Jo Swinson won’t be the one to save Britain

The new Lib Dem leader seems like a breath of fresh air to some. She has nothing to offer but false hope

Swinson claims her party has no reason to believe it cannot be swept to power in new elections

Britain stands in its darkest hour. Political crises loom around every corner. One the one side there are the Tories, conquered by a hard-right faction seeking to drive the country out of the European Union, no matter the cost. On the other, we have Labour, suffering a “Corbynite takeover”, being driven to new political extremes. Both have doomed us all. Set us on a course for misery, poverty and hyperinflation not seen since the time of the Weimar Republic. Surely, we are helpless now. The sun has finally set on our empire, and now we shall go gentle into that good night.

Only, look over there, in the distance. Our saviour, coming to herald a new golden age. Ready to break up the old order and forge ahead with the new liberal path. Ladies and gentlemen, I can hardly believe my eyes, but there she really is. It’s Jo Swinson! My God, how could we have ever despaired when she was waiting in the wings all this time. At last, Britain is saved. I can see the next election now, as yellow seats sweep the board and wash away the politicians of old. We shall return to the EU. We will protect all our rights. The people — and, of course, the markets — shall, at last, be free.

Not to sound too much like I’ve jumped from the pages of the Daily Express, but I can’t help but see Jo Swinson as quite the anti-democrat. Her pledge not just to campaign for a Remain result in a second referendum on Brexit, but to actually revoke Article 50 once in government betrays her real ambition to force her worldview on the country. She thinks her side is right, and she’s not interested in hearing the other side. To her, Brexiteers are contemptible people who’ve all been duped by Farage and co., and it’s about time a proper liberal came along and sorted things out.

So, should we put our faith in her? Let’s check her record. Alongside a brave campaign against the packaging of Easter eggs and an unremarkable history on the backbenches, largely following her party’s line every which way, she also had a three-year stint as Under Secretary of State for Employment Relations and Consumer Affairs in the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government, between 2012 and 2015. Apart from that, she’s had a raft of key positions in her party, including most importantly (before being elected leader) holding the Deputy Leadership under Vince Cable.

All in all, it’s not bad. Better than some people trying to be Prime Minister at the moment. But look harder, and you’ll see what Swinson is really like. She voted seven times against increasing disability benefits, five times against raising welfare benefits in line with prices, and three times in favour of raising university tuition fees. She cast three more votes against introducing more proportional systems of electing Members of Parliament. If anyone’s impressed by her voting against going to war in Iraq, they should know she approved airstrikes in Iraq in 2014. Previously she had supported the efforts to topple Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, which have left that country in a state of total chaos to this day.

Jo Swinson also voted against replacing Trident, supported the “bedroom tax” (decreasing benefits for recipients deemed to have excess bedrooms in their home), supported moves to make councils responsible for helping local people in need (thus shifting the blame for failures in the care system onto the councils) at the same time as she supported cutting funds towards those councils. She also supported cuts to services designed to help people find work after long-term unemployment. On the side, she found time to oppose increasing taxes on the wealthy during the height of austerity, whilst also supporting cuts to corporation tax rates. She supported the failed, wasteful measures that introduced elected Police and Crime Commissioners (elections for those positions saw an average turnout of 11%).

Am I done? I wish I was. How about her voting in favour of selling state-owned forests in England, voting against placing limits on carbon dioxide emissions, culling badgers, going ahead with the now all but abandoned HS2 plan, and — because of course she did — voting against placing greater regulations on fracking. Ride the train? She voted against reducing ticket prices. Hate Royal Mail? She voted to privatise it. Have a gambling problem? She voted against new regulations against the gambling industry. And I promise I’m nearly done here, so we’ll do one last quickfire round: she voted against anti-terrorism laws, supported placing caps on civil servants’ redundancy payments, supported restricting legal aid, and in 2013 voted against a measure calling on the government to “take real action on jobs, affordable accommodation, rising energy and water bills, and the costs of travel to work.”

At every turn, Jo Swinson was complicit in the coalition government’s plans to make life in Britain ever more miserable for the many, whilst making things easy for the few. And if anyone wants to protest and say she voted as she did because she was in the government at the time, I say that makes her even worse. At least the Tories believed in their cruelty. Swinson is nothing more than a desperate careerist, intent on slugging her way up the ranks of the political establishment so she can have her turn at the top. If that’s admirable, then Boris Johnson is admirable. Find me a liberal willing to say that.

If you couldn’t tell already, I’m not impressed by Swinson, and I don’t think you should be either. Her appeal to moderates is weak because she’s no moderate. She’s not even in the centre of politics. If Jo Swinson is anything, she’s a Tory dressed in yellow, making a pretence at being somewhere on the left. On all issues, Swinson either stands for nothing, or stands for the policies of one of the softer Tories.

What’s more, her desperate attempts to be politically savvy are about as effective as those of Matteo Salvini in Italy. For those not keeping up with our Mediterranean friends, Salvini pulled the plug on his own government in the hopes of forcing elections that would sweep his party to power. As it happened, the opposition formed a new government, closing the gap left by his absence and leaving him high, dry, and looking rather foolish. In that same way, believing herself to be right on the cusp of power, Swinson has refused to support any sort of left-wing government. Apparently she exists in a different world in which Labour and the Lib Dems are neck and neck.

This next bit is just for Swinson supporters. Hello you. Now go on and bring up the poll. You know the one, we’ve all seen it. The YouGov poll that put Labour in fourth place. If you’re particularly savvy, you might even bring up the second poll that put the Lib Dems ahead. For my part, I’ll show you the eleven polls since then that put Labour ahead.

Apart from her voting record, there’s no reason to think Jo Swinson could ever come to power at all. She likes to think she’s viable, to the point where she, as the BBC put it, “dismissed the view that the Liberal Democrats were unlikely to win more than 300 seats.” Well, good for her. Might I remind them of a place called reality, where they have a grand total of 18 MPs, only twelve of which have actually been elected under the party banner. They fell short of Labour, the Brexit Party and even the Tories in the Peterborough by-election since. By all means, their performance at the European elections was remarkable, but UKIP stomped ahead to victory in 2014, winning twice as many seats as the Lib Dems did this year, yet never managed to gain a single seat in the Commons.

Jo Swinson isn’t a bad person. She just doesn’t have a noble instinct in her body. Neither does she have any real chance of coming to power. Most importantly, she has no new ideas. She is not the saviour Britain wants, nor the one it deserves. She’s one more politician. Not even one of the good ones. Her entire career has been marked by obsessive party loyalty, which finally paid off when she won the party leadership contest. From there, she has made grand statements about her potential to take more than half of the Commons in one election. Meanwhile, she has ruled out cooperation in any way.

These are not the marks of the leader. They are the marks of cynical power-grabbing at worst, and incompetence at best. When, like Change UK, Swinson’s promise has been wrung dry and she is replaced in the media limelight by some new challenging moderate, I will not shed a tear for her. Nobody will. When like Farron before her she lays her career to rest, and when like Clegg she eventually scuttles off to made a fortune attending meetings with shady corporate entities, there will be no salute. No grand speeches. Perhaps a derisory wave to say, “goodbye, and thanks for nothing.”