Author Archives: Chris Bowers

Chris Bowers

As a party we must be better defined for the 2029 general election

By Chris Bowers | Mon 8th June 2026 - 1:35 pm

There’s a fear emerging in the so-called realignment of British politics. All the talk is of Reform UK and the Greens being the insurgent parties that are taking over from the traditional main forces of the Conservatives and Labour. If that’s the current media and social media narrative, where do the Lib Dems fit in?

The harsh truth is that, unless we have a message that gives us an identity among those who don’t take a massive interest in politics but do at least vote, we are heading for irrelevance. That’s not true in terms of our electoral performance in …

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Chris Bowers

We need to learn to respect the Greens

By Chris Bowers | Tue 7th April 2026 - 9:32 am

This column is going to make me very unpopular in parts of the party, but there are times when the elephant in the room needs calling out: we have to learn to respect the Greens.

I’m not saying we should love them, I’m not advocating standasides, certainly not a merger; I’m also all for highlighting how we’re different as parties. But I am getting irritated at the number of cheap shots coming from our party that denigrate the Greens. The fact is: Lib Dems and Greens perform a similar function in British politics. We need them, and they need us.

Much is made of the current realignment in politics. This realignment is and isn’t happening. It is in the sense that Reform and the Greens will have a much bigger presence at the next general election – even if their current poll ratings aren’t sustained – which will create a five-party system, or six in Scotland and Wales. It isn’t in the sense that there will still be two main blocs: the progressive/centre-left made up of Labour, Lib Dems and Greens, and the regressive/far-right made up of the Conservatives and Reform.

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Chris Bowers

Ed needs to up his game and take lessons from the Dutch Liberals’ sense of insurgency

By Chris Bowers | Tue 16th December 2025 - 9:05 am

It was buried in the depths of The Economist’s ‘2026 Outlook’, and I almost missed it. Could there really be a Liberal Democrat leadership election in 2026? It feels an odd thing to say, 17 months after the party went from 15 to 72 seats, albeit far more off the back of the abject performance of the Conservatives than from our own good works.

The Economist said, “Yet not all in Lib Dem land are content. A private discussion about Sir Ed’s suitability will become a public one. Some MPs are fed up that the party continues to plod along, neither a party of power nor a party of protest, but instead a symbol of mild discontent in England’s most prosperous parts … Perhaps 200 seats could be theirs for the taking with a suitably determined leader. Sir Ed is not that man.”

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Chris Bowers

Our role is to keep the fire of compassion and decency glowing amid the anger and hate

By Chris Bowers | Mon 27th October 2025 - 11:27 am

I listened to a podcast interview with Zack Polanski this week, the News Agents one. I had no preconceived ideas – I’d heard him speak before, but this was my first time listening to an in-depth interview with him as Green Party leader. And I was so impressed as to be worried.

One of the biggest difficulties we have as a party is getting the public to understand what we exist for. First-past-the-post (FPTP) has given us the popular perception of a half-way house between Labour and Conservatives – politically useful but not something I was ever comfortable with. Now that Reform is threatening to smash the main party duopoly, and there are rumblings to the left of Labour, the need for us to present a vision of Liberalism that the electorate can grasp – and identify with if they’re on our wavelength – is paramount.

So to hear Polanski speak like a coherent and credible Liberal was both uplifting and worrying. I know he used to be a Lib Dem, and while he claims to have felt more comfortable with the Greens once he got to know them, he has to say that to have credibility within his new party. So it’s perhaps no surprise that his broad pitch is generally Liberal, and as a very fluent and convincing speaker, much of what he said was music to this Liberal’s ears.

My worry about him was that he might be taking our clothes, but the more I think about this, the less there is to worry about than I first thought.

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Chris Bowers

Time to highlight the community pillar

By Chris Bowers | Mon 6th October 2025 - 10:49 am

Of the six recognised pillars of Liberalism – liberty, equality, community, democracy, environment, and internationalism – each can wax and wane in prominence depending on the Zeitgeist. When human rights are under attack, liberty should be highlighted. When Britain’s role in the world is centre-stage, internationalism comes to the fore. All six are always important, but there are times when we need to lean into one pillar more than others.

The most crucial pillar of Liberalism as we gear up for elections in 2026 (and every year up to the next general election) will be community. In saying this, I’m fighting hard not to let the agenda be dictated by the populists, but as Roz Savage beautifully put it in her LDV column on 30 September, we have to be tough on Farage but also tough on the causes of Farage. And the erosion of people’s sense of community is a big cause.

It’s easy to forget that, until about 300 years ago, most people in this country never went more than 50 miles from their place of birth in their entire lifetime. They identified with their locality, they sometimes had to defend it from hostile threats from without, and they may have had rituals that bound them together as a geographical community. Therein lay their sense of security.

The modern era of technology, travel and television has blown all that out of the water. We can go to the other side of the globe for a couple of days, we can ‘see’ life in the Antarctic, we can become ‘friends’ with people we’ve never met, and we can have our stag and hen parties in eastern European cities. That has brought social change, and shifting assumptions about what is acceptable to do and say. Which is fine if we’re all in it, but once you get large numbers of people who feel left behind, what security can they grab hold of? If that has been swept away by the forces of progress, resentment builds up.

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Chris Bowers

We must be brave on immigration – now!

By Chris Bowers | Mon 19th May 2025 - 12:30 pm

The Liberal Democrats have always been at their best when they’re brave – when we shout about things we believe in, even if they go against the current trend. Things that can tap into a seam of public opinion that is sympathetic but whose members have been wondering whether they are the only ones to think what they’re thinking.

At the end of a week that has seen Keir Starmer do his best Enoch Powell impersonation with his ‘island of strangers’ speech, we have an opportunity – nay, a responsibility – to stand up for immigrants to the UK. This is …

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Chris Bowers

We can solve the housing crisis without creating rural sprawl

By Chris Bowers | Mon 17th March 2025 - 2:33 pm

The two biggest issues that concern young voters are housing and climate change. Housing is the more hands-on challenge, as plenty of young adults just can’t get on the property ladder, whether buying or renting. The traditional rite of passage of children fleeing the nest when school ends now unravels three or four years later when they return to their parental home as their only financially viable living option – which can remain their home for several frustrating years. So if we want to be taken seriously by the youngest voters, we have to have a credible housing policy.

The option all political parties have chosen to tackle the housing crisis at the last few elections is to promise mass housebuilding. It has led to unseemly and meaningless auctions – one party promises 200,000 new dwellings a year, another raises that to 250,000, another to 300,000 – plus antagonistic debates about housebuilding targets at Lib Dem conferences. The developers love it, but the numbers of houses being built don’t really change. And anyway, do we really need to build our way out of trouble?

With the Liberal Democrats holding 72 MPs, many seats in the kind of small towns whose peripheries are threatened by the surge in housebuilding promised by Starmer’s government, we have something of a dilemma. We don’t want to be Nimbyist, but at the same time we don’t want our rural towns to become sprawling car-dependent suburbia.

The implicit assumption behind mass housebuilding is that there isn’t enough residential property. Yet for years suggestions have abounded that we do have enough living space – we just don’t use it well. Even if that’s technically true, to be ultra-efficient would result in a loss of freedom as the state would have to order people to live in others’ houses to maximise residential space. That would be a hard pill for Liberals to swallow, let alone the rest of society that remembers the centralised residential diktats of the Soviet bloc.

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Chris Bowers

What would Paddy do?

By Chris Bowers | Sat 8th March 2025 - 2:30 pm

Image of Paddy Ashdown with words "What would Paddy do?"Bringing the party’s first leader back to life – in a modern-day cause

Six years after his premature death at age 77, Paddy Ashdown is making a comeback in the interests of the party’s immediate future.

Well, not really. But Paddy’s name does adorn a new publication from the Yorkists, a group of party activists keen for the Lib Dems to have a stronger public identity. What would Paddy do? is ostensibly a submission to the party’s policy review, the one chaired by Ed Davey and Eleanor Kelly that will report later this spring and propose motions to federal conference in September. But it’s really a discussion paper about where the Lib Dems need to go, given that the run-in to the 2029 general election is likely to take place on various shifting sands.

Despite its formulation, the title of the Yorkists’ submission is not an attempt to second-guess what Paddy Ashdown would do in the current circumstances, but to invoke the spirit of a political colossus who understood the person-in-the-street and was willing to take bold and counterintuitive stances. His stand-out policy was a penny on income tax to fund a boost to education, the tax rise deliberately ring-fenced to make it more palatable to voters (if indigestible to Treasury mandarins), but he also went against the Zeitgeist in 1989 when he called for all Hong Kong citizens with British nationality to be allowed to live here.

Consequently, what the Yorkists are feeding into the policy review addresses nine policy areas, combining immediate pragmatic proposals with thinking outside the box and challenging today’s Zeitgeist. Defence is a fast-moving topic, but the main call in What would Paddy do? is for cooperation among Europe’s states so money spent on defence goes further. It also urges efforts to tackle housing shortages to focus not simply on new building targets but on a package of measures that includes stipulating the right kind of dwellings to be built and accompanying land and taxation measures to stop starter homes becoming boltholes for the urban rich.

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Chris Bowers

The speech Ed Davey should have made on the EU

By Chris Bowers | Sun 9th February 2025 - 10:30 am

This is the speech Ed should have made on the EU

Hats off to Ed Davey for calling for an EU/UK customs union. Last month’s call rightly attracted media attention, and amounts to the first step towards the Lib Dems re-establishing ourselves as Britain’s most pro-European party.

As a signatory to the Guardian letter in November 2023 which called on the party leadership to make a clearer statement about what the Lib Dems stand for, I give credit to Ed for his EU speech. But he should have gone much further, and framed our party’s position differently. That may sound like an extreme position – after all, leaders have to tread cautiously and take people with them – but let me explain why last month’s stance was too tentative.

All political parties are trying to carve out an identity for themselves against a backdrop of disenchantment that is fuelling populism. In particular, the 18-35 age cohort, which strongly voted Remain, feels no-one speaks for it. It therefore needs an inspiring message, one that is relayed in human, not technocratic, terms.

The case against Brexit is so clear that there are only one-and-a-half reasons not to call for the process of Britain to rejoining the EU to start right now. The main reason is that there was so much divisiveness around the referendum campaign (and afterwards) that everyone is understandably keen to avoid reopening old wounds. But old wounds that have not healed only fester, so the rapprochement with Europe must include an acknowledgement that people are still sore. More importantly, in pursuing that rapprochement we must try to take Leave voters with us – whether they wish they had voted differently or not, they must feel respected, not feel they have lost face.

The half-reason is the fear that going back into the single market will stoke immigration. It’s a valid reason because immigration is high on voters’ concerns, so anything that looks like increasing the number of people entering the UK has the potential to boost support for the populists. But it’s only half a reason because immigration has gone up since we left the EU, not down.

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Chris Bowers

Hope is not just desirable, it could be the key to defeating populism!

By Chris Bowers | Wed 15th January 2025 - 12:59 pm

They say that to be a Liberal you have to be an incorrigible optimist. Yet, even with a record number of Lib Dem MPs, it’s hard to be optimistic in a global political environment witnessing the onward march of populism. 

But what if discovering a seam of hope and optimism and representing it in British politics was in fact the best way of countering the rise of populism? With a tired and irresponsible government making way after 14 years for a new administration with an awful inheritance that’s made some errors in its first few months, it’s difficult to see where any optimism is going to come from. Then again, if any is to emerge, it’s likely to be from that optimistic creed known as Liberalism.

That is the underlying premise behind the latest in the series of Green Book podcasts, which has seen discussions among leading liberal figures on a range of subjects. For the series’ first post-election podcast, the subject was the less easily defined issue of ‘hope and optimism’, and the discussion brought together the Lib Dem health select committee chair Layla Moran, the former minister Lynne Featherstone, and the professor of history and liberalism Timothy Garton Ash, with me as moderator.

Again hosted by LibDem Podcasts, listen in to their discussion on all the main platforms or watch here: 

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Chris Bowers

Pack’s podcast shows striking parallels between Kennedy’s leadership and now

By Chris Bowers | Fri 5th January 2024 - 1:13 pm

In the 36 years the Liberal Democrats have existed as a political party, we have had eight leaders, and Mark Pack’s latest Never Mind the Bar Charts podcast offers an evaluation of one of those eight, Charles Kennedy (1999-2006). The podcast, featuring Mark chatting with the Liberal historian Duncan Brack, has just come out, and the timing is interesting.

Most of the information in it has long been in the public domain, and anyone who has read Greg Hurst’s biography of Kennedy – or, for that matter, mine of Nick Clegg – will find it a refresher rather than a revelation. What was a revelation, however, was just how similar the party’s situation is now compared with the 2001-05 parliament when Kennedy was at his peak.

There are of course some differences, notably that Kennedy’s 52 Lib Dem MPs elected in 2001 were in opposition to Labour, while the 11 Lib Dems elected in 2019 have been opposing the Conservatives. But there are some striking similarities, with some equally striking conclusions to be drawn.

Brack is a firm adherent to the conclusion Hurst drew: that alcoholism was not the cause of Kennedy’s downfall, rather he had no agenda for his leadership, and as he became more aware of this, his drinking got worse. Kennedy was a great communicator who had cut-through with the public because of his appearances on popular TV shows, but he had no clear idea of what he wanted to do with the party leadership, and never seemed to give any policy direction.

Pack takes this as read, and describes Kennedy’s approach to the 2005 general election as “muddled”. Numerically, it was the party’s most successful election, peaking at 62 MPs (up to 63 following a by-election in early 2006), but Pack says, “under those very favourable circumstances (notably the principled Lib Dem stance on the Iraq war), perhaps that was more of a missed opportunity.”

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Chris Bowers

How the Lib Dems can be distinctive on the environment

By Chris Bowers | Wed 6th December 2023 - 9:41 am

It’s important to remind people that we were Britain’s original Green Party. We were into environmentalism in the 1920s when the Liberal Party’s Yellow Book proposed setting up national parks. The party’s manifesto at the February 1974 general election was one of the greenest ever, and the Liberals had policies in the 1979 manifesto decrying the measurement of economic growth in terms of GDP.

It’s also important to remember that being the first doesn’t mean we remain the authority on political representation of environmentalism. Far from it. In a YouGov opinion poll five months ago that asked “Which political party do you think would be best to handle the environment and climate change?”, the Lib Dems came fourth. The Greens were top with 25%, Labour second with 15%, the Conservatives third on 12%, and we polled just 4% (others 2%, don’t know 26%, none 17%). Yet the party’s commitment to the environment is integral to Liberalism – Liberals regard the environment as part of the common good, so we condemn any entity that harmfully exploits the natural environment.

The problem, therefore, is the messaging: how do we Lib Dems get voters to see that we are a fundamentally green party? This formed the basis of the discussion on the second Green Book podcast, published by the people behind The Green Book that appeared in 2013. Hosted by the next MP for Eastbourne – sorry, got ahead of myself there – by the Lib Dem PPC for Eastbourne Josh Babarinde, it featured discussion among the veteran environmental activist Tom Burke (now of the E3G think tank), James Murray, the founding editor of Business Green, and Chris Willmore, a former sustainability professor who’s now the Lib Dem cabinet member for planning and regeneration at South Gloucestershire council.

You can watch the episode here:

The discussion is well worth a listen, because there were different approaches to the central issue of how to make the Lib Dems distinctive on green issues. It covered several aspects of the environmental debate, including the risk of voter backlash, and that old chestnut of how you find the balance between, on the one hand, letting the state set the price signals and then leaving it to individuals and businesses to be the change, and, on the other, allowing the state a bigger role in order to green our way of life via a ‘just transition’.

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We need three or four stand-out policies!

By Chris Bowers | Fri 1st September 2023 - 5:59 pm

Four by-election wins in little over two years, an encouraging set of council results in May, the governing party suffering dreadful poll ratings – it’s a time of optimism for the Liberal Democrats! Or is it? Sorry to prick the bubble, but there’s an elephant in the room.

That elephant is our national opinion poll rating, which is resolutely refusing to rise above the 10-12% range. With the Conservatives doing so badly, a feeling that a once-in-roughly-15-years change in government is approaching, and the reality of the Brexit disaster becoming clearer by the day, we should be up to 20% if not higher. Why aren’t we?

There’s another elephant in the room. We want a hung parliament at the next election, and the number of ‘don’t knows’ in current polls and stay-at-home Tory voters in recent elections suggests this is still possible. It will take a fair bit of tactical voting. But to persuade people to vote tactically, and for the Lib Dems to play a part in some power arrangement that gets us a change in the voting system, we have to tell people what we stand for. At the moment, the leadership of the party is not doing that.

This is what motivated a group of committed, loyal but very concerned Lib Dems to meet in York during spring conference to throw around ideas aimed at encouraging the leadership to give the party a clearer identity going into the next election. There’s no shortage of approved policies, but they need trumpeting, in particular the need for us to be the party committing to rebuild relationships between Britain and the EU, before someone else on the political stage denounces Brexit first (don’t rule out Starmer or Sunak doing so if it serves them).

The follow-up to that informal gathering in York is a formal fringe meeting in Bournemouth on Saturday 23 September to be chaired Layla Moran MP. Entitled ‘Shouldn’t we be doing better? – the need for bolder messaging’, the country’s leading psephologist and pollster John Curtice will explain how his polling shows that the Lib Dems should be scoring much higher. Curtice also believes we didn’t blow the 2019 election on our ‘revoke Brexit’ stance but by not standing for anything else, which reinforces the idea that we need three or four policies the public associate with us if they’re to lend us their votes.

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Chris Bowers

Standing up to government is the only way the BBC will get out of the corner it’s backed itself into

By Chris Bowers | Sun 12th March 2023 - 10:59 am

It would be easy to conclude that if you want to have an influence on British political life you have to be a name in top-level football.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Manchester United striker Marcus Rashford succeeded where many politicians had failed in getting free school meals to disadvantaged children. In the past fortnight, the England women’s football team, the ‘Lionesses’, have used the leverage from their 2022 Euros title-winning run to secure over £600 million in government funding to give girls the same opportunities in sport that boys currently enjoy. And over the past few days, the former England striker Gary Lineker has been the focus of opposition to the controversial proposals by Rishi Sunak’s government to severely curtail the right of asylum in the UK (although the story of Lineker’s future as presenter of the BBC’s football highlights programme Match of the Day is threatening to overshadow his opposition to the asylum policy).

If suggesting that footballers are more influential than politicians seems a flippant remark, it’s not. We may well have reached the point where ‘celebrities’ (however you define them) have more clout than politicians, in which case their comments have to be taken more seriously than just to dismiss them as celebrity fluff – they become part of the checks and balances of a democratic society. And when Lineker talks about something of which he has direct experience – he has taken refugees into his own home – his comments come with added gravitas.

It’s important to note what he’s actually said, as some of the more hysterical reporting of it might lead you to think he’s accused the British government of sending people to gas chambers. Having described the policy as “beyond awful” in an initial reaction on his personal Twitter feed, he said in a second tweet that the proposed new UK asylum policy was “an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s.” Note the important nuance that the reference to Germany in the 1930s was about the language, not the policy.

I must declare an interest here. My father’s side of my family came from Germany and were thrown out for being Jewish. My father came to Britain as a Kindertransport refugee, my grandfather spent 12 days in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and great aunts and great uncles perished in other camps.

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Chris Bowers

Qatar world cup: a dilemma that ought to be easy to resolve

By Chris Bowers | Sun 20th November 2022 - 10:30 am

A lot has been talked about the football world cup that starts today in Qatar. Questions like ‘Should it have been awarded to Qatar?’, ‘How many construction workers have really been killed and injured?’ and ‘Where does having a global sporting event in a state where same-sex relationships are illegal leave the fight for sexual equality?’ are all reasonable, but they don’t address the fundamental question of what sports fans should do over the next month: to watch, or not to watch?

I was in Qatar in December 2006 for the Asian Games, a continent-wide mini-Olympics with a range of sports open to Asian athletes only. I covered the tennis, and it was a fascinating experience in which Asian tennis players were allowed to shine the way they normally don’t on the global men’s and women’s tours. But it was also a troubling one.

Near our hotel was a building site, where Tamil construction workers from Sri Lanka were ferried in every day in a decrepit yellow American school bus. Because I much prefer walking when working at events where I’m sedentary for much of the day, I shunned the official transport and walked to the Games’ hub from where I entered the credential zone and made my way to the tennis.

On that daily walk I saw a number of things that make it very easy to believe that the number of construction workers killed in building the eight stadiums that make up the 2022 world cup venues is way above the already horrendous estimates of 6000-7000 that international human rights groups are giving. These are migrant workers, brought in reportedly for very low wages, who never make it home. Others do make it home, but with injuries sustained in building ‘accidents’ that they may never recover from, and with little or no financial support in many eastern Asian countries like Sri Lanka and Nepal.

Last week, German television broadcast a documentary in which the former German international Thomas Hitzlsperger went to Nepal to speak with families who have lost relatives on the Qatari building sites, or are now looking after family members with horrific injuries. One of his motives in making the documentary was to drum up some money to pay for the support such people need to live out the rest of their days (in many cases another five decades) in some comfort and dignity.

Hitzlsperger is one of the few top-level footballers to come out as gay, and the only former Premier League footballer to have done so to date. That adds piquancy to the documentary, and emphasises that the common thread running through the various criticisms of the Qatar world cup (abuse of migrant workers, LGBT+, questionable aspects of the bidding process, and more) are all to do with human dignity, or the lack of it.

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We must not be complicit in fighting local elections on national issues

By Chris Bowers | Wed 27th April 2022 - 7:03 pm

The old adage “Be careful what you wish for” could be reworded as “Be careful how what you wish for actually comes about.” No, it doesn’t flow easily off the tongue, I grant you, but we do need to be wary of willing the ends without paying some attention to the means.

As the 5 May local elections rapidly approach, the media is full of what a bad result for the Conservatives could mean for Boris Johnson’s future. Both media people and politicians are full of “Voters have a chance to make their feelings felt in the local elections” about Johnson’s fate, and other national issues. It makes my blood boil to hear such statements, even though I’m as keen as anyone to see the back of Johnson.

The reason is that I have seen countless top-quality councillors do a brilliant job for four, eight or more years but then get unceremoniously bundled out of office because their party is out of favour nationally. It’s heart-breaking and a real disincentive to stand in the first place. It happens because elections that should be about dustbins and council housing are made into faux referendums on the popularity of the party in power nationally.

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Restating our political identity through a new liberal manifesto

By Chris Bowers | Fri 3rd December 2021 - 10:30 am

Do you remember what you were doing on the evening of 16 April 2015? The chances are you were in front of your telly, as I was, watching the seven leaders’ TV debate in the run-up to the general election. I have a distinct memory of that night: I became aware I could sum of what six of the seven parties stood for in three or four seconds, but the one I struggled with was my own party.

We must be careful not to make too much of the ‘Do people know what we stand for?’ line, as politics is more about which parties feel right and trustworthy. But in a political culture dominated by two main parties, and a media culture governed by two sides to a story, it’s very hard for a third party to create an identity in the minds of the average voter. As a result, the Lib Dems have become in many voters’ eyes a compromise between Labour and the Conservatives, an image we have not shied away from encouraging with slogans such as ‘Stronger economy, fairer society’.

But we are not a compromise, we stand for something! The problem is that what we stand for is not easily summarised, the way being pro-environment is for the Greens or being anti-EU was for Ukip. So, we need to find a way of encapsulating what we offer.

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The disconnect that many Lib Dems cannot see – or refuse to see

By Chris Bowers | Mon 18th October 2021 - 3:25 pm

The word ‘tragedy’ is used in the literary world in a very specific sense: to denote a situation in which people can’t see what’s going on around them and how it’s destined to end in tears. I cannot help feeling we Liberal Democrats are in the middle of a tragedy we need to stop very soon before it’s too late.

Our autumn conference last month had a steady underlying seam of tribalism about it. The most outward sign was the motion to stand a candidate in every seat unless local members agree to stand aside. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong about this motion; it’s what it says about the underlying mood that worries me – that we are the Lib Dems and we don’t need to do business with anyone else, thank you.

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People are still shooting the messenger, not hearing the message

By Chris Bowers | Thu 11th March 2021 - 5:22 pm

Embed from Getty Images

It was the person who commented on Facebook that really gave me pause for thought: “I get that you may be working abroad,” he wrote, “but this might be a bad image to project upon people who are severely pissed off and stuck in what was once a great country.”

I was on a business trip to Australia. Anyone who knows what I do professionally (I’m a tennis commentator) would not only have known it was a business trip and not a jolly, but my commentary could be heard across the UK. I had recorded a county elections campaign video from my hotel quarantine room in Melbourne contrasting Australia’s approach to Covid with Britain’s, yet instead of people hearing my comparison, some heard ‘Australia’, saw me in a polo shirt, and thought ‘jolly’. I wouldn’t call 14 days in hotel quarantine jolly.

I understand that people are irritated when they’re locked down in a cold snap and they see someone in a polo shirt pontificating from somewhere’s summer. But this form of shooting the messenger (or shooting the messenger’s location) means people don’t see the blindingly obvious message – that they are being taken for a ride by our government.

The biggest comparison I drew between Australia and Britain (or perhaps it should be between Victoria and England) was the contrasting sense of cause and effect. Australia has taken the necessary measures to eradicate the virus, and is largely back to normal now, while Britain’s lockdown is based on hoping for the best with poor enforcement, and we’re a long way from normality. But this week’s figures on track and trace in England highlight an even bigger contrast.

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Great idea – but show us how we’ll get there!

By Chris Bowers | Fri 20th November 2020 - 12:36 pm

Embed from Getty Images

Here we go again! Boris Johnson announces a ‘world-beating’ programme to make Britain the environmental envy of the world. The usual suspects line up to say it’s too little too late, and the whole thing blows over in a couple of days, at least as a news story. But dig a little deeper and it’s not hard to identify what needs to happen to make Boris’s bluster into a plan that can really make a difference.

Let’s focus on the headline announcement: the intention to withdraw all new petrol and diesel cars from sale in the UK from 2030. Yes, numerically that puts us ahead of every country except Norway (which was first out of the blocks on massive investment in electric vehicles) so it sounds good, but on its own it’s meaningless. We’re back into that territory we were in at the election where all parties took part in auctions to see who could say they’d get Britain to net zero carbon emissions earliest – the dates garnered all the media attention, with little heed paid to whether the policies that underpinned them would actually deliver.

So it is with ending new internal combustion engines by 2030. The aspiration is great, though hardly ahead of the game when we consider the urgent need to cut climate emissions. But given that petrols and diesels still make up around 90% of new car sales in the UK, it’s a very tall order to stop all new sales within 10 years, so the key lies in whether there’s a plan – a roadmap if you like – to get us to zero-sales by 2030.

The short answer is that there is, but it’s already hopelessly behind the clock. The EU has a plan to increase e-car sales, and it’s currently being transposed into British law for the post-Brexit era. But the EU’s law is inadequate, and the British transposition is even weaker.

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Chris Bowers

Vaccine breakthrough takes our eye off the ball

By Chris Bowers | Thu 12th November 2020 - 12:30 pm

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Forgive me if I seem the pre-Christmas Scrooge, but I can’t get as excited as everyone else at the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine that has sent share prices rocketing (or falling) and a member of Sage saying we’ll be back to normal by the spring. I feel we are in danger of taking our eye off the ball.

The tendency when any of us are faced with a big problem is to see if we can solve it with minimum effort. It’s understandable; our lives are fairly full, so problems are irritants. But sometimes a problem requires a structural rethink, demanding root and branch reform rather than just tinkering with a failing element of the whole.

Issues like Covid-19 and climate change are problems that demand root and branch reform of the way the world does business, yet we are treating them like irritants. With climate change, we know our lifestyles are warming the planet to dangerous levels, yet we cling to the hope that some technology – like electric cars or planes running on biofuels – can be invented to stop us having to confront how we live and allow us to go back with a clear conscience to the life we know.

It’s the same with Covid. Although we don’t know for certain what caused it, the most likely explanation is our breaking down the barriers between the human and animal realms, to the point where bats, pangolins and perhaps even mink mingle with humans and cause a highly contagious killer virus. We need to look at our global lifestyle and re-establish that barrier, among other things through eating less meat and leaving forests intact – measures that will also help in the fight against climate change.

Yet instead, we hope for the magic wand of technology in the form of a vaccine. To me, it has long felt like lazy journalism or lazy politics to throw in the half-sentence “until we have a vaccine” to any thought about the coronavirus. It’s as if we don’t want to face up to the need to address the fundamental failings in our modus vivendi, and that can be dangerous.

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Chris Bowers

If tearing down the Colston statue is OK, then anything is OK as long as you can justify it to yourself

By Chris Bowers | Tue 9th June 2020 - 11:12 am

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None of us was born yesterday! We all know the wheels of history don’t turn with gentle persuasion alone, sometimes it takes people to step beyond what’s permitted by the law before things really change. And yet there was something frightening about Sunday’s protests in Bristol that culminated in the tearing down the statue of Edward Colston.

Some Conservative MPs have described it as mob rule. In a way it was: a group of demonstrators got it into their heads that this was legitimate, and egged on by mutual encouragement, they toppled a public artefact and dumped it in the river. The police decided discretion was the better part of valour and let it go for pragmatic reasons. As it was ‘only’ a statue, perhaps it’s a bit prissy to say it’s lawbreaking (even though it was), and it was a crime against an inanimate object rather than a person, so it pales compared with violence against a person. But I suspect many liberals will feel queasy about it.

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Chris Bowers

We need to be working on our post-virus vision now!

By Chris Bowers | Thu 23rd April 2020 - 3:17 pm

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Seldom has there been such a need for care in the way we do politics. We may be right about certain things, but the current surreal situation means that being right isn’t good enough – we have to judge the mood.

It is, for example, entirely legitimate to say that the entire basis on which the Conservatives won an 80-seat mandate just four months ago has been obliterated, that public spending requirements during the coronavirus outbreak have been so great that, once the crisis is over, there must be a new election. But it wouldn’t go down well if we said that now.

What we can do, however, is start planning for the next election (both general and local), and for that we will need a vision. Regardless of how long the current disruption continues, it has been so disruptive as to make the next election a lot like 1945. On that occasion, there was no lack of appreciation for the way Churchill had run the war effort, but when it came to the Britain people wanted after the war, Labour had a vision – essentially a liberal vision, but we’ll let that go – that caught the imagination of the voters.

We need a similar vision for the first post-virus election, whenever it takes place. In some ways the government has done a good job, in others it’s been dreadful, but neither will really matter come the election. What will matter is the future. There’s already a strong suggestion that people don’t want to go back to what we had pre-virus, that they welcome the cooperation and civility that has (largely) characterised the response to Covid-19. The inward looking petty nationalism of Johnson’s election victory could start to look seriously out of sync with the times.

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Chris Bowers

We need to find ways of stimulating people to debate inequality

By Chris Bowers | Fri 6th March 2020 - 4:22 pm

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Donald Trump has pulled off a masterstroke of marketing for the film Parasite. I would probably have gone to see it anyway, but once I’d heard his sniffy “Can we get Gone With The Wind back?” I was duty-bound to see it.

Having now seen it, I’m not its greatest fan.

It’s certainly original, but I can’t help feeling its missed a trick. It does make for uncomfortable viewing at times. For Trump, that discomfort probably comes from the massive differences in wealth between the two central families in the film, and the beautifully ambiguous meaning of the title leaves you asking “Who is sucking the blood out of whom?” – a level of self-reflection the 45th president is probably not used to.

We need films that force us to discuss inequality in today’s world. The differences between the richest and poorest even within a single company are at times obscene, and it’s not just liberals who reach the point where they wonder how far the disparity between the wealthiest and the poorest can get before it indicates a dysfunctional society, if not the pre-conditions for social revolution.

As a good liberal, I believe in equality of opportunity. I realise that won’t lead to equality of outcome, and I’m OK with that as long as earned wealth doesn’t tamper with the basic rights of everyone in society (eg. we are all equal under the law, we are all of equal human value even if some have different economic values compared with others, etc). I know wealth currently does buy privileges it shouldn’t (look at the law!) but I’m talking about the society we should be striving for.

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Chris Bowers

Guidance for selecting the next Lib Dem leader – keep it simple and human!

By Chris Bowers | Tue 17th December 2019 - 2:56 pm

It was just gone 7am, and Boris Johnson couldn’t resist it. ‘Let’s get breakfast done!’ he said, to great laughs. And therein lies part of the secret to why he won a general election with an 80-seat majority – it was a corny line, but people could relate to the awful humour.

There’s a massive lesson for us in that as we choose our new leader. Being embedded in the world of politics, we so easily overlook just how little politics resonates with most people in this country, in fact one polling analyst said the public engages so little with politics that he had even heard some people asking whether Nigel Farage was the leader of the Liberal Democrats. And we forget that some people vote simply on whether they see a politician as a normal human being or not.

This is where Johnson scores. A normal human being he is most assuredly not, but he makes the same kind of bumbling mistakes we all make in our daily lives, and that makes him relatable. His slogan ‘Get Brexit done’ was so effective as to drown out the inherent mendacity of it. The lesson for us is that the next Lib Dem leader needs to be relatable on a human level and to keep it simple.

To those of us who are Lib Dem members, we may wish more for a social liberal or an economic liberal, we may want someone who reaches across the divide to other parties or is more tribal, who respects the liberal tradition more than the social democratic tradition, or vice versa, who is uncontaminated by the coalition or not. All this is fine in terms of satisfying ourselves, but if we want to cut through with the voters, we need a leader the public can see in a largely positive light, who says things in simple terms that we can all understand.

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Chris Bowers

We must avoid being the sole obstacle to stopping a No-Deal Brexit

By Chris Bowers | Sun 29th September 2019 - 9:34 am

Boris Johnson has boxed himself into a corner – but he may not be the only one.

The prime minister has got himself into a situation where, it appears, he either has to break his promise to take us out of the EU on 31 October or break the law in terms of ignoring – or circumventing – the Benn Act that stops a no-deal Brexit. But circumventing may be an option for him; certainly the political commentators are far from confident that the Benn Act is watertight, and that at least one loophole exists.

Hence all the discussion about a vote of no confidence this week, as this may be the only way to guarantee that we avoid a No-Deal Brexit. But have our MPs perhaps also boxed themselves into a corner with their commitment to doing anything to avoiding a No-Deal Brexit yet at the same time committing not to prop up a Corbyn-led government, even a short-term one?

If the SNP and Labour are willing to support a motion of no confidence this week, it’s pretty certain the Plaid MPs and Caroline Lucas will follow suit. That would just leave the Liberal Democrats plus a handful of Independents – enoughto make the difference between success and failure.

There is a way out of this for Jo Swinson. It is for her to take the following position:

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Chris Bowers

We must create a non Brexit dividend

By Chris Bowers | Sat 14th September 2019 - 9:37 am

The Liberal Democrats have been the proud standard-bearers of the rearguard action from the 2016 EU referendum. That Britain is still in the EU, and we as a party are enjoying a revival from the drubbing of 2015, are direct results of our commitment to what looked at the time like a lost cause.

But if, as seems likely, we go into the next general election with a policy of revoking Article 50 without another referendum, it will become absolutely vital for us to present to the electorate a ‘non-Brexit dividend’ – otherwise we will fail the very society we have claimed to bat for over several decades.

Last year I wrote in LDV that our party’s approach to the most pressing issue of our time should be summed up by paraphrasing Tony Blair’s dictum from his time as shadow Home Office Secretary – we should be ‘tough on Brexit, and tough on the causes of Brexit’. We have been brilliant at the first but not so good at the second. That must now change.

There are no policy disagreements here. Whatever the question was, Brexit isn’t the answer. The EU is far from perfect, but the idea that we’re better off outside than inside is preposterous. But precisely because Brexit makes no sense, we have to look at why so many people voted for it. And to dismiss it as just years of anti-EU hectoring by the press won’t bring people round to understanding our view.

Our line to date has been that we want a people’s vote. In other words, there is so much doubt about what the 2016 Leave vote meant, and how legitimate the mandate is, that we have to put it back to the people. But if we’re not now putting it back to the people, we have to show that we’re as tough on the causes of Brexit as on Brexit itself, or we really will leave ourselves open to accusations that we are illiberal and undemocratic.

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Chris Bowers

Now comes the hard part

By Chris Bowers | Tue 13th August 2019 - 12:55 pm

We Lib Dems have had a great three months. The local elections were good, the European elections outstanding, we got a high-profile defection from the crumbling Tiggers, and we’ve just won a by-election in a Leave area. We’ve even had our new leader going down very well among voters we need to attract.

But now comes the hard part. As the celebrations from Brecon & Radnorshire die down, we need to recognise that we only won there because the Greens and Plaid Cymru stood aside. It was the smart decision, but they will want something in return, indeed the Lib Dem brand is still mud in Green circles for our perceived lack of generosity in responding to the Greens’ offer to stand aside in 12 of our target seats in the 2017 general election.

We must therefore get our head around what we can usefully give in return, and anyone who remembers the difficulties of deciding who should stand in which seat when the Liberal and Social Democrat parties merged in the late 1980s will know it won’t be easy. It is not my job to carve up seats – wiser counsels are working on that – but there are a few things we Liberal Democrats would do well to get our heads around.

The main one is that we will have to give something up, and it will be painful. If we are to be politically mature and rise to the challenge of the Johnson/Farage regressive alliance, we will have to stand aside (or at least do no work) in seats where there will be dedicated Lib Dems who have worked their patch for years, and who will probably feel after the recent results that they’re finally on the verge of a breakthrough. Whether they really are or not is irrelevant – they will have worked for the Lib Dem cause yet it will feel as if they’re being asked to put the last five years’ work on the bonfire.

Having said that, in strategic terms, what we can usefully offer the Greens and Plaid may not cost us that much.

At the 2017 general election, there were 14 seats in which the Greens were ahead of the Lib Dems, and in 2015 the Greens came second to either Labour to the Tories in four. The chances of us winning these seats are negligible, and the likelihood of us winning other seats if we can ‘trade’ some of these 14 for the Greens assisting us in some of our targets is immense. Not every Lib Dem voter will vote Green (that’s something the Greens will have to suck up, just as not every Green voter will vote for us if there’s no Green candidate), but if the Greens stand aside in seats we can win to avoid splitting the Remain vote, in return for us doing the same in some of their targets, it could be a major gain at very little cost.

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Chris Bowers

The democratic case for resolving Brexit

By Chris Bowers | Fri 12th April 2019 - 11:55 am

Since  the 2016 referendum, we Lib Dems have been slightly on the back foot about the democratic implication of having a new people’s vote. I firmly believe that, had the matter not been put to the public in 2016, the government would have said some time in 2017 or 2018, ‘OK folks, Brexit was an interesting idea, but it’s clearly not going to work so let’s abandon it and stay in the EU.’ But because the people did vote, and they chose by a small but clear margin to leave, the whole principle of democracy appears to be undermined if we ask the people a second time.

Actually the opposite is the case – the case against having a confirmatory people’s vote is the undemocratic one. This conclusion is based around three core arguments:

1. The vote in June 2016 was based on a Leave campaign that was a blank canvas. There was no vision for how we would leave or for which variation of leaving. If you go back to the referendum debate, you’ll find advocates of Leave ranged from the anti-everything-that-begins-with-‘Euro’ brigade to very mild Leavers who wanted the UK to stay in the internal market and the customs union but not to be members of the club. That’s why when a Leaver screams ‘This isn’t what we voted for in 2016,’ it’s founded on nothing but their own perception of what they were voting for. Given that the margin of victory was less than 52-48, the only plausible mandate from the 2016 referendum is for a Brexit that involves staying in the internal market and customs union.

2. The Leave campaign cheated. This has been proven, the campaign has been fined £70,000 (and Arron Banks’ company has been fined more than that for data abuses related to the Leave campaign), and it is not appealing. Moreover, a professor of psephology told the High Court that the extent of the advantage Leave gained by cheating could have affected the overall result. If you have a public vote and one side cheats significantly, the result cannot be considered reliable, certainly not reliable enough to provide a mandate for the UK to leave the economic and legal bloc it has been a member of for 44 years.

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Chris Bowers

The Stephen Lloyd case shows there is no room for nuance in politics

By Chris Bowers | Sun 9th December 2018 - 1:30 pm

Politics ought to be synonymous with good governance, but it’s not. It’s a game you have to play to get into a position where you can practise good governance. Politics doesn’t seem to have any room for nuances or counterintuitive positions, as the case of the Eastbourne MP Stephen Lloyd has shown.

Lloyd is a classic liberal hero. He can thank the NHS for the fact that he can hear anything – indeed that he’s alive – because it saved him when his hearing and his life were seriously threatened as a toddler. He therefore believes in public services through deep personal experience. He also mortgaged and remortgaged his house to allow him to fight the traditionally Conservative stronghold of Eastbourne. He failed to win the seat in 2005, won it in 2010, lost it in 2015, and won it back in 2017.

The way he won it back in 2017 has sown the seeds of his decision to resign the party whip. Bear with me on the detail, because this is very important.

At the start of the 2017 general election campaign, Lloyd worked out that the only way he was going to win Eastbourne was to accept that the Brexit issue was over, and that despite his own views – he was an enthusiastic campaigner for Remain in the 2016 referendum – he would respect the referendum result. He quotes voters who said to him ‘I’d happily have you as my MP but I voted Leave and if you’re our MP you’ll work to scupper Brexit in Parliament.’ He therefore made a pledge that if the government did a withdrawal deal, he would vote for it.

Viewed from today’s perspective, it might be considered rash, but the vantage point at the time was different. The prevailing narrative was that Theresa May had called the election because she knew she’d increase her majority, and the question was merely whether her post-election majority would be 30, 60 or even 100 seats. The idea that she might lose her majority seemed fanciful, and therefore Brexit seemed as good as done.

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