Author Archives: Jonathan Moore

What did the Greens have that we didn’t?

In the elections on May 7th, Salford Lib Dems suffered an unexpected setback. We lost one of our two councillors (I’m the one who remains), and we came third and fourth out of five in our two target wards. In all three cases, we lost to the Greens. The story was similar elsewhere in Greater Manchester.

In only one of the three wards did we face an active Green Party campaign – the other two wards (including mine, where we lost my co-councillor) were won by pretty much paper candidates. 

The councillor we lost was a fantastically hard working and capable councillor, who was outstanding at proactively dealing with casework and had a great reputation in the ward. There is no sense of him having ‘lost’ the ward – others won it.

I spent most of the campaign in one of our target wards with a truly outstanding candidate. Over a few months we knocked on 3500 doors and had many conversations. We ran a fantastic textbook campaign, supporting a great community activist with a big personality.

We lost to a Green Party that has no real local presence, did little to no door knocking, and put out a small number of generic leaflets, all inferior to our own.

So, what did they have that we didn’t? 

Posted in News | Tagged and | 24 Comments
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Recent Comments

  • David Le Grice
    Weird that this appears to be the first LDV article about this, and the first time anyone in the parliamentary party has spoken up about it (as far as I'm aware...
  • Jack
    Delighted to see conference overwhelmingly reject the EHRC guidance (they don't deserve three quarters of that name - I accept they are a commission). People ar...
  • Geoff Reid
    Somebody had to say it eventual!y. Thank you Tom for inviting us to be honest on this matter....
  • Hywel
    Important point there Paul. For all the angst about 'lack of cut through' that has pretty much been the case for most of the time the LIb Dems existed except f...
  • Roland
    @Gwyn, I agree with David Raw about relative urgency. However, even in the list of political reforms, I would put changes to voting way below the changes that n...