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Worrying direction (such as it is) for the Lib Dems. What do you do as a "centrist" party when the Right have moved Right and the Left have moved Left? Go down?

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Patrick Wintour

@patrickwintour

Vince Cable's reforms set up Lib Dems to be taken over - no need to be a member to join, no need to have been a member for 12 months to stand to be MP, no need to be a MP to be leader. Recalling Marx, many will refuse to join a club that is so willing to have them as a member.

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Go down on the Establishment, whichever way that swings? Yeah, that's usually what centrists do...

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I'm actually surprised that they didn't make more headway as the only resolutely anti-Brexit major(ish) party. That should have given them some kind of vote share, but somehow they managed to stuff that up, too.

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I think all the parties that talk the loudest about political expediency, such as your Lib Dems, are the ones that have no idea how that works. As shown by their willingness to discuss a concept like "political expediency", thinking it doesn't lose them voters by the 10000s.

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Literally telling people that tell them whatever will make them vote for you is bad politics, IMHO.

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Having a bit of difficulty parsing the syntax of this sentence. Rephrase?

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Ah... Literally telling people that you will tell them whatever will make them vote for you is bad politics, IMHO.

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Well, yeah. The good liars don't tell you they're liars. It sometimes takes an idiot to trust a liar, but it takes a real moron to trust someone who openly admits to being full of shit.

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It always sounds like some kind of attempt at spin, but I *genuinely* don't know what the point of the Lib Dems actually is. Unless they are literally the party of keeping everything pretty much the same for most people... maybe that really is their thing.

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My understanding of the UK is there's a widespread trust in institutions and governance that has only recently started to erode in a big way. If I'm right, it's pretty easy to fit the platform "we just do the stuff you expect," into that political climate.

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and

Then there is the secondary point: not every political party exists to take power, per se. There are other things that can be gained even as a minority, so long as you're not in a one- or two-party system.

8:21 PM · Sep 7, 2018Twitter Web Client

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Then there's a tertiary point: the conservatives enact neolib economics, but the rest of their platform is, well, conservative. Some people like to pretend they're better than that, even if they're not.

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That's a tricky one; I suspect a huge proportion of their support base do go along with some of the central concepts - for example, spending money carefully. Maybe not that party itself, but the average Tory voter thinks that they'll get better value from their taxes.

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Yeah, in theory, although I suspect you have to narrow down your activism (as it effectively becomes) to a relatively small range of key points - eg the Greens on Climate Change (and opposing may of the things that could help, such as nuclear power and GM crops, but I digress).

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You're forgetting the other side of the coin is that politicians are generally underpaid & often incompetent. If you can secure enough influence to protect the right interests, your bread can be buttered for a long time. It can be as minor as securing a certain contract for sbdy

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