Author Archives: Kris Brown

Liberal Democrat success in Liverpool

By Kris Brown | Sat 7th May 2016 - 11:45 am

I tend not to write pieces for political websites as I don’t consider myself a great writer and often shy away from the challenge.

However, I couldn’t resist an opportunity to talk about, and thank our many volunteers, for the excellent results we had in Liverpool on Thursday night and Friday morning.

First, a bit of context. When I became Chair at the end of 2014, the Liberal Democrats in Liverpool were facing an enormous challenge. Once the largest Lib Dem groups in Europe could soon face having just one councillor left with Erica Kemp CBE. As brilliant as she is, I’m sure she wouldn’t have enjoyed the council on her own. So we put in place a strategy to identify a number of different wards where we could hold and finish a strong second – not just spread our resources too thinly across the city. We decided that a huge door-knocking effort would be to key to success alongside lots of hard hitting leaflets. The result was holding on to Richard Kemp CBE with an increased majority and a good result in our target wards going forward.

A year on, nearly 11,000 doors knocked and hundreds of thousands of leaflets delivered we have reaped the rewards of our strategy.

Richard Kemp secured 21.1% of the Mayoral vote (up from 6% previously), finishing second and cutting into the ‘gutter politics’ Labour Mayor’s vote, and finishing well above the Greens.