Before I relaunched my faltering blogging career with the imaginatively titled ‘The Charlotte Gore Blog’, I had another blog with the title, “Do What You’re Told: Don’t Vote Lib Dem” which was based on the idea that if you want to get through to people who might be naturally occuring potential Lib Dem voters, you have to remember what such people might be like in real life and pitch your message accordingly. I fancied myself as an amateur spin doctor or communications strategist of some kind… laughable, in hindsight, but it kept me busy.

Anyway, I started the blog by posting something along these lines…

Happily my days of playing amateur spin doctor are long since over, but I can’t help but notice that “Do what you’re told: Don’t vote Lib Dem” is starting to become a bit of a ‘thing’, at least on Twitter.  Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) didn’t help:

Frankly I’m tempted to vote Lib Dem now. If we let the Telegraph and Mail win, well, freedom and Britain die.

My friend Stuart Sharpe complained earlier,

I actually quite object to the assumption that a vote for anyone other than the Lib Dems is ‘doing what the media says’.

The inherent “Fuck You!” to the system of voting Lib Dem appears to be the dominant message, and the more the Big Two and the Newspapers try to say, “Don’t vote lib dem!!” the more this cycle of stubborn resistance is reinforced.

But, see, isn’t the idea of voting for a party just because you’re told not to as bad as being told how to vote, really? Isn’t it equally irrational?

My feeling is that it’s not the message but an emerging sense of an ‘identity’ for Lib Dem voters: They see themselves as free thinking, fair minded, socially liberal and fun loving. They’re willing to try new things and listen to new ideas. They’re not interested in partisan politics or the “Punch and Judy Show” of Westminster, and have no particular attachment to any sort of vested interests or lobbyists.

It’s not an identity based on class, which is why it’s not quite as easy to define as the identities for Labour voters or Conservative voters, but it’s an identity nonetheless. And tools like Facebook groups and Twitter appear to give that identity something to cling onto that’s not geographical.

It’s not that this message is “working” and that people really are going to vote Lib Dem to tell Murdoch where to stick it – it’s just that this kind of message attracts the attention of those kind of people that the Lib Dem need if they’re going to grow.

Identity politics may generally have broken down over the last 50 years, and it may be an absolutely terrible way to decide who to vote for, but I can’t help but feel the success of the Lib Dems in this election might be is down to this, not policy.