One by-election win does not a government make.
As a queer millennial living in East London, I am surrounded by Green Party Members. To paraphrase Derry Girls, ‘It’s wall to wall Green Party Members, sure you cannot move for Green Party Members round here’. Never has this been more obvious than in the last few days; conversations with friends and my social media have been filled with, quite frankly, sickenly gleeful Green Party activists & supporters, saying things like, ‘a left wing government is just around the corner!’ and ‘this is the chance we have to change our country!
Now don’t get me wrong. The day after we won the 2016 Richmond Park by-election, I walked into work with a smile that only really comes with a very pleasurable night. For the first couple of parliamentary by-elections that I fought and won, I too was an insufferable git that bored everyone with tales of the campaign trail. This was before I realised a devastating fact:
Winning parliamentary by-elections does not matter at all.
Word count forbids me from turning this argument into a 3,000 word essay; however, here are three reasons why the Green Party’s win in Gorton & Denton means absolutely nothing:
1. You won’t hold onto the seat.
Between 2001-2019, 13 seats moved from one political party to another, 6 of those MPs held onto those seats at the next general election. In each of those 6 cases, the party that held the set was either a good 2nd place before the by-election occurred, or had a reasonable local government base (and thus a track record of winning in the consistency). Neither of those are true in this case. The Green Party currently has no councillors that represent any of the wards in the constituency.
2. “But we won Gorton & Denton, we can win it again”.
Don’t make me laugh. You won it because you threw the kitchen sink at it! Every weekend, I saw photos of massive groups of green activistssmiling with rain stained leaflets in their hands. The Green Party won this seat because they knocked on enough doors that they reminded the people in Gorton & Denton that the Green Party exists. All of those activists will go back to their own constituencies, to fight the elections that they have in May. Never will the Green Party in Gorton & Denton see that many activists and central HQ money plugged into their constituency again.
3. By-election wins do not affect national polls (they merely reflect them).
By-elections are often sensationalized as political earthquakes, the emotional high of which Green Party activists are now. However, in reality, they function more like thermometers than catalysts. While a dramatic upset can generate a temporary media frenzy, or a “momentum” narrative, these results rarely shift the fundamental trajectory of national polling. Take Hartlepool 2021: Boris Johnson’s Conservatives took a safe Labour seat whilst in government, largely due to an almost wholesale move of the Reform vote to the Tories. This by-election was at the point where Johnson’s government was enjoying a post vaccine bounce. Had this by-election been 12 months later, once Party-gate had broken, or 16 months, after Liz Truss had graced us with an appearance as Prime Minster——. Look at all the by-elections in the last 20 years: not one has had a meaningful effect on headline polling.
So, why do parties care so much about parliamentary by-elections?
A question I have often asked myself! But, there are three reasons;
- It is a massive loss of face if a party has political momentum or is the main challenger and they are not up for the fight. It makes a party look weak.
- Political parties use them as training grounds for staff & activists. Showing both sets of people the scale of the operation required to win a parliamentary seat.
- There is genuinely a sub-set of the population whose highlight of any year is a trip to a by-election campaign trail, and who would want to deny them of that joy!
I know that Green Party members will be insufferable for a little while longer. I do not begrudge them that. I would just gently ask them, make sure your joy does not turn into false hope.
* Mills Dyer (she/they) is a recovering Lib Dem HQ staffer (2014-21) and a former member of the Federal Board as staff rep (2017-21). Now just an ordinary member in East London.
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Debt-ridden graduates claim they are seen as cash cows
Why non-fiction books need their indexes
Changes in status: Local Elections wrap up
Mary Reid
Meg Thomas
Institute of Urban T
Tristan Ward
Mick Taylor
48 Comments
hmm. I suspect Greens will make local election gains in Manchester and its surrounding towns because of the by election.
They will probably make life very difficult for us over the next 6 months.
Just hope they do not adversely affect our chances of holding wards in this weeks by elections.
This really resonates. I’m an ex-party member although I can’t give up the habit of coming here, and I live in a city where the Greens are on the rise and Green voters are convinced they’re going to sweep the city (plausible, but in a plurality voting system, not necessarily a sign of majority backing from the population as a whole) and the country (implausible) and impose their worldview on global culture (not happening).
At the moment the most the Greens can hope for is supplanting Labour as the major opposition party to a Reform majority or minority government, with significantly less MPs than either Labour or Tory have now, and a divided opposition requiring fancy footwork and the ability to compromise with parties and voters of significantly different worldviews (and noses significantly out of joint). Its not an entirely joyful what-if scenario.
“each of those 6 cases, the party that held the set was either a good 2nd place before the by-election occurred, or had a reasonable local government base”
This is not true for either the Brent East or Clacton by elections. And it’s very odd to exclude by-elections from the last parliament where our party won north Shropshire from third with no local councillors.
The comparison with Richmond also seems to have been selectively chosen, this by election is more comparable to the 2003 Brent east by election, which we won despite the same handicaps for the same reasons i.e progressive voters and Muslims fed up with labours shift to right and Iraq (with the latter now substituted by current events).
Honestly I don’t get the point of spending so much energy on coming up with reasons why the green surge might not fully deliver. Either way they are growing and have a clear pathway ahead of them, even if it is a bumpy one that takes a few elections. Our party has not had an endgame to aim for since the 2000s when it was the same as the Greens now, i.e to either replace labour or win enough seats from them to prevent them from ever forming a majority government without us. If we’d not immediately ditched this to join the coalition we’d currently be on the verge of achieving it and potentially winning the next election outright.
Lib Dems are massively missing the sudden appeal of the Greens to younger voters: they see how ‘broken Britain ‘ is a result of the real political power being wielded by unelected super-rich who have forced austerity on us for decades (for fear of the markets). We are still saying that a balanced budget is essential – Thatcher’s mantra. It’s not just votes, the Greens now have 215,000 members paying £60 a year for their membership. We should not write them off as fringe any more.
@Ryder Marsden
Soumd money and public finances under control are essential. There is so much government debt that of we fail to renew it because of fears we cannot repay it Britain is on very deep trouble. Pretending it doesn’t exist is simply foolhardy
To deal with 3 points
1) Too soon to say
2) Fair point
3) Absolutely not true. Look at the graphs for Reform, they got a massive Poll boost from their “Breakthrough” in 2024 & when that was levelling out they got a smaller boost from their Local Election performance plus By-election victory.
The crucial point about this By-election is that it was the First Green victory, its The greens equivalent of Orpington in 1962 for us.
I expect The Greens to go up 5% in The Polls over the next few Months & that will help them in May which will, in turn, give them a further boost.
There is some evidence that they have already had a Polling boost & sometime in the next few Weeks there will be a Poll putting them in first place.
Now, if we look forward to Winter, at some point The Greens will peak & start falling, just as Reform did but by then they will be established as a serious proposition in many Voters minds, that won’t go away.
Of what costs is government debt created?
What a silly artcle! Winning Parliamentary by-elections DOES matter, and as someone who joined the Liberal Party in 1974 I know this very well. OK some are more important than others, other more long lasting than others, BUT they do make a difference.
So let’s apply the three criteria listed and apply them to the Bermondsey by-election of 1983:
1. You won’t hold onto the seat.
Simon Hughes held Bermnodsey from 1983-2015 desoite more than one boundary change.
2. “But we won Bemondsey, we can win it again”.
Well we did (see above). Liberal threw the kictchen sink at Bermondsey and knocked on every door more than once. On Polling Day we had so many helpers I was ent ‘knocking up’ at 10:30 AM. But when the by election circus left we still held the seat.
3. By-election wins do not affect national polls (they merely reflect them)
Well the by election wins in the 1972-3 period were a major reason why LIberals went up in the polls and polled 20% of the vote in February 1974. Those with longer memories will say the same about the period from after Orpington which led to an uplift in vote in 1964. The by election wins in the 1990s had a direct influence
…….sorry ending got chopped off on previous post which should have ended:
The by election wins in the 1990s had a direct influence on the target strategy which led to the big gain in seast in 1997 General Election.
……….Winning parliamentary by-elections does not matter at all……..
OMG! That is akin to claiming that ‘advertising doesn’t work’.. I’m 82 and for most of my adult life this party spent it’s time claiming that, “A Liberal/LibDem vote was not a wasted vote”; we now have 72 seats..
BTW.. In 2005 and 2010 we won almost a quarter of votes (before becoming a Tory tribute act and losing almost everything and having to start again from scratch.. Oh, what might have been????)
The problem for anyone extrapolating this by-election result either within G&D or nationally there is one problem overlooked.
The electoral pact with the Workers Party. They are a significant force in parts of the constituency, winning a ward and second in others.
How this coalition holds together will determine if the Green’s hold the seat at the General Election.
Nationally that coalition doesn’t exist in most seats, making it difficult for a Green breakthrough in many seats.
Sadly Mills Dyer is wrong. By-elections do matter, if they occur in the right places. At the start of the year – BEFORE the campaigns in Gorton & Denton started and even before candidates were chosen, I pointed out that this was a seat where the Greens could win (not predicting that they would won!) on the basis of the 2024 GE results and the swings in national voting patterns which had taking place by the end of 2025. Gorton & Denton was one of about 30 seats where on the basis of polling the Greens were positioned to make gains if a general election took place this spring (yes, I know that Labour will not go to the country before 2029, because they know they will lose most of the constituencies that they now hold). To work out where those gains might occur you actually need to look at the position in each of the 632 constituencies in Britain, and apply a uniform national swing to the 2024 results. The 30 to 36 seats vulnerable to a Green gain are essentially in the neglected inner urban seats – in East London, Bristol and Manchester, plus a few odd seats in other large cities, and Gorton & Denton was clearly and predictably one of those seats.
They are NOT going to sweep the country (and at present are unlikely to win in other rural seats apart from the two they currently hold), but are probably going to establish a respectable bridgehead, that is if levels of support across the country remain at current levels (I’m not assuming a further boost in the aftermath of the by-election result!). The Greens capitalised on that position in the by-election, and clearly we (and equally the Conservatives) were never in a position to win, in spite of having an excellent candidate.
@ Expats and David Le Grice
“If we’d not immediately ditched [the aim to replace Labour ] to join the coalition we’d currently be on the verge of achieving it and potentially winning the next election outright.”
In the alternative universe what was the creditable route from refusing collation ?
As I see it the Tories would have minority government in the financial crisis. The would have called an election withing a year asking for a majority so as to be able to govern. They would have won against Labour, labling us as not about power.
It’s conceivable we and others could have sported a minority Labour government. That would have collapsed afterwards – everyone was sick of Labour and they were a tired government that would have insisted on calling the shots. . We and they would have been trounced.
What next in either scenario?
“Oh, what might have been”
We currently have an opportunity to kill off the conservative party. being at the heart of a central grouping with mad nationalists on one side and mad eco-socialists on the other. That’s what can be.
Mills Dyer is missing the point in her analysis. She’s assuming that the mainstream centrist parties of previous decades, with perhaps just the occasional successful protest vote for any radical challengers, will continue to be the mainstream centrist parties in future.
The results of the last election started to show the cracks in the mainstream ediface. We had candidates elected from both the Green party to Labour’s left, and the Reform party on the far right. In addition we had 5 independent MPs elected on a pro Gaza platform.
In times of economic political crisis the centre ground often fails to hold. We’ll likely see more evidence of this in the May local elections.
So we’ll have to see how it all pans out in the future, but it’s quite likely that the Green Party’s win in Gorton & Denton does mean something. Not only will they likely hold onto the seat, next time they’ll win more.
If it was just a matter of “throwing the kitchen sink at it”, why didn’t the Lib Dems do this? Lib Dems have done this in the past when they picked up the protest vote. .
The “don’t make me laugh” comment does sound very superior and condescending. This from a member of a party which managed to poll just 1.8% of the total!
This isn’t just a one-off by-election result. It’s a statement by the electorate that they’ve had enough of bland centrism.
@ Steve,
“Of what costs is government debt created?”
This does seem to be a rather odd place to ask the question. Was it in response to comments from Ryder and Tristan?
If anyone saves some money, such as by buying up Government bonds, the Govt debt will increase. If Govt wants it to increase even more they should put up interest rates to encourage more of us and our overseas trading partners to save more.
An increasing debt is a sign we’re all saving more. When the debt falls it is a sign that we’re saving less and borrowing more. That’s the danger which could cause inflation.
That’s all there is to it really.
Lib Dems could do themselves a favour and get their economics right instead of thinking that the government is a household which needs to balance its books by not borrowing too much. It’s really more like a bank. Whenever did a bank refuse a deposit from a customer on the grounds that it didn’t want to borrow any more money?
I’m not a Lib Dem any more and I probably wouldn’t agree with Mills on lots of things, but I think a number of commenters are mis-reading it as a dismissal of the legitimacy of byelection campaigning and/or of the nature of the Green threat to the Lib Dems.
I read it partially as a comment on the group delusions that accompany intense campaigning and the belief that pervaded sections of the party in the Farron-to-Swinson era that magical transformation of fortune was just around the corner leading to a grand reset of UK politics (which it did) with their concerns accepted and understood more widely and no longer laughed at (which it did not).
What’s really interesting is that Polanski was around and trying to cosy up to the leadership in that time and shouting ‘Lib Dem fightback’ along with the others. His politics was impacted by that period.
I do see Green voters and sympathisers now as falling desperately (as, frankly, pro-European Lib Dem sympathisers did briefly in the post-coalition years) on the idea that a wave is coming that means they will never have to compromise their principles again and they can act without reference to the rest of the country.
I do think the comparison to Richmond Park is telling, as it was partially achieved with a public support from local Greens, in much (although not quite) the same way as the Workers Party lent local support to the Greens in Gorton.
@Tristan Ward 10th Mar ’26 – 9:44am….
The idea that, had we offered a policy-to-policy arrangement with the Tories, Cameron would have called an election within a year, is fanciful.. Cameron had already failed to win a majority over the most unpopular Labour government in living memory and he’d never risk another go whist implementing austerity…
The fact that we supported just about every Tory policy without question is undeniable (Danny Alexander spent more time in the media praising Tory finance policies than George Osborne) the fact that that support cost this party almost 50 seats and a vote share drop from 22% to 7% is also undeniable..
I find it hard to figure out how any alternative scenario, in the 5 years following 2010, that could have been worse for this party!
Anyway, what is past is past.
Yes, my question was in response to Tristan Ward’s comment.
Thanks to Peter Martin for his sound related comment.
Like Peter Martin, the aim was to aid the L. D. leadership to a better understanding that much of the alleged “National Debt” is an essential savings scheme.
Terrible take sorry. I don’t think many Green members seriously believe this means that the Green party will storm ahead. The meaning of the win is this:
– They beat Reform in a seat Reform assumed they would win. Yes, they threw tons of money at it but so did Reform. In an age where fascism is knocking at the door I cannot fathom why LDs would not see this as positive (especially when LD had no chance of winning here). Very strange not to and frankly quite worrying. You state this by-election is more of a national thermometer – yes, that is exactly why people are celebrating. The assumption that the far right is surging ahead everywhere is simply not true and there is hope.
– The Greens are no longer a fringe party. The Greens had next to no presence in G&D until this election, and they won. It absolutely can happen elsewhere – the message is clear. Remember, Reform was a fringe party too until quite recently.
– This stinks of party over politics. The point is that Reform (i.e. fascism) did NOT win. THAT is why people are celebrating – not this “my team beat yours” nonsense. If LD beat out Reform I can assure you that the same Green members would be celebrating for exactly the same reasons.
If we want to have any hope tackling Reform in the GE we need to be united. A lot less of this sneering party politics drivel. There is too much at stake.
Voters don’t care much about what happens in any by-election in another part of the country. Before the North Shropshire by-election some commenters on here said that our deposit-losing vote share in Old Bexley & Sidcup a few weeks prior would harm our chances in North Shropshire. Well it didn’t; it just wasn’t a factor. It’s unlikely that voters in North Shropshire were even aware of the earlier by-election.
Of course there was the (first) 1990 Bootle by-election in which David Owen’s rebooted SDP was beaten by the OMRLP, sounding the end of *that* incarnation of the SDP (the present SDP is another reboot). But that was really a wake-up call for the political commentariat, which had up to then been treating the SDP as a coequal to the Lib Dems in the post-Alliance succession battle. Voters had written it off long before then.
Old Bexley & Sidcup is a long way from North Shropshire.
It seems reasonable that a resident of North Shropshire who was not especially interested in politics outside their own area might not have paid much attention to a by-election in Old Bexley & Sidcup a few weeks previously.
@Peter – but the government/national debt is more than that. Government builds some infrastructure eg. A nuclear power station and it will be accounted for as government debt.
Interestingly, as you not if I buy government bonds it adds to the debt, however if I buy stuff that doesn’t involve government like a house with a mortgage, that is bank/computer debt not government debt….
@ Roland,
Yes if a government spends on any kind of asset it will add to its debt. If we buy a house the loan adds to our debt. Not all debts are government debts as you say. But if we look at our balance sheets we’ve got the value of our assets on the other side. If we rent we don’t have a debt. Generally speaking, though, we’re better off buying that renting in the longer term.
Govts that sign up to PFI schemes are essentially renting. PFIs are a bad deal and its simply about reducing debt. If we consider the longer term liabilities to pay the rent it’s more like they are hiding debt. Just as we are if we rent in the longer term.
Tristan, You ask a valid question “In the alternative universe what was the credible route from refusing coalition (in 2010)?” but then post two of your own answers – first what would the Cons have done and second what Labour might have wanted to do (except they didn’t want to to do it at all). These straw men are in no way an answer to your question.
Quite simply the route was to stand by our principles and pledges, reject the Cons coalition offer as being just a power grab by them, allow them to take power and probably win the following snap election but then watch them disintegrate over the next five years because we weren’t here as their little helpers taking the blame.
After five and a bit years of this, the Cons would have lost the next election very badly, while we would have been in a much stronger position and made more gains. This would have given a decent chance of turning the country around without the mess that was Johnson’s post Brexit Car crash to deal with. Also we would have been in a good second or third place in a much bigger number of seats than we are now.
@ Tristan Ward and David Evans. A brief comment as someone who joined the Liberal Party way back in 1961, was told (by Jo Grimond et al) to think that in due course we (the Libs) would replace a tired old Labour Party in a realignment on the left, and a belief that fired me to get elected five times as a Councillor (much shoe leather gone), to serve as a Council Cabinet member for Social Care, and to poll a respectable near 30% in the 1983 General Election against a Tory Cabinet Minister.
The 2010 Coalition policy outcomes ? A huge disappointment and disillusioning, a disaster, especially to the vulnerable. I still wonder how many long serving radicals activists were lost to the party. Today, I observe a complacent narrow focus on so called ‘Middle England’ (eggs in one basket is dangerous) and empty policy free stunts as an attention grabber.
Manchester was once the heartbeat of Liberalism. The party will dismiss the by-election at its peril. It should be a wake up call.
In 2010, the LibDems could share power or be a protest group, rather than a serious political party
I voted for the coalition as did the vast majority at the special conference. Hindsight is always a perfect science and saying in 2026 that what we agreed to in 2010 was wrong, stupid or even unforgivable, is easy with the benefit of hindsight.
The party made many mistakes during the coalition government, caused by total unpreparedness for government and not having a plan for what to do if we ever were in government. [A bit like Labour now, who don’t even have a plan on the back of a fag packet]. We also trusted the Tories to play fair, but -and here I wasn’t surprised at all – they sought only their own advantage.
The lesson is that we need to have a plan for government, a plan for confidence and supply and a plan for being the main opposition. We also need to include in any such plans, quick wins and long-term constitutional changes that mitigate against being blamed for everything.
If it starts to look like we will be playing in the big league, then we need to have draft legislation ready to go on the issues we want any government we are in to be undertaking from the start.
We need to accept the failures of our time in coalition, stop whataboutery and focus on winning as many seats as we can in 2029.
The Greens lost 41% and the Libdems lost 36% of their deposits at the last GE. You only need to look at where those 487 lost deposits were to realise both parties have a mountain to climb to be fully recognised as a national party.
In post industrial towns across the midlands and Northeast/west they are irrelevant.
@Nonconformistradical: I know, but some political obsessives seem to imagine that other people are like them and so follow every twist and turn of politics and every by-election across the country.
@Mick Taylor: Liberal Democrats were unprepared for Government at a national level, but had years of experience at Local level. Prior to 2010 we ran big cities like Liverpool, Newcastle, Bristol, Cardiff etc. We were in coalition with the Tories in Birmingham, and had loads of experience in a whole range of power sharing options in every part of the country.
The problem was that although the party leadership did engage with the LGA Lib Dem group, they didn’t use the vast expertise the party had. You and I both told Clegg that at the 2011 ALDC Conference, but it fell on deaf ears!
The 2024 election showed how well we targeted winnable seats, and I agree we must do the same in the run up to 2029. The Reform/Tory split will bring many seats into play as targets that were not considered winnable before (eg. Devizes).
@Mick Taylor 10 March 7.55
Good post if I may say so.
“not having a plan for what to do if we ever were in government”
Are we talking about a political plan, or a policy plan? Certainly the political plan for the coalition (if there was one beyond winning the Alternative Vote referendum) failed, and a decent amount of policy was achieved with the astonishing foolish exception of tuition fees. I do recommend David Law’s book about the coalition years for an inside story.
Looking ahead shared power in one form or another looks the most likely possibility, and who can say who the other players will be? I think all eventualities should be planned for, including National Government, with the obvious exception of allowing Farage or anyone like him anywhere near power.
@ David Evans at 6:04 1o March.
Where we disagree is on the viability of your route. Personally I think the snap election in 2011/2 would have been a disaster for the Lib Dems. We would have been portrayed as irresponsible in a national crisis, while Labour would have been in no condition to form a government. I think we would have been very badly damaged.
More importantly you imply that by entering government principles were abandoned. Which principles? My own experience was that, with the exception of tuition fees (and that is policy anyway) and one or two other awkward things the coalition was perfectly defendable from a Lib Dem perspective, especially when one could point to the policy achievements. It’s even more defendable today, as the most recent government run by grown ups.
“Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best.”
@David Raw
“Manchester was once the heartbeat of Liberalism. ”
Indeed, and an interesting brand of Liberalism it was, combining laissez-faire capitalism with pacifism, anti-slavery, freedom of the press and separation between church and state.
@ Tristan Ward I’m afraid you’ve got stuck in the Victorian Gladstonian period, Tristan. Things did move on.
To start with, I suggest Michael Freeden, ‘The New Liberalism, an Ideology of Social Reform, (ISBN978019822961-3) as a helpful primer. Don’t forget Ernest Simon’s family’s contribution – plus the Scotts at the Manchester Guardian. Also, look at the origins of the Liberal Summer Schools in the 1920’s relating to the work of Keynes and Beveridge.
I recall my old and late friend Michael Steed harvested a large vote (over 37% I think) in a Manchester by-election not that many years ago, and we won a Manchester seat in 2010. Correct me if I am wrong, but It seems the Middle England Liberal charabanc never seemed to get much further north than Tunbridge Wells during the recent byelection.
@ Tristan @ David,
“Manchester was once the heartbeat of Liberalism. ”
Yes. Manchester was the UK’s capital of Capitalism in the 19th century The Liberal Party was the party of the emerging Capitalist class. . I’m not sure that many of the present day LibDems appreciate that. The radical policies proposed on land, the freedom of the press, extension of the rights of suffrage etc were about the implementation of policies which suit them.
The Manchester Liberals built a large concert hall and called it the Free Trade Hall. I’m not quite sure how a desire for free trade fits in with wanting to be part of the protectionist bloc known as the EU!
@Steve Comer. I told Clegg more than once both privately and publicly to seek advice from our many council group leaders and the Scottish Lib Dems who had a huge amount of experience in coalition building, but he always thought we knew nothing and he knew best. We really do have to learn from that experience to make sure we don’t repeat it.
@Tristan Ward. We need a political plan AND a policy plan, so we can go into any arrangement with clear objectives about what we want to achieve and, more importantly, a plan for how to sell it to an increasingly cynical electorate. Having legislation parliament ready would, hopefully, get some of our top priorities into law quickly, especially those which take time to implement like proportional voting systems, HoL reform and devolution.
Oh, and we’ve been where the Greens are now and we know it doesn’t last. In a previous post I listed the very many by-elections we have ‘spectacularly’ won and then lost again at the subsequent election. The 2019-24 Parliament was the only one where we won by-elections and then the held parliamentary seats without loss in my lifetime.
Back to the topic of by-elections, I think there’s a good reason to expect the Greens to hold on to Denton and Gorton at the next general election: For people who were mainly trying to stop Reform, it wasn’t at all clear at the by-election who best to vote for. Doubtless quite a few of the Labour votes were people who voted Labour thinking that in a previously safe Labour seat that was the best way to stop Reform. Those people are not going to be voting Labour next time! (Unless of course for some reason the threat from Reform fades away)
How that will play out in other seats seems more questionable. That will depend on (a) how well the Greens can hold their momentum, (b) whether Government gets any less unpopular. There are signs the economy is starting to recover, and I’d expect if any recovery persists, then Labour will gradually pull some votes back.
Not quite Tristan. Where we disagree is on your judgement that the routes you put forward were in any way likely where one (anti-Conservative coalition) was well known to be impossible at the time and where the other assumed the worst possible short term outcome for us and the best possible long term outcome for the Cons where they somehow magically implemented austerity but still got no blame whatsoever for the policies they implemented at the next General election.
Now you add in that our record in coalition was perfectly defendable from a Lib Dem perspective. Unfortunately the electorate did not look at it from a Lib Dem perspective but from their own perspective and it almost destroyed us completely!!
You have to get real and understand that politics is the art of the possible, the attainable – the art of the next best!!
It is not the art of trying to rewrite history and pretending it wasn’t my fault. That’s what Nigel Farage does.
Mick Taylor indeed you did tell Nick Clegg, as did many of us in various ways including on LDV, but he and his faithful acolytes chose to continuously double down on his rhetoric chip and turned down his considered judgement chip in order to protect his self image from accepting any blame whatsoever.
Indeed at a conference fringe meeting, well past 2015, I had the pleasure of asking him what was the one most important mistake he would like to warn any future Lib Dem leader about in any future dealings with coalition. His response was a classic in well rehearsed political spin – “Do not sit in the wrong place.”
Isn’t comedy such a brilliant way to avoid answering a difficult question!
@Peter Martin “ I’m not quite sure how a desire for free trade fits in with wanting to be part of the protectionist bloc known as the EU!”
The EU is not very protectionist though. (And that article is before Trump’s recent tariffs)
@David Evans
I think it was going to happen eventually whatever you did. The Lib Dem voter coalition in 2010 was made up of both “people who wanted an alternative to Labour” and “people who wanted an alternative to the Conservatives”, and it was never going to be practical to hang on to both groups. It wasn’t anything you “did” or “prevented” in coalition which mattered – Lib Dem performance in opinion polling had sunk to its since largely-stable ~10% just six months in, long before the government had really had time to do much either good or bad, and then stayed stable almost entirely unaffected by events thereafter – it was that you’d eventually had to pick a side and the half of your voters hoping you’d pick the other one went off to look for another party – many of them now probably hoping the Greens do better.
You could certainly have kept the other half instead, and maybe the reckoning could have been deferred a few more years entirely, but I can’t see that balancing act surviving all the way through Brexit whatever you did.
I think a more interesting question is what effect the by-election will have on the local elections. The Greens, along with Labour and Reform have seen their best activists diverted to G&D for 4 weeks whilst the LibDems (and Tories) have been busy campaigning for their Council elections. I wonder how many Council seats this by-election will end up costing them, and whether one MP is really worth those losses.
1. The ‘if’ word is always speculation, but here goes. If the Lib Dems had not joined the Cameron Coalition in 2010, might the outcome of the 2016 EU referendum have been different ?
2. Barry Smith speculates on the outcome of the May Council elections and Green Party fortunes. Judging by recent local government results in byelections (with Lib Dem candidates regularly getting in the 1% to 2% range), would he care to speculate on Lib Dem fortunes ?
3. Another speculation – based on recent byelections and newspaper reports – is Sir Ed’s request that the Welsh Lib Dem Leader consider her position may no longer be necessary.
@ Dan,
The question of protectionism in the EU is a matter of opinion. Lib Dems must think the protectionist barriers, both tariff related and hidden, are significant -otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a case for being inside them.
LWW wrote this interesting article a few years back questioning the traditional Liberal attitude to free trade.
https://www.libdemvoice.org/should-liberals-still-believe-in-free-trade-67957.html
I imagine that The Green activists who flocked to Manchester will be feeling energised & will put their campaigning experience to good use in their local Target Wards. With 3 of the last 9 Polls putting them in 2nd place they have good cause to look forward to May.
The Lib Dem voter coalition in 2010 was made up of both “people who wanted an alternative to Labour” and “people who wanted an alternative to the Conservatives”, and it was never going to be practical to hang on to both groups.”
The challenge is to find a way of hanging onto [enough of] both groups.
It’s worth recalling that not all Labour alternative seekers want to “go left” and not all Tory doubters want to “go right”.
At a time when Labour’s whole political philosophy faces existential crisis (*) and the Tory alliance between nationalism and conservative liberalism is breaking down there really ought to be an opportunity for the Liberal Democrats.
(*) Labour has after all spent most of the time since (say) 1994 denying it is socialist party. With the advent of “eco-socialism” they may find that the genuine socialists leave for good. Where will the “liberal left” go – if not to the Lib Dems?
@ Peter Martin
“Lib Dems must think the protectionist barriers, both tariff related and hidden, are significant -otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a case for being inside them”
Of course being inside the barriers means members of the single market do get extraordinary free trade between the 27 members which is an undoubted free trade plus and very much part of the reason for being a member.
In addition the EU has been a powerful force for global free trade in that (for example) it has more trade agreements with other countries than any comparable entity. More than eg Japan, the US, Switzerland, Australia…..and most recently India (*) and South American (+) countries.
(*) India saw tariffs on 96.6% of its exports to the EU reduced or eliminated
(+) The recent agreement between the EU and the Mercosur countries aims to eliminate tariffs on over 90% of goods
@ David Evan
We are absolutely disagreeing about routes. You say the Coalition was bound to fail. I say not engaging with the Conservatives was bound to fail too. We do agree that dealing with Labour was impossible or bound to fail. Neither of us has found the “possible” yet, but less than 10 year after coalition we have 72 seats in Parliament and during the Coalition we helped deliver some decent policy and produced the last stable grown up government we may see for some time.
You then implied that the Liberal Democrats in coalition betrayed Liberal Democrat principles . Personally I don’t think they did. If you do think so, why is that and on what grounds?