FactCheck: how popular are Lib Dems?

Last Modified: 17 Sep 2007
By: Channel 4 News

FactCheck at Conference studies the numbers to see if the Lib Dems are in a slump or just back to basics.

The claim

'The age of two-party politics is gone.'
Nick Clegg, 17 September, The Independent

The background

If you hear a Lib Dem being interviewed this week, it's odds-on they'll be asked about the party's poor showing in the polls.

Squeezed between a resurgent Tory party and a Labour Party enjoying a 'Brown bounce', the Lib Dems are under serious pressure. Their poll ratings have fallen to around 17 per cent.

One poll suggested it had fallen as low as 15 per cent.

So, are the Liberal Democrats really sliding into irrelevance, as some commentators have put it? Or are they just at the low point of a cycle which will soon turn the other way?

The analysis

Compared to 2005, a poll showing of 17 per cent does indeed look bad. In fact it is just a return to the Lib Dem's trend level since the party was formed in 1988.

In 2005 it polled 23 per cent, buoyed by a number of factors, including Labour's support for the Iraq war and university tuition fees.

But in the three elections the Lib Dems fought before then, their support was more or less where polls say it is today - bouncing around the high teens. The party polled 17.8 per cent in 1992, 16.8 per cent in 1997, and 18.3 per cent in 2001.

The party's inability to sustain that level of support is doubtless frustrating for its MPs and members; but it's not entirely surprising.

The party's inability to sustain 2005 levels of support is doubtless frustrating for its MPs and members - but it's not entirely surprising.

On the radio this morning, Paddy Ashdown argued that the election of a popular new Labour leader had hit their support. It's true, as he said that the same thing happened to the Lib Dems in 1994, when Ashdown was in charge.

Tony Blair was elected Labour leader in 1994, and in his first months, the Lib Dems' support fell from the mid-twenties to the high teens - though that put them back where they had been just before Blair took over, when they won 17 per cent of the vote in a European Election.

Incidentally, we enjoyed the chutzpah of Nick Clegg's claim, made in the Guardian and other places, that because only 2 per cent of the electorate outside the big two in 1951, things are actually on an upward trend.

Historical pedants will of course point out that Clegg has ignored the fact that another 4 per cent of the vote in 1951 went to the National Liberal party, a Liberal splinter group which was in coalition with the Conservatives.

But comparing to random dates in the distant past can produce any result you want.

If you take 1918 as your base year, when Labour and Conservative won just 52 per cent of the vote between them, then the trend ever since has been down.

The verdict

No-one can deny that a poll rating of 17 per cent is worse than the party's election result in 2005.

But thus far the Lib Dems have not been 'squeezed' any further than their recent historical baseline, of about 17 per cent.

So it's not backsliding, it's just business as usual.

This will come as no comfort to members of the party faithful who hoped to move forward from the 2005 result, not back. Nor will it please the MPs who won their seats for the first time that year, and risk losing them at the next election.

So the Lib Dems are being squeezed. But if you take the polls as a guide, they are no more irrelevant today than they were in 1992, or 1997.

As for Nick Cleggs's claim that the era of two party politics is over - that's demonstrably true. But that's been true since Labour contested its first general election in 1906.

How ratings work

Every time a FactCheck article is published we'll give it a rating from zero to five.

The lower end of the scale indicates that the claim in question largerly checks out, while the upper end of the scale suggests misrepresentation, exaggeration, a massaging of statistics and/or language.

In the unlikely event that we award a 5 out of 5, our factcheckers have concluded that the claim under examination has absolutely no basis in fact.