Sat it quietly, but they are fighting
Lib Dems staying defiant
Leader of the Liberal Democrats Tim Farron IS it time for the Liberal Democrats to stage a comeback?
The Lib Dems are carving out a niche for themselves as the party that still opposes Brexit.
They’re a little bit coy about it. Party leader Tim Farron insists they’re not trying to overturn the result of last year’s referendum.
But he also wants to have a new referendum on what should happen once we quit. This is the deal that Prime Minister Theresa May negotiates with the EU.
At the moment, the plan is for the Prime Minister to put the deal to the House of Commons for a vote, maybe in around 18 months time.
What the Lib Dems want is for the public, rather than just MPs, to vote on this deal, in a new referendum.
And one of the options in the referendum would be to call the whole thing off and just stay in the EU after all.
So in practice - even though they choose their words carefully - the Lib Dems want to offer the UK another chance to stay in the EU.
Labour’s Deputy Leader Tom Watson, inset, has mocked the Lib Dems for pursuing a 48 per cent strategy. He meant that they had a policy which could only ever appeal to the minority of voters - 48 per cent - who backed ‘remain’ in the EU referendum. And in fact, he was being generous.
Polling by YouGov found that 25 per cent of voters say they opposed leaving the EU - but now think the Government has a duty to respect the result of the referendum and take us out.
Just 21 per cent of voters support a second referendum, or just ignoring last year’s vote entirely.
Even so, if the Lib Dems won 21 per cent of the vote in a general election then they’d be pretty pleased. It may be enough to make them a major political force again.
In the 2010 general election they gained 23 per cent of the vote, won 57 seats and found themselves in Government. In 2015, of course, their share of the vote collapsed, to just eight per cent, and they won only eight seats. So Mr Farron wouldn’t complain about getting 21 per cent next time.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that YouGov’s polling is accurate, or that every diehard remainer will vote Lib Dem. But there are signs the Lib Dem approach is working. The party not only won the Richmond by-election in London, giving them a ninth MP, but they’ve been quietly winning council seats across the country. Brexit may be giving us the strange revival of Liberal England.