Category Archives: Op-eds

Liberal Democrat Voice was kind enough to run my piece on the Liberal Democrats adopting the strategic slogan, The Party of Freedom, as an umbrella proposition for all the party stands for and to give voters an elemental reason to want to vote for us. The article elicited a lively range of opinions. Most, I think, favourable to my thinking.

So, I want to keep the debate alive because I think the idea has real electoral legs.

As a new member of the party I am completely ignorant of its structures and processes. I’m equally ignorant of its internal traditions. So, I think I can use the freshness of my membership to be pretty objective. In this case, ignorance may have some benefits.

By achievement, by attitudes, by policy, by instinct, the Liberal Democrats have always been the party of freedom and the party that gave people an alternative to the excesses of free market economics, spirit crushing Marxism and the xenophobia and insularity of UKIP.

For a time, it looked like the battle of capital versus labour was old hat, but not any more. Corbyn’s hard left Labour is lined up against May’s hard Right Tea Party Tories and her champions of The City and multinational business (how she reconciles this is anyone’s guess). Extremes always threaten freedom. Extremist parties by instinct want to quiet the voices of moderation. Freedom is at risk.

I’m a new Liberal Democrat, though I’ve called myself a social democrat for more than forty years now. In my youth I was an activist tribal Tory, but cast them forever from me before I was 25. Since then have been a fellow traveler of the soft Left, but now, as of three weeks ago, I am one of you.

I realised after 23^rd June that it was time to properly join in the fightback for the sort of political values I’ve long held and that are at the heart of the LibDems.

Given 5 minutes I could give you an erudite and historically pretty accurate explanation of what the LibDems stand for.  That’s roughly four minutes thirty seconds too long. Like or not, brevity, clarity, simplicity and ruthless consistency are the vital elements of winning in today’s febrile communications world.

I know a bit about the art of communications, having worked in newspapers and spent 35 years in advertising and PR. Indeed, I spent ten of those years with “Mrs Thatcher’s favourite ad man,” Tim Bell. My value was probably that, not only could I make money, but that I saw the world through different eyes from the great majority of my personally delightful but unforgivingly Thatcherite colleagues. I was never, thankfully, invited to be part of anything with a Tory party label on it, but did relish helping the Yes to Europe campaigns in Malta and Sweden win their respective accession referendums.