It’s hard to think of a way that Nick Clegg could make himself more unpopular. Yet he seems to have found one. With every passing day, as more information about allegations of sexual harassment at the top of the Liberal Democrat hierarchy leak out, Clegg’s excuses for his inaction seem increasingly threadbare and at odds with the facts. For a man whose electoral appeal rested so much on his professed honesty and integrity, any apparent indifference to alleged sexual misconduct and the abuse of power – if proven – is hugely damaging.
The allegations wracking the Liberal Democrats are serious and disturbing. If true, they could point to the existence in a party that claims to be progressive of a wholly unacceptable culture of disdain for women and indifference to their maltreatment. But they are damaging not only in and of themselves, but also because they are emblematic of why the British people have fallen so decisively out of love with Nick Clegg and his party.
Many people point to the broken promise on tuition fees and the perception that they abandoned their principles in return for power as lying at the root of the Liberal Democrats’ unpopularity. This is right at one level but somewhat misses the point. The reason that tuition fees – and other Liberal Democrat failures – have resonated so deeply is because they exposed the Liberal Democrats’ entire political identity as an elaborately constructed deceit.
Ever since the leadership of Paddy Ashdown, the party has sought to compete for votes less through the policy positions they take and more by projecting an image of honesty and integrity. They have sought to cultivate a sense that they are different from other politicians, more ethical, somehow nicer. Combined with hard-edged local campaigning, their concentration on these soft-focus attributes has formed a potent electoral cocktail, often making them slippery and difficult to campaign against.
Of course, it’s always been nonsense. As anyone who’s ever campaigned against them knows, beneath the veneer the Liberal Democrats have been arguably the most cynical party in Britain. They have taken full advantage of their distance from power to make undeliverable promises and occupy startlingly different positions of the political spectrum in different parts of the country, saying different things to different electorates safe in the knowledge that they’ll never be held to account. The leftwing Liberal Democrats you see in urban constituencies bears little resemblance to the ‘Tory Lite’ variety that compete in the suburbs or the rural parties that have a foothold in Scotland and the south-west. Moreover, the party has repeatedly dressed up regressive policies in progressive language and used the vocabulary of social justice to justify handouts to their middle-class voters at the expense of the poorest.
In short, far from being an aberration, their betrayal of their promise on tuition fees, their record of saying one thing and doing another, is entirely par for the course. Holding multiple positions and changing tack is at the heart of their modus operandi. The point isn’t that they have betrayed their principles and who are they are. Rather, in joining the coalition and abandoning key policy positions, they have finally let the cynical façade of integrity and ethical politics, drop and have revealed who they really are: a party remarkably light on principle.
And now they’ve been found out. First on tuition fees, then on the numerous compromises made within the coalition, the Liberal Democrats’ positioning as the honest brokers of British politics has been exposed as a sham. The scandal currently engulfing the Liberal Democrats resonates because it encapsulates yet again the party’s lack of principle and the jarring juxtaposition between the image it tries to project and what it actually does. As Gordon Brown unfortunately discovered to his cost over the 10p tax debacle, there is nothing quite so corrosive of a politician’s or a party’s standing as the perception that they have not just lied to the electorate about their policy position, but have misled them about who they are and what they stand for.
We’ll have to wait to see whether this is enough to sink them in Eastleigh. But regardless of the outcome, the scandal will be another nail in the coffin of the Liberal Democrats’ carefully constructed brand.
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David Pinto-Duschinsky was formerly a special adviser at the Home Office and the Treasury
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