If Jo Swinson has been elected Liberal Democrat leader in 2015 (as it was she lost her seat in the General Election), I’d have said this: “Look at her voting record.” And I might have had a point. The Lib Dems spent five years propping up David Cameron’s austerity-heavy Tory government. They enabled some pretty terrible things, too, and Ms Swinson did indeed vote for them. Today, she really has been elected leader of the Lib Dems and, judging from the Labour Party’s panic-stricken video reply, attacking her voting record, the world really is her lobster.
To deal with the ‘baggage’ question first of all, it is necessary for Ms Swinson to acknowledge that the Lib Dems got a lot wrong when they took jobs in what was known as the coalition. You know what they did, piling the effects of austerity on the poorest and the weakest, supporting the Bedroom Tax, voting for tax cuts to the better off, tripling tuition fees after they promised to abolish them. The facts are inescapable and they need to be addressed head on by the new Lib Dem leader. She needs to say they got these things wrong, she needs to be contrite, she needs, frankly, to apologise. And she needs to address two distinct groups.
Firstly, to those who believed in 2010 that the Lib Dems would act for them, not least the students who were taken in and conned by Nick Clegg. To all those people they made worse off, Ms Swinson must make it crystal clear that they will never, ever be abandoned by the Lib Dems, as they were in 2010.
Secondly, the vast swathes of voters stretching from mainstream Labour to mainstream Conservative, and the centre ground in between the two, need something to believe in. Labour races headlong to the ultra left fringes of politics, controlled by the 57 varieties of Trotsyism, Stalinism and all the other far left ‘isms’, gone forever as a mainstream socialist/social democratic party. The Conservatives, in direct contrast, lurch to the far right, in part to counter the sinister alt right as represented by the likes of Farage, Banks et al as Brexit continues to tear this country apart. Many millions of us have nowhere to go. But if Jo Swinson gets it right, the opportunity to change this country for the better is her prize.
There remains precious little trust in British, or even world, politics. Liars and charlatans from all sides have made sure of that. A choice between Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson is really no kind of choice at all.
The Lib Dems deserved their humiliation in 2015. Their role in Cameron’s austerity-driven government was not so much one of moderation, as some claim, but of enablement. It does not matter that they were junior partners in the coalition. They allowed things to be done that should never have been done.
But the past has passed and what was done cannot be undone. It is more a matter of how the Lib Dems can convince that they got a lot of things wrong, that they have learned a vital lesson and more so that they will never put themselves in a position where they enable extremist policies to prosper.
The Lib Dems certainly have my vote for the foreseeable future. To keep my vote and to attract the votes of millions of others they need to be honest, they need to be humble and they need to be visionary. And in Jo Swinson, they may have found someone who is all three.
