‘No truth’ in Vince Cable Lib Dem leadership pact, says Jo Swinson
10 min read
She may have decided against a run for her party’s leadership, but Jo Swinson is ready to stand up and be counted as the Liberal Democrats rebuild. She talks to Kevin Schofield
Two years after losing the seat she had held for a decade, Jo Swinson was moving on with her life.
She had set up her on consultancy business, was doing some public speaking, had a part-time role with the Advertising Standards Agency and was nearly finished writing a book about the inequality of power between men and women, and what can be done about it.
Then, on Tuesday, April 18, everything changed. Standing on the steps of Number 10, Theresa May informed the country that, despite repeatedly insisting that she had no plans to do so, she was calling a snap general election.
As soon as she heard the news, Swinson was in no doubt that she wanted to win back her home constituency of East Dunbartonshire from the SNP’s John Nicolson.
“After the Brexit vote last June I was distraught about the future of the country, and when that morphed into the threat of a second independence referendum and the United Kingdom itself being at risk, being out of parliament sitting on the sidelines, I just found intensely frustrating,” she says.
“There were these big issues that I wanted to get stuck into and do my best to influence. It was a very swift, straightforward decision that I was going to stand again and I was determined to win that seat back.”
Nicolson’s majority of just 2,167 gave Swinson cause for optimism, but coming so soon after her bruising defeat in 2015, she was taking nothing for granted.
“My position on independence was at one with two-thirds of the constituency, and on Europe it was three-quarters,” she says. “There were two forces that didn’t exactly give me great odds in 2015 – we had the Lib Dem massacre and the SNP tsunami. As a Scottish Liberal Democrat MP my chances weren’t that great. This time round, neither of those factors were in play in the same way.”
She was right to be quietly confident. Nicolson became one of the 21 SNP MPs to lose his seat on the night, and Swinson’s majority of 5,339 was the largest she has enjoyed since first winning the seat in 2005.
The election in Scotland was almost a separate contest than in the rest of the UK, with the constitution once again taking centre stage, specifically Nicola Sturgeon’s call for a second independence referendum. Put simply, if you supported her you voted SNP, if not you were better off backing the pro-Union party most likely to defeat them.
Swinson says: “There was a lot of tactical voting, but that said the Labour and Conservative share of the vote went up, so it wasn’t just that. There was also a switch from the SNP to the Lib Dems in East Dunbartonshire.
“Part of that was about indyref, but some people felt uncomfortable about the emergence of a one party state. Also, the SNP have been in power for a decade in Scotland and can’t get away from their record on issues like education. “
So after a brief hiatus, is it good to be back on the green benches? “It’s great to be back,” Swinson declares. “I am enjoying it hugely and I suppose I come back with renewed energy and vigour, having made a very conscious choice that this is what I wanted to do.”
Swinson does concede, however, that things are “very different” from when she was last an MP in 2015, not least because she was then a minister in the Coalition government. Now she is a humble backbencher in a parliamentary party made up of just 12 MPs. That does not mean that she is powerless, though.
She points to Stella Creasy’s success in forcing the government to pay for women from Northern Ireland to have their abortions paid for by NHS England as an example of how, in a hung parliament, opposition MPs are far more powerful than is usually the case.
“That to me was a really pivotal moment because it shows what can be achieved in a parliament where the maths are very different than either of the other parliaments I’ve served in,” she points out. “Parliament can be in control if MPs of different parties are prepared to work together, and that includes Conservative MPs. That’s an exciting difference about this parliament.”
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Politics being the utter madhouse that it is at the moment also meant that in the space of less than two months, Swinson went from being an ex-MP trying to forge a career outside politics to being the favourite to be her party’s next leader following Tim Farron’s resignation.
However, despite being able to call on the support of many of her colleagues, the 37-year-old decided now was not the right time to take on the job.
She explains: “I was very clear it didn’t feel like the right thing to do. That is a job that is absolutely all-encompassing. Being a Member of Parliament takes over your life. You structure all of your personal life, family responsibilities, seeing friends, around your job. Taking on the leadership of a political party is a whole other level of responsibility and if you want to take it on you have to be 110% clear that that’s what you’re wanting to do. I took time to think about it and to seek advice, but I don’t think at any point my instinct was to do it. You often know in your gut what the right thing to do it.”
She was, however, appointed deputy leader to another returning MP, 74-year-old Vince Cable, a move which raised suspicions that a deal had been done for her to take over the top job before the next election.
“There was some pretty poorly informed journalism,” Swinson insists. “There’s no truth in that.”
She won’t be drawn on whether the next Lib Dem leader should be a woman (ie her), but concedes it is important for young girls to have high-profile role models. The subtext is pretty clear.
“As a feminist, do I want political parties to be led by women when they haven’t before? Yes,” she says. “I was pleased that the Prime Minister is a woman, and that in Scotland the First Minister is a woman. I have big differences with both of them, but girls growing up today look at politics and it doesn’t really cross their mind. I believe role models are important, but I’ve never been in favour of tokenism, so it needs to be the right choice for the party as well.”
The Lib Dems’ record on female representation is fairly grim. Aside from Sarah Olney’s brief sojourn as MP for Richmond, they had no women MPs at all in the last Parliament. To rectify matters, the party introduced all-women shortlists for the first time – something which the Jo Swinson’s younger self would not have approved of. In 2001, she attended the Lib Dem conference in a bright pink t-shirt declaring: “I am not a token woman.” And in 2009, she wrote on Lib Dem Voice: “I believe we can prove that it is possible to achieve gender balance without resorting to positive discrimination.”
But after the change of tack helped deliver four female Lib Dem MPs in June, Swinson admits she has now had a change of heart. “I’ve changed my view on that. I still think they’re not ideal and I’d rather not have them, and I believe that they shouldn’t be necessary, but my personal experience over 15 years of trying to create greater representation for women at anything like the pace we needed to, is that it’s not taken seriously enough by the right people.
“It’s on the list of important things, but not at the top of the list of urgent things. We’ve done a lot better this time around, but we’re still a long way from equality.”
Increasing the number of female Lib Dem MPs, or indeed MPs of any gender, will be nigh-on impossible unless the party manages to break the current Tory/Labour hegemony. With both parties currently polling in the 40s, the much-trumpeted Lib Dem fightback appears to be going nowhere.
There is no doubt that one of the biggest challenges facing the party is how to win back the younger voters who flocked to the Jeremy Corbyn banner in June, attracted by, among other things, his pledge to scrap tuition fees.
The very mention of the phrase is like Kryptonite to Lib Dems, especially those who – like Swinson – served in the Coalition government. Can those voters ever be won back or are they gone for good?
“There’s no doubt [tuition fees] were very damaging, probably more on the trust issue than on the nuts and bolts of the policy,” she says. “The Conservatives are now dismantling the progressive and fair parts of the policy, getting rid of grants and bursaries and making it much more difficult for people from low income backgrounds.
“I don’t accept that somehow that’s a group to be written off. I think our message of hope, of internationalism and of being pro-EU is one which is very attractive to young people.”
“Jeremy Corbyn had a good election and there was lots that was attractive about his messaging, far less so about the policy. Nobody seriously thought he had a possibility of entering Number 10. It would be different in a future election, when that policy platform would be looked at in much more detail. There were a lot of people who voted Labour who did so with a heavy heart – they didn’t like what the Conservatives were offering on an extreme Brexit, they looked at FPTP and concluded that they had to vote Labour, even though they didn’t like the fact that Labour had signed up for Brexit as well. So I don’t think that vote should be seen as an endorsement of everything they stood for.”
As well as equality issues, Swinson says she wants to use her senior role within the party to campaign on climate change and better corporate governance, as well as focusing on her foreign affairs portfolio.
Inevitably, however, it is Brexit which will dominate this parliament, and quite possibly the next one. Voters blew a pretty resounding raspberry in the face of Tim Farron’s insistence that to stop the UK quitting the EU, they had to vote Lib Dem. Swinson says she still believes that was the correct strategy, and should not be dropped for short-term political gain.
“If you think Brexit will be a disaster for the country, which is my fear, then I don’t really see how you can in all conscience stand on a policy platform that doesn’t give the country the opportunity to step back from that precipice,” she says.
“You come into politics to try to create a better society, so if there’s something you believe is fundamentally wrong and is going to wreck that vision, then I think you’ve got to stand up and be counted. That’s what we did and that’s what we’ll continue to do.”
It’s a bold declaration, and one which could well end up defining whether Jo Swinson’s second bite at the political cherry ends in success or failure.
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