Lib Dems (UK): What is their constituency?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If you believe the opinion polls then the answer is 'increasingly rare'.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A fairly typical example of a LibDem barchart being...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Ah, but reality is often very different from 'analysis' published in newspapers. A very high proportion of the old LibDem vote came via 'none of the above' protest (and had done - on and off - since 1974), particularly outside London and the South East. And, except in instances of surviving local personality cults, this vote is probably as lost for them as students or Guardian readers...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Who'd have thought that voters not attached to any particular party would be the most likely to swing behind a new one?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

But I never understood why the old Liberal Party began to decline to begin with.

An issue that has been hotly debated since the moment it happened. But I think the answer is clear enough:

I'd actually argue that what did for them as a major party was not electoral incompetence, so much as political incompetence, specifically the sort that led to a) British involvement in the First World War and b) the subsequent gross mismanagement of the war effort by the Asquith government. Liberal Party factionalism - Asquith and Lloyd George both led separate Liberal Parties at the 1918 and 1922 elections; the Party only unified again in time for the 1923 election - added considerably to this credibility problem, and it is notable that the only senior Liberal with any mass credibility in the 1920s was David Lloyd George, who's populist image - never typical of a party dominated by a narrow circle of patrician and would-be patrician¹ Oxbridge men - was only reinforced by his record as a wartime Coalition Prime Minister. There was also the great damage that the War had done to the general credibility of Liberalism across in Britain; what did it even mean to be a Liberal after 1914? Peace, Free Trade and Progress were key to Liberalism's prewar appeal, and the War had either destroyed or grossly distorted all three.² To all of this we can then add a further act of gross political incompetence; Asquith's decision to pull support from MacDonald's minority Labour government in 1923 and trigger an immediate General Election. This was stupid for two reasons; the first was that elections in 1922 and 1924 had left the Liberal Party as bankrupt financially as it was politically, and the second was Asquith toppled the Labour government due to some trumped-up red scare bullsh!t, which guaranteed that the election would be fought in an atmosphere of anti-Soviet hysteria (infamously added to - and how - by the Zinoviev Letter). The Liberal Party's core lower middle class support stampeded to the Tories and the Liberals never recovered.

Not that the Liberals were ever really that good at elections, mind. The campaign against the Corn Laws in the mid 19th century gave them such a great winning issue that sixty years later it was still at the core of Liberal electioneering:

Unsympathetic people might suggest that this was perhaps a little complacent.

<sub>1. i.e. H.H. Asquith (never Herbert!), the son of a West Riding wool merchant who spent a lifetime purging all remaining traces of his provincial background, including and especially his embarrassing Christian name.

2. Progress in the Edwardian Liberal sense was linked to technological progress and the rise of the machine, i.e. the very things that led to the horror of mechanised war.</sub>