After May’s general election, both Labour and the Lib Dems needed a new leader, but the contrast between their leadership elections could not be starker.
Labour is in the midst of a full-blown civil war. To outsiders, it appears to be a party in total meltdown, as veteran left-winger Jeremy Corbyn continues to poll ahead of his more mainstream rivals.
Meanwhile, the Lib Dems MPs are under new leadership, after the bloodless ascension of Tim Farron, who beat rival Norman Lamb in a relatively good-natured contest. It would be easy to dismiss the leader of eight MPs as insignificant, but it matters profoundly to Lib Dem members who want to rebuild their party.
After such a terrible result they could have tried for a fundamental overhaul, in the way parts of the Labour party are doing with Corbyn. They didn’t.
This weekend, figures within Labour were reportedly begging acting leader Harriet Harman to suspend its election, amid fears that the hard-left group Militant Tendency had signed up en masse to elect their comrade, Corbyn. Tim Farron was putting together the beginnings of his leader’s office, and has today announced his front-bench team, before going on holiday to Spain.
Looking at this it would be easy to think that it is Labour, not the Lib Dems who over the course of five years has had its council base decimated, lost all but one MEP, and nearly all of its MPs.
On the back of that shock Times/YouGov poll showing Corbyn on the way to becoming leader, followed my a similar poll obtained by the Mirror yesterday, Labour is fighting for its soul, and its survival, in an exceptionally public way.
Meanwhile the Lib Dems have managed to quietly lick their wounds and begin the long, hard fight back. When Farron infamously referred to party members as cockroaches who could survive anything, he was right. The Lib Dems may be a vastly reduced Commons force, but because the party got its election done quickly it has been able to make a stand on issues such as welfare cuts, even though it has few MPs with which to do this.
A senior Lib Dem source said that the party’s fairly smooth transition into the post Nick Clegg era was because ‘most people agreed the analysis of why we lost the election’ – coalition with the Conservatives and a broken promise on tuition fees.
For Labour, that crucial conversation about why it lost is nowhere near complete, and so the sore just cannot heal. Corbyn’s presence has also changed the frame of that debate, with Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, and Liz Kendall now fighting against one another. The added media pressure on the Labour contenders has also made it harder for them, in comparison to Lamb and Farron. Labour’s election is dragging on interminably, making it inevitable that resentment between the campaigns will grow by the day.
In contrast, Lib Dem members at all levels had done some of their bloodletting previously, most notably during Matthew Oakeshott’s cack-handed coup attempt last May, so they have less angst to get out of their system. They already knew they would be in for a tough election, though of course nowhere near as tough as it turned out to be. Meanwhile Labour thought it was going to be in government until 10pm on election day and the release of that exit poll.
An election defeat, and the change of leader that now inevitably goes with it, is always a painful process for a political party, but the Lib Dems have shown that it does not need to be nearly as painful as Labour has made it.
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