Today there was an interesting post on the Lib Dem Voice website by  Iain Roberts which describes the way voters have deserted the Labour Party since 1997.

The anti-Lib Dem meme of choice on the opinion polls has been of voters deserting the party. Our opinion poll ratings are down compared to 6th May and it must be a disaster for the party which would, if many Labour activists’ fevered fantasies were to come true, disappear for good.

Except that idea’s looking more and more stretched.

The Independent runs a ComRes poll today showing the party’s poll rating up two percent to a very respectable 18%. If the poll is accurate, hundreds of thousands of voters have switched from the other parties to the Lib Dems in August – good news.

The dear old Indy thinks otherwise, of course, claiming that “four in ten Lib Dem voters would not vote for the party again”. There’s always a cloud to that silver lining, isn’t there.

Poll rating go up and down, and for the Lib Dems to be at 18% in ICM and ComRes, and seemingly rising in the polls during August – a time the party often slumps – is a good sign. 18% is a higher share of the vote than the party secured in 1992, 1997 or 2001 general elections.

Add that to the party’s good performance in local by-elections and the several thousand new members and there’s every reason to feel positive.

That’s not to say the party wouldn’t like to be higher in the polls – of course it would – wouldn’t everyone?

Labour would surely like to win back the more than one-in-five former Labour voters who, if we follow the Independent’s logic, have abandoned the party since 1997 as their poll rating has crashed from 43.2% to a catastrophic 34%.

Luckily for them, that logic is faulty. The claim of Labour losing all that support is accurate but tells us nothing useful about the party’s likely fortunes in the future.

Everything is not rosy for the Lib Dems. The party would like to be higher in the polls and is well aware of the need to carve out an independent identity within the Coalition and promote the many Lib Dem successes in Government.

But nor is there any disaster. 18% is a very reasonable place for the Lib Dems to be polling in ICM and ComRes polls in early September before the conference season and the other indicators are good. The feeling on the doorstep and in the ballot box from real voters up and down the country is a lot more positive than Labour would like us to believe.

Nothing comes easy for the Lib Dems. Not for us the safe seats for life and the people supporting the party simply because their grandparents did. We’ve always had to campaign for every vote, deliver all those leaflets and knock on all those doors.

That hasn’t changed, and won’t change in the near future. The old Lib Dem mantra “where we work, we win” remains as true now as ever.