So the Tories are out to “destroy” the Liberal Democrats? So reported the Telegraph on Monday. Well, there’s a surprise. When have they ever done us any favours? Or the other lot? Our gains have been made by grit, sweat and community based campaigns run on a shoestring. The Tories are pouring resources into its target seats. They have obscene amounts of money and aren’t afraid to spend it.
Many individual seats have got their crowd-funding sites up now. My bank balance is suffering accordingly.
Chief strategist Ryan Coetzee is in no mood to stand for this. Whether his latest fundraising missive, with the gruesome subject line “Destroy and decapitate the Lib Dems” was a good idea or not, I’ll leave for you to judge. Here’s what it said:
Caron, I don’t know about you, but when I see the Tories saying they want to destroy Lib Dems I have a simple response: over my dead body.
Here’s what one Tory strategist told the Telegraph last night:
“The way we win this election is by taking a couple of seats off Labour and then just destroy the Lib Dems.”
Every day I see evidence that shows we can beat the Tories in the seats we’re fighting them in, but only if our campaign teams have the resources they need.
It’s no surprise that the Tories want us out. We’ve blocked them from doing some really nasty things—even Cameron said we stopped him from governing like a true Tory.
That’s what makes this election important. They want to ‘decapitate’ us this election so they can lurch off to the right—and they’re using the millions they’ve raised to do it. We can only defend our seats if we have the money to do so, please donate what you can.
The request is pretty understandable, because there’s nothing that scares the Liberal Democrat mind more than the thought of Tories with untrammelled power. Many of us lived through Thatcher and those who didn’t read what Cameron has to say about Europe, immigration and demonising benefit claimants and feel queasy.
There are lots of ways to give money to the party at the moment. John Tilley is always on at us to send stamps and money to Adrian Sanders. Most of our re-standing MPs have crowd-funding sites that are bringing in a fair bit of money,or you can give to the party centrally. I feel I should list all the crowd-funding sites, but it seems appropriate to crowd-source them by asking you to put them in the comments. Many hands make light work, as they say.
We need to put up the best fight we can and although we are used to fighting elections on love and shoe leather, money really helps. I don’t want the Tories to have their way…
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
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12 Comments
It makes tactical sense for the Tories to target us. Labour’s share of the vote has risen since 2010. Ours has fallen. In Con-LD constituencies some of those who voted for us last time will have been Labour sympathisers voting tactically and the Tories probably think we can’t squeeze them any more (we’re doing a pretty good job in the target seats I’ve been canvassing in though). And there are enough seats at stake for the Tories to get a majority, or at least put them into coalition with the DUP, who are far more likely to co-operate when it comes to stripping civil liberties away and grinding the faces of the poor (as long as they’re given that £1 billion extra in Northern Ireland funding).
Which ought in turn to encourage us to focus on the Tories!
I found this email in bad taste actually – we publically tried to decapitate senior Tories in 2005, it’s hypocritical to condemn them for using exactly the same language we used about them. Hoping they have about as much success though…
“we publically tried to decapitate senior Tories in 2005”
Indeed, and Labour are trying to do that to us in 2015.
@tpfkar- we didn’t try to destroy the Tories (we didn’t have the resources). I agree “decapitate” is a silly word to use- the Tories aren’t primarily interested in senior Lib Dem scalps, what they want is enough Lib Dem seats for a majority- which they could get.
Philip Thomas – “what they want is enough Lib Dem seats for a majority- which they could get.”
The easiest way for them to get those seats is for our voters to switch to Labour in our held Lib Dem / Tory marginals. And the best way of achieving that is arguing that the coalition was “evil” and no different to a Tory majority government.
Well, I’ll take that as an invitation. Jackie Porter’s Fighting Fund has been up less than 24 hours and already raised a quarter of our target. http://www.winld.org.uk/fightingfund – please help us win back Winchester!
@Tabman
I think the Tories might have some strategic qualms about arguing the coalition was evil. But you are right we have to be careful in that area. That is why Nick is focusing his attacks on Tory plans for the future. Interestingly David Cameron seems to agree with you – he says Nick can’t run on his record and criticise his record- failing to recognise that Nick isn’t criticising his record- he is criticising what he Tories will do next.
The Tories may not be arguing that the coalition was evil, but many of the posters to this board do.
That is because that is their genuine belief. I somehow doubt that vast numbers of tactical voters in Con-LD constituencies are going to be swayed by comments on the LDV message board.
The social media campaign, as I imagine you know, is firmly on-message on this point (coalition good, Tories bad).
There’s a degree of irony in Ryan Coetzee talking about the Tories ‘destroying’ the Lib Dems…
I am helping to try and win back Guildford.
Haven’t got a link to share but i’m sure Kelly Marie Blundell and the team would appreciate any support financial or otherwise.
A very energetic campaign is underway and i’m not finding many enthusiastic Tory voters, hopefully a lot of them are switching to UKIP!
We have just launched a fighting fund to help re-elect Greg Mulholland as the MP for Leeds NorthWest
https://ldleeds.nationbuilder.com/
Please give what you can to help us keep this seat Lib Dem