TIM Farron claims his party are set for an unlikely revival next Thursday, despite just about every poll suggesting voters have deserted Willie Rennie.
Speaking on the campaign trail at a Cowdenbeath nursery with Rennie, Farron said the election would be “very positive” and that his party would be taking votes off the SNP.
“Wherever I go I’ve seen people moving to us, whether it be Aberdeenshire earlier in the week, Edinburgh last night or in Fife today.”
He continued: “The evidence on the ground, and I was in Aberdeenshire East three days ago, is lots of people who voted nationalist last May are voting Liberal Democrat this time.
“I think there is a real sense that the SNP are a poor administration, there is a definite cooling of nationalist support wherever I go, and the campaign that Willie has led here has been massively positive, focusing on the issues.”
He did admit that the party weren’t expecting “Rome to be built or rebuilt in a day,” but, he added: “I think people can see a point in voting for us that they perhaps couldn’t in the past, so I’m very optimistic about how things are going to go.”
According to the most recent TNS poll, the Liberal Democrats will lose two seats to take them down to a rump of three in the next Scottish Parliament.
Though, in fairness to the party, a separate Ipsos Mori poll earlier in the week suggested they would add a seat to take their total to six.
An SNP spokesman said: “It will be a long time before people in Scotland forget that the Lib Dems propped up the Tories for five years, inflicting austerity and the bedroom tax on Scotland. If Tim Farron plans to wait for a Lib Dem revival he shouldn’t hold his breath.”
Farron’s visit does mean that David Cameron is now the only UK party leader not to campaign in Scotland. As well as the Lib Dem chief, Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, the Greens’ Natalie Bennett and Ukip’s Nigel Farage have all headed north to back their candidates.
Ruth Davidson had previously said the Prime Minister was “slightly busy”.
“It’s my name on the ballot paper so I will be handling the Scottish election,” she said.
However, writing in The Times, Farron’s predecessor as leader of the Liberal Democrats Nick Clegg claimed his former Tory coalition partners “displayed little interest” in Scotland.
It was the Lib Dems, the former deputy prime minister claimed, who cared about devolution and were responsible for the Scotland Bill.
Clegg said: “Don’t be fooled by what has happened since the election – the new Scotland Act was drafted by Liberal Democrats in the Scotland Office before the election, based on the cross-party work of the Smith Commission.”
He said: “It was the Liberal Democrats who insisted that the ‘devo max’ reforms that we, the Conservatives and Labour had promised in the vow made shortly before the referendum would go ahead with no strings attached, instead of making them contingent on English votes as the Conservatives initially wanted.”
Cameron and George Osborne had hijacked the independence referendum to send “a clear message that the UK Government, and not the Scottish Government, was in charge”.
Clegg said: “Whenever Scotland was on the agenda, I saw time and time again how they sought to secure short-term political advantage before the long-term interests of Scotland and the Scottish people.”
A Scottish Conservative spokesman told The Times:
“The hypocrisy of the Lib Dems knows no bounds. Only weeks ago, Willie Rennie declared that the Lib Dems were now free to support independence in an attempt to win over SNP voters. Rather than fabricating nonsense from two years ago, they should explain that position first.
“The truth is that if Willie Rennie has had to draft in Nick Clegg to rescue their campaign, he is in deeper trouble than we thought.”
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