After every General Election, it’s become our habit to have a good look at what went well and what went badly and publish a General Election Review.

This year’s will doubtless be a lot happier than the last few. The Review team is led by Tim Farron. He is joined by

Cllr Ade Adeyemo
Paul Farthing
Cllr Donna Harris
Cllr Emma Holland-Lindsay
Mike O’Carroll
Sally Pattle

Their remit is to:

• review the party’s performance at the general election, based on both the campaign period itself and the preparatory work and strategy through the whole Parliament.
• particularly focus on the lessons relevant to the party’s next stages of development, including the linkages between electoral success at different levels, and make recommendations accordingly.

Time is running out to complete the online survey. The website says that it is open until 3 November – which isn’t long – but one of the review team said in a WhatsApp chat that it closed on 18 October, eg this Friday. So if you haven’t completed it yet, you’d be well advised to get a wiggle on.

I think that our campaign was perfect for the moment. But the moment was that the entire country wanted rid of the Tories. Our fun filled campaign, built on years of careful campaigning, did what it needed to.

By the time the next election comes along, we will need to have worked out that compelling and elusive narrative about what the point of us is. As a party we need to lead conversations and appeal to all hearts and minds, not just to soft Conservative voters. Of course we will be judged by how well we have stood up for the issues we championed – the NHS, carers and the environment, but we also need to say some of the things that we have not said out loud enough about aligning ourselves more closely with our European friends and neighbours. Labour are kidding themselves if they think that they can get that growth without doing so.

The political environments in Scotland and Wales are going to change in the next few years and elections to the Holyrood Parliament and the Senedd will be vital in advancing our cause. With the SNP in freefall, Labour struggling at the moment after a strong UK election and Reform getting way more votes than they should, we could end up with some very strange results in Scotland, maybe a bit like 2003 when we had a large socialist delegation and a few independents. That was our best result of all the Holyrood elections. We held our own despite being in Government while Labour fell which gave us the clout to secure PR for local government.

So what I’m saying is that things are going to be very different at the next UK General Election and we need to be sure that we are in a position to grow.

Anyway, if you are a party member or supporter,  go fill in that survey, and if you are from a group that is under-represented, that applies to you even more. We need the voices of women, disabled people, LGBT+ people and people from ethnic minorities to be heard in this party.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social