Author Archives: James Bradford

Last week on this site, Maria Linforth-Hall asked a question that has stayed with me: what are the Liberal Democrats for? One line in particular. “Having individual policies is not necessarily the same as communicating a coherent political vision.” She then asked whether ordinary people can recognise liberal values in the practical answers the party offers to their everyday problems.

I should say where I’m writing from. I’m not a party member. I write for LibDem Dating, an independent dating site for liberal-minded singles in the UK, which has no connection to the party and no endorsement from it. So I’m looking in from outside. But I spend a lot of my working life thinking about how people decide whom to trust, and Maria’s question sounds very familiar from where I sit.

You might expect a dating site for liberals to be full of people listing their positions. Proportional representation, rejoining the EU, scrapping the two-child limit. Some profiles do read like that, and in my experience they’re rarely the ones that get a reply. Nobody falls in love with a manifesto. What draws people in is harder to put in a bullet point: a sense of how the other person treats people.

The profiles I find most persuasive barely mention politics at all. They talk about fairness, about curiosity, about being willing to change their mind. They mention patience with an awkward relative at Christmas, or a friendship that has survived years of arguing about Brexit. They suggest someone who can disagree with you over dinner and still want to see you again. That quality is what most of us are actually looking for, and a party label tells you very little about it. Ten minutes of conversation tells you a great deal.

A first date works a bit like a small election. You can’t check everything about the other person, so you rely on signals. How do they speak to the waiter? How do they talk about an ex, or about people who vote differently? Do they listen, or wait for their turn? None of these is a policy, but together they answer the question that matters: would this person be decent to me when we disagree?