Prepare for power Farron tells Liberals (with just 8 MPs!)
THE Liberal democrats can be ‘ back in power’ in five years, leader Tim Farron said yesterday, as he positioned the party for another coalition with the Tories.
He suggested Labour’s lurch to the Left under Jeremy Corbyn gave the Lib dems the chance to ‘take centre stage’.
Addressing the party’s annual conference in Bournemouth, he set out a mission to ‘put Lib dems back in power at every level throughout Britain’.
The call echoed former Liberal leader david Steel’s 1981 instruction to activists to ‘go back to your constituencies and prepare for government’. The party went on to win just 17 seats at the 1983 election.
But despite a crushing defeat in May this year, which saw the Lib dems lose 49 of their 57 seats, Mr Farron pledged to march his troops ‘towards the sound of gunfire’.
He attacked david Cameron for shifting to the Right since the election and for ‘ dismantling at breathtaking speed’ green policies pushed through by Nick Clegg.
Mr Farron described the Prime Minister’s response to the migrant crisis as ‘pitiful and embarrassing’, and said Britain should join the EU resettlement scheme.
He also condemned Tory ‘Little Englanders’, claiming the drive to get Britain out of the EU was ‘staggeringly unpatriotic’. But he saved his fiercest criticism for Labour, with aides making it clear the Lib dems could not envisage a deal with Mr Corbyn.
Mr Farron accused Labour of ‘peddling fantasy economics’, and said it seemed to have ‘left the playing field’ under its new leader.
In another swipe at Mr Corbyn, he said: ‘If others wish to abandon serious politics, serious economics, that’s their lookout. But you can be certain that the Lib dems will occupy every inch of that progressive liberal space, because you cannot change people’s lives from the glory of self-indulgent opposition.’
Mr Farron’s pitch for the centre is a remarkable shift from a politician who refused to serve as a coalition minister and who gave the last government a rating of ‘two out of ten’ earlier this year.
But allies have persuaded him to abandon his instinct to position his party to the Left of Labour.
Yesterday, Mr Farron told activists he was ‘proud’ of the Lib dems’ record in government, adding: ‘There are those that would like me to … distance myself from the past five years … to say, “I disagree with Nick”. But I don’t, so I won’t.’ He said he accepts the need to tackle the deficit but that taxes on the better-off should play a bigger role.
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