Author Archives: Benjamin Sims

Why, after a year of being involved with the Lib Dems, I’ll be renewing my membership

By Benjamin Sims | Mon 11th April 2016 - 6:51 pm

I was sad to see Josh Lashkovic’s article explaining why he won’t be renewing his membership. I was one of the enthusiastic newbies he refers to; I met him in that summer of 2015, and I thought he was a great guy with interesting ideas for ways the party could move forward after its electoral wipeout.

I’m a great enthusiast for the idea of the Lib Dems as a startup, and I share his desire for the party to change. My experiences over the last year though have been completely different to his, and I’d like to explain where I think he’s wrong and see if he might reconsider.

Just because we need new methods, doesn’t mean we should throw out the old ones

I have indeed knocked on a lot of doors and I’ve delivered a lot of leaflets. But just because those methods are old doesn’t mean they’re obsolete. My first full campaign was, yes, ‘another council by-election’ and we did ‘spend evenings and weekends knocking on doors’. But we came second somewhere we’d never had a candidate before (a new entrant disrupting an established market, you might say) and we learnt a lot.

Posted in Op-eds | 27 Comments

Generation Bournemouth: Thoughts of a new member after Conference

By Benjamin Sims | Fri 25th September 2015 - 1:30 pm

I wasn’t sure what to expect from my first political conference. I thought maybe I’d go and I’d be on my own all weekend. Perhaps the people who’d been going for years would look down on somebody with less than five months in the party. Or they’d be politically narrow minded, not wanting to discuss views that differed from their own.

I should have had more faith. Within hours, I’d made a group of fantastic new friends. Party members, councillors, even Tim Farron and Paddy Ashdown told us how grateful they were to have us and how the surge in membership had given new life to the party.

I spoke to many people with different views to my own – sometimes absolutely opposing views – but those discussions were all pleasant, rational, and ended with an agree to differ and an offer of a drink. Nobody called me a ‘Tory’ if I said Britain should maintain a nuclear deterrent, or dismissed me as a ‘leftie’ for supporting our EU membership.