I guess they just dont offer the things voters are looking for atm. The Tories have usurped the Leave voters for the most part, while Corbyn is mostly drawing voters to Labour because of his leftist rhetoric on the welfare state and the labor market. The Lib-Dems are staunchly pro-EU and pro-globalization, and at the same time they are standing for libertarian views on welfare and labor market.

All across western democracies, the pendulum is swinging to the right on issues of immigration, globalization, internationalism, and to the left on issues of welfare, labor market and such. The Lib-Dems are at the opposite end of it. What they are standing for just isnt in high demand at the moment.

the pendulum is swinging back to normal you mean

there were times, when social democrats were protecting the border and warning against unrestricted mass migration
that was when left actually tried to look out for the working class and realized that a strong national state is needed for their policy

thank god a man like helmut schmidt didnt have to endure his old party turning into a deranged bunch of mass migration fanatics

When were those times exactly?

During the 50's and 60's, when mass amounts of Southern Europeans went to immigrate to Northern Europe for labour? Or during the 70's and 80's, when Turkish and Moroccan immigrants started coming in in great numbers to work?

And if you're talking about before those times, I'm not necessarily sure whether the policies in those time are adaptable to the modern society we have now. Especially with regards to how much smaller the world has become.

Clegg got 23% of the votes because young people came out in droves to support a charismatic, young leader that promised the abolition of tuition fees, and was starkly juxtaposed from the then Blairite government led by Gordon Brown.

The resulting hung parliament paved the way for the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government, which was dominated by the Tories and was reflected in the coalition's austerity policies and, even more importantly, the tripling of tuition fees from £3000 p/y to £9000. Young lib dem voters felt betrayed.

Fast forward to 2015: Ed Miliband leads a Labour party that is firmly left wing, a feat that hasn't been accomplished since Michael Foot in the 80's. Cameron, for all his faults, has done partly what he set out to do in 2010 and offers a reliable status quo option, even for centre-left voters that thought Miliband was a goof and not prime minister material (and there were many). So there were plenty of reasons for Lib Dems to lose their young base and have voters snatched from both sides of the political spectrum. The resulting outcome of that election was the complete destruction of the lib dems.

In the 2017 general election, lib dem leader Tim Farron was caught up in a huge scandal regarding his attitude towards homosexuals. Voting for an evangelical christian that refused to say gay sex isn't a sin didn't go down too well with young voters here.

To answer your question in light of the above - Corbyn is an extremely charismatic and relatable leader that most young people are drawn to, it's no surprise he holds onto the young vote despite many of his hard left cultists preferring the staunchly pro-EU stance of the lib dems. The lib dems have a glaring issue in their party resulting from those with centrist libertarian views (Maajid Nawaz, for example) and those further to the left. Under Vince Cable they'll lose some of the former's support. In addition, as our German friend touched upon, centre and centre left voters that make up the majority of the electorate are alienated by an open border policy.

This post was edited by dro94 on Jul 4 2018 12:22pm

thats a good point, i am talking about the time from the seventies to the early nineties mostly

the idea for the migrants that were invited back in the day was different though

there was a massive demand for extra workers and they were supposed to be GUEST workers

it was a huge mistake to not send them back and the former social democrat chancellor schmidt, whom i mentioned before, did admit as much

This post was edited by ampoo on Jul 4 2018 02:52pm

Two Britons poisoned with Novichok nerve agent near where Russian spy was struck down

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-police-critical/two-britons-poisoned-with-novichok-nerve-agent-near-where-russian-spy-was-struck-down-idUSKBN1JU05A






Curiouser and curiouser.

I wouldnt call the European societies of the 70s and 80s "pre-modern". In the grand scheme of things, nothing too fundamental has changed since then.



nice background info, thx for this post!

one thing though: IMHO, corbyn isnt thaaaat charismatic. what sets him apart from most other politicians is authenticity/credibility. In a time of exuberant cynicism and opportunism with regard to everything political, a guy who has been saying the same things for 30 years without having bent over for the donor class is a rarity, and if those things the guy has been saying all along are suddenly becoming curiously relevant in the wake of the great recession, he will draw voters in droves. this description fits both corbyn and bernie sanders, who for this very reason are the most (electorally) successful far-left politicians in western democracies in a long long time.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jul 4 2018 05:29pm

Thanks for the input, very insightful post.



Well, it's not such a universal trend. Over the last year, countries like France and SK adopted centrist governments that favour greater international integration. Here in Spain the centrist and strongly pro-EU party C's would likely double their results, according to polls.

I dont know about SK, but in France, Macron got very very lucky. The first round of the presidential election was very close, with each of the four major candidates finishing at around 20-25%. He was somewhat lucky to get into the runoff, and he was very lucky to draw the Front National candidate as his opponent in the runoff. Moreover, the front-runner Francois Fillon from Les Republicains was consumed by a last-minute corruption scandal. If not for this scandal, it would be Fillon sitting the Élysée Palace right now, not Macron. Macron was the stopgap solution to voters who neither wanted Marine Le Pen as president, nor wanted to become Germany 2.0 (with respect to the refugee situation) under one of the leftist candidates.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jul 5 2018 05:09am