A warning from the end of the 2005 general election for #LibDemFightback It’s a few days before polling day in the 2005 general election. After an early stumble, Charles Kennedy has recovered and is scoring high personal ratings. The Iraq war has opened up a huge opportunity to eat into Labour’s vote. But the opinion polls are showing his party up only a couple of points up on its 2001 result. What could move the figures? As one of its final attempts to grab the national news headlines before polling day and eat into the Labour vote, the party unveils a high profile defector from Labour: sitting MP (though not restanding) Brian Sedgemore. All that has since faded into historical obscurity. So save for those interested in the details of political history, why does the defection still matter? It’s because there is a lesson for the party’s future in its decision at the time to have as a high profile centrepiece of its campaign the acceptance of the defection Brian Sedgemore. He had been firmly on the left of the Labour Party, a cheerleader for Tony Benn during his most left-wing years, a key Hard Left organiser in the Labour Party, a long-running opponent of MPs registering their interests – had only a very limited track record of supporting Liberal Democrat causes. Yet there he was, being welcomed by Charles Kennedy and presented to any and all media the party could interest. The reason? Iraq. He fell out so badly with Tony Blair over Iraq that he joined the Liberal Democrats in protest. Perhaps all parties should be grateful for just about any high profile support offered shortly before polling day. But in accepting and highlighting his switch, the Liberal Democrats also highlighted how much the party’s appeal was being built not on converting people to liberalism but on accumulating a very diverse coalition of people who didn’t like Tony Blair or the military intervention in Iraq. Being liberal was not required to be showcased as a supporter. Labour’s victory in the 2005 general election meant that the highly diverse nature of that Iraq-coalition was not put to the test in a hung Parliament. But just as the diverse coalition that made up the Liberal Democrat support in 2010 could not then stick together in a hung Parliament, so too would Charles Kennedy and the party have run into the same problem in 2005. Simply being against a decision made in the past to intervene in Iraq would not have been enough to hold the party’s support together across the huge range of different issues that come up during a hung Parliament. The lesson? To hold together, and to prosper, in tough times you need a stronger glue to hold the party together. Coherence that comes from a larger core vote based on the party’s values, with, yes, local coalitions built on top of that to help win specific seats. But those coalitions being on top of a large core vote that positively supports the party’s values, rather than a substitute in its absence. Hence one of the criticisms of Kennedy’s time as leader, as expressed at the time including in places such as the ‘leader columns’ in Liberator (hardly a right-wing publication), was that the Kennedy leadership was too reluctant to self-confidently argue for a liberal party, based on liberal values. Instead at different times it simply went chasing after whatever disillusioned Labour or unhappy Tory support was on offer. In that Sedgemore epitomised the problem. It wasn’t a case of “here’s a new liberal, hooray!” It was a case of “here’s a left-winger unhappy with Labour, hooray!” and no need to modulate those cheers if they were not liberal. The idea that the Liberal Democrats should simply be a nicer form of the Labour Party appeals to some (and I suspect is what Polly Toynbee, for example, was hoping for in 2010). But that’s not what the Liberal Democrats are about. We weren’t just a Labour Party without illegal wars and nor are we now just a Labour Party with a leader who likes Europe and is liked by his MPs. We’re Liberal Democrats. That needs to be the foundation of the party’s strategy and messages.