It’s Nick’s aides that need to up their game
Today’s Independent November “Poll of Polls” compiled by Professor John Curtice of Strathclyde University shows a decline in the Tory share across the range of voting intention polls with both Labour and the Lib Dems moving forward (by one point). The dip in Tory share has widely been put down to in-fighting over Europe, but even assuming that the Tories can bounce back from this with a bit of internal discipline, these figures still see the Labour party in the lead.
Given that we are now nearly one third way through the parliamentary term – and with the economy showing no signs of improvement – surely we really do have to start looking to the next general election and asking ourselves “what now?”. Especially when you take into account the boundary changes – assuming they happen.
Of course this means a damn sight more than the (hardly) brilliant and insightful advise from Nick Clegg’s aides to MPs “.. go on TV and declare proudly “I’m a Liberal Democrat” in an effort to improve the party’s poll ratings“.
Oh it’s that easy is it? Er hardly. I am not saying that we should not talk up the Lib Dem’s successes (I seem to recall we and others were saying that months ago) – but if we are relying on “aides” who think the solution to this problem is just about getting the words “Lib Dem” and “coalition” into every soundbite (which “research finds is popular with voters” !!!) then we have a problem Houston. Have we learned nothing from the Yes to AV debacle? When will Nick get in some communications people with ideas and a bit of media savvy rather than relying on rather worn out (and bloody patronising) cliches? If anyone needs to “up their game” it’s them (and who ever thought it was a good idea to go brief the papers on this piece of “communications genius” should be the first out the door).
The answer is of course to have a plan. We need Lib Dem ministers to deliver something positive (not to mention useful to the economy) from their portfolios. We need principled stances to policies where we have genuine disagreement, not show-boating our muscular liberalism. We need the likes of Farron, Huhne, Cable and Hughes to stop grand-standing at party conference. And we certainly don’t need the likes of Cllr Knight throwing huge great spanners in the works. We need to start now drafting a unique set of policy ideas that define who we are (I have said before that I think we should be the party of “the small and the local“). And we need to start talking to our coalition partners about how we present this partnership at the next general election. Unless of course we do really want Ed Miliband in NO10 come the next general election.
Image courtesy of the wonderful politicalbetting.com – where more analysis of the poll of polls can be found.
November 9th, 2011 at 4:54 pm
14% OTH is static. Interesting, as I would have expected Tory vote to break to UKIP over Europe.
Otherwise a fair amount of your analysis is sound Angela.
November 9th, 2011 at 5:37 pm
Given that a large number of tabloid-consumers in a huge range of constituencies have never heard of us, much less of what it is we actually do, putting references to the coallition and our party alignment should be a sound move. Television communicates much more widely than the papers do, anyway, and we still have to win over the on-the-ground electorate. It doesn’t help that our loose party structure makes it hard to broadcast a coherient summary of our party principles.
As a Liberal Democrat, I think we need to build a relatiable brand outside of the coallition.