Liberal Democrat financial restraints

Guido Fawkes reports on the redundancies at Great George Street. There have clearly been some decisions at Lib Dem HQ which have hit the bottom line hard, but I believe Guido is wrong when he opines: "Spending all your energy trying to fight Brexit isn’t looking to be a very financially sound strategy today". The huge turnouts at anti-Brexit marches show that the party's stance as the only one against leaving the EU is popular. Indeed, many Facebook messages show that Labour members and supporters are prepared to vote LD if their own leadership continues to accept Brexit as a done deal. Membership received a boost as a result of our pro-EU stance. So far from being an unsound strategy, it seems that the anti-Brexit campaign has saved the party from complete collapse.

I would trace the party's travails back to the over-optimism of 2010 when those at the top acted as though the Lib Dems were on an unstoppable upward path and made spending commitments accordingly, seemingly oblivious of the fact that overnight we lost our "Short" money. By entering into coalition, we ceased to be an opposition party and thus were no longer eligible for support from the public purse for our parliamentary activities. At the same time, we were not influential enough to attract donations from big business as the Conservatives did. (The Democratic Unionist Party has cannily avoided the Short-fall by not going into formal coalition, though it clearly dictates a lot of government policy.) Long-standing volunteers were shed in 2010 whose experience would have been invaluable after the electoral collapse of 2015.

It is a far cry from the days when the party was the most financially responsible of British political parties (we had to be!). Labour has only just got its house in order after enduring a huge debt burden which puts Lib Dems' current trouble in perspective. The Conservatives teetered on the edge of bankruptcy when commercial interests deserted them after the 1997 Labour landslide. (Indeed, I regretted at the time Blair-Brown's decision not to put the legal boot in.)

There is no reason to be despondent. In Mike German we have a federal treasurer whose managerial skills were invaluable to the Welsh party when he was leader in Cardiff. He is also someone who is committed to the party. There are doubts about the Conservatives' financial team who have questionable commercial interests which may come back to bite them if they fail badly at the next general election. That at least is not going to happen to the Liberal Democrats.