Why aren’t MPs banging on about freedom, truth and justice? Theres no reason the liberals shouldn’t be delivering the most passionate speeches in parliament!

“The problem is, people who should be our core vote (the “ultra” Liberal, social liberals, Europhiles, “drawbridge down”) – are frequently younger and younger educated people who DON’T VOTE.”

This is where Lembit could have helped out. A bit of bloody razzmatazz and all that?

Suits don’t appeal to the young, at least not since the Beatles exchanged theirs for jeans and T-shirts.

The number of people (often my friends, actually) who tell me they’d vote for the Lib Dems if we were more Liberal would be worrying… Until I discover that they didn’t vote at the last election, the one before, or – in fact – ever. This is because they are young, and though I sound like a broken record for saying this, young people simply don’t vote. They just don’t. Ask the team in Manchester Central Ward what turnout was amongst the generally young, educated voters. In a target ward, where we and Labour tried REALLY hard to turn young people out.

Turnout was 15%!

I agree with a lot of the thrust of your initial argument – that we need a compelling message to motivate that large chunk of voters who are naturally inclined liberals.

However I’m with Hywel and Mark on the issue of what actually happened in 2004 and on the subject of targeting.

Firstly you are just plain wrong that ‘Activists were instructed not to mention Europe.’ I was running the South East campaign and I can assure you that a huge amount of effort went in to get activists to include material about the work of our MEPs in local literature. The results demonstrate that we did very well in the European ballot boxes and in the local elections where we did this. I was most closely involved in the campaign in Oxford where we topped the poll.

Secondly, whatever the ‘air war’, it is absolutely right that we concentrate the ‘ground war’ on target council seats. Work put in in target council seats effectively gives a double reward – more votes in the Europeans and more council seats won. These wards will also have a much larger number of people willing to consider giving us their vote in the Europeans anyway and a higher turnout. Regardless of the voting system we will still be fighting the elections with limited money and limited person hours. It is quite right that we target them at the places they will make the most difference.

I note that you quote Chris Davies as claiming that the tactics of the NW campaign ‘only’ added 1% to our vote. Well in the European campaign 1% caqn make a huge difference – we would have only won half the seats we did in the SE in 1999 with 1% fewer votes.

Now it may also be the case that improving the message could add more % than that, but that’s not a good reason to not gain the 1% from effective ground organisation too.

That’s true. However consider this in the context of what to do in a local and Euro combined election. Is there a significant group of people who would vote for us in a Euro election but not in a local election?

My view is no. Following on from that my view is that the best strategy is first of all to get as many Lib Dem local election voters to “the polls” as possible. Given that local election turnout is consistently higher than Euro election turnout it seems logical that local campaign messages would be the best to motivate people to turnout.

I don’t accept your contention that the 2004 elections were a disaster. Our vote went UP when there was a big non-aligned party vote (usually we suffer disproportionately when that is the case). How much better were we credibly likely to do?

Chris’s 1% point has been made before. It’s a bit of a distortion though. Our vote share in the NW went up by 4.1% – compared to 4.3% in the NE true. But we were also trying to gain a seat in the NE so I’m not convinced an analysis that “much more” was done in the NW would be borne out. The NE actually outpolled our 2001 General performance.

An area where very little was done would by my own of Yorkshire & the Humber where we went up by 1.1%. That suggest our “flawed” campaign in the NE & NW actually had a premium of +3%. Starting from around 11.5% that actually sounds pretty healthy.

None of this is to say that we shouldn’t critically examine the way we campaign in the Euros, in PR elections and particularly with list votes. In all three we underperform. The idea that there are senior campaigners unwilling to accept this is, frankly, nonsense. But if we chuck away the way we do do things we need to know that the alternatives are likely to be at least as effective.

And really there is very few practical alternative suggestions that I see being put forward other than a vague idea that the European election campaign should be “about Europe”. Whatever that means.

But lets get a bit devils advocate here – MEPs complain about the party ignoring Europe. Their website libdemmeps.org.uk has a section on “latest campaigns” with four videos. The most recent is undated, the others are dated Oct, Sept, March 2007.

When including MEP material in leaflets it’s very much a DIY operation – ie pick what the local party wants to say. No-one is attempting to set an agenda.

Where are our MEPs on shooting down the directive that lies behind the database proposals currently being battered by us in the Lords?

If the party is unwilling to produce material putting a strong European message why don’t the MEPs club together to employ one or more campaign staff and start producing some stuff. This is fundamentally how ALDC started

They bear out my point – that the Lib Dems (like all parties) tend to appeal to some groups more than others, that the party needs to plan its national strategy accordingly, and that it must accept that appealing to one target will unavoidably repel another.

The barrier to doing so is that, because the ‘we can win everywhere’ strategy is incoherent, no matter what target the party selects, there will always be a Lib Dem MP or councillor somewhere who can veto the party’s strategic choice on the grounds that “it won’t work on my patch”.

The leadership likes to talk of “tough choices”. Let’s get off the fence and make some.

But if you’re talking about using TV as a medium, & presumably you like blogs too, you may wish to look at the following tasty links:

http://tinyurl.com/55ryxr
http://tinyurl.com/5b2rfv
http://tinyurl.com/69opk7
http://tinyurl.com/6rh2fo
http://tinyurl.com/6pwxee

I very much hope you & others will read them & not get bored. You’ll thank me if you do

My point is – for the nth time – that the Lib Dems’ natural support – i.e. those people who most share our liberal values – are more likely to be found among people who are younger, better educated and more cosmopolitan than average.

That doesn’t mean that all young, educated and cosmopolitan people are liberal. It doesn’t mean that everyone else isn’t.

What it does mean is that, when it comes to the Lib Dems winning and consolidating a core vote – a prerequisite of national as opposed to ward-level success – this demographic is more promising than any other.

Your “best of all” of listening to people on the doorstep and aiming anything at them personally is fine as far as it goes, but it can work as an overall strategy only if (a) the party has enough manpower to canvass the entire electorate in person; (b) the party sticks purely to local issues and avoids making moral choices; and (c ) the party is in a position to make a bespoke offer to each individual.

When it comes to communicating values via the medium of television, your proposal is inadequate, to put it mildly.

http://tinyurl.com/5rx6xl
http://tinyurl.com/6mvtzj

I find it fascinating that the man who created MOSAIC wrote the text himself. I’m glad he did, & seemed to reolutely ignore his PR department, because there are some good laughs & a lot of information in amongst that 210 pages

We need to grow some balls, explain our support for the EU, explain where we think we should cooperate and where national control is important. And importantly why both of these will benefit the UK.

Also, in my opinion we should drop our support for adopting the Euro. Now is an opportune time, with a global financial crisis we can argue that it would be a risk too far.

MOSAIC is a very good broad-brush system, which is why salesmen (&, as we know, politicians). But you cannot expect the door to inevitably be answered by a walking cliche.

Best of all is to listen to people on the doorstep & aim anything at them personally. Leaflets can be generic for any given, defined area, but something more may be called for

I dare say that we could win over some BNP supporters if we put in enough effort. But why focus our efforts on them when there is more promising territory elsewhere?

You counsel against “ignoring” BNP voters but not against ignoring our natural support. It seems perverse to ignore more intelligent and cosmopolitan voters by pandering to xenophobic sentiments, which, for example, Make it Happen does.

The Lib Dems need to consolidate a base vote. The likeliest source for this vote is among people who are younger, better educated and more cosmopolitan than average – the evidence I marshalled in my original post makes an overwhelming case for this.

The party’s resources are limited. The term “lowest hanging fruit” is business jargon I would rather not use. Nonetheless it is a more profitable course of action to win the long-term allegiance of people who tend to share our values rather than expend effort where the yield is likely to be lowest.

Next year, we are faced with a choice of giving priority to the Euros or to the counties, and it is fairly obvious which choice we will make and why.

A pro-EU campaign theme could well bring pro-Europeans to our banner and boost our overall vote. But it might also have the effect of putting people off voting for us in the county polls.

The Lib Dems have never fought a decent Euro campaign. Remember 1989? Andy Ellis dismissed the election as “for Euro bores” and counselled a minimalist campaign. His advice was heeded and the result is history. Ellis turned from being a legend in his own lifetime to an unperson within the space of a week.

Do I have the answer? Nope.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. The target ward strategy patently does not work in Euro elections and it failed badly in this year’s London elections.

Chris Davies MEP, in his article in this September’s Liberator (http://www.liberator.org.uk/article.asp?id=146304069), said of his campaign in the North-West region in 2004: “Technically it was as good as it got”. Yet he estimates that the campaign added no more than 1% to the Lib Dem vote.

Michael Steed, in an analysis of the Lib Dem performance in the 2004 Euro elections (published in Liberator in March 2005, at http://www.liberator.org.uk/article.asp?id=47603928),
says: “In London, at any rate, there is litle sign that campaigning at borough or constituency level mattered much: hardly any cases where a borough’s performance cannot be predicted from the character of its population revealed in the 2001 census.”

The persistence in Cowley Street of pursuing clapped out techniques simply beggars belief. If this thinking predominates in the 2009 campaign – as Chris Davies warns in his article – the Lib Dems are bound to lose seats.

I think you also confuse concentrating on target wards with not mentioning Europe. So you just said, “the thrust of the party’s strategy in 2004 was to focus on target wards (using our traditional campaign techniques) and make the European elections subsidiary to that concern”.

I believe, based on the experiences of people like myself and Hywel who have run constituency-level campaigning in PR elections, that the best way of using our grassroots campaigning to maximise our vote in the PR list is to concentrate those efforts in our held/target wards. I’ve also seen people talk about how there is a better alternative, but when they’ve run such campagins and the votes are counted, I don’t see the evidence that this way does work better.

Far from encouraging people to concentrate their efforts on those areas being a way of neglecting a list PR election, it’s a way of maximising our vote in the list PR election.

You have to explain why our MEPs are still spitting blood about the conduct of the 2004 campaign – and why they are fighting hard to ensure that the 2009 campaign will not repeat those mistakes (see, for example, Chris Davies’s article in September’s Liberator (http://www.liberator.org.uk/article.asp?id=146304069).

And you have to explain why the party has yet to evolve a satisfactory strategy for PR and list elections, as our underwhelming performance in European elections, the London mayoral and assembly elections, and Scottish and Welsh elections has demonstrated.

The Lib Dem campaign techniques that have worked so well under FPTP simply don’t work in list elections, certainly not when you have constituencies the size of European parliamentary ones. A dogmatic adherence to ritual tactics prevents the Lib Dems from achieving their potential in these elections.

As I stated in my original post, roughly one-third of the electorate is pro-European. No other party (except arguably the Greens) is competing for them. Traditional Lib Dem tactics neither reach nor mobilise this substantial body of opinion – indeed, by competing for the Eurosceptic vote, we probably put them off.

Rather ironic, is it not, that the party that champions PR has no idea how to fight a PR election?

“If every ward with Lib Dem councillors and future target wards delivers literature to help the Europe campaign between now and June 10th it will make a big different to our chances of success”

followed by example literature for people to use about European policies, such as the EU and air pollution, the EU and compensation rights for airline travellers and the EU constitution.

Isn’t that the exact opposite of an instruction “not to mention Europe”?

This edition was by no means an exception in including material about Europe:

June 2003: full page of European stories, headlined “Who says you can’t put Europe in a FOCUS leaflet?”

July 2003: “Page 6: artwork boxes on Europe…”

November 2003: 1/2 page on EU constitution artwork

December 2003: Focus artwork story on EU action to get better compensation for airline passengers and a second story about EU funding for Wales.

March 2004: 3 Focus stories on positive policies possible via the EU

April 2004: two pages of stories on what our MEPs are doing / will do.