Rennie pledges fight for the Union

WILLIE Rennie has made a deeply personal pitch for the Union – and vowed to fight independence at Holyrood and Westminster.

In a speech to his party conference in Perth, the Scottish Liberal Democrat leader spoke of his own family ties to England, where he and his wife Janet once lived and where their son Alexander was born.

Mr Rennie said: ‘Our family story is like so many others in Scotland and in the rest of the UK. Our lives are intertwined, connected. We are one.’

Former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg had warned it would be difficult to ‘impose a fatwa’ on any move to hold a referendum.

But Mr Rennie told the conference: ‘If it comes before us in the Scottish parliament, we’ll vote against it.

‘If it comes before us at Westminster, we’ll vote against it.’

AFEW years ago, when the Scottish Tories were bumping along the bottom, when they really were reduced to scraping together as many hardy activists as they could just to hold a conference, they used to go to the Dewars Centre in Perth.

At one conference, they had to share the space with a group of stamp collectors – and something of a spat ensued, with each side claiming it had more members and more right to the available space.

Well, the Scottish Lib Dems were at the Dewars Centre last week and, like the Tories then, they are now bumping along the bottom. However, had there been militant stamp collectors about, the philatelists would surely have won; not just because there really aren’t very many Lib Dems left, but because the fight seems to have gone out of them.

The party has always attracted nice eccentrics. They harangue passers-by over the plight of funfair goldfish one moment, then apologise for the weather and open a door for them the next. They have always been endearingly odd: committed to peculiar ideals such as proportional representation and federal structures certainly, but at least they were there. Now their very existence seems under threat.

IN the conservatively small space allocated in Perth, the Lib Dems only put out a couple of hundred seats – aware that they were unlikely to need more. As it turned out, it was something of a job to fill the seats they did put out, even for a speech by former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.

His appearance was bittersweet. It reminded members of the days when they really did matter, held powerful offices of state and were able to force through policies at Westminster because they were in government.

But it was also a sharp reminder of how far they have fallen. This is now a party with only one MP in Scotland, which is on course to secure an abysmal 6 per cent of the vote at the local elections in May.

The Lib Dems always used to be about localism. But if current trends continue, they will have precious few councillors to keep that tradition alive.

The danger is even more acute than that. If the Lib Dems lose all but a handful of their councillors, they will lose the local presence they need to build campaigns. The party will shrivel and become truly endangered.

The Lib Dems who gathered in Perth seemed to be pinning their hopes on their strident opposition to Brexit. While that may work, to an extent, south of the Border, it’s not cutting through in Scotland.

In England, the Lib Dems are the only absolutely anti-Brexit party – hence its success in the Richmond Park by-election.

In Scotland, the anti-Brexit landscape is crowded with the SNP and the Greens, both of whom are able to mix proEuropean talk with a policy of Scottish independence.

So just saying, ‘We don’t want Brexit,’ is not getting anywhere near the appeal of parties with an answer to Brexit: leaving the UK.

This is just one of the reasons the Lib Dems are more and more irrelevant in Scotland.

Year after year, its Scottish conference gets smaller. It has been reduced to a couple of hundred nice, polite activists who sincerely believe in principles which appear oddly out of tune with the whirlwind nature of politics today.

Perhaps their time will come again. But at the Dewars Centre, it was hard to imagine it.

THEIR best hope may lie in the Tories winning the most seats at the next Holyrood election, but without a majority. Ruth Davidson would need the help of another party to govern and it is difficult, if not impossible, to see the Tories getting into bed with anybody else.

But for that to happen, the Lib Dems would have to enter an agreement with the Tories – and the disaster that followed their last liaison with the Conservatives burns so strongly that it would be incredibly hard to secure party approval.

Oddly, it is difficult to see the party disappearing completely. The activists who are left genuinely seem to believe in what it stands for and will not drift off to another. They appear caught in a strange political limbo, increasingly irrelevant but refusing to disappear.

The Scottish Lib Dems may just have to spend the next few years moving to ever smaller conference venues.

When they really are reduced to meeting in a boardroom, they may look back on the days when they could pack a couple of hundred people into the Dewars Centre to hear Nick Clegg with fondness. How sad would that be?