Of the three main parties, none is clearer about how they intend to fight the next election than the Liberal Democrats. Their message will be that they’ll make the Tories be fair and Labour economically responsible. Their ground game will fight for every inch in the seats they hold but effectively withdraw from the rest of the country. I suspect that this strategy will yield the Liberal Democrats around 40 seats and, if there’s another hung parliament, the balance of power again.
But this near-term strategic certainty obscures a bigger question, what are the Liberal Democrats for? This is a question that Jeremy Browne, the former Lib Dem minister, is trying to answer in his new book.
Browne is a liberal and he expected to flourish under the leadership of Nick Clegg, who is from the Liberal rather than the Social Democrat wing of the party.
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