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Alright, one of the things I get asked all the time is how the Liberal Democrat party would survive if the leftmost elements fell off it and it ended up veering towards the Orange Book Liberals. I don't think we will split unless the Social Democrats want to, but I'm going to explore what it'd mean for the elections and whether it'd be a bad thing to do.
It's probably worth going back to history quickly to see how the party came to be.
Originally, there was a Liberal Party, which stood for the values which I mostly represent, social libertarianism and economic libertarianism, and there was a Social Democrat Party, which was formed by more moderate members of the authoritarian-left Labour Party.
In the early 20th century, the Labour Party started to come onto the scene and became a major force quite quickly at our expense. Authoritarian policies were the order of the day, with a lot of worries about war and a newfound poverty caused by the two world wars, and it became hard for the Liberal Party to get back into the contest.
As the Liberal Party struggled to break into the duopoly, it began to expand to the economic left, trying to paint itself as a 'broad church' and ending up in league with the Social Democrat Party. The two merged in 1988 into the Liberal Democrat Party, and since then seems to have been drifting further and further from its neoclassical economic roots.
In fact, at the last election, Political Compass suggested that the party was to the left of the Labour Party, despite the prior publication of the Orange Book by many prominent Liberal Democrats, promising a return to the glories of true liberty.
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At the last election (before I became a member), I actually voted for the Conservative party, because I felt that they were the only party which had a credible plan to reduce the deficit. Nick Clegg was too busy alienating us right-liberals by promising no increase in university tuition fees and interventionism in the private sector, despite having contributed to The Orange Book, which offered the total opposite message.
Like many people (I expect), I was also put off voting for the Lib Dems because of fear of a Lib-Lab coalition, the last thing this country needed was another five years of Labour in power, after their ruthless obliteration of reasonable spending policy.
The fact that the Lib Dems refused to rule out such a coalition might have been a wise decision, as the Social Democrat voters would most likely have preferred a coalition with their socialist brethren at the Labour Party than with the Tories, but it probably cost them a lot of their pre-1988 grounds, leaving market freedom as the solitary domain of Cameron & Osborne.
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Having said that, however many votes this lost the party, far more were lost to the archaic and unfair 'First Past the Post' system. Between Labour and the Tories, they polled 65.47% of the votes, but got 86.9% of the seats. For every 34,398 votes they got, they got a seat.
For the Liberal Democrats, the situation was far more harsh. For every 119,942 votes they got, they got a solitary seat. With 23.03% of the vote, Clegg was rewarded with 8.8% of the seats. For as long as we have this archaic voting system, I find it hard to see the duopoly of Labour and the Tories being broken for a long time.
Unfortunately, for as long as two thirds of voters and seven eighths of MPs stand to gain from the current system, they're unlikely to ever allow fair voting. By that, I don't mean the miserable little compromise we're voting on next month (although anyone who supports PR should vote yes on principle), I mean AMS or STV.
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But what does this have to do with a party split? Well, quite a bit really in terms of the tactics of it. In the event of a split, Conservative voters would likely put the Liberal party above the other two major parties, and Labour voters would likely put the Social Democrat Party above the other two major parties.
Essentially, in the case that the AV vote is won, a split would be bad news if we assume that the party is roughly 50% social democratic voters (lefties) and 50% liberal voters (right-wingers). This is because the advantage of the party in an AV scenario is lost.
The Liberal Democrats, as a single entity, will gain the most votes through being everyone's second party, therefore picking up the most second preferences (Labour won't vote Tory, Tories won't vote Labour). This scenario doesn't come into play if the party splits, so I think in the case of an AV vote being won, the split would be bad for us as a second choice of the electorate, but maybe good for us as a party overall.
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What I mean by this is that by consolidating ourselves on the right as a party of the small state, keeping out of peoples' wallets and out of their personal lives, we can tap into the growing Libertarian feeling in the UK. Sitting on the left and competing with Labour is unlikely to work, as the Labour party is considered to be the most authoritarian of all in the Commons. There are surely more Tories who would be tempted to a right-libertarian party than Labourites.
A lost AV vote might pave the way for a sooner party split. We (the libertarian right) have little to lose, as most of the swing vote from the Liberal Democrat Party to Labour will come from the Social Democrats (right-wing libertarians won't be crying over responsible spending or the tuition fees increase).
Personally I feel like if we lose the AV vote, this party will jerk to the right whether it splits or not as the Social Democrats lose some of their seats and the right-liberals keep all of theirs. We will lose some voters on the left to Labour, and gain some (in the short term, probably less) on the right from the Tories now that we have proven that we can live by The Orange Book.
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Only by either convincing the Social Democrat element of the party to let go of their discredited far-left ideology and concentrate on providing actual freedom (economic & social) to people, or by splitting the party into two, can we ever hope to appeal to this growing group of unrepresented people (look at the Political Compass graph and look at how many major parties in the UK sit in the right libertarian corner) and return to the original mandate of the party.
In optimism, we know that this feeling exists within the party. Clegg & co in the House of Commons have shown aptitude in economics and understand that austerity is the only way out of Labour's mess. The very fact that we're even in this government shows that we're capable of making the right decision between state controlled markets and free economies.
Sadly some, especially for some reason certain councillors, will kick and scream about it and kick up a fuss against the party. Maybe they would have preferred us to stand by, not remove Labour's Big Brother state and not forced the Tories to move their tax cuts from IHT to the Income Taxes which affect the very poorest. Anybody who would have preferred a Tory minority government or a six-party Labour-led coalition is driven by ideology, and not the desire to help Britain.
We made the right choice. A secure liberal-right government in a time when strong decisions and strong policies are needed to tear down Labour's CCTV state, their central databases and their borrowing culture.
This coalition is not a pact with the devil; it's an opportunity to reclaim our core and historic values, claim a whole bunch of unrepresented people who currently vote Tory and UKIP to a party that actually represents them, prove that we belong in power and restore liberty to the UK.
Forget the pessimism; a shift rightward can be the making, not the breaking, of the Liberal Democrat Party.
