We see you. You, who would return our party to the comfortable, squishy, managerial centrism of the past. You, who would lay the blame for our defeats solely at the feet of a leader who had the temerity to be a young, outspoken woman. You, who are desperate to hark back to the 1990s when the 2020s are upon us in days. We see you and we will resist you, as we have at every previous election review.
It would be wrong to apportion any election result to a single cause. But let us not forget that Bollocks to Brexit was criticised for scaring the horses by those afraid of radicalism – yet it was a major factor in our best national election result since 1910.
At their conferences, the Conservatives please themselves to sing complacently about how wonderful the country already is. Labour sing about the symbolic colour a pretty flag – and we Liberal Democrats sing about taxing landlords until the pips squeak. Somewhere between Conference and the electorate, that radicalism is all too often lost.
I have taken part in three General Elections, and after each, I have said the same thing: we must remember that in politics these days, how things actually are does not matter. What matters is how they look. Having to explain means you’ve already lost. It did not matter that our policies were the most popular of any party’s. What mattered is that we failed to connect them, and our values, to everyone’s lives. Until we develop that connection – story, cut-through, whatever you call it – we will be left casting around and scratching our heads in reviews like this.
In our current age, it is easy to reach for soaring, sweeping change as a solution, when what actually matters to the people out there are boring, everyday bread and butter issues. We are where we are because wealth is being hoarded, safety nets dismantled, middle classes crushed, and the planet pillaged – and people in a world in crisis don’t have bandwidth to consider sweeping change when they are struggling to eat, to rent, to survive. Solve those problems and the sweeping changes will follow.
Everyone in this party is here because we know that Liberalism and Social Democracy remain the best and clearest solutions to these problems. Charles Kennedy famously said “Three simple words: freedom, justice and honesty. These sum up what the Liberal Democrats stand for.”. That is the lens through which we must focus everything we do and say on the three great crises of our time – of climate, inequality, and trust.
* John Grout is a Lib Dem activist and lives in Reading.
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49 Comments
I agree with Charles Kennedy.
David Steel has a plan for a Senate in a letter to the Times today (16/12/19), but
Vince Cable DID say he was our candidate for PM, at a rally in Eastbourne, “Younger than Gladstone”.
I whole heartedly agree with this. We must do a proper review and avoid ghe squashy centrism that is so easy for our opponents to target us with
@JohnGroat
“It would be wrong to apportion any election result to a single cause”
Actually in this case no it wouldn’t.
We made a huge mistake in allowing ourselves to believe that it was somehow ok and justified to subvert demoracy and simply ignore the result of the 2016 referendum.
By promising to revoke Article 50 we essentially presented ourselves as a party “above the law”, “above politics”, and in that singular moment we alienated 17.4m voters and likely many more besides, who had fairly expressed their wishes to Leave the EU in 2016.
What on earth were we thinking?
Was it really ok to stand on the gamble and vain hope that we could get into democratic power by ironically subverting the democratic process itself? What does that say about us?
The damage done to the party is immeasurable. Not only have the public firmly cast us into the pit of obscurity and irrelevance but they will likely never now forgive us for the undemocratic position we took on BrExit.
We must think on this.
Understand that the millions of Remainers who so desperately want to stay in the EU didn’t vote for us despite us being the only party promising to actually cancel BrExit!
What does that say about the electorate.
It says to me that there are a lot of Remainers who, despite losing the referendum, realise that the democratic process in the UK is sacred and that it is beyond the pail to trash it.
Remainers who value democracy itself, more than the decision to Leave or stay in the EU.
There is no way forward for us if we maintain this undemocratic stance. What we actually need to do is stand up and apologise for the mistake we made and set in people’s minds the belief that we DO support democracy and will never try to subvert it again. How that haoppens I can not contemplate just now, but failure to do so will mean the party is finished for years and years to come.
One can not hold a tennable position if one has the word “democrat” in the party name and yet wilfully seeks to subvert democracy in the manifesto.
Thank you John. I liked your comment, which appears to be your core thesis…
‘It did not matter that our policies were the most popular of any party’s. What mattered is that we failed to connect them, and our values, to everyone’s lives. Until we develop that connection – story, cut-through, whatever you call it – we will be left casting around and scratching our heads in reviews like this.’
What are your ideas for addressing this central commnications problem you refer to ? Are there any other issues at play in addition to not being able to communicate our popular policies sufficiently, in your view ?
Revoke policy a disaster. Cummings made us look illiberal but the fight goes on.I wonder if people thought they were only putting a Tory Govnt in power for a year ‘get brexit done’ and not realise that the govnt is for 5 years (as Andrew George says). where Tories can consolidate a hold over the country as Trump has in the US. We need a leader asap so that he/she can become recognised before the next election. A new leader who connects with the people . Whose weaknesses (we all have them)can be ironed out to show a future leader for the country and takes the countries whole views in to consideration before a maninfesto.
John. Our best national election result since 1922 was the General Election of 2005 when we elected 62 MP’s with 22% of the vote.
As for EU elections -low turnout and PR – the UK electorate always treated them as one big Parliamentary by election where they could safely make their protest of the day. No smaller Party has ever turned a EU surge into success at the following GE -not the Greens, not the BNP, not UKIP and not the Lib Dems.
To get our message across our leaflets should NOT have bar charts on them and be replaced by our policies.We must NOW find a way of counteracting the fact that we can be classed as undemocratic for it will be held agin us as Swinsons decisions in the coalition were.
It’s nice that the comments here are showing us some of the ideas we need to reject, too!
I really love this piece, thank you for writing it. We can’t be so busy chasing votes (which is as unlikely to work as it is morally bankrupt) that we forget our Liberal values.
John Grout we were a radical party in the 1990s right up to 2006.
What people want are:
a secure job with a decent wage, that at least keeps up with inflation;
a home that they can call theirs;
a NHS that is there for them when they need it;
free training if unemployed for a jobs that exists locally to them;
a safety net that doesn’t leave them with no money and treats them with dignity;
safe streets.
I don’t think anyone has all of these.
The way to provide all of these is first to ensure that the economy grows by close to 3% each and every year. 3% growth is more than £66 billion and the government takes about 40% of this – £25.2 billion. Over fives yeas this means there could be £378 billion to spend on services – welfare, education, training, police, prisons, NHS, social care and transport. Imagine what we could do over 5 years with £47 billion to increase spending on welfare by.
I agree with many of these comments but not all of them (blaming Brexit is just a cop-out for the operational failure of the whole campaign). But at the heart of it all must be a clear understanding and expression of what Liberalism means in the 2020s. How and why we are different, including the difference from people who are vaguely progressive and well-intentioned but haven’t really worked out what they stand for. Our failure on this is a central problem in our party for at least 15 years.
Completely agree with you, John. There are too many so-called ‘Liberals’, who are coming out of the wood work trying to get us to be thankful that Brexit happened and that we should lie-down and surrender; even in these comments. They sound like voices from the Tory/Labour parties. We should never have tried to placate Tory Remainers or Labour Corbynistas. We should’ve stuck to our Revoke policy, rather listened to the PV movement ( a known Labour Front Org)! And, yes, we need to join up the dots linking our policies and European beliefs, to ordinary peoples lives.
Agree with a lot of what Michael BG and others say in this and other posts. Concentrate on what matters to individuals,families and communities, namely jobs, services, and support that offer them security and respect. Back this up with holding the government to account over brexit and trade negotiations. Human rights matter and should continue to work on these as part of spelling out Liberal values. Its about building trust again with people and saying LibDems and the individual can hold local and national politicians to account.
Yes I agree that perhaps bar charts have had their day. Have seem to become an object of ridicule and fun. Good idea to use them to emphasis local and national actions as bullet points/short sharp slogans etc.
Think about how you can work at offering a message to the leave voters. They voted that way for many reasons and the majority are not racist little englanders. If you are developing and promoting policies and actions that matter you can hopefully gain a few votes. Can offer a different view on the positives of the EU as well in case of future plans to campaign to rejoin.
Hopefully the review will not follow the Jan Lansman narrative. Saw him on election night being interviewed, his take was the policies were brilliant but the public failed to move their agenda to match i.e we were brilliant but the voters were too stupid to understand that we knew best.
I feel some agreement with Reece. The Revoke play was a gamble, which I thought very high risk, but having played it the only option was to play it to the hilt. It seemed though, that the party was embarrassed by it and squirmed. Massive mistake there.
The idea came from a belief, regularly expressed here, that many of the leave voters had now realised their mistake and were looking for an opportunity to repair the damage they had done.
Clearly not the case. I don’t see what else the party could have done, though. The Santa Claus stuff was already covered by Labour (to excess) and what else did the party offer?
An economic revival plan endorsed by the New Covent Garden Soup Company?
A manifesto endorsed by a few C list celebs who did more harm than good?
This was bound to happen when two drastically opposing ideologies go to the polls.
The question is “will there ever be a party of the centre?”. My answer would be yes, but it is centre-right, not centre-left. In my 50 years of voting the Libs have gone from 12 seats to 13 so it is legitimate to ask such questions.
once we adopted the revoke policy we had to logically also attack the terms of the existing Boris Brexit deal, we never once did that, leaving the policy itself fatally exposed. This meant our appeal to the 48 per cent was less than it could have been.
Secondly we had no other messages being communicated, or so it seemed, we never seemed to mention Climate Change or any of our other manifesto policies at ALL. This left us with no message for Leave voters at all. Thank God the election did not last another week.
@Dave Thornbury
I agree 100% What I find shocking is that most people here see nothing wrong with ignoring a massive referendum vote when it doesn’t give the answer they want. They are rejecting democracy itself and insulting the electorate.
I pointed out in another thread that as the only remain party they should have picked up the Remain vote but they didn’t. Labour didn’t either.
Clearly the bulk of remainers respect our democratic conventions, but not the people here. I think the party has seriously damaged its integrity and democratic credentials.
Most people now regard the party with derision. Even Corbyn’s bunch respect our democracy.
Innocent Bystander – you are incorrect, in your 50 years of voting the Libs have gone from 12 seats to 62 to 11 (not 13 actually). Suggesting theyve gone from 12 to 13 in 50 years is very disingenuous and erases the achievements of Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy from history.
Nigel Hunter said “We need a leader asap so that he/she can become recognised before the next election”.
NO. We need a new leader who can connect, who can think strategically and pragmatically, who is not tainted by the coalition years, who was not associated with Jo Swinson’s ‘revoke’ policy. And who can lead. If it takes us months to find such a person, so be it. There’s no prospect any longer of an early general election and in the meantime we have an able caretaker in the person of Ed Davey.
Let’s not rush into something, only to regret it later – that does seem somewhat of an LD speciality.
ELECTION LITERATURE. Am I the only one who was distressed by our leaflets this time (and the time before). Play school colours. Big mug shots. Dumbed-down statements. No development of arguments. And very little differentiation from our opponents, who follow the same general pattern.
One useful thing we could do immediately is to talk to designers and copywriters within our membership and come up with some distinctive, differentiated, look-and-feel literature platforms – and then test them on the membership before printing millions and stuffing them through letterboxes.
Dave Thornbury speaks for me in his comments above. As soon as I heard the party had adopted a Revoke Policy, my heart sank. At a stroke we abandoned the moral high ground which we had occupied for 3 years and handed opponents in both the Tory and Labour parties (and in the media) a stick with which to beat us – we went from being Lib Dems to Un Dems. The Revoke policy, far from being radical, was just daft.
The early days of the campaign when Jo was telling the electorate she was aiming to be prime minister were also ill judged. Had we surged in the polls as soon as the election was called, it might have made sense to speak of becoming the largest party. But, probably as a result of the revoke policy, we started to drop in the polls, from day one. To then suggest that Jo was gunning to be PM, just sounded delusional.
The inquest should not just mean a new leader but also the removal from the inner circle around the leader of those responsible for both the revoke policy and the decision to claim Jo had a chance of becoming PM. These were both terrible tactical blunders and were rightly punished by the electors. That we still managed to gain votes overall is great – but it is a measure of how much better our performance could have been had we got the tactics right.
Perhaps we might research, develop and present a sound and straightforward policy on the creation, distribution and storage on money which can be presented in bullet points?
JH,
I was not trying to be disingenuous or provocative but to try and add some realism. As football managers say, you are only as good as your last game and this is deja vu all over again.
My numbers (with your corrections) are correct and I would not know how to motivate the activists to devote countless hours and miles of shoe leather, over the next 50 years against that unarguable backdrop.
This seems to be an existentialist crisis and I would take time to involve all the members (who have different views) to find a way forward. There is a huge appetite out here for national reform but the current offering is bland, predictable and anodyne and there seems little point in minor tweaks. That does not mean some massive unaffordable giveaways but a rewrite of our nation’s future history which may not involve Scotland or Ulster.
From my experience at work the biggest issue remains trust following the coalition and to set the scene my job is blue collar, shop floor, ‘banter’ that breaks most norms of polite speech and late Friday night pub style language.
We need to accept the lasting damage of ‘tuition fees’ and address the popular opinion that the LDs can’t be trusted to say one thing and not do another in a way that reaches the large part of the electorate who are more interested in voting for Strictly than discussing politics. There’s no need for clever arguments or in depth analysis on the reality of what happened and why when most people get their memories jogged by the Sun or the Mail.
The other observation is that although the first opinion is common it’s often followed with both our local LD MPs (Baker and Lloyd) were very good! I did ask a couple of colleagues with that opinion if they’d be voting LD (most recently a few weeks ago for Stephen Lloyd) but it was always no, refer to point #1.
Just one other observation from the last couple of months, we know Lewes was a high profile seat for us but the sheer amount of election material (local and national) was detrimental. On some days we were delivering three different items of LD literature to some addresses, this started days after the GE announcement right up to last Thursday. Some 1st class addressed leaflets even came through last Friday most likely as a consequence of having a GE during the peak of Christmas with the mail centres flat out processing cards. I dread to think how much money was wasted on what ended up being a wall of noise, most of which would of ended up being binned as soon as it was opened.
as Ive asked before , what were you (are are you) offering those people in the Leave areas who feel they have gained nothing , and lost a lot by the loud pro-European, metropolitan views promulgated by some (I’m looking at you , LibDems) political parties. There may be something but its not obvious to me as an interested observer
@Dave Thornbury – Um, no, that certainly wasn’t it either. The notion that further consultation of the public is somehow un-democratic is ludicrous, but is admittedly a narrative very helpful to the Brexiteers.
@Paul Reynolds – I think there’s a reluctance on the part of “HQ” to countenance embracing some of the more radical changes implied by Lib Dem philosophy and our long-standing policy positions on things like the Land Tax. Connecting Liberal principles to things like civil rights, homelessness and so on is something that was flirted with in this campaign, but the connection was never fully made explicit. That’s the sort of thing I think we need more of.
@Nigel Hunter – I’m not convinced it was the wrong policy, by a long shot. I am convinced it was very poorly handled, however, which allowed the creation of an unhelpful narrative.
@Paul Holmes – It’s true that no party’s converted EU election success into Westminster election success, but it is also true that it was the first nationwide poll since 1910 where the Liberal( Democrat)s handily bested both Labour and the Conservatives.
@ Holly – I completely agree.
@ Michael BG – That might well be true from a policy standpoint, but not from a campaigning one (I had in mind recent, thoroughly cloth-eared nostalgia for a certain disgraced peer when I wrote that). I think that’s a useful starting point from a practical perspective, though, and would agree with you otherwise.
@ Tony Greaves – I did not expect to agree with you in the comments thread under this post, but yes, indeed.
@ Reece – I generally agree.
@ Sean Hyland – Again, I generally agree. Bar charts have a place but only when clearly and simply explained (as I say in the main post, generally, explaining means you’ve already lost). Completely agree about giving a convincing offer to former leavers.
@ Innocent Bystander – I think we need to ditch thinking about the ‘left-centre-right’ spectrum completely and start thinking about the ‘liberal-centre-authoritarian’ one, and firmly position ourselves right up the liberal end of that one.
@ Clive English – I think our limited exposure could have been used more wisely, but this also speaks to the need to more convincingly connect our values with our policies.
@ Ken Munn – I’d argue that our long-term leader should also not be associated with the Coalition. Agree that Ed Davey is a good pair of hands, but having so convincingly backed Jo over him in the summer, it’s a bit galling to end up with him anyway. But I do agree that we need a good strategic thinker at the helm. I think what you describe is more of a messaging problem than a literature one, and the literature this time was a significant improvement on 2015 and 2017. Designing literature that can be effective in the 8-second window before it’s put in the recycling bin is a whole other issue, however.
Not green enough compared to the Greens.
Not spending enough compared to Labour.
Not Brexity enough compared to… anyone else.
The party has got to get its act together. There will not be a Lib Dem government in our lifetimes. Better to go the way of the Brexit Party and campaign on specific issues that matter to people and would make a difference. Policies like the pupil premium were easy to explain and popular. More policies like this.
In 2024 I hope to see a Lib Dem mini manifesto that reads, “Our views on certain issues are well-known so we won’t bore you with them. Our 5 priorities for the next parliament will be: 1,2,3,4,5…”
Simple, short and realistic. None of this “I’m standing to be the next PM of GB.”
Not currently a member – but regarding bar charts, are we talking about the false origin ones where “Only Lib Dems can beat Party X here”?
Unfortunately with the current British system of first past the post with heavy tactical voting, we have a form of “Do it yourself AV.” and it’s important for voters to know who the election is between so they can decide if they want to use their vote to decide it or to just register their opinion (either being ok). You win seats by getting into second and then getting the third party’s voters to push behind you. There are alternatives – for example Redcar (known for its racetrack) was the largest swing in the 2010 election – as well as the usual barcharts there was “It’s a two horse race at Redcar” with the odds Ladbrokes were offering on the candidates, which were a different way of showing the Lib Dems were the only credible winner other than the deeply unpopular sitting MP.
Of course the vast majority of the leaflet needs to be about reasons why Lib Dems beating Party X would even be a good thing rather than something to prevent.
Also whether or not they are the object of ridicule in the political twittersphere (see Guido Fawkes “Killing here” barchart on the silly Swinson squirrel “rumour”), isn’t that relevant to the majority of voters who probably aren’t aware that “Lib Dem barcharts”, “Lib Dem’s pointing at things” and so on are such well known things. As I said in another post. Get off twitter.
I hope you don’t mind me posting here and accept this post in the way it’s meant which is an honest opinion of where both yourselves and labour really didn’t help yourselves.
I live in a tory stronghold with the Lib Dem’s the second party. Right up to the election started I had decided that I would, despite what you did in power with the tories and me being a lifelong labour supporter vote for the Lib Dem’s along with my wife.
I realised that the odds were against labour or the Lib Dem’s winning and it was imperative to get a hung parliament to stop brexit.
My opinion soon changed after the first three or four days of the election campaign when all I saw from jo Swinson was attack after attack on labour and corbyn and her ruling out ever working with labour while he was in charge , something that in the early days of the election she didn’t do with Johnson. She made it impossible for me and my wife to vote Lib Dem. I heard the same from nick clegg when he said the same about Gordon brown but was happy to work with Cameron.
Labour too have to take some of the blame because they too got have offered an olive branch but at the same time that’s hard to do when the minority party were consistently making it clear they wouldn’t work with the current leader. If I’d have been a Lib Dem I’d have been looking at if there was any common ground or even tried to get something around electoral reform but I certainly wouldn’t have gone on the attack like you did . Everything should have been aimed at getting a hung parliament , instead we now have a tory majority and brexit a certainty, this despite remain parties having enough votes to have stopped it.
Both labour and the Lib Dem’s should hang their heads in shame because you both put your parties before the country and now we will have to pay the price.
Both of you need to wake up to the reality that unless you find a way of working together we will have decades of tory rule and decades of the most needy in society paying for those at the top.
Is it possible to honour a referendum, not choosing a direction,but merely opposing the status quo, from several contradictory perspectives ? ( Not my words, but wise ones.) I have always thought that the task of leaving the EU, without causing colossal damage, was bigger than our capabilities and though I feel unhappy about letting Johnson out of his box, by the early election, it was all a mess and decent people, who could see this self inflicted car crash developing, did the best they could.Johnson will no longer be able to hide in a fridge and will have to confront his lies about the EU and the rest of it.
I think he will feel the wrath of the Northern working class communities, one of which I came from, once they realise that he will not deal with the pain which I think they deflected onto the EU, just my opinion.
I have learned to respect well meaning MPs from all parties and I hope that there will be a reshaping of the non Johnson parties, as the people will certainly need an advocate and a ” people’s opposition. “
But let us not forget that Bollocks to Brexit was criticised for scaring the horses by those afraid of radicalism
It smashed our party, losing us votes from people who actually need us to speak up for them.
The problem was that saying “Bollocks to Brexit” just persuaded those who voted Leave to think of us as appalling elite types, and strengthened their view that Leave needed to take place to build a society which turned back the growth in inequality and lack of democratic control that has grown since 1979.
What we needed to do was show an understanding and sympathy for why so many people voted Leave for these reasons, and give a proper explanation of how the EU works, and why leaving it will if anything make those aspects worse rater than better. We needed to persuade those people the truth – they had been tricked into voting Leave by extreme right-wing economic types who want it for the precise opposite of what most of those who voted Leave thought they were doing it for.
We did none of this. By just saying insulting things to those poor people, we greatly strengthened Leave.
Vince Thurnell – Labour refused to take part in the Remain coalition because they “dont do deals”.
I’d laugh if I wasn’t crying.
Nostalgia’s a wonderful thing and hindsight is 20/20.
Perhaps standing on a remain and reform platform doesn’t sound like such a bad idea now, huh?
A radical response? I’d start with truth first.
I won’t hold my breath for the leadership to learn any lessons from this election since they didn’t from the previous two.
In principle I agree entirely that the party needs to resist managerial centrism and discover a coherent narrative and a coherent ideology. I have read articles explaining that the party needs to return to ‘grownup, sensible politics’ and decided this was code for ‘doing what thinktanks and lobbying groups tell you to do’.
I worry very much that – never mind Liberalism – the Liberal Democrats, since the messy slow death of the coalition, haven’t been quite sure what they believe about Democracy.
Who are the Liberal Democrats FOR?
Are we for us? People like us? Imaginary people who aren’t like us but conveniently agree with us before we’ve met them?
Or are we for defending and furthering the democratic rights, freedoms, and welfare of people who may use that freedom and choice to disagree with us? (And are we mature enough to keep the conversation going when they do or will we tut, lecture, flounce or sulk?)
Boris framed the election as a referendum on ‘ Get Brexit Done ‘. Done is ambigious word so the phrase united all leavers and many remainers who just wanted clarity and closure. The only response to this was a unified opposition attack on ‘ done ‘ showing it was a fraud. But the opposition wasn’t unified and all individually decided to talk about different things. Then disaster struck.
We love working at an abstract level: “are we for defending and furthering the democratic rights, freedoms, and welfare of people … ”
When Campbell-Bannerman won the 1906 Liberal landslide it was on the “big loaf, little loaf” ticket. People were afraid of hunger and knew they would not get the big loaves.
Brexit was won for several reasons including a fear of immigrants or “different” people.
Conclusion: fear wins votes. People will be terrified of something in in 2026. What will it be? Can we watch for it and find an election-winning solution?
JH, and that’s why I made it clear that both parties were to blame but do you honestly think that spend the first couple of weeks attacking Labour and demanding the current leader would have to be removed did anything to sway people into switching from Labour and lending their vote to the Lib Dems. It certainly didn’t in my household and I doubt it did anywhere else either.
A campaign driven by the Euro election results – a snapshot in time and immemorially treated by the public as a ‘free hit’. A message suite of Revoke, Toke , Woke. A leader who few knew, many of those who did didn’t like. But we liked her and we liked the messaging – remind you of another Party? – and so that was all that mattered. We are Liberals and we don’t compromise with the electorate.
Result: 11 MPs (ooh, but lots of saved deposits and near misses and BLAH)
LibDems are seen as a party of well meaning social workers, often with hopelessly outdated views on how the younger half of the populace think (they would much rather win X-factor or the lottery than work for fifty years in a safe job) and can’t get their head around the idea that a vast swathe of populace don’t want the State poking around in their lives.
The Tories weakness lies in the perception that they put big business before individuals, the way into that is move tax from individuals on to companies, rather than try to level everyone down with things like Land Tax. Eliminating fixed costs in people’s lives and radically lowering tax for those on less than 20k would be good starting points. LibDems need to move more to the freedom of the individual side of Liberalism, especially now all those EU rights are going to disappear, rather than try to be Labour Lite…
I agree with Vince and as a previous Labour voter who voted LD to try to keep us in the EU, I could not vote for you this time, partly because of the early election capitulation, from an inexperienced LD leader, where I feel wiser heads, like Vince Cable, would have found a way of working with Labour, in a GNU, to get another referendum.
My other reason, like Vince, was because of the strident messages coming from Jo about not working with Labour and in view of Jo’s voting record in the coalition, I was genuinely afraid that she was overplaying her cards and we would end up with another coalition with Tory .The messenger shot the message .I am giving up now,as Johnson is likely to be in power for the rest of my days and I am sad that we have a repeat of my own children growing up under Thatcher and my grandchildren will now have the same or worse.
I am pleased that Corbyn will now eventually quit and think Labour could split if another Corbyn disciple gets in.
It is a tragedy of our times that the only fully Remain party has been a prime mover in what will end up most likely as a hard brexit.
Matthew Huntbach:
“What we needed to do was show an understanding and sympathy for why so many people voted Leave for these reasons,”
No. “understanding and sympathy” will be perceived, rightly in my view, as patronising. I suggest that empathy would be much better.
I meant that LDs became a prime mover, accidentally, of course, not planned, which makes it even more of a tragedy.
I agree with Charles Kennedy. We represent Freedom, Justice and Honesty in politics and all of those are in short supply in our country at the moment and are going to be under extreme pressure.
I think we have to come to terms with being a “third party” in a FPTP system. We talk as if triangulating the messages and policies, toning down radicalism and waiting for the two main parties to become some extreme that they become toxic to their own voters will automatically result in us becoming a government. If we have any chance at all of cutting through it is by being different, not by being slightly less Conservative than the Tories and slightly less socialist than Labour.
What do we believe will move the country so we can all be more free, just and honest? What do we do that will make that happen?
For me, right now, honesty is the critical one. A huge election victory has just been won by the deliberate, planned and conscious employment of dishonesty. The tuition fees debacle hurts us because we were dishonest, either in making promises we couldn’t ever have kept or not keeping promises we could have. Apologising for the coalition is dishonest too: if we didn’t believe in what we were doing, why do it? Once we had adopted the policy of revoke, as many have said, being willing to abandon it as soon as it was challenged was deeply dishonest.
the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
@ Andrew Tampion
A Google check on what is mean by empathy gave it as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another”, and then the difference between sympathy and empathy as “The difference in meaning is usually explained with some variation of the following: sympathy is when you share the feelings of another; empathy is when you understand the feelings of another but do not necessarily share them.”
So I think your suggestion that what I’m saying is wrong doesn’t really make sense, because I don’t see that much difference, and if anything the difference between the two words is the other way round.
Anyway, I didn’t give details on exactly what needs to be said to show understanding and sympathy. I do get your point that whatever is said needs to be done in a way that doesn’t come across as patronising. Given that I come from a working class background, grew up in a council estate with free school meals as my parents’ income was low, and later in my life for 12 years was a councillor for a ward that was in the 10% poorest in the country, I do think I have an understanding which is not patronising of poor working class people, and why that led many of them to vote Leave.
I feel my own life and career have suffered from class discrimination. So please don’t patronise me by making that accusation.
From Nick Tyrone’s ever-excellent ‘blog:
“Then I think, maybe the Lib Dems can be rescued. But I’ve fallen for that one way too many times. Lots of people have pointed out the following: that the Lib Dems gained vote share in 288 seats; that there are now scores of seats the Lib Dems are in second place in, primed to win next time. I get all of that. What those who point this out are missing is this: the Lib Dems never learn and they never listen. They just keeping doing the same exact thing, every time. They are always sure that THIS election is Lib Dem time; that everyone is going to fall in love with the party, like a magic trick. They are incapable of examining the political terrain as it is as opposed to how they wish it was, and then acting accordingly. I mean, completely incapable.
This election was a perfect encapsulation of the party’s deep failings. Blessed with defector MPs from both main parties and millions of pounds in donations, they buried the defectors in the basement of HQ and slaughtered several forests to bombard the poor denizens in their target seats with twenty leaflets per household. It’s all they know how to do; they are incapable of being different. Which is why they will continue to lose. I’m sorry to tell you that, but that’s how I see it. Unless 50+ Labour MPs defect to the Lib Dems and set about radically changing the culture inside of the party, the Lib Dems will keep on losing.”
https://nicktyrone.com/my-labour-membership-dilemma/
I’m not a traditional LibDem (but really enjoy LDV): I normally vote conservative but have recently (but not in 2019) lent my vote to a good local LD candidate. I also voted remain – but respected the result.
I think that many are getting too hung up on the Revoke-stance. I can’t really see what choice you had in that that would have improved your results – which weren’t bad in terms of voter share. The only improvement you could have got is if Labour had been overtly ‘Leave’ – and there was no chance of that.
I know many will disagree with me, but you have to play the FPTP game, like the SNP do. Be clear about your fundamentals and target votes/seats in line with that. Policies come and go – but the LibDems lack an easily identifiable set of values that sticks with voters over the long term. We can all identify potential Tories and Labour voters through fairly simple principles that dominate their lives. Electoral swings live around the edges of these. But it is much harder to identify the potential LibDem voters, in my opinion, and they are too often defined as a -ve reaction to either of the other two rather than a +ve set of principles in their own right that can be translated to voters’ lives.
The Tories will target the working class Northerns for a bit; Labour will remain the ‘metropolitan elite’ whilst having a meltdown. You are strong with the middle class professionals in the South: focus on those seats and you could get back to your 50-60 seat levels. The worst thing that you could do is go down the progressive alliance route – you will cease to exist in no time.
John said: ‘Designing literature that can be effective in the 8-second window before it’s put in the recycling bin is a whole other issue, however.”
Quite. I’d hazard that most of our stuff was so trite and predictable it didn’t even make it to eight seconds.
Peter said: “Conclusion: fear wins votes. People will be terrified of something in in 2026. What will it be? Can we watch for it and find an election-winning solution?”
Job losses?
Peter Farrell-Vinay
Brexit was won for several reasons including a fear of immigrants or “different” people.
Yes, there are some issues here where the left is losing because it appears no longer concerned at all about working class people, and is now solely about race issues.
Because we don’t want to come across as racist, we never say anything about the concern that working class people get discriminated against, because the wealthy would rather import immigrants to do jobs. The danger caused by our population keep growing because we rely on more immigrants to do basic jobs never gets mentioned. Just push working class people out, don’t bother to train them, because it keeps tax down for the rich if we bring in people whose training is paid for in other countries. Don’t bother providing housing for working class families, because you can import immigrants who are happy to live in crowded accommodation.
Class inequality has grown rather than decreased in the past few decades, yet now it hardly gets mentioned. It used to be the main issue in left-right politics. Nowadays, from what one reads, one might suppose the main distinction between left and right is that far-left is anti-semitic and far-right is anti-islamic.
The consequence of this, very clear in the 2019 general election, is that people who need left-wing politics (in what it properly means, well still does for me i.e. more equality in wealth and income) for a better life end up voting for right-wing politicians, because they are easily tricked into doing this by the way left-wing politics no longer seems to be about giving them a better life.