Thanks for the response. My comment was aimed in general terms, not with any specific individuals in mind, though it was raised as a rallying call for those with real local experience. You are obviously the best placed to consider your own merits against that of other candidates.

However, I would clearly say that if you’ve been a Lib Dem Councillor for 25 years and probably a Lib or Soc Dem longer than that, from my viewpoint, you would be just the sort of person we need in parliament. The ability to “analyse significant issues and contribute to the political life of the nation” is doubtless important, but we all know of well meaning grand schemes that have been an embarassing failure due to a lack of eye for detail. A prime example would be the desire to make the Post Office more profitable – which due to incompetent government target setting resulted in the closure of multiple “Little Snodbury sub-post offices”. People who have lived and campaigned at the sharp end for years know this; those who consider themselves to be deep thinkers may be good at what they do, but they often miss the point that any good intention can be messed up by insufficient planning, monitoring and control over what the people they give the job to actually do.

My saying that I (40 year resident, 25 year councillor etc) was an inferior candidate to the “outsider” we selected was not “undue modesty”. It was factual.

At the heart of my concern is that our obsession with “localness” could see us putiing forward [and perhaps electing] inferior MPs.

As I said in my original article, I’d quite like to have an MP who can analyse significant issues and contribute to the political life of the nation – even if they haven’t “campaigned to save the Little Snodbury sub-post office”.

1) A truly local candidate wins substantially more votes;
2) We didn’t have a truly local candidate in Henley, we had one for the General election and some misguided people chose someone else who wasn’t local (Oh yes and if any party member wants to debate the legal meaning of words like “local” they are part of the problem, because voters know the old saying “Argue the facts; if the facts don’t work argue the (meaning of) words, and if the words don’t work, pound the table and shout like hell!”)
3) We lost (very badly).

Q.E.D.

Crewegwyn makes an interesting point, if the best local candidates don’t want to stand, it is obviously a problem. There could be a million and one reasons why they don’t, but not thinking they are up to it, is probably undue modesty. We (i.e. the Liberal Democrats) need people like that in Westminster. There are too many lawyers, barristers and (sadly for us, because most of ours are very good) ex public schoolboys there already.

I’d say that in Crewe it was useful being from nearby (as both Elizabeth and Edward Timpson were) but it wasn’t vital.

In Hartlepool, I think we did lose out though because the Labour candidate was local and Jody Dunn lived all of 15 miles away!

In Sheffield, the majority of councillors do not live in their ward and so not being local does not usually make a difference. However, when we had all-outs and people had three votes the local candidates did noticeably better than those who weren’t.

The thing that can beat being local though is being well known. Back in 2000 when I was a councillor in Derby I was re-elected in the all-outs ahead of a local candidate because I’d already represented the area for two years and she hadn’t, even though I lived nowhere near.

On the whole I think being local matters much more if people feel that where they live is remote or off the beaten track. If you feel more in the centre of things then it matters less. That should probably guide us on whether we use being local as a campaign theme or not.

HOwever IIRC (the by-elections literature website links to that campaign are broken) we didn’t make such an issue of localness as we did in Crewe

I think you’re entirely right. Localness [whatever that may mean] is clearly “a good thing”, but not the only thing.

I was part of the approval and selection process in Crewe & Nantwich. Ironically, the candidate we chose – who was derided by some as “an outsider” “parachuted in” “West Midlands councillor” – lived closest to the constituency of all the applicants!

That she lived close, and had a record of action in a neighbouring authority, was probably a factor in her selection, but by no means the clinching argument.

Perhaps our campaigning would have been “easier” if we had chosen the leader of the Liberal Democrat Group on the Borough Council :-

40+ years a local resident; has lived in Crewe and its rural hinterland
25 years experience as a borough councillor
noted local campaigner
went to two local schools [and no, not because he was expelled from the first!]
worked for 20 years in a major local industry [the railway]
etc etc etc

But he would have been streets adrift of the person we actually chose in terms of doing the job of being the local MP, and isn’t that the key question ????

p.s. the group leader in question won’t sue ; it’s me!

For clarity, I was not arguing that we should disregard local cerdentials where they exist.

BUT

I am strongly against “inventing” localness – it won’t work and will end up with us, frankly, looking shifty;

If our candidate doesn’t have a “local” qualification then for goodness sake talk about his/her other attributes instead [presumably they have strengths or why did we pick them ???].

Play to your strengths!

But I am sad that the local issue has now come round and bitten us, and I think that we should acknowledge that public debate is all the poorer as long as it is constrained by the ‘where are you from’ question.

One suspects that the previously selected Lib Dem candidate for the next election, who was not selected, would also have had a higher starting profile. What happened to her? Ought not PPCs to be automatically the by-election candidate?

The Tories chose a local candidate because they knew it would help them win. Ask Chris Grayling.

I spot the reference to the Midlothian Campaign. I feel its worth remembering Glasgow Kelvin and Crosby as well- neither Jenkins nor Williams were local.

To the question of whether we have been hoist by our own petared the answer is a resounding yes.

I’ve never got the who ‘local’ thing myself. I mean, if it an potential MP had to face a private sector interview, whether they were ‘local’ would only come into it when asked how they’d get to work because their ability is more important.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some in the party who would rather a candidate was local than good at the job.

1. We are as bad as anyone, if not worse, in running these sort of campaigns

2. We pioneered hyper localist community politics which makes where you live more relevent.

3. you can’t get away from the fact that we have a geographicaly based constituiency system. If localities are the basis of democratic legitimacy then surely the localness of who you elect is a legitimate issue?

4. realistically this is much less of an issue in urban areas with mobile populations and where seat boundaries make litle sense often. However in more rural areas, where social stability is far higher surely its upto voters what they do and don’t value in a candidate?

5. While these comments make perfect sense in the context of By Election campaigns and some of the nonsence that goes on in them what about the finished product. Does anyone really think the problem with the current set up is that we have too many “Local Champions” in the Commons and not enough career politicans?

I did 8 years as a Councilor in an Inner City ward I lived in. I could counte on the fingers of one hand the public sector leaders who lived in it or anywhere near it. If just 50% of the relavent politicans,civil servants,senior police officers etc had to live in such communitis then a hell of a lot of intractable problems would become tractable over night