Charles Kennedy had to concede defeat by the SNP after representing in the wonderfully named constituency of Ross, Skye and Lochaber for 32 years. He will be sorely missed. And we have lost another much valued minister in Steve Webb in Thornbury and Yate. David Laws lost his traditional LibDem seat in Yeovil while Danny Alexander crashed in Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch & Strathspey.
Mike Crockart lost Edinburgh West, so did Simon Wright in Norwich South, John Hemming in Birmingham Yardley, Dan Rogerson in North Cornwall, Julian Huppert in Cambridge, Lorely Burt in Solihull, John Leech in Manchester Withington, Steve Gilbert in St Austell & Newquay and Alan Reid in Argyll & Bute.
David Rendal was not successful in David Heath’s former seat of Somerton & Frome, neither was Lisa Smart in Hazel Grove , formerly held by Andrew Stunell, nor was Gerald Vernon-Jackson who was defending the Portsmouth seat.
We have won six seats so far and are still awaiting results from these constituencies:
Berwick-upon-Tweed
Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk
Bristol West
Cheadle
Leeds North West
Lewes
Mid Dorset and North Poole
North Devon
North Norfolk
St Ives
Taunton Deane
Wells
* Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.
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90 Comments
First task – drive Mr Coetzee to Heathrow and put him on the first plane to Cape Town one way.
Go and wake Paul Barker up and get him to explain it all?
Re-build the party around the preamble, drop the ‘liberal and unionist’ act, and ensure that elected LibDems never ever again are able to imagine themselves as grandees who need not listen to the rank and file.?
Oh, and maybe drop the redundant ‘democrat’ bit from the title, so that a new identity can emerge.
Simples. Next time, when your voters desert you very quickly after an election – listen to them. Show you are listening to them. Don’t ignore them and stick heads in sand.
We Will do well to win 8 seats now. But Clegg MUST go. Worst Lib/Ld leader in more than 50 years. Suspect there will be a Sheffield Hallam by election or that he will defect to Tories
I don’t think it’s helpful to attack employees like that. There are wider issues with Lib Dem losses that started before Ryan’s appointment in 2012.
How do we go forward though? I want there to be a place for a liberal party in Britain’s political life, but I can’t see how there can with first past the post.
Quote of the night during the Alexander /Dimbleby interview : Liberalism never more needed, never less wanted.
I take no pleasure in Dan Rogerson’s defeat but I decided five years ago that I couldn’t support him. Those Lib Dem voters who saw ourselves as broadly left of centre, progressive and, above all, not Tories yfelt disinfranchised. Dan and other good MPs paid a harsh price.
First task – let’s get some sleep. Look after ourselves, and each other. I’m so proud of the way my Lib Dem family has acted tonight, grieving and consoling and celebrating in turn. Very little sniping from within the party so far, despite the fact we’re all exhausted and upset. I’m particularly proud of the Manchester Lib Dems, who have shown far more grace in defeat than Labour has in its victory.
I’m back from the Manchester count and off to bed now, but I’ll be spending this weekend talking to some of the candidates, agents and activists I know both in the area and across the country, buying a few drinks and trying to bring a few smiles to faces. Everything else can wait – caring for ourselves and each other is our first priority.
I am not here to gloat, but simply to offer advice. For years you have censored and ignored those telling you you were heading for disaster and look what happened.
You must rebuild by ditching Clegg and becoming a progressive party again. Most importantly, you must ditch the Tories or you will be wiped out.
I’m particularly proud of the Manchester Lib Dems, who have shown far more grace in defeat than Labour has in its victory.
Geez, still thinking having a go at Labour will help you???
Well said Dave. From down south it looks like Manchester Lib Dems have behaved in an exemplary fashion throughout the electoral hardships of coalition. Keep on working, it will turn eventually. John Leech was an excellent constituency MP, good campaigner, and thoroughly good guy. Your grace under fire has been inspiring.
lost lewes sadly…
You will recall I and others have been saying for months we would be fortunate to get 15 seats. We were decried and not listened to. This is the result. 30 years hard work to build up a party destroyed in 4. Absolutely terrible. Three huge mistakes, Tuition fees, failure to change the leader and image and not leaving the coalition in November 2014. There must be immediate changes. I am going to say this openly I just do not know how the party could have been so blind. Mr Ashdown must retire and there should be a leadership contest with a new leader in place at the party conference. Perhaps we should change the rules to enable someone outside the Commons to be the leader, We now have to go through two years of cleansing and hope the Greens do not take our place..
The next few years are going to be crazy.
How does Cameron keep his right wing sane with a tiny majority (or minority) when he starts campaigning for us to stay IN the EU?
Which way does Labour go, they got battered from a left wing anti austerity alternative in Scotland, but lost key English marginals to the pro austerity Tories?
I don’t even know where to start with the Liberal Democrats.
The entire million pound polling industry a laughing stock. Things are so much better than 1992 they said.
I’ve been outside the UK since early 2010 so have only followed the party at a distance. But it seems to me that perception was key here. Joining the Conservatives as a junior partner meant that the party couldn’t avoid sharing responsibility for the austerity measures taken. And that went against the LIb Dems’ ‘core’ support: non-Tory, non-Labour voters but who are more social democratic than economically liberal – and a lot of them students. So also making a promise on tuition fees and then breaking it… Was it any surprise?
This has been an exhausting and dispiriting night and a grim morning. The fact that things went much as I expected is not the smallest consolation. I trust that I will soon hear Nick Clegg announce his resignation as leader.
Just got up and can scarcely believe that Clegg has held his seat while so many good Lib Dems have lost theirs. I can’t remember such an unjust election result.
I don’t think it was all about the coaliton. Sure, that’s the swing against us to labour, and it made labour harder to squueze. But the anti-miliband factor has been huge in tory facing seats. The national squeeze was really powerful.
Can’t see a ‘ Liberator’ approach working. Sorry Mr Meadowcroft. Public too bigoted, disinterested. We need a realignment of the Left. Actually we need a new electoral system but the Labour dinosaurs are not likely to campaign for it. Too radical for those conservative Blairite-types. Can u imagine Prescott, Straw types supporting reform? Sad, but true.
The stirring up of fear by the Tories was the problem.
Surely it’s about the coalition? Most voters don’t pay as much attention to politics as activists and so usually weigh up who’s in government, who’s not. The latest BBC figures on vote share show that Tories and Labour have 35% (+1.3% swing)and 32% (+0.5 swing) respectively, after 545 seats declared. Lib Dems? 7.6% of the vote, a -15% swing against.
Maybe the final figures will change, but not greatly. If that’s not a message I don’t know what is.
In a first past the post system voters who wanted continuity had no choice but to vote conservative.
Voters who deserted us leftwards just helped a tory minority become z majority. I hope they’re happy with what they got.
It was a huge mistake for Nick to take on Nigel Farage with the 3 million jobs lost argument in the in vs out debates last year. I did warn that the original researchers were not saying that. The result was a huge loss of MEPs. We did not recover from that. We should have dumped Nick a year ago. We are going to take decades to recover.
“I don’t think it was all about the coaliton.” Yes it was. For goodness sakes, people can’t even get it through their thick skulls after a result like this.
Guy Burton,
The odd thing is both the exit poll and the opinion polls were fairly close to the truth. In terms of the popular vote it was about as close as it appeared. 35% v 35% is well within the margin of error ditto for 7.6% and 8% or 9% . It’s the spread of the vote that a lot of us didn’t take into account. The Conservative vote hasn’t actually risen that much if at all.
I doubt if anyone could argue with Dan Falchikov’s suggestion but I think it might be reasonable to say –
“don’t blame the employee, blame the employer”.
This thick skull had a great many people tell her on the doorstep that they didn’t want the miliband / snp combo. The Tory fear strategy worked to some extent. Pincer movement with ant-coalition. Result, annihilation
The ant-coalition sounds more fun. Put it down to tiredness.
Tonight has been our worse nightmare and the bloodbath has not ended. Clegg needs to stay on, we are too weak to hold a leadership battle now. We need to build up grassroots abs learn from the mistakes.
1. Do not make promises then break them
2. Negotiate better ie PR should be a pre-requisite
3. Do not accept any decisions when in power that you know will turn your voters away from you
It’s opposition for us for at least a generation
Panicos: Clegg, he is responsible and accountable and must immediately fall on his sword. He can stay whilst the contest is held, but we must get on with it forthwith and the result declared at or by the party conference. Enough of this ridiculous rally round the leader nonsense, we need a totally new image. Without bragging people like myself have been more than proved right. For goodness sake listen to us NOW.
So now TCO is blaming “those who deserted us leftwards”?
The cheek. As I said before, the rewriting of history is beginning. It’s all the votes fault
I am totally dismayed and distraught.
Nick must go, go now, and apologise to the party and the nation for totally mismanaging the one chance we have had in generations to show the British people how Lib Dems in government could make things better.
I’m beginning to think it’ll take the Lib Dems losing all their seats, councillors and MEPs for some people here to understand what has happened.
The Lib Dems should never have gone into coalition with the Conservatives, they should never have carried on in government after so many members left and after the disastrous local election and European election results.
The signs were all there. They didn’t just ignore them but they actively hounded people who raised the issue. The result is the almost annihilation of the party in the UK general election. It will take a generation, possibly more than that to correct this. Nick Clegg has been an utter disaster as a leader, and many of us said that time and time again but few people listened,. Well there you go, we now have a Tory government arguably because of Lib Dem capitulation (after all, that’s where the Tories made big gains), precisely what we were being told the coalition was there to avoid.
Danny Alexander fought like a tiger in defending some nasty Tory policies, with relish at times, real passion.
WildColonialBoy 8th May ’15 – 7:34am
So now TCO is blaming “those who deserted us leftwards”?
The cheek. As I said before, the rewriting of history is beginning. It’s all the votes fault.
Simple facts WCB. In a FPTP system you desert the incumbent or main challenger at your peril. We spent the 70s 80s and 90s learning that fact and now we’ve unlearned it you get a conservative majority government.
The best thing that we can do is to have a look at what the people who won seats did. They were in quite varied types of areas.,so what was the common factor ? We need to look for this. From this we can find some positives in this result. We can recover but we will only do this if we listen to the voters.
Norfolk North means at least now there will be a proper leadership contest
In one of my “self-serving comments”, as I was accused of earlier by a randomer, I would like to say that nobody predicted this result (not that I know of anyway), so there is something for us all to learn.
Let’s talk, try to improve and build on it. I echo what Dave Page says. It is great to see little sniping.
Well I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so.
People said voters would come round to Nick Clegg because of his resilience – they didn’t. People said the polls were wrong, they weren’t. People said £500,00 on constituency polls was money well spent, it was wasted,
people said relying on incumbency would save us, it was a recipe for disaster.
What needs to happen is for Clegg to go as soon as possible and all those in positions of power within the party who have backed him and made the wrong calls again and again and again need to go with him and stop offering their advice.
We had the agent for Camborne and Redruth telling us how well Julia Goldsworthy was doing, oh yes, 12% of the vote.
If we want to have any recovery, we need to build it on policies and values. We need to be distinctive and relevant and radical. We need to talk to voters about issue that affect them not repeat robotic sound bites.
We need to think 5-10 years ahead. We have no strategy – there are Scottish elections next year, we are relying on the voters realising they got it wrong. We need to build alliances with other parties to change the electoral system and block one party rule.
Making the wrong decision yet again – Nick Clegg spent the last days of the campaign warning a hung parliament would be unworkable and would mean a general election later in the year – a message designed to drive people to vote Conservative, Cameron must have been rofl.
Clegg was invisible for at least half the campaign and saying the wrong things for the rest of it.
@ Eddie Sammon – I predicted this result. Why the possibility, indeed likelihood eluded (if it did) those running the campaign is one reason why we lost so badly.
And no-one was listening anyway.
Even some of those of us who departed the Lib Dems a while back will mourn this result. The Lib Dems governed responsibly and it is sad to see them decimated in this way.
The unannounced welfare cuts will now be brought in. Soon some who punished the Lib Dems yesterday may realise their mistake.
But the Lib Dems must make themselves more open to those of us who are Eurosceptic. I am convinced that portraying yourselves openly as the party of the European/ immigration status quo lost you many votes.
And still they failed to listen to Bill Le Breton, Tony Greaves. John Tilley and others………………………………..
Helen, the anti-milliband factor hurt liberals? How could that possibly be, if the liberals had retained a distinctive brand. The whole problem is they simply became conservative light. The left wont vote for something aligned to the right, and the right will vote for the real thing. Liberals gained ground in the past not exactly by holding the centre ground, but being distinctive with flashes of both right and left. The SNP have a brand image SCOTLAND. UKIP have a brand image. Greens have a USP too. Labour also failed to be distinctive and prevaricated on race -the scots english standoff, european migrants-, failed to stand up for its own record, had nothing to be FOR. This is really also the liberals problem.
Ed Balls has just lost his seat.
@Danny for sure the “Miliband thing” hurt us. Given the vagueries of FPTP the tory message was “you can only be certain to keep them out by voting for us” which hoovered up the coalition approvers whilst the left leaning lib dem voters deserted us to Labour and the Greens (and SNP)
Our few remaining MPs need to provide strong opposition to the Tories and a liberal voice in Parliament.
Just got back to work after the Winchester count finished. Before the coalition we held Winchester, now we are 17,000 behind the Tory (I thought we’d lose this time by 10,000). The huge strategic mistake was to go into this election focussing on a further coalition, never mind with whom. The last week or so felt like 1992 to me, and when Labour leaked the ‘story’ about a possible Lib-Lab coalition I knew we were doomed. The only strategy that would have been respected by the voters would have been to say, “We will not go into coalition with anyone but will work with whichever party it might be necessary to work with to achieve these objectives….” But I agree with Dave Page, before calling for resignations and trying to affix blame, let’s get some sleep, reflect, and console each other.
Looks like the discussion has moved to a new thread while I was away.
Has anyone orange popped up yet to say it’s all John Tilley’s fault?
What hurt us was the anti-Scottish vote stirred up by the Tories in the south. That’s why we lost so many seats.That plus the SNP landslide north of the border. So quite what people are doing posting here about it all being our fault for going into Coalition and being entirely due to Nick Clegg, I don’t know. People in England wanted a clear guarantee that they weren’t going to end up with an SNP/Labour government, and we could’t give them that.
Please, look at the actual results before you simply go and repeat all the things you have said before regardless of the fact on the ground.
Does this mean the disastrous Orange brigade will be kicked into touch, or will they still wield influence without seats ?
How do you explain the huge loss of seats in the south as being due to the “disastrous orange brigade”?
John Tilley would not be willing to admit that we lost lots of our MPs in Tory-facing seats due to a determined Conservative targeting campaign backed with lots of money. Nick Clegg is not to blame for our losses in those seats. After all, he himself won largely on the basis of his appeal to the Tory vote.
RC, I’m a lifelong liberal tactical voter. My first consideration in this election was not to do anything which would support the conservatives. Any suggestion liberals would support Cameron made it impossible to vote for them. happily for me, locally no liberal stood any chance, so I could quite happily vote labour. The coalition was a DISASTER. Liberals showed themselves utterly dishonourable with broken promises, any very personal promises in many constituencies, not the ordinary vague ones all parties make and break. Whats more, the coalition achieved NOTHING. Last night I heard one of the candidates saying liberals must dissociate themselves from conservatives, but saying liberals had taken a hit in the national interest by making the coalition. TOSH! All the coalition did was allow conservatives to carry out their program, and involve liberals in going back on things they believed in. Liberals became an excuse for the conservatives to their own right wing for not carrying out the more extreme policies, which Cameron did not want to do anyway!
Are you prepared for further massive losses in the Local Election results. Wake up your party has been crushed because of the lust for power of a few at the top. Wake up.
@RC
“What hurt us was the anti-Scottish vote stirred up by the Tories in the south.”
I think you will find Nick Clegg did just as much of that as the Tories.
He constantly kept saying Labour would be dependent on the SNP which would put the union at risk and he would never be a part of government that relied on support of any kind of the SNP.
Instead of challenging the Tory Scare tactics on the SNP. Nick Clegg fueled them.
@ RC – we have always faced determined conservative campaigns in our held and target seats. Nick Clegg won his seat because Conservatives voted tactically for him, not because he had any appeal to Conservative voters. The number of Tories form 2010 switching to the Lib Dems comprised 0.3% of those who voted. This group has been made our target audience with entirely predictable results.
There may be a dead cat bounce in next years local elections – but with many more candidates from UKIP and the Greens that is far from certain. We need to start serious planning for the EU in or out referendum, stop opposing it being held, embrace it, embrace working with other parties and make sure it isn’t like the Independence Referendum.
@ Caractacus
“If we want to have any recovery, we need to build it on policies and values. We need to be distinctive and relevant …We need to think 5-10 years ahead.
+1
TCO
The problem with your view is that the Labour vote was down in Conservative facing seats too. What the experience of the last five shows and similar results in Australia is that if you have left leaning voters you do not form coalitions with right wing parties. The Lib Dems had high numbers of public sector workers, students, people put off by the Iraq war, Scots and disabled voters. We then cheered “swinging cuts”, helped triple tuition fees, argued for what turned out to be the mess in Libya advocated the same for Syria and helped introduce the bedroom tax, whilst demonising Labour and the SNP for having policy that were in the 2010 manifesto. We then ran a campaign that basically banked on a continuation of a coalition that was plainly killing us and ended up turning soft Tories into more solid Tories. This went on even after election after election brought more lost deposits. The truth is the coalition should at the very latest have ended in 2014 but instead was carried on to the bitter end rather than replace the leader. Oakeshott was pillared for telling the truth and trying to stop the rot.
I am terrified about the UK’s future today and for the values I still believe in. I also believe that whether the country knows it yet or not they still need us.
Its a dark day, but I fear darker days are to come – we need our strength.
We must get our head out of the sand and remember our core values as I believe that very soon the countries most marginalised and discriminated will start feeling the brunt of today’s choice.
We have to find our authentic voice again, regardless of how bruised and battered we are.
Today there is more than just seats to worry about – what happened has happened
We need a plan of action or the country will pay the price.
The Libdem’s didn’t listen to the people and have paid the price, but all is not lost
We have not died a death as a party until our values of liberty, equality and freedom.
A lot can happen in a short-time look where we were just 4 years ago.
We have differences here on how to move forward, but everyone here is fighting the same battle; we are not enemies we are a family that has been through a lot tonight but a family that if we support each other can fight on.
Yes its time to get our head out of the sand, but not a time to turn on each other.
We have to change and that change may be difficult
But liberty, equality and freedom is what we are fighting for today – lets find a way forward together.
Plenty of party members warned Clegg and Laws what would happen if they insisted on pursuing their project to turn us up into a British version of the FDP.
It happened. Time to go Clegg to go. Time for our party to rediscover its Radical Liberal heart and soul.
As for the organisers of the worst Liberal election campaign I remember. Well, they were also warned and need to be kept as far away as possible from future campaigning.
The party should now hand itself over to those who had the vision, commonsense and foresight to realise the disaster that was coming. Ashdowns performance on TV this morning was simply awful.
Glenn:
You make my point. There wasn’t much change in Tory and Labour shares of the vote. But who took the biggest hit in vote swing against were the Lib Dems. So it’s not that voters supported or rejected Tories/Labour (even if the electoral system results in different seat shares), but they DID reject Lib Dems. So questions must be asked.
Back in 2012 I told Clegg that supporting Tory policies that went against our principles would lead to disaster. Why would anyone vote LD in those circumstances. Clegg’s reply was that the electorate would recognise our policies and success in government. Clearly he was wrong. The way forward >
1. Clegg out.
2. Apologise for an awful 5 years of inflicting awful policies on the electorate.
3. Then maintain a low press profile for a year.
4. Reinvent/relaunch under a new old name – Liberal Party.
5. Don’t give up hope. Scotland will soon realise SNP MPs sre pointless against a Tory majority.
6.
Was Nick hinting recently that he would be OK with an EU membership referendum? Why the heck did he not say that over a year ago, we might have retained a good number of MEPs. Then our disaster today could have been less bad than it is. His judgement is lacking.
Even the Greens are in favour of a referendum. We should now get our ideas straight on the EU, and stop making non-credible statements such as the 3 million jobs would be lost if we left. The electorate have spoken, we need to regain whathever shreds of credibility we can, this could be our last chance. No more broken promises. No more nonsense statistics. No more Clegg – hopefully.
How much money have we thrown away on lost deposits?
Some of us have been saying for years that the Tories played a blinder in the coalition, they outwitted, out smarted and outmaneuvered the Liberal Democrats from the very start.
The Tories were not just being generous when they agreed to certain cabinet posts, they were calculated as they knew certain briefs would cause the most harm to the reputations of the party.
The Tories were always banking on the effects it would have on the Liberal Democrats and the results we see today.
8 MP’s and unless Tessa Munt somehow survives, No female MP’s
I hope those who vigorously defended Nick Clegg over the last 2 years, when many was saying it was time for him to go in the hope of salvaging something in time for this election are pleased with themselves.
Hopefully now there will be a change of leadership, change of direction, back towards it center left and the party can start to rebuild in time for 2020
How the various factions behave in the next few weeks will be crucial.
I hope there will be an attempt to consolidate and rebuild. However I fear for the worst. The last thing we need is a fratricidal night if the long knives
You can bet one of the first things the Tories will do is boundary reforms and scrap the Fixed Term Parliament act to now favor themselves
Caracatus
“make sure it isn’t like the Independence Referendum.”
Or the AV referendum.
@ TCO – Rebuild what? Don’t you get it your party is finished its over, you were tricked and now your paying the price. ‘No more broken promises’.
@Silvio it’s considered polite not to intrude on somebody else’s wake.
I suspect that RC is right to identify the SNP fear factor as the trigger for some of last night’s rout. This momentum towards the Conservatives was picked up several weeks ago here by Bill Le Breton and others and is consistent not only with our collapse but also with the failure of Labour to make inroads even in their top Tory-facing target seats.
But the bottom line is that the SNP factor simply exacerbated a situation that was already dire. The party’s core vote was deliberately destroyed in a self-aggrandizing “project” to reinvent it. The general election campaign has been vapid and uninspiring. The voters have given their verdict. Our party is in pieces.
The buck stops with the leadership. Clegg must go at once. Coetzee must go at once. After that we can begin the slow and painful process of reconnecting with our natural supporters.
RC 8th May ’15 – 8:41am
“….John Tilley would not be willing to admit that we lost lots of our MPs in Tory-facing seats due to a determined Conservative targeting campaign backed with lots of money. ”
?????????! — What? Are you confusing me with someone else?
RC, I guess you must have missed some of the comments I have made about the Conservatives in the seat where I live, it is Richmond Park where the Conservative Zac Goldsmith inherited his multi-million pound wealth and spends a good portion of it on politics.
Or perhaps you missed my repeated appeals for money and support for Adrian Sanders in Torbay, who faced a Tory onslaught?
Or perhaps my suggestions for months now that we concentrate our efforts in half a dozen seats where we could make a difference?
I suggest you go back through the LDV archive and read what I have actually said rather than putting false words into my mouth. Whatever else I may be guilty of, underestimating the Conservative finances and campaigns has not been a crime of mine.
Your suggestion is frankly bizarre. Have you never actually read any comment I have made?
@ TCO – Point taken and I am sorry for Charles Kennedy a decent man.
It is so sad that we have lost all these good MPs but I am hoping that we now have the opportunity to reapply our values to create a vision of a Liberal Democrat nation for the 21st century.. We need to think radically and use the talents we have lost in parliament as well as members to consider how we can pay for a welfare state.
Last night one of the BBC commentators said that Labour haven’t an individual economic theory but the Tories have. Let’s use this opportunity to develop our own unique position. We can also look at the relationship between the Parliamentary party and the members. All is not lost. but we could do with understanding why our MPs were so blind to the situation on the ground.
I don’t want to apportion blame as that is wasted effort and will definitely bring about our demise as a party. Instead we should see this as an opportunity for serious thought about what we believe in and how a Lib Dem society would function in the future.
Guy Burton,
Questions do need asking. The problem for the Lib Dems that the vote dissipated all over the shop. Some even went to UKIP, but mainly I think what happened is that the leaderships failed to stand up for our voters. This is a common problem with progressive parties, when you’ve got lobby groups and “experts” feeding you the l orthodoxies of the day and journalist talking about “realistic politics” then joe blog gets forgotten.
So the Captain took the ship down with him anyway.
Phil Rimmer 8th May ’15 – 9:07am
“Plenty of party members warned Clegg and Laws what would happen if they insisted on pursuing their project to turn us into a British version of the FDP. It happened. Time to go Clegg to go. Time for our party to rediscover its Radical Liberal heart and soul. As for the organisers of the worst Liberal election campaign I remember. Well, they were also warned and need to be kept as far away as possible from future campaigning.”
Almost total agreement Phil. I only deviate when it comes to your final sentence. They should be told never to darken our door again.
No one will convince me personally to ever touch the Tories again. A very costly lesson for our party and our natural supporters.
Clegg must not even be a Lib Dem MP come 2020 and we must distance ourselves from anything connected with this destructive episode. The toxicity of ‘Reclaiming Liberalism’ must stop here.
David Boyle has this morning written, “The idea that (the Liberal Democrats) could win territory campaigning just to mollify the extremes of the others has also now been tested to destruction. In fact, I’m not sure there is a role for the party unless it rediscovers its capacity for crusading in the country, rather than just quietly in the corridors of power. Nobody else could have performed with the skill and charisma that Nick Clegg has, and I’m proud of what my party achieved in power, but there appear to be no votes in compromise – at least for its own sake.”
How true.
People who said that the Liberal Democrats were “on the right track” and who apologised for Nick Clegg’s leadership after it lost the party unprecedented numbers of councillors, MSPs, MEPs, and now MPs can do the Party an huge favour today by just shutting up and leaving the rebuilding of the Party to more clear-sighted people.
One consequence should be that the price of coalition has shot up enormously.
Indeed, we relied too much on optimism, that we would achieve electoral reform; that we could engender consensus; that we would be listened to.
Nonetheless, we did achieve a recognition outside the party that a coalition government can operate. At future elections it will be less easy for Tory and Labour leaders to assert that coalitions are a recipe for chaos.
True to my word, following a certain speech 30 minutes ago, I have just had my application accepted for membership. It is good to be back. I suspect there are others doing this as well.
Normally knowing the exact time of a leaders departure is impossible, but I and several others predicted this event to within a few hours nearly 5 years ago. Watching the party sailing towards the end has been the worst period of Lib Dem politics to me. I hope members like Caron and Paul will realise they’ve destroyed the very the thing they hold dear and could of done something about it instead of continuously denigrating our position. They sacrificed dozens of talented MPs that this country needed to retain a political figure that was broken 4 years ago. Its been the height of political ineptitude, let’s hope that behaviour at least will end to night or this is simply the end. It’s not a meaningful organisation without all of the people it abandoned by allowing a man that had broken a direct promise to the public to stay on as leader.
We’ll continue to sit and wait for you, or for something better to come along. By something better, I mean an organisation that’s self-aware enough to realise when it has to change or die, not one that sits on the shore muttering positive sentiments whilst watching the approaching tsunami.
I’m going to see what happens first theakes. Perhaps a new center ground party will emerge from this, plus I can’t bear to join if it means Tim Farron is the de-facto leader, because that’s just the sort of thinking that got the party here. The perceived wisdom has been wrong for a while and I think Farron is the next phase in the party not understanding its own position.
An awful lot of soul searching to do after this less than favorable result.
Paddy Ashdown must EAT HIS HAT IN PUBLIC if he ever wants to be believed. He had always been promising but never fulfilled them!
I predicted in The Liberator of Sept 2012 the massacre because Clegg lacked any strategy. I described him as “a cork bobbing on the water” and was quoted in the Sunday Times. I forecast the almost complete wipe-out of our MEPs and major council losses. Last year in the same magazine I continued the marine analogy saying Clegg was “a fish dead in the water.” Why did I get it right? Because I’m a realist and, unlike the LD Leadership and too many colleagues, did not put my head in the sand hoping something better would turn up. Bill le Bretton is quite right as usual: Fighting on the Coetzee slogan of “Stronger economy, fairer society” was banality itself. We need to reassert the LDs as a radical, progressive left of centre party.