Chris Huhne writes: Don't underestimate the Lib Dems

6.40.05pm UTC (GMT +0000) Fri 5th Sep 2008

• THE new conventional wisdom at Westminster is that the Conservatives are heading for an overall majority at the next election, and that the Lib Dems are therefore bound to take a pounding.

On this view, the Lib Dems' fortunes are inextricably linked with Labour and we are supposed to lose seats as we did when the Conservatives won in 1951, 1970 and 1979. I don't believe a word of it. After each Liberal Democrat advance - in 1997, 2001 and now 2005 - the commentariat has written our obituary. But we went on to increase our seats at the next election. We can and will do the same again.

The politics, the party and the electoral arithmetic are all fundamentally different to the previous periods of Labour to Tory swing. Unlike 1979, we are not associated with the Lib-Lab pact propping up an unpopular Labour government or the Thorpe scandal. Unlike 1951 and 1970, we are major political players with 63 MPs instead of 6. We have a fifth of all councillors and control big cities like Liverpool, Newcastle and Sheffield.

Our poll ratings have recovered since the beginning of the leadership contest, when they averaged 13 %. We have recently averaged 17 %, better than at the same time of the electoral cycle in two of the last three parliaments. It is a good platform from which to make our usual advance during an election campaign when the media have to give us fair time.

The seductive danger of the conventional wisdom is that it was right once. The Lib Dems' electoral battlegrounds used to be overwhelmingly with the Conservatives even after 1997. As Professor John Curtice wrote then: "The Liberal Democrat party is still heavily dependent for its success on it being the Conservatives rather than Labour who are unpopular. Labour/Liberal Democrat contests barely exist. There are just seven seats where the Lib Dems came second and were within 30 % of Labour in first place".

All that has changed, which is why Nick Clegg recently announced a new targeting strategy to go after 50 Labour seats. As Professor Curtice pointed out in his analysis of the 2005 election, there is now a big electoral battlefield with Labour. We won 12 Labour seats in 2005, and can now win many more. We can now make gains from both Labour and the Tories.

Mr Curtice said: "These advances in Labour-held territory have two important implications for the party's future prospects. The first is that it is now significantly less vulnerable to any future swing from Labour to Conservative. Because hitherto the party's best prospects have been so heavily concentrated in Conservative territory, the party stood to suffer significant net losses if there was a swing from Labour to the Conservatives, even if its own vote held steady. Now this is far less the case".

Look at the electoral arithmetic of the new boundaries, and make that conventional assumption that the Tories win an overall majority. They would have achieved a 6.9 % swing from Labour, nearly half as large again as the biggest post-war swing to the Conservatives of 5.3 %. Such a big swing seems unlikely given that 1979 saw the winter of discontent, rubbish in the streets, and corpses unburied.

But let's play the swingometer game. A narrow overall majority of one for the Tories - if the Lib Dem vote stays the same - would mean Tory gains of 116 seats. But the net effect on the Lib Dems, if the same swing were repeated uniformly in every seat, would be a loss of 5 seats. We would win 57 instead of 62 seats last time. This is not, though, the end of the story. We would have arrived at this position by winning 8 seats from Labour, and losing 13 seats to the Tories. But would we? This fails to take into account our track record in defending our turf once we win it.

The Nuffield general election study said: "The party for whom the personal popularity of their incumbent appeared to matter most, however, was, as in previous elections, the Liberal Democrat party". The Lib Dem incumbency factor was worth an average of 6.6 % of the vote in 2005. Out of the 13 Lib Dem seats which the Tories would in theory win if they got an overall majority - including my own Eastleigh - 5 are being defended for the first time by new MPs who can expect the "incumbency bounce" to lift them out of danger. We would also win another seat nominally lost to the Tories due to boundary changes.

Because we have younger MPs, there is only one new seat which is more vulnerable because of a retiring incumbent. Even if we lost there, overall Tory gains from us would be cut from 13 to 8. Add back the gains from Labour and we would have the same number of MPs. There is everything still to play for at the next general election. Where we work we win, and everyone knows that Lib Dems work. Our opponents underestimate us at their peril.

• Chris Huhne is the Liberal Democrat MP for Eastleigh and shadow Home Secretary.

Related Link:

• Lib Dem Voice