Nick Clegg deserves ‘LibDem members give poll boost to Clegg’
It’s good to see that headline, even cloistered, as it is, in the august environs of the FT, behind a free registration wall. Cleggie deserves a boost. He’s doing a good job. And it’s good to see such prominence being given to a humble LibDem Voice forum survey, in which I took part.
But our national poll rating has halved, so why are members not up in arms?
Well, firstly, I think there is a masochistic strand within the DNA of LibDems. We enjoy the occasional purging which comes with low poll ratings. We all thoroughly enjoy remembering when we were an asterisk in the polls, for example, when Paddy started the party. Oh, how we chortle at the memory!
Although I have never had the experience, I should imagine that getting low poll ratings is a bit like an coffee enema. It gives you a sort of cleansed feeling afterwards.
But a passer-by might ask whether Nick Clegg and the LibDem members are locked together in a sort of suicide pact. …Ignoring the prospect of electoral meltdown, we all sail blithely on towards the golden horizon of an electoral system we don’t like and might not get.
…Indeed, the whole thing is a bit of a mystery.
I think two things are fundamental to all this. One was the arithmetic at the election - which left us with little option but to go into government with the Tories – unless we wanted to turn into a permanent debating society.
The other was the coalition agreement which gave us an enormous number of our policies plus muted or abandoned extreme Tory policies.
I would also cite the remarkable resilience of the party which is based on its democratic structures.
…The prospect of a stable five year government also helps.
So, I am pleased that Nick Clegg gets a boost just before the conference. He is working very hard and is a good honest liberal and Liberal Democrat.
…But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a great deal of work to do, and many battles left to fight.
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