The Lib Dems: a failure to fly?

Grandiose debates about a potential realignment in British politics seem out of place after a shoddy conference by the Liberal Democrats.

The Lib Dems don’t form part of the syllabus we teach but we have been discussing them in detail in lessons this week and this seems only fair given that the party scooped a fifth of the vote at the last election—and though their attraction to young voters has diminished in recent years they do seem to present a more credible alternative to the big two, Labour and the Conservatives, to this demographic than most other segments of the voting population.

A question I was asked this week was that given the current government’s level of unpopularity, could the Lib Dems supplant Labour as the centre left rival to the Tories. Yes, whilst the idea of the current LabCon government hegemony is not written in tablets of stone, I think it would take a much greater rupture than the current economic situation for this to take place.

Interestingly Anatole Kaletsky lays out a case for an altered dynamic in the centre left in today’s Times.

But the Lib Dems have not helped their cause by failing to use the free media time given over to their party during conference season to rebrand themselves as a party of change. In 2005 it was clear what was different about them. Now, post conference I don’t see how they can swing voters either from the Tories slowly returning to the party after over a decade elsewhere, or disaffected Labour voters upset at the current government’s performance.

See the Economist on how internal squabbling turned their week in Bournemouth from a potential springboard into a farce where the party now looks like it couldn’t fight its way out of a wet paper bag.

The Tories have a big lead in the polls, but this gap could close in the run up to an election, and even psephologists disagree about how the vagaries of first past the post will benefit Labour, and the combination of these factors suggest that a hung Parliament may result in May 2010.

Have thoughts of the dizzying heights of government led Nick Clegg and his troops, like the mythical Icarus, led them too fly to close to the sun?