Hi Tony, thanks for reading!
Short answer: I lean pretty heavily towards (b) as a result of (a).
I have a firm belief that the most successful party platforms are proactive, not reactive — essentially, a party which has a clear and consistent message which is presented well (and can be postulated as working long-term) is more likely to pick up votes than a party which is reactive, and changes policy based on immediate public opinion.
My justification for this belief is based in a lot of things, but the three most salient points — which i think individually are fairly uncontroversial — are these:
- The ‘average voter’ — insofar as they exist — are not dogmatic or particularly tribalistic;
- The ‘average voter’ isn’t stupid, but often doesn’t pay as much attention to ‘politics’ as we might think, leading to:
- The ‘average voter’ regularly changes their mind when confronted with certain narratives — ones which make more intuitive sense, ones which are more popular, and ones which directly appeal to any fundamental principle.
Superficially, it makes sense that, as the third party in a system which very heavily favours the two major parties, the Lib Dems might want to position themselves as ‘inbetween’ — they know that they’re not going to be winning majorities anytime soon, so they’re tempering their expectations accordingly.
However, this doesn’t make for an appealing platform, since it is a) unclear (the political positions of the two major parties are fairly fluid, and hence the Lib Dems have to be reactive in order to not be an ‘extreme’), b) inconsistent (because, inevitably, the rationalisation for the changing of policy to be ‘inbetween’ will conflict with other rationalisations), and c) without any fundamental set of values to appeal to voters.
The exception to this — which I think proves the rule , and which also relates to what i was saying in the text — is their stance on Brexit, where they have taken a ‘hard remain’ stance, quite unlike the other two parties — however even this betrays their fundamental lack of platform. If we decide to annul the vote or do a second referendum, and it comes back as remain (even if it is a sizeable swing away from leave) — then what? The millions of people who voted leave are not going to just disappear, and neither are the reasons for why they voted leave (regardless of how grounded in reality those reasons are).
Because the Lib Dems are unable to profess any fundamental values beyond ‘we are between Labour and the Tories’, their stance of ‘we will stop leaving the EU’ doesn’t say anything about what the country will look like (Will we keep David Cameron’s negotiations? Is the UK going to sign up to future EU projects? Are we going to attempt to change or influence the EU institutions in any way? Is the EU perfect?)— it simply says ‘we wish things were how they used to be’. It is, as I pointed out previously, yearning to return to a time when we were all happy about the EU, and all wanted to be part of it. But that time never existed — euroskepticism in the UK has been a fact of life for many years, even if it wasn’t as overt as it was between 2014 and now.
In summary, rather than leading with a set of beliefs which they then ‘sell’ to the population — beliefs which can give you a strong idea of what their stance might be (for example, Labour have made it very clear that their main priorities are living conditions and worker rights)- the Lib Dems exist in this barren land where all they can say is ‘we will be a moderating force if you vote for us — but we can’t actually tell you how or what we will moderate’. I do to an extent agree with your suggestion (a), that they have been ‘forced’ into this by the circumstances of the party, but ultimately because they are unwilling to forge a new future and would prefer to look to the past, they end up completely vapid.
And again, like I said previously, that a party with such history like the Lib Dems — such as in the form of English Radicalism — would become such a shadow of its former self, reduced to begging for votes, is honestly just a bit sad.
