Long campaign

“They are playing hokey cokey with the British people… You cannot win the argument on Europe unless you are in Europe. I think it is an elevated form of petulance to say, ‘we are going to stamp our little feet to get our little short shopping list of really very minor changes, and if we don’t get them we’ll quit.”

Speaking to the BBC, Nick Clegg let David Cameron – and the electorate – know exactly what he thought of Conservative Party policy. And it was not the first time in the last year or so.

From its stance on Europe to the mutiny within the Coalition on the so-called bedroom tax, signals have been emerging for some time that the Lib Dems are attempting to distance themselves from their Coalition partners.

With the General Election approaching this is pretty normal behaviour, with every party currently attempting to carve out a clear space in which to gather votes. But this is not a normal conference, with the party only recently emerging from arguably the most important campaign it has ever fought.

The independence referendum turned British politics upside down. Faced with the threat of the British state splitting up, alliances were forged across benches, with the Westminster parties coming together to see off the threat of a Yes vote.

And given the shortage of Tory MPs in Scotland the Lib Dems, for once, formed the face of the coalition within Better Together. The campaign looked shaky but it made it over the finish line. There is still a United Kingdom, so there will still be a general election. The question is what effect the referendum will have on the campaign.

Secretary of State for Scotland Alistair Carmichael argues that the party played a key role in Scotland voting No, though he does not believe it will be a vote winner come 2015.

Speaking to Holyrood, he said: “In practical terms, the fact that we were central to the Better Together campaign – and that was ultimately a highly successful campaign – will bring with it some benefit. I think, though, that by the time we get to next May, people will have filed that in the back of their mind and they will be forward looking and not backward looking. But I am very proud of the fact that we played the role we did and that we got the result that we did.”

Carmichael may be proud but for a significant part of the campaign – particularly the closing week – the result looked far from secure. In fact in the course of the campaign, support for independence rose consistently, with the prospect of Scotland voting Yes beginning to look very real indeed. Surely there must be things that Carmichael – the man drafted in to add fight to Better Together – wishes he had done differently? 

“Of course. I have campaigned in every general election since 1979 and I have never yet come out of a campaign thinking, ‘that was perfect, we are not capable of improvement’. But the truth of the matter is that the fundamental strategy was right and we were right to stick with it and that has been vindicated by the result.”

But even if the party is not synonymous in the minds of the electorate with being the party that saved the UK it can at least claim that, in contrast to Labour and the Conservatives, it has long held a belief in localism.

There are no guarantees that the Lib Dem policy of federalism will be adopted, yet greater devolution across the UK now looks inevitable. But with no party holding a monopoly on the right to bring that change, it is not yet clear what form further devolution should take. 

To Liam McArthur MSP, any constitutional reform must involve the SNP if it is to work.

“There will be a bit of a temptation for some of them [SNP members] to stand on the sidelines and say, ‘I didn’t want to do that,’ which gets you nowhere, and they walked out of the Constitutional Convention, they were not engaged with the Calman process, so I think it is third time lucky – they need to roll their sleeves up and get involved in this. The sovereign will of the Scottish people has been expressed and clearly it has expressed a desire not for independence but for more powers, so they need to get involved in that. 

“But equally, it needs to go beyond parties – we need to have a process, like the Constitutional Convention, that involves all parties and none. But at least we are not starting from a blank piece of paper and there are sizeable overlaps between the plans of the three main UK parties. But if this process does not deliver the changes that are seen as far-reaching enough, in line with expectations of those who voted Yes and voted No, then we are just going to find ourselves back at this point, and sooner rather than later.”

Whatever the result of negotiations the political landscape has been transformed since the last General Election, with the rise of the SNP in Scotland and UKIP in England creating new dynamics in the political discourse. In fact following a surge in membership, the SNP has now overtaken the Lib Dems in UK membership numbers.

And with many voters left disappointed, at best, by the decision to join the Coalition and make the compromises that it entailed, there could be a danger that the party is threatened by these new forces. How much of a threat do SNP and also UKIP candidates pose to the Lib Dems at the next General Election?

Carmichael at least is pretty relaxed.

“It does not cause me great anxiety, you can see from polling that the electorate is a sophisticated body of people these days and they vote differently for different parties in different areas at different elections. So do I think that UKIP and the SNP pose a particular threat to us? I don’t see any of our seats being threatened by SNP or UKIP candidates, both of whom will struggle in 2015, as they struggled in 2010, to explain a relevance in the context of a Westminster election. Liberal Democrats, however, have been absolutely central to politics in the Commons over the last five years.”

Another part of the Lib-Dem strategy – likely to form a key narrative in the conference – is an attempt to highlight the difference between the party and those it shares a Cabinet table with.
In fact despite the way that Labour would like to portray them, the two coalition partners have had their fair share of fallouts over the last four years. But if the party is to survive it must prove to the public that these are disagreements between two ideologically distinct groups, rather than the faux bickering of a married couple.

Carmichael expects disagreements to become more public as the General Election approaches.

“I think it will be inevitabe that as the time between now and the General Election unfolds both parties are going to want to lay heavy emphasis on the priorities they took into the Coalition and what they achieved from it. I think we can both claim some credit for the deficit reduction, turning the economy round and the growth we have seen in recent quarters, along with the rise in employment. Beyond that, we both have our own priorities – ours were very much to ensure that while the economy grew there was greater encouragement for people to get into employment by allowing them to keep more of the money they earned.”

It is this point upon which the strategy may come to rely – the party may have lost support from its policy on tuition fees but in exchange it has gained greater credibility in terms of economic management. After all before 2010, there was no basis for claiming the Lib Dems could be trusted with the economy. Carmichael suggests that the public understand the party had to make difficult decisions.

“I think there is a maturer understanding of coalition politics among voters than there is among, dare I say it, among some media commentators. If there is a mechanism by which you can implement every one of your manifesto commitments while still being 257 seats short of an overall majority in the House of Commons then I am in the market for hearing it.

"The truth of the matter is that we didn’t win the election, no party commanded a majority in the House of Commons, so at a time when the economy was in a truly parlous condition we stepped up to the plate, we made some difficult compromises, we may even have made some mistakes along the way, but we did what was necessary for the good of the country and I have no qualms about facing the electorate on that basis.”