Doubts about the role and direction of the Liberal Democrats are voiced by Michael Meadowcroft, Paul Lally, Gordon Vassell and Peter Loschi
“Why don’t we take the UK’s third-biggest party seriously?” says the headline in your print edition on Martin Kettle’s article (Frank Field saw benefit in the Lib Dems. In this election year, Labour would be wise to do the same, 25 April). It is a question that many of us within the party have been attempting to answer for a long time. Even if most of the electorate does not interest itself in the depths of political philosophy, a party has to have a rigorous ideological position that gives it a vision of the kind of society it campaigns for. Only this encourages concerned individuals to commit themselves to working sacrificially for years in the political jungle.
Despite the existence of a Liberal-shaped gap in British society today, in which, as Fraser Nelson of the Spectator stated recently, we have “two conservative parties”, the Liberal Democrats have failed to express and present the historical Liberal position as a non-statist radical party. Its last significant document setting out its values and philosophy was in 2002. Today its appeal is directed at Conservative seats and relies on the deep unpopularity of the Conservative party for any success. Its pathetic performance at the recent Rochdale byelection – a constituency the party won as recently as 2001 and almost won back in 2010 – demonstrated its lack of a broader positive appeal.
