Apart from Liberal Vision nobody seems to have made an issue of the fact that we are third to the Conservatives in many of our target Labour seats. Therefore they are only targets if the Conservatives are weakening which is not the case.

The idea of targeting 50 Labour seats is a poor idea because it will lead to the proposal of ideas targeted at illiberal labour voters and will be ineffective and simply alienate the voters we do need to win over. We should be targeting liberal minded floating voters of all camps – particularly Conservatives where we have sitting MP’s.

I attended the fringe meeting on the Monday – it was excellent and I hope to see more of the same from Liberal Vision.

I think you’ve misunderstood how we decided to exclude local election results. From what I can glean from your critique, we have done the exact opposite of what you criticise us for.

The problem with a 2003 result of, say, LibDem 1250 Tory 300 and a 2007 result of the LibDem being returned unopposed is that you need to exclude BOTH results. This is what we have done. Otherwise, the 2007 figures look a lot worse for the LibDems COMPARED TO 2003. I can’t see any other credible or viable way to compare 2003 with 2007. This ensures that the same contested areas are being analysed and the swing is therefore valid.

There is a detailed explanation in the pamphlet about how we calculate multi-member wards and it is completely wrong to say we “just gave up”. I think the mechanism we selected is fair and reasonable – particularly in comparing the LibDems to the Tories, which is the main aim of the pamphlet. (if we were trying to compare LibDems to Greens, we might have used a different approach).

I’m not quite sure how/why you think Gordon Brown is a tax cutter. He is exactly the opposite in my opinion.

I have some sympathy with you on “narrative”. In fact, Liberal Vision’s pamphlet deliberately focused on message and narrative rather than policy. We deliberately didn’t argue for tax cuts of £15bn or £25bn or outline exactly how these would be delivered. If you’ve read the pamphlet’s conclusions, you’ll see it is all about making a narrative/message that is compelling. Obviously, having a budget that adds up is crucial too – but that’s a project for another time!

On the smoking ban etc., I don’t agree that our philosophical approach shows that we don’t understand what liberalism is. Fortunately, the meeting itself managed to avoid this sort of patronising name-calling, and started to tease out some interesting differences about what constitutes “other regarding” behaviour and the extent to which freedoms should be based on property rights. I still take the view that if smoking is other-regarding behaviour then there are a whole host of other activities that need to be banned (and probably long before we get to smoking in pubs).

I think your view that its easy to get publicity for very little work is way off the mark. The work put in to get Liberal Vision off the ground was extensive. Even if you don’t like the methodology we used in analysing the local elections, I defy you to compile something similar (or better) without many, many hours of work.

I think the key reasons we got so much publicity were:

(a) good media planning and communications
(b) picking topics that were exciting, interesting and controversial (both fringe meetings were packed to the rafters with around 100 people attending each one, even though we didn’t offer food or refreshments)
(c) putting our case in a numerical as well as a philosophical context. In both the Cameron Effect and the liberal league table, we included a raft of riders, and accepted that we were not presenting something that is an “exact science”, but I think we helped to trigger a useful debate.

Furthermore, where thay have no data or whenever complicating factors such as other parties or multi-member wards they have simply given up and and gone for figures that are easy to calculate rather than for -figures that are more meaningful.

A tax cutting message is not always a vote winner, Gordon Brown has been cuttting taxes, it hasn’t won him many votes.

Context, narrative and other factors are important.

Anyone like Liberal Vision, who seeks to catergorise how liberal you are on whether you oppose the smoking ban doesn’t understands Liberalism.

It merely confirms that anyone can set themselves up as a pressure group or think tank and gets loads of publicity for very little effort.