UK Liberal Democrats leadership election, 2017

[Tintrlvr]

The LibDems have one safe seat: Orkney & Shetland. Everywhere else is a constant negotiation with the electorate...

Has the situation ever been so bad for the Lib Dems? Even looking at the 50s and 60s (when they held 6 seats and got 2% of the vote) they still had large majorities (10%+, ie larger than anything they have now) in several of the few seats they held.

Those were seats where the Conservatives stood aside for the Liberals. They would have lost them if the Conservatives had stood.

[Tintrlvr]

I honestly do think though they could benefit from some rebranding. Maybe dropping the Democrats and just calling themselves the 'Liberal Party' would more accurately capture them at this point.

I definitely do think Norman Lamb is the best option. Alistair Carmichael would be a good fit for Deputy Leader to show the look towards Scotland among the party. Obviously Jo Swinson should be given a prominent role as a spokesperson of some sort.

As someone else noted, the "Liberal Party" name isn't available currently (and unlikely to become available soon). They've bandied about rebranding as the Democratic Party or the Democrats in the recent past, but I think voters would rightly view any name change as silly.

[Tintrlvr]

Only somewhat related, but do we know how Orkney and Shetland vote separately ? Is the LibDem base evenly distributed or more on one of the archipelagos ?

They have separate seats in the Scottish parliament, and the Lib Dems hold both with huge majorities, so I would assume evenly distributed.

[Tintrlvr]

Only somewhat related, but do we know how Orkney and Shetland vote separately ? Is the LibDem base evenly distributed or more on one of the archipelagos ?

IIRC in the 2015 close shave (The Lib Dem majority was only 4% or something) the word from the count was that Carmicheal won Orkney but lost Shetland. Although given other results I imagine that wasn't due to innate partisanship but because Danus Skene, the SNP candidate, was based in Shetland and Carmichael is based in Orkney, and if there is one place in the UK where people are most likely to vote for local candidates for local people it's Orkney and Shetland.

Agree on both counts. For what it's worth, the Lib Dem candidates for Scottish parliament in Orkney and in Shetland in 2016 both won nearly the exact same percentage of the vote (67%), although there has been some variance in the past depending on whether there was an incumbent or not and on independent candidates.

[Tintrlvr]

Lamb vs. Davey, then? With Lamb as the favorite?

Davey has less baggage and seems more electable.

What "baggage" does Lamb have? If anything, Davey has more business connections and so forth that certain types of people might view as "baggage".

I'm not sure why but I kind of like the vibe I get from Lamb.

Me too. He kind of comes across as a standard Labour member.

He was the Orange Bookers choice at the last leadership election!

Of course, Ed Davey actually wrote a chapter of the Orange Book, so these things clearly change.

And to say Lamb was right of Farron in 2015 is not to say much at all. The two took basically identical positions on everything.

[Tintrlvr]

Tbh I'm kind of amazed that a significant portion of former LibDem voters supported Leave.

Pre-coalition, they were the main non-Labour/Tory party and were seen as 'clean' due to not having had experience in government since the War. A lot of their old vote was in no way intended as an endorsement for liberalism.

Overall, their voters were definitely more liberal than other non-Lib Dem voters in the same seat, of course.

In any case, the EU wasn't a significant political issue to most Britons until the referendum. That's what made the referendum such an own goal by Cameron. He never had to promise it, and he would not have been punished much if he had ignored the promise.

[Tintrlvr]

Tbh I'm kind of amazed that a significant portion of former LibDem voters supported Leave.

Pre-coalition, they were the main non-Labour/Tory party and were seen as 'clean' due to not having had experience in government since the War. A lot of their old vote was in no way intended as an endorsement for liberalism.

Overall, their voters were definitely more liberal than other non-Lib Dem voters in the same seat, of course.

In any case, the EU wasn't a significant political issue to most Britons until the referendum. That's what made the referendum such an own goal by Cameron. He never had to promise it, and he would not have been punished much if he had ignored the promise.

Yes, the reason the referendum happened was all about the obsessions of a certain part of the Conservative party than it was driven by any real popular demand.

The Lib Dems also had a lot of there middle of the noughties strength on the back of their opposition to the Iraq war, which never had the level of public support in the UK that it did in the US.

Also, a good deal of the Lib Dem strength in the South West was always based on them being on the left of the Tories, in a region where an "urban" party like Labour was largely unpalatable.

Iraq had little to do with the strength in the Southwest; that was more of the cause of Lib Dem strength and ability to eat into Labour in the cities, the Muslim vote and the youth and student vote. The Lib Dems were strong in the Southwest in 1997 and 2001 also (and pre-1997 they were clearly already ahead of Labour in the region back to the days of the Alliance). In order to get back to 1997-2001 support, the Lib Dems don't need another Iraq, although they would need one in order to really break the party system (deeply unlikely within the next 20 years or so).

I do think the Lib Dems will probably come back at least to a degree in the Southwest naturally once the Tories have done things to make themselves unpopular. We say that the Tories are unpopular right now, but that's not really true. They're middlingly popular, certainly nowhere near the depths of the late 90s. And the Tories could easily rebound if May leaves and is replaced by someone else.

[Tintrlvr]

Iraq had little to do with the strength in the Southwest; that was more of the cause of Lib Dem strength and ability to eat into Labour in the cities, the Muslim vote and the youth and student vote. The Lib Dems were strong in the Southwest in 1997 and 2001 also (and pre-1997 they were clearly already ahead of Labour in the region back to the days of the Alliance). In order to get back to 1997-2001 support, the Lib Dems don't need another Iraq, although they would need one in order to really break the party system (deeply unlikely within the next 20 years or so).

I do think the Lib Dems will probably come back at least to a degree in the Southwest naturally once the Tories have done things to make themselves unpopular. We say that the Tories are unpopular right now, but that's not really true. They're middlingly popular, certainly nowhere near the depths of the late 90s. And the Tories could easily rebound if May leaves and is replaced by someone else.

Oh,  I didn't mean to say that their strength in the South-West was due to Iraq. The SW is like Mid-Wales or Northern Scotland in that it has always been a strong area for the Lib Dems. The fact they did particularly well round there in the New Labour era is probably due to the general weakness of the Tories at the time.

What I meant was, if you go back to the mid-2000s, the Lib Dems were able to take advantage of a very specific set of circumstances that are not the case at the moment. At the time, economic issues were kind of off the agenda as the economy was growing strongly and there wasn't really much mainstream debate over New Labour style economic policies. The major political topics at the time were things like foreign policy or identity cards, where the Lib Dems seemed to be more in tune with much of the public..

Getting down to it, I think the Lib Dems have never really won much support for their economic stances, and most people have probably never really been aware of them. So they were able to harness a good deal of public support at a time where economics faded into the background, and the sorts of issues that the public are generally quite socially liberal on where among the most salient issues.

Basically, now at a time where much of the focus is on falling living standards, job insecurity and the ongoing fall out of the 2008 crash, the Lib Dems don't really have much of any real relevance that they can say to people.

I think it's not so much that the Lib Dems don't have something to say about economics as it is that, while they can stake out positions clearly different from both the Tories and Labour on many issues, on economics they definitely are in the mushy middle, which doesn't appeal to that many people unless you are a technocratic party of government and which also contains some politicians on the right of Labour and the left of the Tories. It's also hard to throw around rhetoric about middle-of-the-road economic policies, much harder than "poor people are poor because they deserve it" or "the rich are undeserving fatcats who exploit the common man."