There was a lovely shot at the top of this morning’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg of a very happy looking Ed Davey standing in his garden. Some might say he even looked a wee bit smug, but he is entirely entitled to do so after our amazing result on Thursday.
Lib Dem MPs will make up the third largest group in Parliament. That means that Ed will get two questions to the Prime Minister every week. We’ll get more speaking time. We’ll get more media time. I mean, we’re on Kuenssberg for the second Sunday in a row. We will still need to make the absolute most of every opportunity we get, but it’s a massive step forward. It’s strange to think that there will be only 49 more Tories than there are of us. While they will be ripping themselves apart trying to decide whether they are going to go full throttle ultra right or to try to regain some semblance of one nation conservatism, we will be united, dynamic and brimming with ideas.
It will be a change in dynamics, too. Our returning MPs have had to juggle several portfolios each and they have done so admirably. We will now have the capacity to share the workload and have backbenchers for the first time in a decade. Maybe we might get a Select Committee chair or two.
Anyway, back to Ed’s interview.
Congratulations, I suppose, said Laura. A bit grudging, I have to say.
Her first question: What do you plan to do with all these new MPs?
It was an amazing result for us. We are excited by this opportunity. We fought the campaign putting health and care at the top of our list and we will fight in Parliament on health and care. I have already called for an emergency budget for health and care this month so we can start to rescue our NHS which has been brought to its knees by the Conservatives.
Will we be as tough on Labour as the Conservatives? Ed said that we would be putting forward our ideas on care, on the environment in the hope that Labour would take some of them on board.
“We’re going to be constructive opposition”
Lib Dem leader Ed Davey says his party have “already started” on pressing the new government on issues and “want to make sure they respond” to their call for an emergency budget on health and care#BBCLauraK https://t.co/4UbQQl3ahn pic.twitter.com/UtFxzypG8x
— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) July 7, 2024
Then we turned to PR. Finally people are waking up to the idea that parties getting a massive chunk of the vote and few seats isn’t fair. It’s a bit like the experience of many women in meetings. They put forward an idea, which is ignored and then five minutes later a man says exactly the same thing and everyone fawns over him. Laura put it to ed that Reform UK got many more votes but got far, far fewer seats. Is that fair, she asked.
Lib Dems have long argued for fair votes. We want ti improve our democracy. Our politics is broken. And so we are going to continue to make that case. It might mean that there are people elected that we don’t agree with but that happens under first past the post. There seem to be many people in the Conservative Party who share the values and ideas of Reform and they are already there.
If you reformed the voting system, would you be happy to see Reform being third party and not the Liberal Democrats?
That’s democracy. It’s allowing the people to express their will.
I’m just proud that the Liberal Democrats have got a record result. Our best ever the biggest third party in history I am determined our amazing candidates who are champions for their areas will put forward liberal democrat values that I think are much closer to the values of the British people than anyone else.
It’s so good to see such a happy, positive interview after a brilliant result. Let’s enjoy it as we get to work in the next Parliament.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
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25 Comments
Kuenssberg is a Tory so you shouldnt be surprised that she is less enthuisiastic about our current status.
A fair question from Laura. I’m going to offer a few thoughts about what the Party is now.
One of many remarkable long-term trends in politics thrown into relief by this election is how the Conservatives, more or less entirely of their own volition, have ceased to be the Party of contentment. Their voices are raucous, clamant and discordant. So who represents of the satisfied of the leafy suburbs and the southern shires, and has taken on the inheritance of Baldwin and Macmillan? We have – and we should own it.
When people saw Ed Davey they saw a kind, caring, thoughtful man. Facing challenges, yes, but surmounting them with decency, humour and patience in conditions of material comfort. This is apolitical, small c conservatism in excelsis, and we played it really well. Combined with the Conservatives generously vacating that political position, we now have 72 MPs – 60 or so from south of the Severn/Wash, and you can walk from the white cliffs in Sussex, across the rolling downs of southern England to Bristol channel and only briefly leave Lib Dem land.
Accepting this is going to be difficult for some people. Accustomed to loudly ‘demanding better’ we now need to make the transition from clamourous outsiders to caring conservators. We are no longer ‘disturbers of the peace’ – we are the peace. After a century, Liberal England is back. Let’s own it.
James Fowler has a point but it is massively overstated.
He is completely right about the shift in the Right – Boris Johnson writing that we are on The Road to Serfdom is just the latest loopy example.
We are a Party that is against hysteria & despair, but we also against complacency.
The Climate Emergency is real & demands Urgent Action – we need to sound more urgent than we currently do. Our criticism of Labour should be to demand more action & sooner.
We can be calm without being smug.
@James Fowler, I agree with you. Our MPs have been lovely calm and intelligent people. Ed and Daisy Cooper have been brilliant communicators on TV. We now need to be constructive in our opposition to Labour and calmly take apart the strongman image of Farage that Reform voters seem to like, just as we did with Johnson and his hangers on. I thought Sunak has presented himself well during the campaign and he and Hunt have done well to stabilise the economy from the position they inherited.
On Farage, tackling Reform from a progressive perspective could involve promoting a points-based immigration system, emphasising skill sets, qualifications and English language proficiency, while also dealing with social deprivation through an urban regeneration scheme in partnership with the private sector. That said, social liberalism must also be a core priority, so not only climate action as mentioned, but also a multilateral foreign policy holding Labour to account on both the Middle East and relations with Europe should be central over the next term.
It was completely ridiculous that she interviewed two washed up Tories. One maybe but two? I’ve lodged an impartiality complaint. Ed’s performance was confident and relaxed but IMHO he missed a trick on the response about fairness in voting. He should have said, “yes. It’s something the Liberal Democrats have had to deal with for years. Welcome to reality”. Also, I’m astonished that the media are believing the rhetoric that Reform is a new party. It’s simply UKIP in another guise and they only increased their vote share by 1.7% versus their performance in 2015. Hardly a resurgence. The only reason they won any seats at all this time around was because traditional Tories either stayed at home or switched their vote to punish their party. I think it’s very unlikely that such a performance will be repeated in future elections. (Thankfully) Especially if Labour deal with illegal immigration and the NHS (and our broken relationship with Europe), which they have a massive incentive to fix.
@ Robert Sayer, “Kuenssberg is a Tory”.
I’m afraid that comment does you no credit. Have you any evidence ? Whilst I don’t particularly warm to Laura Kuenssberg, I do get very disappointed with people who, with careless words, attack and undermine the impartiality of the BBC.
If you don’t want wall to wall GB News, be careful what you wish for.
If we introduce PR we will soon be the fifth or sixth party really on the fringe of politics. We will hand it to The Greens. Selfish maybe but we need to move forward from 72 not backwards.
I would agree to it being introduced on a limited scale to a newly elected House of Lords, hopefully that will have a different modern name, but not anything else.
I agree entirely with David Raw. If Mr Sayer wants to see politically biased news he only needs to watch GB News, or, for the daddy of them all, Fox News. Better still, he could read most of our newspapers. In any case, what if Ms Kuenssberg is ‘a Tory’? A lot of people are. That’s life for you. We can discuss, disagree but still be friends, surely? It is the job of all journalists, whether broadcast or in print, to ask awkward questions. We have moved on a million miles since the first (apparently scripted) televised Q and A between the BBC’s Leslie Mitchell and Anthony Eden in the General Election of 1951 (you can get it on YouTube, I think).
@theakes
What a cynical, dare I say, illiberal response. If it is typical of many Lib Dems it makes them no better than supporters of the two main parties, who are still wedded to FPTP. The fact that, by some quirk of FPTP, the Lib Dems ended up with more or less the same number of seats as their national support is no reason to abandon support for a proportional voting system. What I want to see is fairness and if this means Reform getting 14% of the seats so be it. Remember the words of LBJ and being in the tent.
Robin Day was a one time Liberal candidate. That didn’t stop him being an impartial interviewer for the BBC.
I have no real idea whether Kuenssberg has ever been active for the Tories. She seems to be able to give all party leaders a hard time. Like all BBC journalists she is not permitted to show any party sympathies in her current roll.
I agree with David Raw that the BBC is not an institution that we should seek to undermine, rather we should defend and strengthen it.
What next for Kuensy her bias is shocking. Throughout the campaign our coverage was condescending and snearing.
@Douglas Chisholm, unfortunately Kuensey as you call her seems to get some sort of a thrill out of confrontational politics. She had three Tories on her programme, Lord Howard, Victoria Atkins and Robert J enrick. Each one of them told her their party needed aterm of reflection as to the future. She was only interested in getting them to name a new party leader (. I personally think they would be better persuading Sunak to stay on )
Agreed John – if we believe elections should be fair then we need to accept the consequences of fair elections. That would change the political landscape, but for the better IMO. I’d argue that parties like Reform might do well at first, but unless they can pull themselves together they’ll crash and burn after a period of public scrutiny, rather than a period of sniping.
STV is already party policy, which encourages positive campaigning and voting, and we shouldn’t have anything to fear from it.
Labour will drag their heels, and would also favour the top-down control of list systems, so we need to be careful how we handle the discussions and I would argue that pushing for STV in local elections is the best next step. It will let Starmer kick the Westminster can down the road, but it will make reform at Westminster more of an inevitability. We have examples of it working in Northern Ireland and Scotland, and I’m a firm believer that once people see it in action they realise the benefits.
Kuensberg is a poor political journalist. She has the job she has partly because of her right wing bias – no left wing political journalist would ever get that position with the BBC. You could go to ITV. They had George Osborne on their election coverage; a man who holds considerable responsibility for the state of the British Economy (and I’m not forgetting Clegg or Alexander, but they weren’t on the TV).
I remember in the days of George W Bush people claimed he was being influenced by BigOil. It’s simpler than that. He was a Texas oilman: there was no need for influence.
@ Jenny Barnes, ” ‘Kuensberg’ (sp) is a poor political journalist. She has the job she has partly because of her right wing bias – no left wing political journalist would ever get that position with the BBC.”
To quote King Charles, “Oh, dear, oh dear”.
I do so wish some Lib Dems would stop feeling victimised and sorry for themselves and feel they have to have a go at the BBC. It’s not a good look.
Ms Kuenssberg, in my view, is a very well informed journalist who, incidentally got an outstanding First in History at Edinburgh University (something she shares in common with Gordon Brown). Whether she is kind to children and fluffy animals I do not know, and she is not paid to give Lib Dems (or anybody else for that matter) an easy ride..
To be frank I’m more disturbed about the judgement of a Lib Dem MP who can donate upwards of £ 40,000 to the Tory Party over the last ten years – including £ 25,000 to the Johnson campaign as recently as five years ago.
Thanks for your support, Fiona. I know that STV was party policy and, the wags might argue that, if the Irish can work it out, why not us 😀. However, I personally reckon you might do more to counter the anti PR argument about its severing the link between an MP and their constituency by going for something like the Germans have where roughly half the members of the Bundestag are directly elected by FPTP and half by regional party lists. Scotland and Wales have a variation of the AV Plus which the late Roy Jenkins came up with when tasked by Blair to look at PR, which he promptly kicked into the long grass.
Today The Guardian calculated that under ‘a more proportional system’ the distribution of seats would have been: Reform 93, Green 44, LD 79, Tory 154 and Labour 220. What a great opportunity for an alliance between Labour, Green and Lib Dems, which could have ticked so many boxes.
AV Plus or Additional member systems do remove the link between constituencies and half of MPs and they tend to be the front benchers making the leaderships even less connected. AV+ constituencies are twice the size of current ones so constituency MPs will also have a loser bond with their electors. It is not a big leap from doubling constituency size to quintupling them for STV. Under STV though they can be real communities. Cornwall, Cumbria and Liverpool are real places. “Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North” isn’t.
We’re in politics to change people’s minds.
If no one ever changed, there’d be no point bothering with politics. I’m extremely happy one of our new MPs has moved away from the Tories. Let’s hope we win over many other ex-Tories, ex-Labour and ex-Greens.
Or is it only the sinless and the purists we want in our fold?
@James Fowler “you can walk from the white cliffs in Sussex, across the rolling downs of southern England to Bristol channel and only briefly leave Lib Dem land.”
Actually, you can walk from Eastbourne to North Devon entirely within Lib Dem constituencies.
Admittedly my direct experience of STV is council elections where multi-member wards are smaller than Parliamentary constituencies, but I believe it leads to better links to constituencies. There are some predictable winners, which you could argue equate to safe seats, but they are the hardest working councillors, and most visibly active in the community. There are some who will always win based on party affiliation, but it’s likely to be just one per multi-member ward, so any second representative has to work harder for it.
In particular, having a choice of cllrs/MPs means that most constituents will be able to take problems to the representative who they feel will be most sympathetic or useful. Having an MP that is a government minister comes with some perks, but challenging the government on policy that doesn’t suit you isn’t one of them.
I’m not convinced that people being able to choose which MP they think will be most sympathetic to their case is entirely a benefit. The risk is that MPs will lose touch with the range of opinions and problems that their constituents face because the only problems being brought to their attention are those that already align with their party’s views. As an example, if people with benefit claim problems always choose to approach their Labour or LibDem MP in a multi-member STV constituency, then the Tory MP for that constituency could end up quite genuinely completely unaware of the issues being raised – because no-one is talking to him/her about them.
@DavidRaw. There shall be more joy for 1 sinner that repenteth… Must you always look for bad news? Surely this should be a time for rejoicing, not nitpicking!
7% of Conservative voters from 2019 voted Lib Dem (You Gov). That’s about 3% of the national vote and not far behind the 10% who switched to Labour. Its quite a seismic shift and explains the amazing seat haul but it makes the “strategy” of targeting 30-40 seats look a bit redundant.