Author Archives: Michael Kitching

Two months ago I wrote an article for this site. I spoke about how for the Liberal Democrats, tactics have become our strategy. In the time since, an election review has kicked off and internally there have been many conversations about what our strategy should be in the coming years. Most of what has been suggested, however, has not been about strategy. It has still been about conflating strategy with electoral operations and tactics.

That’s why I’ve responded to Mark Pack’s request for feedback on our strategy and what it should look like in the future, with this letter. I hope you will input your thoughts too!

We still fail to articulate what the vision and grand strategy is for our party. What sort of a party do we want to be in ten years, when the conservatives most likely face the election that will remove them from power? Who do we want to stand for and most importantly what course of action, at the topline, most basic level, must we take to get there?

Simply cobbling together a disparate core vote, that we adapt slightly after each failed election campaign will not take us to the end of that journey, especially while our national politicians choose short term opportunism over the alternative.

The great strategist B H  Lidell Hart wrote: “The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old one out.” We can take from this many of the problems facing our party today. Following a decade of relative failure, we face an existential crisis and are in dire need of a rethink.

Many, including me, have written here in recent months about specific failings we’ve made, things we’ve overlooked or miscalculations that have occurred. But I think that much about how we operate as a party is fundamentally flawed – because we fail …