Canvassing last month in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, we came across a middle-aged woman in her garden. “I’ve had enough of all of you. I’m voting Reform”, she said.
Our candidate, Julie, calmly explained that it was a local election and a chance to vote for someone who would work hard for residents on planning, potholes, housing and other issues. Reform didn’t have much to say about those things. And Julie also observed that while she was out meeting people, the Reform candidate was nowhere to be seen.
A week or so later, when we were visiting postal voters, I knocked on the same woman’s door, inevitably with some trepidation. But it was good news. She’d thought about what we had said. She hadn’t been canvassed by Reform. And she voted for Julie because she’d met her and liked her.
So that’s one way to win over a potential Reform voter. And there are others. For some, a reminder that the Lib Dems are the party of carers, with a leader who is himself a carer, provides a positive alternative. For others, pointing out that Farage thinks Putin is the most admirable world leader prompts a rethink.
So the rise of Reform creates both an opportunity and a challenge. As Ed Davey has pointed out, we’re seeing a surge in people joining the party because they are worried by Reform and believe we stand for true British values – compassion, tolerance, environmentalism and internationalism. That’s the opportunity.
But it should not stop there. We need to step up to the challenge of stemming the rise of Reform. As we found on the doorsteps, not all Reform voters are nasty people. There are some outright racists out there, and some very angry characters, but also a lot of decent folk who feel left behind, don’t know much about politics and are attracted by simple but misleading messages. I’m sure others met voters who were choosing between Reform and us. The risk is that more of this group will fall for the Farage narrative. Our task is to figure out what will appeal just as powerfully to the positive side of their nature. As the examples above show, it can be done. It works. Julie is now a County Councillor.
And, as Ed Davey has said, Labour won’t do it. They seem to think that if they deliver enough nurses and police then the voters will magically switch back to them. It doesn’t work like that because once trust is lost, it’s very hard to regain. So it does actually fall to us to stop the UK going the way of the US and stop Farage becoming Prime Minister. That’s quite a responsibility. It’s a historic mission that we need to pursue with all of our talent and energy.
Such a mission needs a strategy – not just a few soundbites, but a solid and well-researched plan for the rest of this Parliament. That would include an analysis to understand the different segments among those who support and oppose Reform, informed by focus groups, and the campaigns and messages that will reach them. It will take input from people with wide experience in politics and communications, psychology even, to develop the right approaches in terms of themes, messages and channels.
Personally, I think it includes focusing on issues such as care, which represent common ground, before progressing to careful messaging about Britain’s role as a global leader and a haven for genuine refugees.
At the same time, let’s demonstrate that while we welcome those fleeing persecution, we don’t have an open door policy. This is a chance for us to work up our immigration policies in more detail. How can the UK create safe routes for asylum seekers? Can technology do more to deal with small boats? What are the causes of the claims backlog and how are they tackled? Why is the NHS and care system recruiting so many migrants? We need to grasp these issues in detail and provide responses that blend compassion and common sense.
The 2020s increasingly carry an ominous echo of the 1930s. Hard right parties hold power in the US, Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, Finland, Croatia and the Czech Republic. We have four years to stop the UK going the same way. It can be done. But we need a plan.
* David Vigar was Paddy Ashdown’s Press Secretary in the early 1990s and is active in the Melksham and Devizes constituency. He has just stood down from Wiltshire Council.
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12 Comments
David, I warm to what you say about combatting Reform UK. Yet I would add that ways of dealing with inequality and helping build a fairer society are essential to our strategy and message. On immigration I entirely agree that our policy is not one of letting them all in but being sympathetic to asylum seekers and only having economic migrants if it fits with our economic needs; this is not clear to people. On this one, during the GE campaign I said we need to improve the training and education of our own people and that will reduce the need for economic migrants; Reform supporters warmed to me on that.
“How can the UK create safe routes for asylum seekers?”
It is heartbreaking to watch asylum seekers drown in small boats, when we know it would be technically quite feasible to accept e.g. online asylum applications from overseas and to issue entry permits to successful applicants. However, it seems to me that this would cause problems that are virtually insurmountable.
The easy, safe online application route would surely draw in a massive number of valid applications from all round the world, including many who would otherwise have settled for other final destinations. Then, what would we do with all the applications?
If we agreed an immediate entry permit for all successful applicants, we would see a massive upsurge in immigration. Clearly most people (myself included) would find that quite unacceptable.
Alternatively, we could impose an annual quota, e.g. limiting the permitted numbers to the tens-of-thousands presently reaching the UK in small boats. What would that achieve? The many migrants who failed to qualify for the quota would have no option but to continue pursuing the small boats. So we would have let in a few people safely, but it simply wouldn’t have done anything to “stop the boats”.
Is there something I have missed here? if not, don’t we have to conclude that “safe routes” (other than for special cases e.g. Ukraine, Hong Kong) is – sadly – an impracticable red herring?
@David Allen
“The easy, safe online application route would surely draw in a massive number of valid applications from all round the world, including many who would otherwise have settled for other final destinations.”
Why would an online application route have to be ‘easy’? Wouldn’t you expect an applicant to have to make a good case for coming to UK as opposed to another safe country, with some evidence, e.g. family already settled here?
@David: That’s a good analysis of the problem, and I agree with you. ‘Safe routes’ sounds like a good slogan but in practice there’s almost no way to implement it that won’t cause even worse problems than we currently have. @Nonconformistradical. Sure, but if you make the online applicant route hard, then it will have almost no impact on the boats because many of the people who find they can’t meet the requirements for the online application will just jump on a small boat anyway. Also, documents can be forged and stories made up, so at some point you probably do need a personal interview with each applicant too to help verify the information they’ve given you. It’s unlikely that any regime that persecutes its people is going to cooperate with the UK Government in facilitating that.
Any asylum seeker that gets near enough to “jump on a boat” is very likely to have left their country of origin. Let them go to *any* British embassy (or consulate ?) for the in-person interview.
I would hope that publicising the numbers that succeed through this route would make it look more attractive than camping at Sangatte and risking a dangerous trip on a rubber dingy. If they have already failed an in-person interview at an Embassy, we will be able to reject them at the border, rather than admit them until they have been through the whole process.
Much of the comment in this thread seems to be based on the idea that immigration is a bad thing and that somehow we have to appease those who don’t like it.
Where are the people who think immigration is not only a good thing, but vitally necessary for many of the services we need in our country; the NHS; care; farming to name but three.
Instead of challenging the lies and misrepresentation about immigration, we appear to be agreeing with them.
I am the son of an immigrant, who would have died if she had been sent back to Nazi Germany like her aunt in Treblinka and her cousin in Izbeka, so I’m biased.
We are allowing the disgraceful Farage to set the terms of the debate. Labour issue wilder and wilder far right statements and policies foolishly believing that this will stem the Reform tide. The Conservatives are already beyond the pale.
The UK needs a fair, easy to understand system for asylum and immigration, one that can be accessed before travel is undertaken. And it needs to make swift decisions.
Freedom of movement was a system that allowed people to come to the UK and seek work for 3 months. The only problem with that was that no-one kept track of who should have returned home. A system that allowed people to seek work, but not get benefits till after they had work would end much of the debate. Why not go for it?
I agree with Mick.
@Mick: Please don’t confuse wanting lower immigration with thinking immigration is in principle bad. Of course giving people to freedom to migrate is in principle good: It enhances human freedom and allows people to experience different lifestyles that might not be available to them in their home countries. At its best, immigration brings people from different countries together, allows different cultures to mix and enhance each other, promotes understanding between countries, and the accompanying economic freedom also makes us materially better off.
But lots of good things in life can become on balance harmful if they happen to excess. And if immigration has reached the point that it’s adding 600K people a year to a country’s population, every one of those people needing somewhere to live, at a time when that country has a massive shortage of homes and can’t even adequately house the people who already live there, and the massive house prices caused by that shortage are driving millions into financial hardship… Then I think most people would conclude that immigration into that country has grown to the point where it does more harm than good, and needs to come down to more sustainable levels.
I too agree with Mick but others are talking about applying for asylum by phone. It is our party policy to enable “safe routes” by Humanitarian Visas. More detail on this from an article in LDV from Bradley Hillier Smith here https://www.libdemvoice.org/a-radical-new-policy-humanitarian-visas-a-lifeline-for-refugees-67381.html
“Why would an online application route have to be ‘easy’? Wouldn’t you expect an applicant to have to make a good case for coming to UK as opposed to another safe country, with some evidence, e.g. family already settled here?”
Well, of course an online application route, to be supplemented by an interview e.g. at a UK consulate as described in Suzanne Fletcher’s link on “Humanitarian Visas”, would not be absolutely plain sailing. But it would be far, far easier than trekking halfway round the world, braving the storms, the smugglers and the bandits, wouldn’t it? So, it would inevitably be rapidly and massively oversubscibed.
Now, anyone who says immigration is all good, or all bad, is blinding themselves to the complex realities. Yes we do need immigrants, yes Farage hugely overstates the problems. But nobody wants the chaos that would ensue if the UK, uniquely, considered flinging open its gates to millions.
David, as one of the authors of the piece which Suzanne shared , I would like to remind people on this thread that it describes official party policy since 2021 – I should know, as I drafted the amendment to the 2021 Spring conference motion on this issue. It is indeed the case that if the UK alone had a humanitarian visa route and imposed no quota then it would be overloaded (though notably no numerical quota was ever imposed on e.g. the HK scheme). But there are lessons to be drawn from the collective (European) response to the Ukrainian displacement, where Ukrainians were able to go to any European country and hence have dispersed. The UK should push for collective responsibility-sharing.
Ruvi, that’s a constructive response, but, how well would it work in a major emergency situation, with millions on the march as in the Syrian conflict a few years go, or potentially from India / Pakistan now? Ukraine is a bit of a special case. The nations of Europe felt a sense of responsibility to their fellow Europeans in distress, and they anticipated that most Ukrainian refugees would expect to return to Ukraine.
A European humanitariam scheme could, for example, give the Rohingya a new home in Europe instead of awful conditions in Bangladesh, It could do the same for the Gazans, and the Kashmiris, and more. But how many Europeans would countenance continung to vote for political parties which had been so generous to so many refugees, inevitably at cost to their hosts?