Leader: Centre-left politics a little too crowded for Scottish Lib Dems

hese are unhappy times to be a Scottish Liberal Democrat. The party’s MSP ranks were scythed down in May’s Scottish parliamentary elections. Its leader in the Scottish Parliament, Willie Rennie, can now hold meetings with his colleagues in the back of a taxi. Where his predecessors could bask in the limelight at the party’s UK federal conference as ministers in government, he has to make do with popping up at a fringe meeting.

The man he followed as Scottish leader, Tavish Scott, ascribes this sorry state to the decision by the Westminster parliamentary party to go into coalition with the Conservatives after the 2010 general election. Coupled with the abandonment of the party’s pledge not to raise tuition fees, the near wipe-out in May was pretty much inevitable.

Mr Scott is not vengeful about this. He fully recognises the force of political circumstances in which his Westminster colleagues found themselves and the logic of the choice they made. As an “Orange Book” Liberal – one of those who supported the greater economic liberalism championed by that 2004 book – he might well have made the same choice himself had he been an MP. Thus, his reflections on the consequences are rueful and sanguine rather than angry and bitter.

But now Mr Rennie and his little band have some hard thinking to do. Is there a place for Lib Dems in modern Scottish politics? And if so, what kind of place is it?

It could be argued they are paying a delayed price for failing to define themselves, widely and clearly, when they had the chance in the first eight years of the Scottish Parliament. The party gained electoral strength in the 1980s and 1990s through strong local constituency parties running strong local campaigns – what connected them was the belief in a Scottish Parliament and proportional representation.

But once achieved, with the establishment of the parliament and then the introduction of PR to local government elections, what then was the role, or indeed the point, of Lib Dems apart from PR for Westminster?

This question, in our view, has never been satisfactorily answered. But now there is an opportunity to do so on the centre-right of politics. The Lib Dems, especially in Scotland, have always regarded themselves as a centre-left party. But this is crowded territory, occupied by Labour and the SNP.

It might be argued the Scottish electorate is generally perceived to be centre-left with enough room for three parties. An alternative view is it only became so because of hostility to Mrs Thatcher’s brand of Conservatism, and that centre-right voters have wandered the spectrum ever since, finding shelter with the Lib Dems, then New Labour and now the SNP.

Now the Scottish Tories are going through the same self-analysis via a fractious leadership election, there is a prospect of fluidity on the centre-right. Can Mr Rennie compete for that ground? He has little to lose.