Remain and Revoke hasn't worked for the Lib Dems. So where do they go now?

Switching from revoking Brexit to rejoining the EU would seem like the next logical step for the most pro-European party. But without building a core vote, the Lib Dems will never break through the ceiling they've hit

Being the party of Remain, then Revoke, did not go as expected.

Following the disastrous 2015 and 2017 general elections and the Brexit vote, this was the Lib Dems’ chance to finally build the core vote that they've lacked for so long.

Surely the most fervent Remain party stood to win many votes from “the 48%” and many seats around the country. It looked like it in the summer, reaching 24% in some polls and with the likes of Chuka Umunna making heady predictions of hundreds of seats. The party looked to have found a winning strategy for the first time since “Cleggmania”.

This campaign, and the reality we woke up to Friday morning, is totally different. The Lib Dems are back down to 11 seats and having won 12% of the vote – which, while better that the 8% of the last two general elections, is still way off the 23% won in 2010.

Much has already been said about the role Jo Swinson played in all this. But expecting a new leader to change everything would be to paper over the cracks.

The Lib Dems have now fought two general elections on the basis of being the most pro-European party; both times, they’ve seen poor results. Prior to this election, a Conservative win and the passing of the Withdrawal Agreement, which will surely follow, was widely assumed to mean the Lib Dems would become the party of Rejoin. Now even that seems uncertain.

One of the first questions is what route to rejoining the EU the party would advocate, and where it would seek a mandate to do it.

Since last September’s conference, the Lib Dems have advocated revoking Article 50 without a second referendum if it were to win a (highly unrealistic) majority. That seems to have backfired during the campaign, being vulnerable to the charge of being undemocratic, as Swinson’s appearance in front of a hostile crowd on Question Time illustrated.

A promise to rejoin on the same basis could be equally vulnerable.

Perhaps a more likely gambit would be to advocate a further referendum to rejoin the EU. A public so tired of the Brexit debate would surely not be enthused about doing it all again in reverse, but that may change if Boris delivers too hard a Brexit or the end of the transition period results in a chaotic no deal.

Regardless, the rationale has always been that running as a hardline pro-European party will give the more fervent Remainers a reason to vote Lib Dem. The Remain and Revoke strategy failed because the number of people it appealed to turned out to be too small.

Yet to change tack now would look insincere. So is there a valid alternative?

In the aftermath of the 2016 referendum, the Remain movement had to decide whether to advocate a reversal of Brexit or a close post-Brexit relationship to the EU. What became the People’s Vote campaign ultimately opted to advocate Remain via a second referendum, but there was a time when it advocated a “soft Brexit”. The Lib Dems could now move back to that position.

In practice, that would mean rejoining various EU institutions piecemeal after the new Conservative government leaves them. But that wouldn’t solve the party’s more fundamental problem of how to cut through to voters.

A Soft Brexit stance risks squandering what support the party has attracted from hardcore Remainers. It’s also likely to overlap with Labour’s evolving approach. If the Lib Dems are indistinguishable, or too close to, Labour on their key issue, there’ll be no reason for voters to choose them.

For now, the party seems stuck. In the short term, it will most likely take a Rejoin position so it can stay distinctive and not appear flighty. Yet either path, Rejoin or Rethink, will run into the same problem the Lib Dems have long grappled with: how to articulate the “one big reason” people should vote for them.

Labour and the Conservatives have clear historical positions on the bread-and-butter economic issues on which most elections are fought. The Lib Dems do not. On identity politics, it seems ever clearer on which side of our culture wars each of the Labour and the Conservatives will fight. For the Lib Dems, it’s not so clear.

Whether it is Rejoin or Rethink, finding a way to cut through is still the Liberal Democrats’ greatest challenge.