The 'Clegg Bubble'

There are some very good reasons for the ‘Clegg bubble’. It might well be sustained on the basis that a lot of people just want to strike out at the Labservative system and do not care over much about promises from any side of that particular game.

Keeping Things In Proportion

But let's keep this in proportion. Yes, we have seen polling show the Liberal Democrats in second and even, in one case, first place this past weekend and, yes, this surge is significant. However, the numbers shifting their opinion are still only a small proportion of the electorate.

The social networks drove a lot of sentiment in the days after the TV Debate. The common denominator in these circles was that of depressed disillusioned centre-left people finally feeling that there was ‘something that could be done’. This alone was probably enough to explain much of the surge.

The question is whether these left-liberals will move back into anomie, into the Labservative camps or into the small protest parties once the emotional catharsis of rebellious support for the historical no-hoper passes. If it does not, British politics may never be the same again.

But what drove this shift? It did not happen simply because Clegg outperformed his rivals. It was a political accident waiting to happen.

When the history is written, Clegg's performance will be laid out alongside Cameron's longer term failures, attrition within the Labour movement and some Liberal Democrat courage over policy.

The Discovery Of Mr. Clegg

The point about Nick Clegg was that no-one really knew who he was before he appeared on our screens last week. His appearance on TV against two ‘heavyweights’ showed him to have far more substance than anyone had expected.

Brown may have been widely regarded as ‘heavyweight’ but he looked tired while, bluntly, Cameron did not come across as a ‘heavyweight’ at all to many people, perhaps appearing to some as just there to persuade us to give him what he and his pals wanted.

Cameron's odd mix of ‘fluffy’ image and perceived cynicism is not being helped by Tory election material which looks as if it is designed by marketing people to sell a product or service. People are resistant to this. The leaflets look professional and certainly look 'compassionate' but they don't convince.

So it was with Cameron in the debate - perceived by some as a competent performance by someone who had been over-trained to the point of blandness with a not-so-faint suspicion of insincerity lurking in the background. He gave Clegg his Kennedy moment by default.

Cameron Fails To Win Over Liberals

David Cameron quite simply does not impress his key target market on the moderate centre-left and his attempt to shift to a compassionate Blairite position was poorly timed – just as the public was turning away from a culture of communitarian promises.

What had started out as a sensible attempt to capture Blairism for Conservatism now looks very old-fashioned. A strategy suitable for prosperity and the two-party system should have been changed with the credit crunch and the growth of mass anger over expenses. It was not. This was a mistake.

This error may prove fatal because Blairism's star has waned with economic crisis. War-mongering and authoritarianism were tolerable prices to be paid by Middle England when jobs were secure and prices relatively low. Even Blair himself has become tarnished not only by Iraq but by the mess he left behind.

Cameron is thus losing his petit-bourgeois Right to UKIP without winning any serious support from a liberal Middle England that is disillusioned with a system and not just with a Government. His own libertarian Right is not exactly enthused in its support for him either.

Meanwhile, the ‘Red Toryism’ of Phillip Blond is already being exposed as a form of Christian paternalism, not much liked below a certain generation and not helped by the growing belief that it is a scam to get elderly people to volunteer as cheap social labour.

Close scrutiny also suggests that it may have serious potential for informal interference in private life. Combine Christian enthusiasms with the half-baked fashion for 'nudge' social intervention and with Blair's now jaded communitarian impulse and you have something quite illiberal in the making.

‘Volunteer’ culture is also often a recipe for bumbling. Everyone knows it who has ever dealt with the so-called 'Third Sector'. New Labour managed to keep this sector working and on message by pouring money into it but that money is not going to be there under the next Government.

The public are still basically libertarian in morals. Church-based thinking creeps out many urban liberals, with the Catholic Church’s recent and increasingly disturbing troubles adding to the worry pot. Social authoritarians are not shifting from New Labour, left-libertarians are not going to the Conservatives.

Left-Liberal Depression Lifted

Meanwhile, the Labour Party is coalescing into its tribal electoral coalition but this has long since shrunk to its core vote. The Party has had great difficulty in making its liberal and Left elements cleave to it, especially after the production of a Manifesto of the Right that took its liberal-Left support for granted.

Older Labour people will vote tribally, especially public sector white collar workers, turkeys who won’t vote for cuts Christmas, but the calculation that the non-public sector libertarian and liberal centre-Left have nowhere else to go (standard thinking within New Labour) has now been blown sky high.

Liberal-minded people angered by war and civil liberties issues and disillusioned private sector white collar Labour supporters, filled with gloom at the choice between Brown and Cameron, find that Clegg now offers a way out – through Scylla and Charybdis to ‘hope’ beyond. Basically, a desperate punt!

What is not appreciated is the degree to which New Labour itself is on the edge of civil war. The conduct of the Party in imposing candidates has alienated even stalwarts in key areas like Tameside and Staffordshire.

Independents are also popping up in odd places with direct appeals to the Labour vote. Many traditional Labour supporters will be tempted to vote Liberal Democrat outside the North as a vote loan to punish the Party where they do not have such a choice. And this brings us to Trident ....

The Labservatives are both trying to paint the Liberal Democrat's Trident policy as a national own goal but it makes sense for them. Many Labour people are horrified by the whole idea of billions being spent on a Churchillian monstrosity that cannot be used without killing indiscriminately and en masse.

On the other hand, not enough Tory Party people care about ‘big willies’ in defence compared to having the funds to keep taxes low or soldiers in Afghanistan well armed and protected.

Some serious left-liberal votes may well move from New Labour to the Liberal Democrats on this marker policy alone and the SNP and Plaid Cymru are lined up behind it as well. There are also many people who want something to take revenge on New Labour over Iraq – Trident does this.

So there we have it - the 'bubble' may  prove to be just that but there are some fundamental reasons to believe that the libertarian centre-left may be prepared to make a decisive move not to the conservatives as Cameron may have hoped but to the Liberal Democrats.

A weak performance by Clegg at the next two debates may well burst this bubble quickly and will certainly halt any secondary drift from the Tories but it is now within the realms of possibility that the Liberal Democrats could displace one or other of the major Labservative powers.

At the least, this 'bubble' has made one of the most boring elections in living memory extremely interesting. This is now one for the Liberal Democrats to lose and there is little that either of the other two 'main' parties can do to push back Clegg into the obscurity that they believe is his due.

Comments

[Tim Pendry]

Anton Howes - http://twitter.com/antonhowes - helpfully advised that two (BPIX and YouGov), not just one, weekend polls put the Liberal Democrats in first place.