Most readers of LibDem Voice, now that the election campaign is under way, will be opening its messages as they come in from leaflet delivering or canvassing.  So far the weather has been good, and there’s been real advantage where we’ve managed to be the first on the doorstep to voters disillusioned with politics and parties.  In spite of the growth of social media and the internet, face-to-face discussion remains key to winning  voters’ support.

Voters are much less willing to come out to public meetings than they were a generation ago.  In the 1979 campaign, when I was mainly working on policy in Liberal HQ, I spent a long weekend driving from village to village in the Skipton constituency, as the warm-up speaker to usefully large groups of people gathered in village halls to hear Claire Brooks, the candidate, when she arrived; as you can imagine, she got later and later as the evenings went on.  Now contact has to be doorstepping, or electronic, or by phone, or by personalised leaflets wherever possible.  Helen and I have just finished hand-addressing our first chunk of envelopes for a target seat. Like other older readers (no doubt), I’ve been banned from the frenetic leaflet-delivery and canvassing that used to mark my campaign participation; now I’m a backroom helper.

It’s a characteristic of the Liberal Democrats that everyone mucks in on tasks like this.  I recall folding leaflets with 8 others round a large dining room table in Sheffield a campaign or two ago, and reflecting that everyone at the table had at least a doctorate, including the lady in a headscarf who had collected me from the station.  Yesterday we were writing with a committee member of the National Liberal Club, and someone who explained ‘I’m not actually a Liberal member; I’m a tactical voter.’  We also serve, who only sit round and fold leaflets or write blue envelopes.

The Liberal Party I joined in the early 1960s was amateur at campaigning, but professional at formulating policy and debating values and principles.  Academic Liberals held long discussions in ‘The Unservile State’ group and others.  The Liberal Summer School attracted a crowd. Even the Young Liberals had the ‘New Orbits Group’.  Jo Grimond loved long discussions with student group and older experts; several of the books published under his name still line my shelves.  But we didn’t win many elections.

In recent years, however, we’ve risked neglecting  broader discussions about our political values, and how to translate them into policy proposals, as the 24-hour pressures of breaking news and the demands of campaigning exhaust our energies.  After this election we will need to turn back to harder and more fundamental thinking about why we are in politics and how best to pursue our values in a changing society, economy and environment.

The dispiriting character of the two-party campaign so far, displayed at its emptiest in the televised ‘debate’ between Sunak and Starmer, shows how far the quality of political debate in Britain has deteriorated.  Starmer scarcely dared to challenge Sunak’s ‘small state’ orthodoxy of promised tax cuts.  Neither addressed the challenge of climate change, nor of demographic change, nor of the darkening international context which we now face – nor, worst of all, the depth of public disillusion with conventional politics as such.

In Britain’s non-partisan policy institutes – the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Chatham House, the Resolution Foundation and so on – a much better-informed debate is under way.  In university social science, economics and environmental departments high-quality research is reshaping the agenda that politicians should be addressing.  A pile of reports from the Institute for Government is sitting on my desk, for instance, setting out the political reform agenda any incoming government should pursue – largely ignored by the right-wing press and parliamentary leaderships, though actively discussed within an expert cross-party community.  We need to engage with the new generation of policy experts, draw on their insights, and translate them into the priorities we will set out for a more intelligent political debate.  If we can manage to do that without giving up leaflet delivery and knocking on doors, we will be well set up for the next Liberal advance.

* William Wallace is Liberal Democrat spokesman on constitutional issues in the Lords.