of the opinion that the deficit reduction plan is wrong; would not, could not have formal deal with Tories at next election; quite like Simon Hughes; are on the left.”

But with such accuracy, how would the negative findings for the Lib Dem’s current leadership be swept aside?

Galen

I’d agree with you if I didn’t think the lib dem leadership got pretty close to everything they want. They could have bargained harder for other things. But they didn’t really want other things.

PR would open the door to lots of small parties and the growth of the Green Party – wheras AV would entrench the present 2.5 party system but with the prospect of a proper long term deal with the tories to advise voters to cast second votes for eachother.

Redistribution through taxation of private property is being reduced.

The size of the state is being reduced (with reduced levels of public services)

There will be no renegotiation of the UK’s relationship with Europe (Clegg is basically a Tory who saw no career path for him in an anti-european party so joined the lib dems instead)

opposition to nuclear energy and trident was mostly just opportunism – trying to draw dissafected Labour voters their way. So dropping those policies meant nothing.

It is very hard to find anything about this government that doesn’t fit with the ideas of the orange book.

@ 6: Ever? I’m fairly sure that Blair’s approval among LibDems would have been even higher than that in 1997.

@ 8: If anything, I believe the opposite to be true. Most people I know who are or were in the habit of voting LibDem are to the left of the party membership. I voted for them myself back in the Kennedy era.

Their real problem is that, fundamentally, they are still two parties. Maybe they should never have merged into one. The Liberals are now ascendant, and the SDP are out in the cold.

Galen

I agree that the Lib Dem leadership has indeed been very clear about its political direction – hence my repeated suggestion on Liberal Conspiracy that people stop pretending is a left wing party. It is a free-market small-state party. It is seemingly reasonably happy to be so. It gave some populist left-leaning hints before the election, but that was just to get votes. The real problem is not that the party itself or its leadership professes to be left wing. It is that so many outside of it profess on their behalf that it is left wing despite all of the evidence.

They do that, I believe, because they consider civil liberties issues to be largely left wing. I however think that is a misunderstanding based on two recent phenomenons.

Civil liberties arguments (mainly through talk of rights) tended to be invoked by Labour when campaigning for sexual and racial equality. But that was not a caused based on a deep desire for liberty. It was rooted in a deep desire for equality. And equality, as anyone with common sense will know, mainly comes at the expense of liberty.

At the same time the anti-drug movement tended to be most vehement among the right. But that was not because of a desire for control and state intervention. It was just born of the Christian tradition of people benefiting from staying free from vice. State intervention was thus seen as a necessary evil.

The only area of civil liberty that has been consistently left/right for a long time is probably that of property. Right to private property (and associated issues like lower tax) have tended to be backed by the right wing – while the left has tended to see that as an obstacle to things like equal health, education and incomes.

makhno

6 – I genuinely can’t find any polls that say as much. Though granted in the 90s online recording of poll results was somewhat less prevelant.

You can either claim this:

“Libdems prefer Labour deal”

Or this:

“Asked what the party should have done given the circumstances after the 2010 election 50% think a Conservative coalition was the best solution, 22% would have preferred a deal short of a coalition, 19% would have preferred a deal with Labour.”

You can’t claim both.

There’s more than a whiff of an Evening Standard poll about this article

Firstly I will say that I am a (critical) Lib Dem party member (joined last election), and have always voted Lib Dem (as long as I have been able to vote).

@PDF

Perhaps you could do yourself a favour by learning how to read?

@margin4error

I think you are quite wrong in your analysis. Classical Liberalism has always advocated an egalitarian appraoch to society because it sees it as necessary to provide individual liberty. The right-wing traditionally has been against civil liberties, from equality before the law to homosexuality. Civil liberties have been traditionally left-wing causes, because the left is primarily concerned with addressing the balance of power, on both a legal an economic level. This has been a part of ‘true’ liberalism since Fox, Mill, Bentham, Russel, Lloyud George, Keynes and Beveridge. This silly illogical and unworkable ‘libertarian’ nonsense is a relatively new introduction and seems linked with ‘neo-liberalism’. Neo-liberalism is termed ‘neo’ for a reason… that is to say it is not classical liberalism.

Even the founders of the heavily authoritarian socialist governments originally saw their movment as ‘liberalising’ and in favour of human rights…. in many cases socialism started off as more liberalising than the right-wing regimes it often replaced.Thatcher’s government was without question more authoritarian than the recent Labour government in its policies.

The problem you have is whilst there are strong currents of this silly right-wing libertarianism at the pseudo-intellectual level, most right-wing voters in Britain are more authoritarian than their left-wing counterparts. Labour did not become more authoritarian out of its obvious ‘socialism’ (and I will say as I have said before, if New Labour was socialist then Harold Wilson and Churchill were communists). Labour became more authoritarian because the hardline right wing press constantly pressured it to be so.

It is the right-wing in this country that is most obviously inimical to civil liberties, and that is what mainly distorted the last Labour government… because they were soft ‘socialists’ they had to prove their ‘toughness’. The fact that they went too far put them out of line with the public mood.

You dismiss right-wing illogic (if it was about ‘vice and virtue’ why isn’t the more damaging alcohol and tobacco banned? Homosexuality was banned due to ‘vice and virtue’ No it was banned due to irrational prejudice and taboo, just like drugs, against the right of citizens to do as they wish if not harming others) in regards to drugs as not being ‘illiberal’… yet you consider financial regulation to be ‘illiberal’. That is another fallacy, incompatible with classical liberalism in the philosophical sense.

Traditional Conservatives have traditionally shown the most propensity to tell other people how to live, unfortunately it has been socialist governments which have more often had the totalitarian means to enforce their beliefs on others (although we have had plenty of Conservative fascist governments from Hitler’s Germany to Pinochet’s Chile)… that doesn’t make liberalism incompatible with egalitarianism or the ‘left’ (or even with democratic forms of socialism, even though I wouldn’t consider myself a socialist).

By your idea of what is ‘liberal’ in regards to economics (presumably minimal regulation and minimal taxation) laws preventing slavery be ‘illiberal’, additionally minimum standards of education which enable economic mobility would also be ‘illiberal’ as they rely on taxation (and progressive income tax is the only form of wage taxation that can maintain a viable economy). The role of the state, as envisinged by Mill, is to be the neutral Umpire… the state is not bad just for having power… but the state should only use its power to protect the liberty of its citizens. Economic regulation and redistribution protect the liberty of citizens, and Mill argued that point well.

I would also like to point out that while I don’t really have an interest in the Lib/ SDP debate it is completely factually incorrect to suggest that the SDP were the ‘left’ of the Liberal Democrats. It was traditionally the Liberals who were the left of the party. Just because the SDP broke from labour and were explicitly ‘social democratic’ it does not make them to the left of the historic liberal party. Simon Hughes, currently the most left-wing of the Lib Dems in office, comes from a Liberal not SDP position for a reason. I don’t know what Clegg is, but he is from neither tradition as far as I can tell.

@Richard

Do you have any figures or evidence to back up your claims?

I can only speak from anecdote, but as a lib dem voter, not an activist, as well as the majority of Lib Dem voters I know I would consider myself pretty ‘left-wing’. Several of my friends who have voted Lib Dem have sworn they will never do so again for this reason (they didn’t vote Labour beforehand). My mind is easier to change, but I really do hope they scrap Clegg soo. He is absolutely hopeless at represting the beliefs of most lib dems as well as providing cogent or cohenret arguments for his standpoints.

Not that my terrible typing does anything for my own coherence*