Mr Farron said: “The message here is very clear: we have the biggest space in politics open to us for a generation”.
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Economically, we campaign unequivocally for Britain’s membership of the world’s largest market, the European Union, and for global efforts to liberalise trade fairly.
“The Liberal Democrats will fill that space”.
Interestingly, at the time of writing 44% of respondents to the poll at the bottom of the page think that moderate Labour MPs should join the Liberal Democrats. Having had the result in May, against all the odds we matter more than we have done for a generation’.
He is now just one of eight Lib Dems MPs left at Westminster, a fraction of the 56 they boasted prior to May’s General Election.
Mr Farron, who has been in contact with disaffected Labour figures since Mr Corbyn’s election, played down suggestions of defections to his party, saying “we are not talking about that at all”.
“But I remember there wasn’t a single minute in the whole of the 1980s when the Tories were not in power”.
But he is expected to use the autumn conference, running at the BIC between Saturday and Wednesday, as a platform to continue what he has coined the Lib Dem “fight back”. Some of them are in other parties.
“I’ve had various unsolicited texts, some of them over the weekend, where I felt like I was being an agony aunt rather than anything else”, he said.
Sir Vince stated that the Labour party made a “catastrophic choice” and now it is stuck with a leader “totally out of touch” with its base, so it offers the Lib Dems “a way back” after election losses.
In a sign that he does not believe Labour can win the next election under Mr Corbyn, Mr Farron will say: “We once again see the prospect of a decade or more of Tory rule, and it fills us with dread”.
He said: “It certainly is not right that over a period of five years we end up accepting as many as Germany are taking in a weekend”.
He added: “Our duty is to claim the mantle of the credible progressive alternative to the Tories”.
The need for a “credible opposition has never been more obvious”, Mr Farron told supporters gathered in Bournemouth for their annual conference.
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Party activists had previously ruled out airport expansion in south-east England.
