Whither the Liberal Democrats?
It's worth looking at the LibDem position. They came second in 2019 in 91 seats, though this does flatter them somewhat. Only 15 seats finds the party facing majorities of fewer than 5,000, all of them held by the Tories with the exception of Sheffield Hallam (Labour) and Dunbartonshire East (SNP). Smashing the Tories in set piece by-elections are one thing, but they're always up against it in a general election where they're perennial also rans. Can they make a contribution to ending the Tories?
Their deputy leader Daisy Cooper thinks so. Making the same point as Starmer, she correctly states there are many voters in the so-called blue wall of ostensibly safe Tory seats that won't make the jump to Labour, but are willing to give her party a punt. She argues a formal understanding would smack of a stitch up which would scare off the soft Tory voters they need to target. It wouldn't be "fair". Slapping his party on the back, Ed Davey argues the North Shropshire result amounts to a "progressive reset" along the lines of what Boris Johnson pulled off in so many former Labour seats. That might be over-egging the pudding.
You wouldn't expect Davey or Cooper to honestly reflect on how Chesham and Amersham and North Shropshire were one-off protests rather than the sea change they're hoping for, but the sad truth for Sarah Green and Helen Morgan is their time in Westminster is likely to be short. Because while the Tories are hurting and the Johnson tipping point might have been reached, this is not accompanied by an upsurge in enthusiasm for either of the main opposition parties - except for small, incremental advances in the polls. Yet, besides the LibDem bluster, they are on the right track.
During the years of the Corbyn interlude, Tim Farron and Jo Swinson believed disgruntled Labour voters were ripe for the plucking. For the former it was because Labour was too left wing, for the latter it was too beholden to Brexit. In the end, the LibDems failed to capitalise on either strategy because they were better placed to take votes from disgruntled Tories. At least that's what local contests between 2015 and 2019 demonstrated. You can make your own mind up about whether they chose to ignore what actual elections were telling them, or were keen to exorcise the spectre of working class politics and pile on Jeremy Corbyn's Labour. One thing's for sure, there would never have been any serious LibDem musing about a progressive alliance, even if it was de facto and on the down low, with the left still in the leadership.
The willingness for the LibDems to entertain these notions are another sign that Keir Starmer is successfully making Labour safer for bourgeois politics. But the jury is out on whether the LibDems can open a serious front against the Tories. They are caning the local by-elections, they are winning the parliamentary by-elections, so go ahead. They are welcome to knock themselves out and draw Tory fire away from Labour. But when all is said and done, the experience of 2010 hangs like a question mark over their heads. Can they be trusted to keep the Tories out?
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