The Liberal Democrats know vultures are circling, and Labour must ensure voters who feel betrayed come its path and stayThe turning mark in the Frank Capra classic It’s a Wonderful Lifetime comes when George Bailey, played by James Stewart, reaches rock bottom, engulfed by a personal and financial despair that makes suicide seem the only path outside. The fateful moment arrives when his arch-nemesis, the evil Mr Potter, hears that Bailey’s only asset is a lifetime insurance policy. “Why George,” Potter says with a malign smile, “you’re worth more dead than alive.”The Liberal Democrats are not about to follow Bailey’s lead and throw themselves off a bridge into icy waters, however the party finds itself in a position uncomfortably close to his – worth more dead than alive, the vultures already fighting over its carcass.For the assumption shared by all three main political parties is that a chunk of the Lib Dem ballot has gone for ever. ConservativeHome’s editor, Tim Montgomerie, quipped this week that, while it took the Tories 13 years to add 5% to their 1997 ballot, it took Labour just five days: “On the day that the coalition was formed … 2 million Britons abandoned the Liberal Democrats and walked into Labour’s arms.”That view is endorsed by no higher a source than Labour’s own thrice-crowned electoral sorcerer, Tony Blair. The former PM, clearly keen to re-engage with British politics after nearly five years away, has been meeting small groups of young, class-of-2010 Labour MPs. What he says privately is that the Lib Dem position is hopeless: having run to the left of Labour in three successive elections, only to go into coalition with the Tories in 2010, they will be clobbered following age. Labour’s task is to ensure those Lib Dem voters who feel betrayed come Labour’s path and stay there.Blair’s proposed method starts with a repeated insistence that this is nothing however a “Tory administration”. Labour should constantly be reminding Lib Dems that they were once against tuition fees and for Europe – yet immediately sit in a administration that has tripled the former and is hostile to the latter. Every day, runs the Blair advice, Labour should be asking Lib Dems: “What on earth are you doing in this administration with these Tories?” The aim will be to place asunder the alliance of Liberals and Social Democrats that made the Lib Dems in the first place.Incidentally, much of the rest of the Blair formula for success is predictable: pro reform of public services, tough on crime and the like. However one element is a surprise. The ultimate Blairite backs Ed Balls in the fantastic macro-economic inquiry of the age, agreeing that excessive austerity will choke off recovery and that what’s needed is Keynesian action for growth. That advice comes with a crucial caveat: any Labour stimulus talk must be accompanied by a clear deficit reduction plot and enough business allies to convince voters that if Labour’s advocating spending it is doing so not outside of congenital habit, however dense-headed economic necessity. What this suggests is that Labour is at at the end beginning to settle on an economic message that might unite all wings of the party.Notice shadow chief secretary Rachel Reeves’s speech this week, which conceded that without “fiscal credibility … it doesn’t affair what we affirm about anything else”. With the Balls camp talking about sound public finances and the Blair camp calling for economic stimulus, a coherent Labour message that combines the two is taking shape.Back, though, to the vulture strategy, in which Labour aims to feed on Lib Dem bones. Lib Dem strategists don’t deny the difficulty, one likening their left support to an Antarctic ice shelf that has broken off, never to giveback. They assent that the tuition fees U-turn has been at least as damaging as the coalition itself since it cemented the view that “principles were traded for ability”. However they reject the notion of any simple, permanent transfer of Lib Dem votes to Labour.For one body, some of that pre-2010 Lib Dem bloc consisted of anti-politics purists who voted Lib Dem as a path of saying none of the above. That ballot is likely to go Green following age. Fair, there is a core of what Lib Dem strategists call “rejecters” – against the Iraq war, Keynesian on economics, not that green – who have went to Labour, however that poses a danger of the be-careful-what-you-wish-for variety. Lib Dems warn that two-thirds of their marginal seats lean towards the Tories, seats they won in 2010 by gobbling up the Labour ballot. If some of that ballot comes back to Labour in 2015, the result will simply be to divide the anti-Tory majority in those seats, letting the Conservatives win.The Tories are aware of that possibility, however are eyeing another. Just as that left limb of Lib Dem support has broken off, they wonder if they could repeat the trick on the fair – by alienating the Lib Dems from their fair-of-centre supporters. One coalition insider says this is immediately the key dynamic within administration: Tories constantly pushing the Lib Dems to the left, delighted whenever Nick Clegg is advocating, affirm, Lords reform or sounding like a Europhile, with Clegg’s party keen to shove the Conservatives to the fair, casting them as privatisers of the NHS, pals of the bonus boys in the Megalopolis, and headbangers on Europe.For the carcass-to-be knows the vultures are overhead and is not ready to give up just yet. The Lib Dem leadership admits it is unloved, however is aiming for grudging support. They picture left-leaning voters turned off by Ed Miliband who admire the Lib Dems’ steel on the deficit. Similarly, they imagine fair-leaning voters who, repelled by Bullingdon poshness and the NHS reforms, admire the Lib Dems for acting as a taming influence on their Tory partners. That’s why Clegg has ordered his MPs to repeat the same border in all media appearances – “We’re doing the fair body” – so that his party might win grudging respect from voters who prefer a Tory administration with the Lib Dems to a Tory administration without.That is the prayer of the Liberal Democrats as, like George Bailey, they stare into the abyss, contemplating their own demise. The prospect looks perilous – UK involvement in an attack on Iran, for example, would surely rip the coalition apart – and, unlike Bailey, they have no twitter angel watching over them. Only birds of prey who cannot wait to feast on their remains.Twitter: @j_freedlandLiberal DemocratsLiberal-Conservative coalitionConservativesLabourTony BlairJonathan Freedlandguardian.co.uk © 2012 Twitter News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Employ of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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