As Labour and the Liberal Democrats battle it out in Mid Bedfordshire, both are equally astounded by the titanic collapse of the Tory vote in a seat they owned for 90 years. Before canvassers speak, voters volunteer their disgust at Tory disgraces.
As in many “safe” seats where constituents feel neglected by complacent MPs, seeing the Mid Beds’ absentee, the MP Nadine Dorries, strutting on TV and in the Mail “crystalises all they feel about the Tories”, says Mark Pack, the Lib Dem president, sitting in a cafe after a hard day’s canvassing. “Sewage in these chalk streams has the same symbolic effect, as a wealthy place finds public squalor reaches them too.” The Tories’ point of no return feels to him like the Lib Dems’ collapse over promise-breaking on tuition fees. There’s no turning back the sewage outflow of Tory votes.
Peter Kyle, who has been leading Labour’s campaign here nonstop since June, echoes that: “People who always voted Tory are enjoying thinking differently and we are loving every second of the conversation with them. They are pleased to see us.” Time and again he hears them say: “They don’t deserve my vote any more.” Disgust at ministerial code-breaking, law-breaking, Partygate and their negligent MP overflows. Labour puts out no anti-Tory attack leaflets, only positives about their local candidate, Alistair Strathern, and Keir Starmer’s values: “They’ve already decided against the Tories.” With the third-highest number of mortgaged properties in Britain, the Truss market-crashing experiment hit them hard.
Defending a 24,000 majority, the Tories’ last hope is that their defecting voters are bamboozled into splitting their votes between Labour and the Lib Dems – both are claiming that only they can throw the bastards out here, trading conflicting graphs, canvass returns and old timers’ electoral folklore.
The Lib Dems say that Labour hasn’t won a byelection in the south-east (outside London) in living memory. Pack claims that Tory voters are much more likely to switch to the Lib Dems, and that “Labour has hit their maximum already”.
Kyle says that Labour harvests many more vote promises than the Lib Dems, as people flood out to ply his candidate with questions on growth, the cost of living, GPs and potholes. “We are mainstream again, on patriotism, security, law and order, economic orthodoxy – and Keir is a positive.”
The latest poll shows the Tories’ plunge from 60% to 29%, level pegging with Labour; the Lib Dems score 22%. It finds that 29% will vote tactically to block the Tories. Is this poll the tipping point telling tactical voters to opt for Labour? A split vote would be a calamity (though a few observers think the shock would force better future coordination). They may fight here, but Labour needs the Lib Dems to capture seats at the general election beyond Labour’s reach: luckily, they compete in vanishingly few seats.
The Lib Dem conference this weekend will glory in recent sensational byelection wins that the professor of politics John Curtice says “have been making the spectacular seem routine”. But he is far less sanguine about the party’s national standing at just 12%, and about the lack of progress on the general election. “Outside byelections, they have failed to profit,” he says. “The Tory collapse means they should be on 20%, but three times more Tory votes have gone to Labour.” They need, he says, a distinctive stance.
He thinks they should boldly go where Labour fears to tread: advocate rejoining the EU in tune with the drift of public opinion, now swung to 56% thinking leave was the wrong decision, only 32% the right decision. Labour’s refusal to talk of rejoining either single market or customs union opens up turf for Lib Dems to occupy. And what about tax? Labour adamantly eschews income, wealth or capital gains tax rises: the Lib Dems’ long-abandoned policy to raise a totemic 1p extra for education under Charles Kennedy was highly popular.
Tacticians for the Lib Dems reply tartly that these eye-catching policies could raise their national popularity without winning them a single extra seat. That’s the rottenness of our corrupted electoral system. With just a 15-seater minibus of MPs, they must grapple their way back seat by seat from their disastrous fourth place in the Commons, to regain lost official funds, a right to prime minister’s questions, a seat on Question Time and attention from broadcasters. To overtake the SNP’s 44 Westminster MPs as the third-largest party, they need at least another 30 seats. Look where those seats are: places not keen on tax rises, or on refighting Brexit for another decade. So strap on the crampons for a seat by seat climb, not national grandstanding that doesn’t win key Tory voters.
For all their weak national polling, they may yet be key players the day after the general election, due to electoral maths beyond their control. Will Labour’s huge lead survive a fierce election campaign and how many seats can Labour swipe from the SNP? Curtice reckons there’s a 50/50 chance of a hung parliament: that’s why Labour tiptoes so cautiously along the policy tightrope.
If the election is hung, an independence referendum would be the SNP’s price for letting legislation through. The Lib Dems’ price should be electoral reform: surely they can’t waste the chance by making Nick Clegg’s crass mistake again? Mid Beds’ rivalry is only a local scuffle, when both Labour and Lib Dems know they need each other to succeed. To let the Tories claim this seat through the failure of either to step back would give the government an undeserved fillip, against the grain of the great majority who want them gone. However, voters are now super-canny at tactical voting: they read the polls and they will know which way to go.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
