Nick Clegg’s survival strategy appears to rest on saving as many of the 57 seats as possible. How many MPs the Lib Dems need have at next year’s general election to cross that palatable threshold depends on expectations, of course. 30? 35? 40?
What constitutes a good result (in the circumstances) is in the eye of the beholder. And in some ways the low overall opinion poll results – hovering between seven and ten percent – suppress expectation. Hanging on to the majority of seats while barely registering double-figures in the polls could be something akin to the parting of the Red Sea, the feeding of the five thousand and the resurrection all rolled into one.
Yet miracle worker is precisely what Clegg could become thanks to the vagaries of our political system. Holding onto three dozen seats while in single-figures across Britain while UKIP only get one or two MPs with 50 percent greater share of the national vote is entirely possible due to Lib Dems reinforcing their strength in tiny pockets while votes Nigel Farage’s party are spread evenly across the land.
Ironically the age-old grumble about the number of Liberal MPs massively under-represented in the Commons compared to the national vote could be flipped on its’ head. It was a grievance that fed the insatiable appetite of Lib Dem grassroots activists for electoral reform, so much so that the demand for ‘fair votes’ should have been followed by brackets ‘(for us)’.
When (now Lord) Chris Rennard was appointed director of campaigns at Cowley Street in 1989 the party was perpetually jaded with the experience of attracting a high national vote but only ending up with a dozen or so MPs. In 1983 the party pulled over 25 percent of the popular vote but landed just four percent of MPs(23), and in 1987 collected 22 percent of the ballots but again just four percent of MPs(22). It was manifestly unfair.
Rennard changed all that. His ruthless plan to target selected seats by corralling supporters from the region, and even across the country, to pour in, and his invention of street campaigning – making a fuss over some neglected pothole – showed residents in those areas the Lib Dems really cared. They were visible and active. Local teams pounded the streets shoving endless Focus leaflets through the letterboxes, each headline containing the word ‘local’ or the name of the street or neighbourhood. Candidates were vetted and their performance in recruiting activists and raising money scrutinised with a cold eye before their constituency qualified as one of the chosen ones.
The strategy was incredibly successful. Aided by some stunning byelection results – Eastbourne and Ribble Valley amongst them – the Lib Dems’ share of the Commons shot up in the next four general elections. For the first time in a century they were a potent electoral force, even while their national share of the vote declined. Many, if not most, Lib Dem MPs owe their jobs to Rennard.
In some ways this explains the gratitude and loyalty that has cost the Lib Dems credibility with women as the party obfuscated and procrastinated over allegations – now acknowledged to have some truth to them – that he sexually harassed women activists.
If Rennard is now disgraced his campaigning legacy lives on. The party continues to work to the same blueprint that has served it so well over a quarter of a century, just tweaking it here and there to add more sophistication. And despite the massive unpopularity of the party nationally – due to struggling in government and in the media – they may yet pull of a miracle and retain many of their MPs with a record low popular vote.
The Rennard rulebook could well be the difference between the party imploding in the ruins of disaster and picking itself up with a cockroaches’ sense of invincibility.
Yet there is every reason to rewrite this rulebook for a modern age. The announcement yesterday by Pauline Pearce – aka the Hackney Heroine – that she was throwing in the towel in her bid to be party president citing “underhand racism” is a side-effect of the Rennard strategy in two ways.
First, whatever the merits of Pearce’s claims there is no denying that the Lib Dems have failed to move with the times on diversity and working class representation. We are a white, middle-class, and overwhelming male party and everybody knows it. And in this modern age that is simply not a good look.
Second, the fact that a sizable slice of activists were backing Peace in the first place in a desperate bid to appear more diverse is a testament to the inability of the party to attract more talented and credible members from under-represented sections of society.
In that sense Pearce’s pièce de résistance speaks to a much wider and deeper issue than her individual huff might at first suggest. The institutional barriers that cause internal tensions are the flipside of a problem that also make the Lib Dems such a turn-off to large swathes of the public even if they care not for internecine squabbles.
The unforeseen consequence of Rennard’s Law is that past successes, particularly in recruitment of activists, have served to collectively blind the party to ask a fundamental question: who are we attracting? The uncomfortable answer is ‘more of ourselves’. In the good years the Lib Dems self-replicated like, well, cockroaches but this is an individual species and not an accurate reflection of the whole biodiversity system.
As we languish in single-figures in the polls the time has come to rip-up the Rennard rulebook and start again. Keep the pages that have worked – like local street campaigning – but shred the rest. Having a representative party involves more than a few tag-on initiatives; it requires a fundamental reorganisation of the way the party campaigns and reaches out to communities. It requires local, regional and national strategies based not just on pot-holes and Focus leaflets but on intelligence-led plans to target every under-represented group, and better policies and better selling of the policies we have to those sections of society.
While there is an immediate need to hold on to as many seats as possible in May 2015, there is perhaps an even more pressing need to raise our general appeal across the country. If that means sacrificing a few MPs to increase our general share of the vote it may reap greater benefits in future elections.
2015 is not a time for short-termism but a chance to rebuild and regroup. And that means more than a post-mortem on the coalition, but a fundamental reorganisation of the party from head to toe. Miracles have their place but there’s no substitute for intelligent design.
By Lester Holloway
