Here’s a few to ponder … Or perhaps best to sleep on them.
1. What happened to the predicted Lib Dem surge? Did people change their mind at the last minute? Did young people not turn out? Did floating voters turn their back on us?
2. How did the opinion polls get the Lib Dem share of the vote so badly wrong? They were pretty accurate in terms of the Labour/Tory vote, but all nine of the final polls put the Lib Dems in the 26-29% range when in fact we scored 23%.
3. What happened to our targeting strategy? Given our share of the vote was higher than in 2005, how did we lose so many seats? Did we over-reach ourselves? Or did we underestimate the residual Labour/Tory vote?
4. Why were there such differences between results in individual Lib Dem seats, sometimes making gains against the Tories (eg, Wells, Eastbourne), sometimes suffering horrendous swings (eg, Oxford West & Abingdon, Montgomeryshire). Incumbency seems to have helped in some places, not in others: why?
5. Should Nick Clegg have ruled out any form of coalition before the election to avoid a week of the campaign getting bogged down in the usual hung parliament media process stories? Was it a mistake to state openly the party wouldn’t work with Gordon Brown if Labour came third?
6. How far did the rightwing press’s smear operation in the latter half of the campaign eat away at our vote?
7. How far did the Tories’ Ashcroft money torpedo our campaign against the Tories?
8. Did people in the end decide they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for our liberal policies on immigration and Europe? Or did they in the end simply decide the Lib Dems couldn’t win (the old ‘wasted vote’ argument most of us hoped this election would put to rest)?
9. Have the Lib Dems reached a ceiling of what can be achieved within the constraints of a third party not backed by the financial largesse of the trade unions or big business? Is 50-70 seats all we’re scaled-up to win given the unfairness of the first-past-the-post system?
10. And the $64,000 question – what happens next?
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11. What hapepned to our original campaign plan, assuming the original plan wasn’t just Cleggmania and “I agree with Nick”?
12. Why, in our rush for twitter, flash mobs etc did we decide it was OK to ditch our normal high supporting and high turnout elderly voter in favour of young voters. We could have treid to go for both. Or were the old not cool enough for Cowley Street?
3 and 4 are interesting ones. I haven’t examined all the figures in any detail yet, but I suspect that overall we went backwards in our top 100 seats, compensated by a small net gain in the rest. Our targeting strategy seems to have failed abysmally and we need to work out why.
There also doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the Lib Dem results. Before the election, could anyone have predicted gaining Redcar and Burnley with massive swings from Labour, but not winning any of Islington South, Hampstead and Kilburn or Edinburgh South? Losing Oxwab to the Tories and going backwards against Labour in Oxford East? Losing Montgomery but increasing our majority in Ceredigion? Increase in seats and votes in Somerset, losing seats and votes in Cornwall? Increased majority in Eastleigh, losing Romsey and Winchester? Increased majorities in SW London seats, while losing Richmond Park?
Re. questions 1 & 2:
Ben Page of Ipsos MORI was quoted earlier today, saying: “In our final poll we had 40% Lib Dems saying they may change their mind, (28% Labour, 17% Conservatives). They did.”
The clues were there. Yes, the headline poll figures were still showing 26-29% support for the Lib Dems but drill down and the same polls were showing that Lib Dem support was disproportionately soft.
So the problem isn’t the polls. The question to ask is why, following the surge, did the Lib Dems fail to firm up their new support but instead allow it to remain flaky? This new support came mainly from younger voters. Why were there no messages aimed at consolidating their support?
And isn’t it the case that the Lib Dems’ GE team was taken by surprise by the surge as much as anyone else, that it had little idea how to respond, and that it was crippled by a risk-averse culture?
Re. Point 4: example of Oxford West; Evan Harris won in a largely urban seat which included two central Oxford wards that are heavily college-filled. He fought this election in a seat which now included large chunks of the countryside towards Abingdon (Tory central) and lost two of his wards full of students. He then lost by around 170 votes.
Boundary changes have screwed LDs in at least 6 of Mark Pack’s ten ultra-close LD losses.
A thought to throw around: it was the debates wot lost it for us. They took the focus off the individual constituency campaigns and made it harder to present a simple tactical message tailored to a specific seat. So attempts to explain it was (eg) between our candidate and Labour’s in a particular seat were drowned by people assessing the merits of the three leaders and voting on those grounds.
The opinion polls didn’t get it wrong – on the eve, they said there were huge numbers of undecideds. It didn’t need that many of them to decide to go against us to produce a three or four per cent drop overnight.
As for individual seats, Lembit was very predictable. At least, I predicted it in the constituency thread on ukpollingreport! There were some seats we knew were in danger and it was just a question of doing our best and hoping – they included Richmond Park, Torbay and Romsey. OXWAB is more puzzling – did we divert resources away into East during the halcyon days of the surge?
I don’t believe policy was relevant – I never do – except inasmuch as it allowed a bit of a narrative to develop about inexperience and irresponsibility, fanned furiously by the press. Anecdote alert: I have a relative who usually votes for us but was pretty sure this year she’d pick either Labour or Tory in order to contribute to choosing the government. In the end she didn’t vote as she couldn’t believe in any of them. But Daily Mail stories prevented her from coming back to us.
And yes, I do believe that categorically ruling out any coalition of any sort beforehand would have been the right strategic move. I’ve always thought that.
If we support the Tories we are finished! Our supporters won’t buy it.
One more question to ponder – we’ve gone backwards in terms of gender balance and still have no ethnic minority MPs – what do we do about that?
Evan Harris was the darling of the radical liberals, but the last five years have seen a number of issues like abortion on which he would turn off a lot of floating voters.
Lib Dems probably have the highest vote of any party across the two Oxford seats, in actual fact. But FPTP means the seats are split between Labour and Conservatives.
Isn’t this a stupid system?
“Our targeting strategy seems to have failed abysmally and we need to work out why.”
It’s quite easy really: shoving ludicrous amounts of paper through peoples’ letter-boxes doesn’t necessarily translate into votes, in fact it can turn off more people than it attracts.
Is Brown trying to appeal over Clegg’s head to the party membership?
Immigration amnesty & Euro support killed us! Big question is whether we ditch these or not? I am very worried about our future we could even split!
Certainly one of those losses, at least was not legitimate. Paul Blomfield is not the legitimate MP for Sheffield Central. The “student lines” and preventing people from voting was an absolute disgrace.
On the positive side, despite the gerrymandered boundaries in Brent Central (excluding Alperton Ward from that constituency), the election of Sarah Teather was fantastic news.
On Question 1 and 2, Is it partly that libdem voters are more inclined to vote tactically? and that tactical voting advise caused a loss of support?
on 5 the Nick should have given only broad principles, not “if, then; else” statements, that the media used to tie his hands and ask awkward questions, and allow both big parties to day
On Question 1 and 2, Is it partly that libdem voters are more inclined to vote tactically? and that tactical voting advise caused a loss of support?
on 5 the Nick should have given only broad principles, not “if, then; else” statements, that the media used to tie his hands and ask awkward questions, and allow both big parties to claim he was the route to the other
(1) There was a major shift in the final 24 hours, similar to the one in 1970 brought on by Heath’s “Do you want another devaluation?” and “We’ll reduce the rise in prices at a stroke”. It was induced by scare-mongering from both Tory and Labour sides, delivered by a corrupt media. There isn’t much we can do about this, certainly not under FPTP.
(2) They may not have done (see (1)).
(3) A mixture of things. Many of our more luke-warm supporters voted Tory out of fear of a hung Parliament, or Labour out of fear of a Cameron government rewarding its rich backers and taking the axe to the public sector (things which the hung Parliament may enable us to prevent if Nick has the mettle).
(4) A mixture of reasons. In Eastbourne, there was a deeply unpopular sitting Tory MP (shades of Kingston & Surbiton 2001). Evan Harris is an abrasive and patronising figure who goes out of his way to offend people who happens to disagree wiht his views about science, medical controversies, etc. The Dawkins endorsement probably pushed the clothespeg off too many noses. Regarding Lembit, it is all to obvious. Good man, but appalling judgment.
(5) Probably. But if he did, he would be open to the accusation that a vote for a party that refuses to participate in government is a wasted vote.
(6) Probably not very much. It was the scares that did it.
(7) Not everywhere. It didn’t do for David Heath, Chris Huhne, Annette Brooke, Lorely Burt, did it?
(8) In some cases, yes. But I think it was more the two-pronged scare (hung Parliament / what a Cameron government would do).
(9) Probably. Which is why we have to use the opportunity of a hung Parliament to get PR. And we don’t have long. Another FPTP election looms in 6-12 months, with no money and exhausted and demoralised activists.
(10) Nick Clegg has to consult colleagues (AND members) before installing the odious Cameron and his vile billionaire string-pullers into No 10.
Jim
“It’s quite easy really: shoving ludicrous amounts of paper through peoples’ letter-boxes doesn’t necessarily translate into votes, in fact it can turn off more people than it attracts.”
And yet in all the areas we won, it would almost certainly be because we put a lot of paper through letterboxes giving our message to voters. And it doesn’t explain why it worked in some areas, but not in others.
But this just raises the question as to whether it’s the methods or the message that are at fault, or both. Did we have clear, simple and effective messages in the seats we won, but not in those where we didn’t? Discuss.
“Immigration amnesty & Euro support killed us!”
More people support joining the Euro now (usually around 28-35%, even with the current crises) than voted for us. Indeed, passionate pro-European sentiment runs at around double our European-election vote. Our problem is not that we believe in these things, but that we run around trying to hedge it in order to appeal to phobes who will never vote for us anyway – we should instead loudly bang on why they’re good things, that we proudly support, and convince others to as well.
2 preconditions for our temporary support for a government
1. PR (not a referendum on it cos it’ll be fiddled to make sure we can’t win it, a change in law)
2. Another general election within a year under the new PR system
Nothing less is acceptable.
Martin Horwood holds Cheltenham with a good swing to him from the Tories.
I think the threat of Tory victory / Labour return scared people into voting tactically to stop whichever their most hated party, and under first past the post the Lib-Dems get squeezed under these kind of circumstances.
It’s easy in hindsight but you can now start to see where things went wrong. Cleggmania came too fast and too soon in the campaign and after the third debate NC’s message started sounding repetitive. The momentum disappeared from the campaign and Lib Dem support started emptying like a slow puncture. The initial euphoria also cast a harsh light on some of the Lib Dems more unsellable policies – especially the amnesty, VAT on new homes and the stance on the Euro. People just didn’t like them and the public’s nervousness was not helped by the concerted campaign by the Tory press to torpedo Clegg (which was again fuelled by the initial surge). In the campaign itself I think Clegg made two big mistakes. First, the prevarication over the Lib Dems negotiating stance after the election in the middle of the campaign. It looked wobbly and drew attention to the probablity that the LDs wouldn’t win and that people couldn’t be sure who they’d get as PM. Finally, I think NC was mistaken in targetting Labour voters in the last week before the election. I think the party got swept away with the idea that they could take the place of Labour as the official opposition whereas the real battle was always to beat the Tories in the key marginals.
@jim – I definitely agree with that; the continuous reams of Lib Dem paper i got through my letterbox wouldn’t have attracted floaters.
In retrospect, I think there needs to be a complete from-scratch re-think of the style of campaigning next time. I think in some areas, we were simply attacking the other two parties, rather than giving a clear positive message of our own, and Clegg didn’t go far enough to rebut right-wing press smears. I suspect its the smears that did the majority of damage to the Cleggmania poll highs.
Also, hopefully we’ll have FPTP out of the way by next time, so the electorate wont have the “Lib Dems will never win” mindset quite so much.
The positive thing to come out here is that we can find the mistakes made, and learn from them.
I’d love to know how Sarah Teather got such a swing – was it papers through doors, canvassing door-to-door or was something else going on there? Interesting that it’s not just a case of money, when you think how much the Conservatives have thrown at this election.
I think we over did it with paper through post boxes, I mean I was on the Durham round and we talked to people on the doorstep who were saying that they wanted to vote lib dem but the amount of paper turned them off, one commented that they had almost one leaflet a day for a week, this isnt a way to win votes now is it?
I do think the Euro and overacting over our immigration amnesty killed it, we gave the Tory media what they needed to hang us, sadly!
Another important question: why did what look like obvious gains from Labour not materialise – Liverpool Wavertree, Islington South and Finsbury, Hampstead and Kilburn, etc. etc.?
As I a former member of the LibDem who resigned back in the late 1980s as the party ripped itself about after doing so well in 1983 and almost ‘broke the mould’. I was disgusted by the ability of the party to pull itself apart and not get ‘real’ about how to take the fight further. Now the LibDem actually have a real chance to introduce multi-party politics and ‘new’ politics, when parties work together, to the out-of-date UK political system. Was this not what we meant back in the 1980s about ‘breaking the mould’?
It is right that the LibDem should talk to all parties that can help form a stable government. However, it appears only Labour provides an opportunity to introduce multi-party politics through PR. There are very open people in the Labour party who recognise that 2-party politics in the Uk can not go on anymore. Our society is too pluralistic. They have been arguing for electrol reform for a long time now. So lets not repeat the 1980s again and rip the party apart again. Unite behind Clegg and take this once in a generation chance to let British politics join the new pluralistic era we live in and introduce multi-party politics. It is the principled thing to do no matter what might happen in future election. Do not behave according to the ‘tribal’ politics of old!
Well hold Westmorland by over 12,000. Great result by a top MP – if only other seats could of been like that.
Westmorland hold too. Over 11% swing.
How did LibDem expect to win in Richmond Park with a policy to restrict pension relief to 20%. In the end you have to look at your family finances with 40% band kicking in at quite a low level. With my company asking for extra contribution to the 40% > 20% change would have crippled me. It made me change my vote
BBC were ramping that Farron was looking dodgy earlier today.
BANG! Take that!
How did LibDem expect to win in Richmond Park with a policy to restrict pension relief to 20% ? In the end you have to look at your family finances with 40% band kicking in at quite a low level. With my company asking for extra contribution as well the 40% > 20% change would have crippled me. It made me change my vote.
From what people have told me #8 definitely lost our votes.
The great majority of voters didn’t watch the debates. 10 million people watched the first, and 8 million the third, which means that, respectively, 35 and 37 million voters didn’t – and of those who did, we have no idea how many of them were floating voters. So, probably, the whole debate bounce was an illusion propagated by a fixated media.
My guess is that the immigration/Euro issues had little effect. Ardent Europhobes, and those who are antsy about immigration, are unlikely to vote Lib Dem anyway.
Without analysing the figures, I suspect the key factor overall was Tory turnout. Conservative supporters actually bothered to vote this time, having stayed away at the last three elections. In Richmond Park, for example, Susan Kramer received more votes yesterday than she did in 2005 – but the Tories put on 9,000.
In Liverpool Wavetree we got a lot of negative press the Michael Shields family came out to back Labour due to our election leaflets and the ‘vote CLegg get Cameron’ message seemed to resonate with voters there.
Worse thing of all though was that the Labour candidate was a 28 year friend of Euan Blair who was parachuted in, who nade a few gaffes such as not knowing who Bill Shankly was or who sung Ferry across the Mersey.
Cameron offering us a partnership.
Not sure if experience on this side of the Irish Sea is any guide, but many people here were genuinely afraid of a Tory government, especially as it started to seem likely after the third television debate. The polls showed significant slippage to Labour in the last few days and that would explain many poor results in Lib/Lab marginals, especially down the socio-economic scale (how the hell did we lose Rochdale and Chesterfield?) as worried voters “came home to Labour”.
The DUP managed to defend every seat UCUNF were targeting from them, despite everything they’ve been hit with over the past year, and ran a very hard anti-Tory campaign. It’s telling that the only seat they lost was to us (still can’t quite believe we’ve not only won a seat, but decapitated the First Minister) and their Tory bashing there was of enormous assistance to us.
It’s definitely too early to answer these questions usefully, to be frank. People are chipping in with anecdotes, when what we need is detailed evidence. We’re not going to get that at this stage – all we’ll get is finger-pointing and hysteria.
I’m just off for my local election count, and then I’m taking the weekend off to enjoy a festival in my ward (for which I’ll hopefully be councillor), catch up on sleep and think hard about what lessons we can learn as a party from this. Let’s see what happens over the weekend, try to chill out a bit and come back with a positive, constructive, reason-based analysis of the situation on Monday.
“But perhaps more importantly, this flurry of speculation meant that television clips of the Lib Dem leader were dominated by him talking about process, about horse-trading, about politics. For three or four days, voters saw him no longer articulating vision or speaking about policy, but talking like any other politician.
This interlude accounts for the stalling of the extraordinary upward momentum of Lib Dem opinion ratings and, thereafter, their gradual drift downwards. In the very final days of the campaign the party’s support slumped dramatically by perhaps three or four percentage points as voters turned back to Labour, the Conservatives and minority parties. ”
This in the Times and I agree with view.
When Clegg talked about Gordon Brown squatting in Number 10 and how Labour wouldn’t have a moral authority to govern if they finish in third – it scared of a lot of Labour voters who then voted with their instincts to keep out the Tories.
In Lewes the night before Labour sent leaflets stating vote Clegg get Tory – it didn’t resonate in Sussex, but i suspect in many of the Northern seats it did.
Does the party have to have a leadership election after every election. Because considering the absolute massacre that this election has been I suspect Chris Humne might try to challenge Nick Clegg for the leadership.
We engineered a swing of 10% to us from Plaid in Ceredigion through two quite simple measures. Shoving vast amounts of literature through people’s letterboxes. Having an excellent incumbent MP.
Everyday for the last fortnight, we’ve had in Guildford a libdem leaflet through the door encouraging tactical voting to oust the the tory incumbent – Labour can’t win here – but now we see we might have well as cut out the middle man as we’ll get a conservative govt with libdem support. I voted libdem for the first time yesterday and regret it.
There was little about your policies in the literature just that barchart repeated to stress that a libdem vote was an anti-Tory vote. If you’ve pushed tactical voting, then you need to realise that the national share of vote is not necessarily a reflection of your support.
Don’t throw away the chance to secure the changes to the electoral system we all need. Cameron is clearly wedded to FPTP and you will regret not pushing home your advantage. You wan’t get this level of tactical voting support again.
There’s a tendency to overthink here with regards to ‘policies’. The fact is that most people do not know anything about policy, as shown by some polls which attributed, for instance, the NI increase to the Conservatives right after that whole debacle broke out before the first debate. I think the campaign fell down to the fact that politics in Britain is tribal, and that the Lib Dems do not represent enough of an extreme on the spectrum to ever garner a significant solid vote. This means we rely on disaffected members of the other two tribes to flip to us. But in a close campaign like this, with a powerful media pointing to the dangers of not voting for one of the two major tribes, our vote simply, and logically, dissolves away.
We do best when we fight *local* campaigns with strong, well rooted candidates who’ve made great efforts to get under the skin of their local electorate. Yes, we are still going to lose sometimes despite that, but this is the most *solid* way of getting a consistent vote in election after election. If we can, occasionally, couple that with a strong national presence and positive media reflection on us then that solidity can transform into some surprise victories and an improving profile for us in areas where we already have some contention. But never a landslide.
We are never going to win an election outright under FPTP *without* the collapse of one of the other parties and us effectively taking their ‘tribal’ position. The Liberals fell apart in the 1920s and that is how Labour came to take our place. Once in, they were *never* going to slip behind us unless they start to break apart or move too far from the position on the spectrum that society requires/expects at that time (eg Foot in 1983).
The only hope we have of maintaining our Liberal-Social democratic integrity and having any influence on government policy is through a reform of the electoral system that gives us some kind of PR. I therefore don’t actually think we have *any* questions to answer, except that we were mistaken to believe in a prospect that could just never happen.
1. People saw too much ‘fear’ from the media and labservatives about the dangers of a hung parliament and thought that a tory majority was ‘better’. Youth vote seemed to get out but maybe not as high as hoped.
2. Figures are with margin of error so not 100% surprised. Remember that LibDem share is up 1% from a good result last time round
3. No idea, local presence was best described as poor (1 other lib dem poster within 1 mile of home [Salford] ) and only bumped into a local councillor because they are friends with Mother-in-Law. Local elections performance seems weak as well. Did we focus too much on ‘target’ seats?
4. Boundary changes weren’t accurately presented so votes were at the wrong starting points. Lembit is a character up against a local hard working AM and Evan (much as I love him) can be abrasive & was targeted. Couple of today’s results looked better. Probably related to local tactics rather than anything else.
5. Getting away from the ‘hung’ argument is difficult, personally I would have gone down the John Clease TV route (the 51% of you say you would vote for us if you thought we could win….) using the 49% figure and Nick’s popularity would have killed it dead
6. Smear didn’t work on the young, but will have scared the older generation who still ‘trust’ the papers
7. Money will always win, especially if targeted
8. Europe/Immigration were good policies but more could have been made on the labservative 14 yr rule (especially with the community service element)
9. Under FTTP 60-70 is going to be the limit without a massive injection of capital (human or financial)
10. PR followed by new election May 2011
The targeting strategy was harmed in my area by huge outbreaks of candidateitis in our twinned seats.
A number of times people told me on the phone that the target seat was won and they were staying in their own seats 100% of the time because they could win from third with us at 28% in the polls.
I haven’t had time to read all the contributions but thought I’d throw my two penneth in… You can’t fight a war on two fronts with no tanks or artillary. We don’t have the membership levels, money/resources or traditional support base of the other two parties. The election seems to have panned out more like a series of local fights than the national fight that the debates made us think was possible – for example at the start of the election (before the debates) I would have not thought these results were unexpected, its more or less what we were heading for a month ago – just with a pleasant interlude of Cleggmania.
It seems we’ve reached the edge of what our limited resources will deliver on election day – the only way to change this is to either alter the voting system, raise some more money, recruit more activists or all three. We can win big where our local campaigns are well run and well funded – just look at Brent Central or Leeds North West.
Regarding point 1&2.
How many times have we seen this is local elections the first time a seat is targeted. Lots of enthusiasm from voters who suddenly realise they have a say and can make a difference. Excellent canvassing returns predicting a huge surge in support, followed by a relatively poor election result. Most of us know, if we carry on the good work, eventually people will believe we can win, and we do.
This year’s general election felt different. Many people considered voting liberal who have never actively considered it before. In the end they did not feel they could make the switch this time, but it is all to play for in the future.
Good progress despite the disappointments of last night.
I’m not a member, but did vote for Vince Cable – and at work today it was clear that almost all of my colleagues voted Lib Dem too. I think it’s simple, we’ve been convinced that “people like me vote Lib Dem”. We see it as the “intellectual option” and are proud to be part of that tribe. And yes, that’s a tribe too.
Can you increase the number of people who think “people like me vote Lib Dem”?
I’m hoping you form a good long-term coalition government with either of the other two parties (I don’t really care which, actually) and actually start talking seriously with each other about solving the problems the country has got. It’s time for positivism in politics – stop the scare mongering, stop the politics, work hard and try to build consensus about what needs to be done!
I’d like PR – because I’d like more consensus politics. I think when like-minded people get together they can polarise to views – by forcing different tribes to work together, I think solutions will come out that were better than either tribe’s original policy.
Good luck.
jim
Posted 7th May 2010 at 1:42 pm | Permalink
“Our targeting strategy seems to have failed abysmally and we need to work out why.”
It’s quite easy really: shoving ludicrous amounts of paper through peoples’ letter-boxes doesn’t necessarily translate into votes, in fact it can turn off more people than it attracts.
especially when it starts becoming ‘negative’ leaflets
Bernard Salmon
Posted 7th May 2010 at 2:03 pm | Permalink
Jim
“It’s quite easy really: shoving ludicrous amounts of paper through peoples’ letter-boxes doesn’t necessarily translate into votes, in fact it can turn off more people than it attracts.”
And yet in all the areas we won, it would almost certainly be because we put a lot of paper through letterboxes giving our message to voters. And it doesn’t explain why it worked in some areas, but not in others.
But this just raises the question as to whether it’s the methods or the message that are at fault, or both. Did we have clear, simple and effective messages in the seats we won, but not in those where we didn’t? Discuss.
examples of leaflets used in won seats would be useful, & details of what they were combined with
In terms of learning from all this, I think the most important questions are going to be three and four – allocation of resources and variations between constituencies. The big differences in swings across the country would suggest that the “national” issues such as the negative press or the big policy debates did not affect candidates equally, if at all.
I can understand if people thought some seats were safer after the leaders debates, and so campaigned harder in others. Hindsight is not much consolation.
And Cleggmania aside, if other parties with more resources were able to build up more canvas data well in advance, I guess that would have helped in getting out their vote – regardless of what the polls said.
Personally, in the short-term, I’m thinking Conservative minority government with backing on the key economic issues. As for the rest …
Would someone in Cowley Street care to apologise to the people in this constituency who have been completely betrayed by the inability of the national and regional Parties to control the behaviours of the idiots who created:
http://archipelago-of-truth.blog.co.uk/2010/05/07/the-walthamstow-libdem-wipe-out-8537979/
They were all warned. Walthamstow has gone from potential target seat with chance to provide the back-bone for the LibDems to be the biggest party on Waltham Forest council to a one-Party Labour fiefdom. It’s a total disgrace.
I have made no secret of the fact that I felt Clegg was not the best person to be our leader. I argued against him during the leadership election. I gave him a period of a year’s grace, then argued about the failings I had observed in that time.
As we approached the election campaign, I muted my criticisms. Obviously, when it comes to an election we must all pull together, any criticisms must be careful and constructive.
Nevertheless, during this election campaign itself I made several critical comments about how Clegg and the national campaign were coming across. I suggested several things that I felt it should be doing and was not doing. I gave suggestions for tactics and lines that could be used in speeches. You can see what I wrote in various places in Liberal Democrat Voice.
I don’t know if the ad-men Clegg used were paid for it, but my advice was for free, and I think we would have done a heck of a lot better had some of it been taken,
If anyone is intererested I should like at some time to write this down more carefully, all that went wrong with our campaign and how we could have done better.
On 3 – nobody seems to have mentioned the fact that this GE coincided with a lot of District Council elections. Here in Harlow, we went and helped in target constituencies in 1997, 2001 and 2005, helping win 2 new MPs in the process. But this year we had to defend existing council seats with low majorities. (In the event, we got our highest vote this century, but still lost – one by 31 votes). Something similar must have happened in many other places.
The other factor, as already said above, was that believing the headline polls but not noting the softness of our new support, many ‘going forward’ seats thought they would actually win this time, aided by target seats feeling safer than they actually were.
Well, I voted Lib Dem in this GE for the first time, mainly because I wanted to see electoral reform and a change to the way that politics are carried out in this country and I believe the Lib Dems are the only credible party who can bring some different to the table at this time.
As to with whom the Lib Dems form a coalition – well, that’s not an easy answer. Coalitions in countries with a form of PR are proven to work and it could work here, but a coalition formed on the basis of a hung parliament predicated on an undemocratic system seems wrong (49% of seats in the Commons with 36% of the vote?), but it’s the best we have at the moment.
Whatever the Lib Dems decide, I think electoral reform has to be high up the agenda and I would like to think that they will push for significant changes – DON’T let the Tories or Labour water it down or let them get away with anything less than real action.
Enough is enough!
E.Harris and his campaign against aternative meds cost him big time should not have been such an arse.
Pre 1980, the Liberal vote tended to rise when the Tory vote was weak, and fall when it was strong. I think this is still true. We’re disappointed because the Clegg surge gave us false hope, but remember, our vote went up in the face of a Tory revival.
We shouldn’t let our disappointment turn to anger. There are lessons to learn, but Nick Clegg has been an fantastic leader.
3. Entirely predictable. Our target seats are mostly fights with the Tories. In the last three elections there’s been a weak Tory vote, this time it was much stronger.
4. Only a few people have experience on-the-ground of more than a couple of campaigns, the rest of us are just guessing. But from past experience, campaigns vary hugely, even from year to year. Gain a key person and a losing campaign can be transformed, and vice versa.
I fear some MPs may have lost focus on keeping their electorate on side, and campaigned on things their electorate didn’t care for. Our MPs have every right to pursue other campaigns, but if this means they spend less time on the issues their electorate care about, they will pay a price.
5. Clegg started saying he’d give first try to the party with most votes/seats, and nothing else. I think that was a good tactic. It sent a signal to soft Tory voters that we’d not necessarily just prop up Brown.
His later statement about not propping up Brown if he came third was confusing, and took a day to clarify. In the final week, he should have refused to say anything on coalitions – instead the media were constantly quoting him, which was a lost opportunity to promote our policies.
6/7 Tory funding advantage and press smears hurt, but some campaigns did well despite them.
8. Immigration was #2 policy concern of the electorate. Nick did his best, but the electorate didn’t like what was offered. Would have been a lot worse without the Clegg surge. I think an “earned amnesty” is probably a good idea, but was it politically realistic? And why did we even mention the Euro – no one seriously believes we could join the Euro in the next parliament.
9. In 1997, 50 seats looked like our high water mark, and we’d lose most of them when the Tories recovered. It’s a great achievement that, post Cameron surge, we still have 57. We’re in post-election depression. If you want perspective, hop over to Conservative blogs, where some activists are demanding Cameron resign! Many of them are saying PR is inevitable in the medium term. We just keep fighting, and fight smarter.
10. Tough decisions ahead, no easy choices. If the party holds it’s discipline, accepts we have a weaker hand than we’d thought, we can make major progress. If we just got STV for local government, without the need for a referendum, that’d be a massive step forward.
All the more reason to remove the presumption of undergraduates receiving a vote in the constituency they move to.
Tories have plans to cut spending immediately and triggering another recession. I thing doing a deal with Tories will back fire on the liberals. Perhaps Nick Cleggs talking about it prior to the election would have put many floating voters off. Common sense suggest doing a deal with Labour will atleast give some progress towards proportional representation. Nick Clegg is honest and high minded but one has to be realistic about what is achievable in a partnership. Labour has more able, high profile and modern politicians than Conservatives. Hope Nick will see the sense of a deal with Labour.
Q1: I think people chickened out at the last minute. Fact is, when it comes to keeping out someone you don’t like, it is a two horse race after all. Also, I don’t think that Labour voters voted tactically at all.
Q2: Because, I fear we lost that much support on the last day. LibDem vote is always essentially soft. tough but thats how it is.
Q3: We REALLY underestimated residual Tory and especially Labour support. HUGE MISTAKE
Q4: Some people still vote locally. They vote for their parliamentary representative rather than who will make up the government. At least, I think some people do.
Q5: It WAS a mistake to rule it out. Clegg should have played a straight bat to those type of questions at all times. He got caught up in the hubris of being second in the polls (how ridiculous does that sound now!)
Q6: I think that the immigration counter by the Tories was very successful. What’s more damning is that we didn’t bat away at all. Cmaeron lied and suggested that Lib Dems want to give amnesty to ALL illegal immigrants, Clegg et al should have made it clear that it is always conditional: been here ten years and can prove it, willing to to do community service in penance for the crime of coming here illegally, willing to pay a fine and willing to come into the tax system. Its really a great idea, and we let the Tories misrepresent us completely. Woeful error on our part.
Q7: Don’t overestimate Ashcroft. You can defeat money with a smart campaign. We propbably just didn’t have smart campaigns in enough seats.
Q8: I do think some people wouldn’t like our immigration and European policies. But I think what was even more damaging is the fact that we cannot win. And the voters know it. In this sense, voting for us is a wasted vote. Its true. We need electoral reform NOW. Otherwise we are in danger of becoming irrelevant.
Q9: Under this electoral system, we may be only capable of 60-ish seats. Whatsmore, I think we are looking at the apex of our achievements and unless something happens to the electoral system, we will be going down, sharply, from here.
Q10: We now become a single-issue party: ELECTORAL REFORM, ELECTORAL REFORM, ELECTORAL REFORM, ELECTORAL REFORM….
If hasn’t been pinned yet, some welsh reactions I found to be of interest
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2010/05/08/cleggmania-led-us-astray-91466-26402535/
mpg wrote: ” I don’t think that Labour voters voted tactically at all.”
You are wrong, I did.
I live in Leicester South and we seemed to have a very solid Liberal candidate who stood pretty good chance tof getting in on May 6th . I , and indeed alot of my friends and family thought very seriously about voting liberal , so yes I was a floating voter, undecided got carried along with Cleggmania, Also as Leicester is a city rich in ethnic diversity how refreshing to have a party leader who talked positively on immigration??!! I was v impressed!! BUT WITH THE CURRENT UNDEMOCRATIC FPTP SYSTEM we felt that we had to vote labour so cameron and the tories did not get in !!!….FEAR made me vote for labour!! and untill we do have electoral reform I fear the true voice of the liberals will never be heard and I will no doubt always remain reluctant to vote liberal untill this system is reformed.
I am growing increasingly concerned, even as a deal with brown and labour ( AND LIKELY ELECTORAL REFORM) is on the table Clegg and the Liberals have not grabbed it ??. They now AT LAST can really make a differance I just pray “no deal ” is made with Cameron. PLEASE DO THE RIGHT THING?? LETS HAVE A TRULY PROGRESSIVE AND DEMOCRATIC SYSTEM AT LAST.
I think we have moved 1 step forward………but 2 steps back and I think the main cause of this is that we didn’t secure before we attempted to grow.
We lost a number of key members this election; Lembit Opik, Julia Goldsworthy to name but a few. Although much will be said about the influence of Ashcroft’s millions, I think that we were all swept away by the TV debates and attempted possibly to run before we could walk. We should have shored up the areas we needed to defend before we attempted to make gains.
Is it simply down to the fact that pollsters just ask people ‘If there was a general election tomorrow, which way would you vote?’, THEN ask ‘How certain are you to vote ?’ but don’t really link the two ?? The one thing you can be sure-ish of at an ‘Exit Poll’ is that the person HAS voted, although they may not tell you which way, or they may even lie.
But one thing you do know is that they aren’t saying ‘I am going to vote Lib Dem’ but without being registered, too young, too lazy, or just plain forgetting on the day.
Evan Harris was the darling of the radical liberals, but the last five years have seen a number of issues like abortion on which he would turn off a lot of floating voters.
Yes, this is another problem with FPTP. It becomes impossible to advance an opinion unless it is absolutely within the party norm for fear it will be mainly remembered by those who oppose it. I’m sure that Evan’s lining up with some of the hardline anti-religion people lost him quite a few votes from people who would otherwise support our party. Equally, someone who was a good radical liberal but had a personal anti-abortion view would probably lose votes by being outspoken on that view. Best to shut up and be bland if you don’t want to lose votes. With STV you don’t have to win a plurality in one constituency, so you can more easily take the line that openly holding a strong but minority opinion will win some as well as lose some.
Andy
A thought to throw around: it was the debates wot lost it for us. They took the focus off the individual constituency campaigns
Well, I am glad that someone else can see that, because I think it was one of the problems.
We fight good local campaigns, but the national image seems completely detached from them, even more so this time. The “Cleggmania” gave the impression that the support we were getting was just froth based on a good debate performance, rather than based on solid local activity. Clegg was just so much “vote for me” rather than “vote for good local representatives who are part of this movement I lead”.
The initial response to the first debate surely gave people the confidence to go with what they had already seen building up locally in the seats we were targetting. Up till then they were maybe a bit suspicious, thinking “ok, I like what the LibDems do round here, but aren’t they a bit ‘funny’ nationally?”. The first debate showed no, they had a national leader who seemed quite sensible. But this just wasn’t built on to make a coherent whole, uniting our local campaiging and our national campaigning.
We were wanting people to vote for us locally on the grounds we had a good active local candidate, but the national image was saying “vote for the good-looking guy in the orange tie”. So people turning out to vote were confused, what were they really voting for? This was made worse when the national image, supposing the first debate had gone well, just seemed to be carrying on doing the same thing, instead of developing it. The emphasis in what we did nationally should have been “Look, you like Nick, he’s a nice guy, but we’re about a lot more than just Nick”.
1. Easy come, easy go! By its nature the surge was soft and needed strengthening! There was a squeeze in the last week and the Greek situation did spook some.
2. There were signs back to the bank holiday weekend that we were tending to slip back to 3rd. The surge had reached its upper limit and was in reverse, with some polls indicating low 20’s.
3. We lost a number by very small margins – we could so easily have ended up with a few more! The increased Tory vote gave some to Labour (Chesterfield) and higher turnout benefitted Labour and that gave some to the Tories.
4. Demographics – hard to read from afar but Lembit was perhaps a victim of his own controversial celebrity image.
5. No, no-one would have believed him anyway. What we needed to have done to sustain and strengthen the surge was: 1/ keep saying that the more Lib Dem MP’s, the stronger a balanced parliament would be and the more likelihood of change. 2/ keep showing the shadow cabinet! Nick could have introduced them via a PPB and say why a Lib Dem executive would be the most talented and able.
6. Definite effect – it was incessant and vile. Think of the soft Lib Dem surge supporter going into the work canteen or pub and trying to defend his choice in the face of Mail and Sun readers.
7. We’re always on the back-foot on funding. Yes especially in Tory targets.
8. Immigration and Europe policies were too vulnerable to attack – and misrepresentation. They produced an immediate cap on the surge and began to roll it back. Beyond that it was just the effects of squeeze, media attacks, not able to project our depth and size. Honestly, even Cable was disenfranchised by Cleggmania.
9. Probably! It depends upon too many variables outside of our control vis-a-vis the dynamics between Labour and Tory. That’s why the last time was 36 years ago.
10. Cameron is PM, with Lib Dem coalition if a referendum is promised. A fixed term deal for 3 or 4 years. Could actually end up quite a reforming administration and successfully address the deficit.
It is deeply maladjusted of me to be reading LDV at 2.23pm in the morning but the Southwark local count only finished this afternoon (Saturday) and I still don’t know what time zone I’m in!
Anyway – as the meerkat says, some of this is ‘simples’. To win we need to work grindingly, back breakingly hard
in a way the other parties don’t, for obvious reasons. Many people lost their heads thinking Cleggmania was enough to win from nowhere – we were painfully over stretched.
I despair on the ‘gender balance’ question. Mentoring a few people is not enough. In Newcastle, Labour got two women elected (one black) in a region where neither of them would have been selected in a million years without all-women short lists. We need all-women shortlists for held seats. Otherwise we will wait until kingdom come for gender balance.
Deeply resent stupid comments about Evan alienating people on abortion. I imagine Evan and his team were probably too unselfish helping elsewhere.
1: Especially if you look at the Scottish swing (more notable in seats where it would make no rational sense to vote Labour, such as in North East Fife) people were scared and confused by the coalition talk and decided to vote for their preference between red and blue; some people voted red to keep the blues out, some blue to oust the read. We got caught in the middle and except for seats where the incumbent had considerable personal gravity (David Heath FTW) there was a swing of our votes to either Labour, the Conservatives or both as well those famous undecideds. This was caused by a lack of clarity regarding what Nick would do in the event of a hung parliament – I mean that as no disrespect to Nick, I think he handled it correctly. It was a failure of media reporting and, on our part, media handling. Ironically if Nick had said ‘I love Labour, I think we had a lot of similar ideas and we can ameliorate the bad, illiberal parts of their party’ or something similar for the Conservatives the swing might not have been as bad as it wouldn’t have hit us from both directions.
2: See above. If people had been prescient and asked ‘would you switch your vote to red/blue to keep the blues/reds out’ you would have got polling results which more closely tracked what actually happened. It was the hung parliament issue which did us in, not because of Conservative scaremongering about the need for a decisive result but simply because some people really hate the Tories and some people really hate Labour and were unwilling to vote for us for fear we’d worth with their chosen object of hatred. How could this have been improved? Nick should have made a stronger case for saying ‘we will force our manifesto through in the event of a hung parliament; a vote for us is a vote for our manifesto’. This might have been insufficient in light of the media misrepresentation of the manifesto however it would have been better than what did happen.
3: Our targeting strategy was actually successful, or so I think on the basis of the swing in the seats I care about (in Scotland) and the seats we gained (in England), however it was swamped by the effect of us doing well in the polls leading to talk of a hung parliament and fear we might form a coalition ‘the wrong way’. Ironically, if Nick had done badly or if the leaders debates had never happened so there wasn’t so much talk of a hung parliament, we’d have probably have done better than we did – we would at least have made our projected Labour gains (though one ‘swing factor’ which has been ignored is the reversion of the swing in ’05 based on the Iraq war; no one seems to care about that anymore so some of the Labour area vote might make more sense if you compare it to 2001 and 1992 than to 2005).
4: The answer to the Lembit question is obvious; he brought it on himself with his media coverage and his expenses claims. Oxford West was a combination of aggressive targetting and character assassination by religious and animal rights groups and a complete lack of focus on defense in favour of concentrating on Oxford East instead, which we failed to win because of fear of the Conservatives. For those candidates who won despite expectations you should look very carefully at their campaigns; it is possible that they are either more charismatic figures in some way (David Heath is charismatic in a non-conventional sense and won over a lot of Labour voters), emphasised the manipulation being run against us, were clearer than our national campaign was about the misrepresented policies or about what a coalition would mean (our manifesto! our manifesto! our manifesto!) or were negative/positive in interesting ways. I know from friends that the reason we lost Durham City was because of how egregiously negative the campaign there was. It should be pointed out that we lost Oxford West because of how negative the campaign /against/ us was and I suspect given the resources focused on Oxford East not enough was done to defend against it.
5: It was a mistake to say we wouldn’t work with Gordon Brown, in retrospect, but this could not have been forseen at the time and for all we know this would have placated ‘anti-Labour’ voters in England. It was sensible to do but we should learn from it in hindsight; detailed discussion of coalitions and hung parliaments was what killed us; we should have just said ‘you’re voting on the manifesto, in the event of a hung parliament we’ll get as much of the manifesto through as possible. The more votes we get the more likely that is’. Instead by talking about who we would and would not work with we allowed our opponents in the media and in politics to say it was a forgone conclusion we’d worth with the other. I think Nick is doing a lot to dispell this impression RIGHT NOW, so we shouldn’t worry too much that it will hurt us in the future if we do get electoral reform. HOWEVER, given if all our hopes come true we will be facing the certainty of a hung parliament in future, we must not get sucked into who we would and would not work with in the future – ‘we will work to honour our manifesto’; the only line.
6: The initial (Nick=Nazi) slurs did absolutely nothing, they may actually have helped us but (a) the misrepresentations of policy (b) the accusations of a favoured and forseeable coalition partner and (c) the scaremongering about a hung parliament almost certainly all hurt us. As I’ve said above I think a careful look at the actual results
7: I don’t know enough about the key marginals he targeted but (a) we missed a trick if we didn’t have the cash value he was throwing into the campaign front and centre in our leaflets and (b) is there any evidence it went on anything more elabourate than direct mailings and bill boards? The Tories literally threw money at Somerton and Frome and Morley and Outwood with no success. For all the money thrown behind Jacob Rees-Mogg the Tories managed a 2% swing. If you want to look at an example of where the response to the Ashcroft millions was managed poorly you should look at the Richmond Park campaign (I’m assuming: I’m as big a fan of Sue as anyone).
8: It wasn’t our policies. You can say they are ‘too capable of misrepresentation’ but really the only improvement we could have made to the Euro policy would be to have instead of saying ‘longterm we wish to join’ saying “short term it would be unthinkable to join” then we could have said “our manifesto says it’s /unthinkable/ to join the Euro” and so on, but really the problem was that they were misrepresented and the misrepresentations were not effectively countered either in the debates, in the media or in campaign literature. Cowley Street should pay more attention to what misrepresentation is going on and instruct campaigns to counter it. We should, in the future, pay more attention to how to effectively caveat our manifesto so it is less possible to misrepresent what it is saying as saying something completely different. We left ourselves open to misrepresentation on trident by pretending at first that our policy was something it wasn’t; scrapping Trident to save money. I think the “increased scrutiny” was mismanaged and whoever’s responsible for this sort of thing should be taken out and shot but I don’t think it made that much difference. Again; someone (or many people) should be tasked to study the campaign literature in both the constituencies where we had unexpected losses (I’m talking Richmond Park here, Lembit doesn’t count) and unexpected wins (you want to look at seats where we did better than expected, against the Tories, where the personal element can be removed and the swing to us wasn’t just from Labour supporters: Eastbourne would top my list. Whatever they did in Eastbourne was the ‘right answer’ in this campaign).
9: No. Cleggmania could have been turned into microfinancing. ‘Click here to donate £ to suchandsuch’s campaign, she’s a [selling point] and believes in [selling point] and is currently fighting Ashcroft’s millions’. Epic failure of opportunity there. It’s something we should have been doing earlier; big media events about the ‘future of politics’ to take the gloss of David Cameron. The only reason the first debate was such a big thing was because of prior marketing failures on the part of Cowley Street (or whoever). The losses as a result of uncertainty over a hung parliament could have been prevented (or at least dampened), the local campaigns could have been more closely delineated from the national campaigns, we should have more clearly criticised conservative Conservative policies both during the last two debates and in national news coverage (we’re going to throw people off benefits for not taking the first job that comes along? And that doesn’t get a mention? Again; those responsible for prepping Nick for the last two debates should be taken out back and shot).
10. We’ve already lost most of those voters who would leave us for fear we’d work with the Labour party; it is suicidal, especially in Scotland, but also in general, to enter into a coalition deal with the Conservative party. Our two options are (a) the ‘rainbow/progressive coalition’ alternative – which can’t further hurt our votes as we’ve lost those voters who feared it already or (b) accusing Labour and the Conservatives to be too disorganised to be able to garauntee they’d honour our manifesto pledges and allow the Tories to lumber on as a minority government. THIS WILL DIMINISH THE HARMFUL ‘coalition?’ effect from this election and enhance the perception that VOTING FOR US IS VOTING FOR OUR MANIFESTO. Anything else is suicide, though it might be worth it if the Tories gave us STV.
We didn’t do enough to capitalise upon our new support. People were very stand-offish about, for example, the Rage Against the Machine group – we should have been actively thrusting them at the media at every possibility to highlight the grassroots support we’d suddenly been getting. Remember that student who introduced Labour’s manifesto – we could have easily done that. Missed opportunity. We similarly missed opportunities to capitalise on our ‘celebrity endorsements’. I saw Bill Bailey pimping Labour but I didn’t see Richard Dawkins or Ben Goldacre being approached after they went as far as writing letters to the Guardian in support of us. Dawkins, Goldacre and the like should be the frontmen of any campaign to re-seat Evan in Oxford at the very least. Viewed from the sidelines it’s as if everyone at Cowley Street was so stunned by mild success they didn’t know what to do so they didn’t do anything.
Question 11: At what point in the evening did you start actively celebrating when Labour won constituencies (against the Tories)? For me it was pretty much as soon as the shock of Evan Harris losing began to wear off, and the prospects of a hung parliament began to sink in.
In answer to why the polls got it wrong:
There is still a social stigma against voting Tory; You can see this in all the anti-Tory FB groups. What this means is that Tory voters are more likely to keep quiet about it, and give non-commital answers or say they are voting Lib Dem (which is more ‘trendy’) . Come polling day, they just quietly vote as they intended, there by confusing the pollsters.
In our area the labour party won against the odds and they did this by working extremely hard on identifying their potential vote ,building a relatuionship with it and motivating it…..ie phoning them all on tuesday saying things like ‘if you dont vote labour you will loose your Sure Start or your family credits.They canvassed relentlessly for a year and had the team to deliver.
our activist base is too small and dwindling .(God help us if we go into alliance with the Tories) Leaflets are important but no seat should be invested in by the national party again until it has hit infrastructure Targets first.
(Also even in seats with brilliant infrastructure we lost ) until we can match national resourdces we will always have a glass ceiling of about 70
A few points and queries:
(1) Why did we put up a candidate against Dr Richard Taylor in Wyre Forest, thereby handing the seat to the Tories on a plate?
(2) The Richmond Park campaign should have gone negative on Zac Goldsmith, focusing on: (i) his non-dom status; (ii) his lack of educational qualifications and absence of work experience; (ii) the source of his father’s money (asset-stripping), and (iv) the loonies who informed his “environmentalism” (Teddy Goldsmith, John Aspinall, etc).
(3) We ran many good campaigns, which cut the Labour vote to the bone and kept the Tories at bay. Any complaints about Eastbourne, Eastleigh, Somerton & Frome, Wells, Taunton Deane, Chippenham, and a good few others? I hope not. They delivered.
(4) I take the point that eyeball-to-eyeball contact was put on the back-burner in preference to 24-hour papering. I speak as someone who had to knock-up good areas with an ancient canvass-record and had to field complaints about paper overload.
(5) The results tend to indicate that even if the polls had been correct, we would still have won only an extra 20 seats.
(6) We now have more close second places than we did in 2005.
(7) Oh, and the Party is finished if it does any kind of deal with the Tories.
Ruth Bright
I despair on the ‘gender balance’ question. Mentoring a few people is not enough. In Newcastle, Labour got two women elected (one black) in a region where neither of them would have been selected in a million years without all-women short lists. We need all-women shortlists for held seats.
I note 41% of the MPs we now have went to private school, compared to 7% of the general population.
Why do we get so worked up about gender and race balance, but seem to care nothing aboyt tjhis massive discrimination against people who don’t have a posh background?
It’s like Cameron – kick out the decent local man candidate, put in some posh woman from the posh part of London, and claim this is making his party more representative.
Matthew, I was a parliamentary candidate last time and as a matter of fact I agree with you that class is a huge issue too. I am the ninth child of a Romany speaking bricklayer and I haven’t very often met any Lib Dem of my background let alone a Lib Dem PPC of my background. Had I retained the broad Hampshire accent of my early childhood and cheerily advertised at selection meetings that my Dad went to prison for armed robbery I doubt if I would have made much progress in the party!
I’d love you to define your terms, What pray is your definition of a ‘posh woman’? I am not ‘posh’ but I don’t think a candidate can be deemed intrinsically evil because she went to private school and comes from London. By the way, the all-women shortlists in Newcastle produced two local candidates of working-class background.
The answer to 2 is that the polls always do get Lib dem cvotes wrong.
ASfter Local elections they say “The LD’s always poll higher in locals so we should not take any notice”
In previous general they said “LD’s increase their vote when they get more coverage”
What they really are saying is that votes cast for Lib dems are always anomalous and only the polls at any instant give the “true” figure!!!
@Nathan – Total rubbish; shy-Tory doesn’t explain the pro-Labour swing seen in majority Labour areas like Scotland. I suppose if you wanted to run that argument you could say there was also a reversal of the Iraq war effect from 2005 but you would then have to explain why Labour voters were saying they were going to vote LibDem along with these supposedly shy Conservatives.
Two things
a) Nate Silver at the 538blog points out that phone-based polls show considerably less error than the polls we were all paying attention to. There seems to be a LibDem bias in favour of the people who do face to face polls (read; leave their houses) and internet-based polls (read; own computers) – I’m not making this up 😉
b) I should have said earlier actually the other constituency people should definitely be looking at the campaign in is Redcar. Seriously; if there’s another general election in the offing we ought to copy as close as is possible the campaign run in Redcar for Labour seats and Eastbourne for Conservative seats, other things being equal – unless, unbeknownst to be there are special local circumstances which made those seats stand out from the general trends in the UK (we run the council in Redcar, as I recall). Redcar and Eastbourne – the right answers.
P.S. – Actually, looking at the details, we might find out Eastbourne was a fluke to do with Nigel Waterson’s criminal record. Again; looking at the campaign details should give the answers.
Why people changed at the last minute:
a) The idea of Labour staying in and becoming more totalitarian was too much to stomach
b) The Tories may have some crap policies but they are promising to roll back the state
c) The Lib Dems come across as Labour Lite, so if you hate labour, you probably will really dislike Lib Dems
If you hate Big Brother policies and you hate Labour, voting for Lib Dem is risky. They are likely to spin Labour as progressive when Labour is really dictatorial. Don’t kid yourselves that you didn’t have a say in why you lost seats!
1. Two party squeeze. Nothing more, nothing less. It is exactly what happened to Jeremy Thorpe in 1974.
2. Because people really do WANT to vote Lib Dem, they just also know that a Lib Dem vote is largely wasted. And they are right, a Labour vote was worth 4 Lib Dem votes in this election.
3. I think the campaigns for a hung parliament before-hand and the extraordinary anti-politics feeling meant all bets were off in this election. We weren’t playing by the usual rules and no-one could have predicted those swings.
4. See 3.
5. Yes. It was a mistake because no-one could have predicted this outcome before but now, when working with Gordon makes sense, he will appear inconsistent. But I doubt it made, or will make much difference in the end. There will be a few rough headlines from the right-wing press, but that’s a given anyway.
6. A little, not as much as they would have liked and I doubt there was anything more we could have done to stop it.
7. See 6.
8. Yes.
9. Yes. FPTP breaks down when three parties have an approx. equal share and starts to deliver hung parliaments. An incremental growth in vote share from ~25% to the 40% needed to usurp one of the other two and get to the point where FPTP works again with us as one of the main parties is impossible because it has do be done while the system is broken. The next election, voters will desert in droves, whatever decisions are made regarding coalitions. Our only hope is electoral reform.
10. Fight for PR with every fibre of our being as it is our only hope (as well as being the right thing for the nation as a whole 😉 ) Long term, I like Duncan’s suggestion that we try for Obama style microfinancing. Support for on Twitter and Facebook is astronomical, if we can get those people to donate £5 each, that would be an excellent start!
Duncan wrote:
“I should have said earlier actually the other constituency people should definitely be looking at the campaign in is Redcar. Seriously; if there’s another general election in the offing we ought to copy as close as is possible the campaign run in Redcar for Labour seats and Eastbourne for Conservative seats, other things being equal – unless, unbeknownst to be there are special local circumstances which made those seats stand out from the general trends in the UK (we run the council in Redcar, as I recall). Redcar and Eastbourne – the right answers.”
I cannot speak for Redcar, but I can tell you that the campaign in Eastbourne differed little from campaigns mounted in other Tory held target seats. There were three factors which led to victory, none of which had much to do with special features of the campaign:
(1) A long 3rd party presence, going back to the 1960s.
(2) Stephen Lloyd was well-known, and people generally had positive things to say about him.
(3) Nigel Waterson was not liked and had upset many in his own party.
In short, there was a combination of positive factors and no magic formula.
The Lib Dem surge failed miserably, why? That is for better people than I to work out; I can have a guess…
Labour are in difficulty with Mr Brown at the helm so there has been a switch of votes enough to make it clear that he is not wanted, I switched my vote to Lib Dem (and I ask myself now was it a mistake) but I know a lot of people who would not take the risk that by switching to Lib Dem they would allow the Tory party to gain power.
The opinion polls were probably correct on the night.
Talking about hung parliaments and who Nick would or would not work with, that made it plain to Labour voters who were maybe thinking of protest voting to think again… and as it turns out it looks as though those fears are coming true via the back door.
Without PR I think the Lib Dem party is close to where their ceiling is
What happens next is all down to Nick and his advisors, I feel whatever they do is going to have repercussions for the country, if that is with the Tory party and it goes sour for the public as a whole I think you can say goodbye, some of us can still remember Mrs T and what the Tory party did then; what is funny is the Tories want to do the same thing again… so if unemployment rises to the levels seen under the last Tory government there is no doubt the Lib Dem party will be associated with that and it will cost votes.
If Mr Brown had stepped down 6 months ago I think we would be looking at labour still in government, I personally think Mr Brown has cost the Labour party 50 – 60 seats maybe more; by not stepping down… Labour in opposition with a new party leader, I think the Lib Dem party and the Tory party will be looking over their shoulders all the way to the next election even if it is in a couple of months the longer it takes the more Labour will regain what they have lost because of Mr Brown.
So hang on to your hats
I’m no member or even activist, but I have consistently voted for Ed Davey ever since my wife and I and 14 of our friends helped get him elected in 1997 (interestingly on the night it seemed as if he won by 14 votes rather than the 56 quoted in Wikipaedia). His record on expenses has a lot to do with how we vote, but there are a number of fundamental issues and the Lib-Dem approach more closely represents my wishes. I was traditionally a Labour voter, but voted tactically in ’97 to get rid of the Tories. Since then Labour has moved further away from representing me and the LD’s have moved closer. I think that there were a couple of areas where Tories and labour lied about LD policies and the “corrections” were not stringent enough , and a couple of areas where the way the ideas were presented would have “turned off” voters.
I think rather than touting “scrap Trident”, LD manifesto should have stated (and stuck to) that Trident would not be exempted from the Defence Spending Review (in the interests of fairness and exploring every avenue to cut costs).
Joining the Euro is academic anyway (for at least the next 5 years) so that idea should have been downplayed far more. The coincidence of the Greek situation did LD no favours at all.
The Illegal Immigrant amnesty would have been a turn off (IMO) for many. This policy could have been ommitted from the manifesto.
Part of Labour’s ’97 success in my view was their care to stress that nothing would change immediately and that existing policies would be looked at carefully before any changes were made.
But I really think that the main reason for the disparity in the polls to the actual vote was the tenet put forward by both Lab and Con that a vote for LD is a vote for Cameron/Brown. I think this “polarised” electorates into voting against another party rather than voting for what they wanted. The “wasted vote” idea will hang around until Electoral Reform happens. Ironically, as LD becomes more successful the probability of “splitting” the vote increases, creating more pressure for Polarisation eg. Brentford and Ealing Central.
Re: Proposed Lib/Con “alliance”. If compromise is the order of the day, my preference would be forget Trident in exchange for an early referendum on electoral reform, questions to be; 1) Do you want a change in the current voting system? Y/N 2) Rank in order of preference; AV, AV+ & STV.
Keep status quo re; 1) Europe. 2) Nuclear Energy Build Programme (but implement the “green economy” now)
Drop “Immigrant Amnesty” but retain rest of immigration policy
3 simple reasons why a lot of people couldn’t vote Lib Dem.
An amnesty for illegal immigrants, scrapping Trident and joining the Euro.
Our targeting strategy at the next election should be based upon the Labour MPs currently sabotaging coalition talks. “Vote Labour, Get Cameron.” “Diane Abbot has proven herself incapable of negotiating a fair compromise and forced a Conservative government on the country; I don’t think that’s what the people of Hackney North signed up for.”
I think there is a general feeling that Clegg’s performance by the final debate came across as repetitive. There seemed to be no progression in his argument other than – ‘don’t vote for the old parties’. Of course this is the core message, but I got the feeling that for there could have been greater effort on developing the narrative of why the old parties share an old outlook on things like foreign policy and the economy, rather than just the voting system.
What happened to the Clegg effect? I have two thoughts:
1) In a constituency like Brentford & Isleworth (which I fought) we experienced a real surge in new supporters and financial donations. The reality is that it was just too late to be a game change in a marginal. We needed these donations coming in for three years in advance to fund the voter ID that Ashcroft’s (and other) donations to the Tories were enabling. Only with voters IDed can you then “get out the vote” on election day. Even then, if you need to telephone thousands of voters on election day, parties will now use call centres in other parts of the world to provide the necessary capacity. Again this requires higher levels of long term donations.
2) Policy. The Lib Dems still need to better communicate our policies on: immigration, Europe and the Mansion tax. On immigration Nick failed to communicate the sheer impracticality of trying to kick illegal workers out of the country (economically and socially). On Europe the Lib Dems need to re-position ourselves as the party of reforming the EU institutions, rather than being perceived as mindlessly pro-European. And on the Mansion tax few people I spoke to actually got that it only applied to the value of a property over £2m at 1%/annum. It was too complicated and lost us “Soft Tory” votes.
The failure in these two areas contributed in large part to the dampening down of the impact of Clegg (this time!).
Andrew
Immigration was a good policy but never explained well to the electorate. I watched many hours of election coverage and in the last 2-3 days almost every Labour and Tory spokesperson interviewed mentioned the Lib Dems ‘crazy immigration’ policy. It was clearly a deliberate tactic by both and succeeded as I think this put doubts into potential switch voters.
The reason for our ‘failure’ I suspect was not due to any one reason but rather a culmination of many of the points raised above. In view of recent developments however, the question now is; have we missed the chance for ‘real’ political reform by (apparently) agreeing to a referendum on AV?
@C H Ingoldby
“3 simple reasons why a lot of people couldn’t vote Lib Dem.
An amnesty for illegal immigrants, scrapping Trident and joining the Euro.”
None of which were our policies. We wanted amnesty for immigrants who had been here 10 years who had ‘proven themselves to be productive citizens’ (whatever that means) with an expiry date (so all that rubbish in Debate 3 about a sudden illegal rush into Britain was nonsense), we wanted to subject trident to the strategic arms review process (and it sounds like we’ve got it, depending on what ‘scrutinize’ means) and we said in the manifesto that we didn’t forsee joining the Euro in the near future, and if we did it wouldn’t be without meeting various economic checks and even then not without a referendum.
If what you say is true then it lends some support to the idea that we were subject to misrepresentation; either hostile misrepresentation by the other parties of self-misrepresentation to make our policies (such as on Trident) appear more radical than in fact they were.
I don’t think this is as significant as the ‘anti-Tory’/’anti-Labour’ swing.
@Andrew Dakers – “The reality is that it was just too late to be a game change in a marginal. We needed these donations coming in for three years in advance to fund the voter ID that Ashcroft’s (and other) donations to the Tories were enabling. Only with voters IDed can you then “get out the vote” on election day.”
That’s a fair thought however I guess a) as a matter of psephological interest why was there such a disparity between the proclaimed and predicted voter intentions and the actual votes. Given turnout went up ‘get out the vote’ doesn’t seem a plausible candidate, b) a lot more could be done with microfinancing. The Tories were doing some on Conservative Home for particular candidates “see if we can raise £1000” sort of thing. It would be possible to do this, especially as the LibDem blogosphere increases in size and interconnectedness.
As for the claims that Evan is ‘abrasive’ I have to say I’ve met the man on a handful of occasions and (perhaps I’m just young and easily influenced) I always found him inspirational. I hardly think that saying he deserved to lose because he was a ‘darling of radical liberals’ is the right attitude to have; the party’s name, after all is the LIBERAL democrats, not the Middle-of-the-road Democrats or Moderate Democrats or Inoffensively-Liberalish Democrats. If Evan’s emphasis on science ‘offended’ anyone then we failed in not taking better advantage of the endorsements it brought from the likes of Richard Dawkins and Evan Harris (or the money it could have brought, for that matter). I’m afraid anyone saying Evan deserved to lose because he was too liberal… I think we belong in different parties.
Ruth Bright
Matthew, I was a parliamentary candidate last time and as a matter of fact I agree with you that class is a huge issue too. I am the ninth child of a Romany speaking bricklayer and I haven’t very often met any Lib Dem of my background let alone a Lib Dem PPC of my background. Had I retained the broad Hampshire accent of my early childhood and cheerily advertised at selection meetings that my Dad went to prison for armed robbery I doubt if I would have made much progress in the party!
I work at a university as a lecturer. My dad’s last job before he retired was also at a university. As a cleaner. There’s some Romany on my mother’s side, though nothing like as much as yours.
I think there is a lot of hidden discrimination against people like us. It’s often unconscious, but it’s there. When we open our mouths, yes, they do write us down. They think of us as work-horse people, not as leaders or thinkers.
It’s worse to have a southern working class accent than a northern accent. A northern accent is generally recognised as an accent, but a southern accent is generally dismissed as poor speech. Most of us in the south speak something between what is now called “estuary” and what is technically called “Received Pronunciation” but I’d call it “posh”. Because we can never quite make it to real posh, it always pulls us down. My normal accent is something like that, but funnily enough I find a touch of broad Sussex tends to come out when I get really worked up and I wonder “Where did that come from?” since I recall even when I was a kid it was only my older relatives on my mother’s side (my father’s family moved to Sussex from the midlands) who spoke like that.
The electoral system too has pulled us down. Because it means almost every MP in the southern counties is a Tory, and almost every Tory MP is posh, people like us are hardly every seen or heard in public life, our very existence is hardly recognised.
I’d love you to define your terms, What pray is your definition of a ‘posh woman’? I am not ‘posh’ but I don’t think a candidate can be deemed intrinsically evil because she went to private school and comes from London.
As ever, I am writing these things in a hurry. As an academic, of course I would be much more careful to define my terms and throw in all the ifs and buts in any sort of professional writing done in that capacity.
I am not saying someone who is “posh” is intrinsically evil, any more than anyone who is white or who is male is intrinsically evil, though the over-representation of white people and male people leads to frequent calls for some sort of action to correct it. I have never heard within the Liberal Democrats for any action to correct the over-representation of posh people.
I’m saying “posh” to get away from the technical language of social class. It’s more a feeling than something I could give a precise definition to. However, when I find 41% of our LibDem MPs had private school education, which you have to have fairly rich parents to have gone through, compared to only 7% of the population as a whole, I think there’s a problem. So why is this problem not given any attention compared to the constant concern about our lack of non-white MPs, for example?
I think one of the reasons the Lib Dems did not do as well in the election as the pundits thought they would is that when people got into the voting booth they suddenly realised that they were not voting for the party leaders. They were voting for the constituency MP. Most of the electorate had been thinking about national level politics and representation because of the debates, and then got hit between the eyes with the local agenda when they went to vote. That could have concentrated the mind considearably. It certainly did for me and my friends and family.
I will defect, actually I already have! Where are the women in your new govt? The Lib Dems are a bunch of sell out harlets in my view. I am really angry I put money, time and energy into propping up the tories. You might have 5 years of power (yes, it was just announced you lot will prevent the next election from happening for 5 years). The Lib Dems are finished.
OXWAB
sometimes suffering horrendous swings (eg, Oxford West & Abingdon, …)
I would argue there was not a horrendous swing in OXWAB, our boundaries had been changed and we were painfully aware we had lost many votes to Oxford East, and had gained many conservative constituents in exchange. We had our doubts about keeping the seat all the way through the campaign. Having been seen as a marginal we had Ashcroft money poured in here, the plush leafleting started months ago.
That’s the background to the post mortem here.
Ramble coming:
I’ve gone through an existentialist crisis since the negotiations and formation of the coalition. I came out in hives as I always say at the idea of any coalition agreement with the Tories, they have always been the party and ideology I have wanted to fight.
Now after a walk, I have taken a more pragmatic and realistic view. Quite simply Clegg would have looked stupid and the whole ethos of the party redundant if he hadn’t formed a coalition, that’s what one can expect under PR no? And it certainly is a different way to do politics, and hopefully a departure from Punch and Judy politics. For my own emotional comfort I would have preferred Confidence and Supply, but that might have looked too churlish.
The MPs up on London are excited (there are probably exceptions) by these new opportunities.
Meanwhile back in the shires, we have the reality of the simpler, non-analytical way most voters look at politics. Most citizens are not interested in this as we are, and have not developed the reflexes to think around this, or else they haven’t got the time or inclination. On the door step, the party is going to be horrifically difficult to promote in future canvassing drives unless mindsets and profound shifts take place. “Vote for us to keep the Tories out” is not an argument or sentiment we can rely on any more. which is a shame as it worked.
Of the dozens of conversations I had, I can think of only a couple of voters who will be impressed by the LibDems entering this coalition. Many people I saw must be feeling bewildered and betrayed, and are too busy doing other things to have a discussion and be persuaded. Some rapid spinning is needed. Or perhaps this coalition will be positive, will not damage our party’s integrity and will radically shift the national psyche from ding-dong, hate-filled politics to a more sophisticated getting on with people politics.
Now let’s hope our MPs do well and are perceived as doing well, it’s our only hope, and if it works, more importantly it’ll be good for the country.
@Edward • Posted 7th May 2010 at 1:33 pm
This is important to highlight, and since I’m a Radical LIberal I will highlight this, but not quite on the slant I expect you mean.
In OXWAB there was an A4 leaflet highlighting embriology and abortion issues and exaggerating Evan Harris’ position on these issues, it was an ugly read and was fully intended to damage his reputation.The leaflet was 4 colour on decent stock and not off a desktop printer, so was not a cheap item to produce. I heard that a woman seen distributing the leaflet, on the other side of the eastern bypass, was recognized as being from a fundamentalist evangelical church.
Please keep in mind this particular extreme Christian denomination for the months and years to come.
Also, there was an animal rights campaigner standing in OXWAB expressly to unseat Evan, naming him “Doctor Death” due to his support of using animals for medical research. Indeed there is much research done in Oxford and enormous support for animal testing so he’s not the only person to blame. The leaflet got everywhere, and doubtless added more poison to the mix.
In his standing down speech, Evan Harris said words to the effect that free speech and the right to disagree are paramount, but in a democratic society, disagreement must never veer to the malicious and dishonest.
Well we’ll miss him, he was cabinet material!
Thanks for that Matthew. Perhaps we should learn from the Tories – in this coaltion they have found at least two occupants of the Great Offices of State who were educated at comprehensives. Not sure the Lib Dems could have done the same!
““Vote for us to keep the Tories out” is not an argument or sentiment we can rely on any more. which is a shame as it worked. ”
But do we seriously want to belong to a party that has this as its only philosophy?
“Vote for us to get X implemented” is far more positive – and in Government you get things implemented.
Kathy, what you say about Evan Harris illustrates a big problem. He was outspoken about his views on certain issues where he needn’t have been, and as a result lost votes. While you highlight a “fundamentalist” evangelical Christian organisation opposing him, there was also a lot of concern about him from much more liberal Christians.
I find myself in a position in some ways similar but in some opposite to Evan here. I’m a Catholic, and though I certainly would not say my Church has done no wrong, I have felt media coverage of it in the past few years has been extremely biased to the point where I keep reading anti-Catholic rants in places like the Guardian newspaper and get really angry wanting to say “No, it ls not like that” or “Well, a fair debating point, but not the only one, when are you going to give the other side a chance to put its view?”. In the end, in the absence of anyone else, I have felt the need to stand up and put the other side where I can, including this website. As such, no doubt there are people who would only the whole be sympathetic to my views on most things but were I ever to be seeking their vote for anything would think “Hmm, he’s a Catholic, don’t like that, better not vote for him”.
In both cases it means being prepared to stand up and say something you know will make you unpopular, perhaps just because you feel “Well, someone needs to put that viewpoint”, is really damaging to a political career. During my time as a councillor I remember how often I felt I had to shut up about so many issues (I don’t mean the religious ones now) because I was constantly thinking “Well, I may think that or want to suggest it as an idea, but how will it look if my opponents get hold of it, take it out of context, misquote it, and throw it back at me?”. Which, despite my carefulness, they did on some things. I do feel some liberation now I’m not elected or planning to be elected to anything to speak my mind more.
I would hope that under an electoral system like STV one may feel less inhibited, because it is no longer the case that to get elected you HAVE to get more votes than anyone else in one locality. Instead you can hope that what you lose in one place you may gain as unexpected support from the wider multi-seat area. Had Evan been standing in a wider multi-member constituency, I am sure what votes he lost from Christians concerned about some of his views would have been replaced by extra support from keen secularist people who liked them.
@Tabman – That’s exactly the right sentiment!
@Matthew – Or if he didn’t then at least there would be the feeling that it was a democratic decision had been made.
To explain what Matthew is saying for those who might not know, it is possible for the second preference to count under STV in a way they don’t under AV. In multi-member constituencies there is vote redistribution from top candidates as well as bottom candidates because once the candidates reach above a certain threshold it is known that they will be elected. Their votes are then redistributed (under the better systems) according to the additional preferences of the voters indicated in proportion to both the number of additional preferences for each candidate and the number of votes which were above the threshold (which is why you can get things like 0.5 of a vote transferred if 50% of voters had one second preference and 50% another and the candidate was only one vote over.
So if there is an area, call it Oxfordshire, in which only one Labour candidate can get elected, on the presumption that Labour supporters are often secularists we might expect to find people voting 1) Labour A, 2) Labour B, 3) Labour C and then 4) Evan and if one of the three Labour candidates is elected above the threshold and other two are redistributed we’d expect additional votes to be counted towards Evans total which might make up the difference.
STV is awesome, as is Evan Harris.