Author Archives: Noel Davies

The party of “I told you so”

There’s a strange mood on Lib Dem Voice, and perhaps in the wider party, and a sense of treading water. There have been a host of explanations for why the fightback hasn’t quite materialised and you only have look through this website to find some of them. I’d like to offer here my own two-penneth and also to gently encourage members not to fall into the traps we’ve readily accused members of other parties of falling into.

Let me give a personal example of this; my mother is a longtime Liberal Democrat voter who voted for Brexit. She even toyed with the idea of joining the party at the last leadership election. I doubt very much, despite my best endeavours, that she will vote for us again. Why? Because clearly we don’t want her vote. Look about Lib Dem Voice and you’ll find people saying that we are the anti-Brexit party and that if only Theresa May hadn’t been so cunning as to call an election now. Conventional wisdom at the beginning of the year was that the Lib Dems would become the party of Remain and Labour would fall between two stools. In fact that is still conventional wisdom, only with the Labour split on the issue pushed into the future. But we should be cautious about how far we push this for four reasons:

Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 62 Comments
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Recent Comments

  • Jonathan Parry
    This is an interesting article. One Nation Toryism never got going until the demise of the Liberals in the 1920s (Disraeli certainly never practised it). To t...
  • Peter Davies
    In Latin it may be a gerund but in English it's a noun. If I were to object to the Government's referending of the public, that would be a gerund....
  • Alex Macfie
    Except that "referendum" is not a Latin 2nd Declension Neuter noun. It's a gerundive; as such it is used in English differently from Latin so should take an Eng...
  • PM
    @ PM, It can be either. I do remember from my schooldays that the plural in Latin involved replacing the 'um' of a neuter noun by an 'a'. I must have managed...
  • Alex Macfie
    It's "referendums"....