Two months ago I wrote an article for this site. I spoke about how for the Liberal Democrats, tactics have become our strategy. In the time since, an election review has kicked off and internally there have been many conversations about what our strategy should be in the coming years. Most of what has been suggested, however, has not been about strategy. It has still been about conflating strategy with electoral operations and tactics.
That’s why I’ve responded to Mark Pack’s request for feedback on our strategy and what it should look like in the future, with this letter. I hope you will input your thoughts too!
We still fail to articulate what the vision and grand strategy is for our party. What sort of a party do we want to be in ten years, when the conservatives most likely face the election that will remove them from power? Who do we want to stand for and most importantly what course of action, at the topline, most basic level, must we take to get there?
Simply cobbling together a disparate core vote, that we adapt slightly after each failed election campaign will not take us to the end of that journey, especially while our national politicians choose short term opportunism over the alternative.
The Conservative campaign machine has changed the game and we have to adapt. Whilst opposition parties flip flop from position to position, chasing the popular end of the story of the day with their own niche audience, the Tories have a narrative. A clear position that is not designed to win over a whole population (and certainly not the membership of the Liberal Democrats) with short term gimmicks, but one that will cement a long term commitment with enough people to win when an election comes around.
We need to develop our own version of the long term strategy that has made the Conservatives the natural party of government in this country. Over two elections they destroyed the Liberal Democrats and over the following two, they ripped the heart out of the Labour movement. If we consider that Liberalism is about more than just our broadly metropolitan consensus, the Conservatives are presently the home to a large swathe of the traditional liberal movement.
It isn’t as simple as electing this year’s newer, slightly different leader and deciding on a couple of new demographic groups to target. We need a proper strategy. Something that can guide us as we reform the party to turn it in to an organisation capable of winning an election, rather than a body tied in knots by its own internal democracy. Instead of feeling like we are purely upholding our very specific brand of liberalism we should instead be thinking about and understanding the wants and needs of the people we seek to represent.
* Michael Kitching is a Liberal Democrat Member, previously from 2005-2018, rejoining after the 2019 General Election - @mwkitching
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12 Comments
You’re exactly right Michael but I fear you’re pissing into the wind with this. The party has proven itself to be institutionally incompetent – consistently less than the sum of its parts – before and since the disastrous 2019 election. I can’t see any hope of a change of course at any level at the moment.
We’re just digging in and doubling down on the approach that has already failed us for a decade or more. I haven’t responded to the election review at all – it just feels utterly futile.
“We still fail to articulate what the vision and grand strategy is for our party.”
Yes, but you do not discuss vision here (is that for a follow up article?) and where you write of strategy, it looks to me more like tactics – at least not a grand strategy.
Moreover, it is not at all obvious that the Tories have a narrative. I would rather say the Tories have an image, but rather than a narrative, I do see a number of inconsistant narratives. Politics often trade negative messaging. Surprisingly for many of us, the Tories have been more successful in portraying a negative image of us and of Labour than either our Party or Labour has managed to project to swing voters of the Conservatives.
I could discuss Labour, but will not. Of ourselves, too often we have been inclined to project a negative image of ourselves, on these pages we often see Lib Dems self-righteously falling over themselves to castigate the party, particularly for its temerity to have been involved in government. The party also needs to be careful how it embraces niche issues. However worthy these issues may be, unless presented within a broader Liberal vision, they are apt to fit into a negative rather wonkish image that the media and the Tories readily seize upon.
Michael Kitching: “The Conservative campaign machine has changed the game and we have to adapt. Whilst opposition parties flip flop from position to position, chasing the popular end of the story of the day with their own niche audience, the Tories have a narrative.”
That is evidently bonkers. Conservatives are spraying money on the economy as if it is a disinfectant. And the world has changed*, in case you didn’t notice.
“Instead of feeling like we are purely upholding our very specific brand of liberalism we should instead be thinking about and understanding the wants and needs of the people we seek to represent.”
I’m a liberal not a popularist. I am looking to the long term consequences of this crisis.
* In the current world, it seems easy for conservatives to change economy policy. That is their choice. But liberals are not required to back illiberal government actions.
Hi Martin,
I’d like to think that my letter (hopefully you read it) covers off a lot of areas. An overarching objective, a topline Grand Strategy, followed by some points that deal with operations and tactics.
There is alas a word limit for LDV articles and I certainly did not set out to write a full strategy document in my submission to Mark, because let’s be honest, no one in their right minds would read that. So I have tried to demonstrate what the very beginnings of a Grand Strategy could look like, aswell as getting over some operational and tactical points that I think are currently standing in the way of progress, or a grand strategy actually being workable. My main point of all of this is that the “core votes strategy” that is supposed to lead our activities is not a Grand Strategy in itself, nor is the traditional, just fight 200 by-elections and we’ll win through shear weight of paper.
I think you’re being unfair by shooting preemptively at the election review. As an outspoken critic of the 2019 campaign (during, not just afterwards), I have some faith that the combination of Dorothy’s leadership and a committee that aren’t just the usual party patsies will come through with a suitably critical analysis of our risible campaign.
The real question is what happens thereafter, and whether the yes-people who were running things last year manage to kick any serious changes into touch.
@Phil The real challenge for the party’s direction and strategy is that we have rowed up a blind creek, representing now only a handful of seats, almost all the prosperous “haves” who have done very nicely out of what is casually called globalisation.
Whereas politics in general, and the post-COVID environment in particular, will (from the centre left) be asking for a new vision, tying together elements of our once traditional platform – localism, community, co-operation, safety nets for the vulnerable, opportunity for all – with a requirement that we abandon our attachment to elements of the current economic settlement that have loosely been termed “neo-liberal” and a down dialling of our obsession with advancing liberalism by pursuing the electoral dead end of identity politics.
Whether the party is mature enough to face this challenge is the big question of the coming decade.
Ian: “Whereas politics in general, and the post-COVID environment in particular, will (from the centre left) be asking for a new vision, tying together elements of our once traditional platform – localism, community, co-operation, safety nets for the vulnerable, opportunity for all…”
That all sounds very complicated. It hardly concurs with my comment on another thread that we need to simplicicate things.
“We still fail to articulate what the vision and grand strategy is for our party.” Yes, it would be good to know if such a thing existed in April, 2020.
Of passing interesting, is H.H. Asquith’s opinion of Liberal Headquarters in 1921 :
“With one or two exceptions, a simple-minded and dunder-headed lot, with no experience of politics and a plentiful supply of ingenuous vanity”.
H.H.A. Letters to a Friend 28 June, 192. The Friend ? …..a Mrs Hilda Harrison – rumoured by that bastion of reliable reporting, the Daily Mail, to be the great grandma of Carrie Symonds). Maybe that’s a way of getting an Asquith into Downing Street again ?
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’,
Based on Corona Virus results, the Lib Dems should consider replacing the NHS system with the German private insurance system.
Liberals used to be radical eg proposing the NHS system in the 1940s.
Interesting and thought-provoking thread.
Tories and those for whom financial growth (as opposed to real growth in goods, products and human capital) to always win. They have done so because they have money, control much of the media and because there is a divided opposition. The idea that Boris has a strategy ??? The men in the background with the money sure have.
The Brexit fiasco should have taught people that there are important threads of strategy – internationalism, environmental protection, the urgent need for more equality, media that operate within rules that make mass communication open and fair. Such threads went across parties throughout 2019.
Encouraging and facilitating localism might be part of a strategy, localism is NOT. I fear that because LibDems do well locally, it is too easy to overlook this.
Trying to predict the future and the strategies and tactics which will be needed, in a post (or ever-present) covid19 world is necessary but needs boldness WITH caution.
One thing is sure, I will only vote LibDem in future if I can see a strategy and if the party is prepared to stand down in more seats. We need to help other progressive forces in Britain (paradoxically including Nationalists) who share many of our aspirations.
An excellent article with which I fully concur. CQ, Davids Raw and Evershed add also. My article on oblivion adds context. The problem is one of herding cats. We need the two faces of strategy; vision and leadership. JFDI.
I thought being in government in 2010 could have been really positive. What went wrong was the tory liite policies that were implemented.