Category Archives: Op-eds

It’s hard to believe that it’s 6 weeks since Rishi Sunak stood in the rain in Downing Street to fire the starting gun to the General Election campaign.

Since then, there hasn’t been much movement in the polls, apart from a few points up for us, sparked by the brilliant, positive, incredible images and messages coming from our leader. What a time to come in to the form of your life, Ed Davey!

This party has fought our best campaign for years at every possible level. Our media spokespeople have been amazing. Ed has shown in the debates, Question Times and interviews that there is a huge amount of substance behind the style. He has tackled tough questions head on, with honesty and humility.

It’s all getting real now. Tomorrow, people in our target seats will have to clear a path through their Lib Dem leaflets to their door and go out to vote. Some will still be wrestling with their choice even as they stand in the voting booth with the pencil in hand. We need to be in their heads with our positive messages at that point. That is why it is so important that we get our eve of polls and good mornings out and knock on as many doors and make as many phone calls as possible.

And it’s why it is really really important that every single ounce of our efforts goes into seats where we are in the running.

If you need convincing of this, here’s the North East Fife result from 2017:

Stephen Gethins Scottish National Party 13,743 32.9% -8.1%
Elizabeth Riches Liberal Democrat 13,741 32.9% 1.5%
Tony Miklinski Conservative 10,088 24.1% 7.8%
Rosalind Garton Labour 4,026 9.6% 1.9%
Mike Scott-Hayward Independent 224 0.5% 0.5%

Two votes in it. Don’t let that happen again.

And even this May 97 more votes could have given us control of 3 more Councils.

What you do and where you do it on Polling day really matters. If you can’t travel, please think about making calls from home – or from holiday.

The messages that the Tories are putting out might seem bizarre to us. Their “letter from July 2044” aimed at bringing Reform voters back on board is probably the weirdest bit of literature we’ve ever seen, but we are not their target audience.

Mel Stride’s extraordinary comments this morning that you need enough Tories around to scrutinise Labour are very strange indeed. The only thing that the Tories will be capable of scrutinising over the next five years will be each other, with menaces. They are a party riven with irreconcilable differences and they will make a load of ferrets in a sack seem like the best of friends.

If you want a really good opposition to Labour, you will need a coherent, confident, capable party to keep their feet to the fire. So you obviously need lots of Liberal Democrats.