Author Archives: Caron Lindsay

So we’re up 155 councillors in England. We can give ourselves a big pat on the back, right?

Well, maybe not.

Let’s look at London. A tale of two cities in one if ever there was one.

In the leafy southern areas, our heartlands, our results were, to be honest, unhealthily good. While it is a testament to how well our councils in Richmond, Sutton and Kingston are doing and are regarded by local people, holding virtually all the seats just isn’t conducive to good, inclusive government.  Even though it would disadvantage us, perhaps we should really be pushing for PR for local government as much as national.

But it wasn’t all plain sailing in that neck of the woods. In Merton, we had hoped to do much better against a dreadful Labour Council, but our gains were modest and Labour easily held control, gaining a seat from the Conservatives in the process.

It was a completely different story in inner London where the Green vote rocketed up.

Voters looked to them, not our well established Council groups, to defeat Labour and several councils, including Southwark, Haringey and Lambeth went to no overall control as the Greens surged. In Islington, where we once ran the Council, we didn’t make the breakthrough we had hoped and I was very sad that talented people like Rebecca Jones didn’t get elected despite spirited campaigns. In Haringey, voters again looked to the Greens and another disappointment was that Shamim Muhammad missed out. She spoke in the global women’s rights debate we had at Federal Conference and would have been a powerful voice for women’s rights on the Council.

We ran full, locally relevant campaigns in those areas and worked our socks off. The Greens did next to nothing on the ground but yet hoovered up hundreds of Council seats.

Why?

Everyone knows what the Greens stand for. They are speaking to people’s concerns about the divisive rhetoric we see from Reform and other socially conservative sources, about inequality, about poverty, about housing, about the international situation. And our lack of a cohesive national message is holding us back.  People do not feel that we get it, that we are on their side.

The challenge for us is that the Greens is that they are going full throttle with an emotionally resonant message that connects with people and we are not.  We sound technocratic. We lack passion. We don’t respond with suitable levels of outrage when the Prime Minister comes out with Reform lite garbage on immigration. In fact we come out with nonsense that sounds like we’re pandering to it only to put out a slightly better thing a few days later. It’s mixed messaging that makes us look untrustworthy.

We don’t have to promise everyone a free puppy, as the Greens frequently come close to doing, but we do need to wear our liberal values on our sleeve. It is simply not good enough to slightly shamefacedly and timidly put out something saying we are against division without actually taking on the arguments advanced by those who are stoking the division.

Our job as a liberal party is to bring people together and protect marginalised communities from attack and we need to be much better and clearer about it.

We look very much at the moment that we are here to serve the home counties and “blue wall” seats when we should be a voice for the north and our cities too.

So much of what we say seems to be moderated by timidity. We fear upsetting those in those seats more than we fear failing those in the rest of the country. Our liberal values are universal and we need to apply them and be relevant in every setting.

I understand that some key councillors across the country were warning that we needed to up our game against the Greens a long time ago and were ignored. The results this week show that we will lose out in the future if we fail to do that. In places like Oxfordshire we need to keep all progressive voters onside if we are going to continue to win. If we don’t, and at some point in the future the Tories and Reform merge and unite the right block vote, we will be in peril.