I’LL start on a note of sympathy: it can’t be easy being a Liberal Democrat in 2017. The small, defeated-looking audience at the party’s Scottish conference in Perth at the weekend said it all.
Think about it. You wait 88 years to get back into government – albeit as the junior partner in a coalition - and it’s basically a disaster. Not only do the Tories pass off all your best ideas as theirs, but they manage to persuade the electorate that you are to blame for all the worst bits. The five years in power from 2010 to 2015 pass in a flash and electoral oblivion follows.
And if the party hoped proportional representation would bring them more success at the Scottish elections a year later, they were to be heartily disappointed yet again; five seats. Five.
With a fair-minded, egalitarian, pro-European outlook and Labour on its knees, totally unelectable under Jeremy Corbyn, you’d have thought the Lib Dems would be a pretty attractive option for disillusioned voters on the left. But polls continually put them nowhere. Why?
There’s no room here to even scratch the surface of the grim reality for them in England, so I’ll concentrate on Scotland. And here, it seems to me, their failure is far more straightforward: the refusal to even countenance independence for Scotland following Brexit. As I listened to Scottish Party leader Willie Rennie deliver his keynote conference speech, I genuinely couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Framed as the “emotional” case for the Union, Mr Rennie talked of standing up “for our United Kingdom” as an “uplifting, mutually beneficial partnership”.
With Nicola Sturgeon seemingly gearing up to announce a second indyref for autumn 2018, Mr Rennie told his party faithful his “new” case for the UK would be “positive, uplifting” focusing on “the ties that bind us rather than the differences some would use to divide us”. It was as if Brexit had never happened, or Scots had not voted by a majority of 63 per cent to remain in the European Union, or the Tories had not steamrollered over our wishes and refused to make any concessions on immigration or membership of the single market.
Indeed, the weasel words spoken by Mr Rennie in Perth on Saturday sounded suspiciously like what Theresa May told her party conference in Glasgow exactly a week earlier. And with the Tories ploughing ahead with their hard Brexit, happy to ignore Scotland’s protestations and wreck our economy in the process, it is sheer fantasy to think the UK represents anything like the rosy picture painted by Mr Rennie. I believe he knows this all too well, which makes his words even more disingenuous.
Indeed, only six months ago former UK Lib Dem leader and deputy prime minister Nick Clegg was far more honest when he admitted Brexit made arguments for independence “compelling”, adding the case for the Union was now “incredibly difficult” to make.
But there was little of this realism in Mr Rennie’s rhetoric at the weekend; instead he chose to treat his party, and the wider electorate, as if they are stupid, as if Brexit had not changed the UK, and thus Scotland’s place within it, irrevocably. This fantasy is not only a betrayal of the pro-European credentials that underpins Lib Dem ideology – independence now looks like the only possible way for Scotland to retain any real economic, social and intellectual ties with Europe - but I can’t work out for the life of me who it was aimed at.
A more savvy and pragmatic leader, someone who had learned lessons from Labour’s evisceration in Scotland and was prepared to stand up for their European beliefs, would have taken a more open-minded approach to indyref 2. Mr Rennie, it appears, is none of these things. Continued oblivion it is, then.
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