It is being reported that the our Council Leader in Colchester, David King, has called for a change of leadership. Talking to the BBC’s Simon Dedman, he said;
We need to let the party take the time to look to the future, and that’s my appeal to Sir Ed. It’s politely saying, time’s up.
Whether or not this is simply a reaction to disappointing results in Colchester – the Party lost Shrub End and Stanway wards to Reform – or indicative of a wider movement remains to be seen.
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13 Comments
In life we all have a part some more successfully than other. Ed Davey has seized a situation and as a result we have 72 MPs, probably more if an election was held today.
However every success has its limits and the party, due to the strictest of targeting policies, albeit very successful, is now virtually extinct in may localities and areas. Is Ed Davey the person to change this, on balance it would seem not and if we are to get back into those areas of Wales, the North, Midlands and London that have been lost over the past decade we probably need a new personality and style. Not the crash and burn of type Polanski but certainly someone with a persona that is not London and South based. We need to be national again.
No big surprise. This has been coming and building up for a while.
There’s more to the UK than the bit of it identified as ‘Middle England’.. To be frank, it’s not just down to Edward Davey but to those around him in the decision making positions who chose to shape the party’s image through meaningless stunts.
Has anybody actually researched the impact of bungee jumping and similar stuff in Ashton-in-Makerfield ? Or, more to the point, in those now long lost constituencies once regarded as safe Lib Dem seats (in some cases for over fifty years) ?
@ theakes Sorry, but 72 seats is one heck of a long way from being a party of influence and power.
We need to be careful here – our leader is not the issue…our lack of a compelling vision/policy programme is.
Ed is perfectly placed to be the mature, experienced and serious leader, our country will need in 2029…so long as he avoids silly publicity stunts from now on.
Who does this help?
Opponents of Ed (perhaps not unfairly) moan that we should be doing better at capitalising on Labour’s malaise, but this sniping is equally unhelpful at achieving this goal.
I do not think Ed as a individual is a problem. I have in the main no problem with our policies. What we do need from our leadership is more energy and not being backward in going for the Reform and Green party jugular.
Very well said William Tench. Ed is certainly not the issue. We do need to sharpen up our messaging, but Ed is the best person for Liberal Democrat leadership in the coming months and years. Those who harken back 50 years etc ignore the 5-party politics England now has. A seat that was a target yonks ago, isn’t necessarily a target now for all sorts of reasons.
“I have in the main no problem with our policies”
Maybe not but do you mean the policies that are passed at your conference or the ones that make it into your manifesto?
If you want to liven things up a bit, as the Greens have done, these need to be one and the same.
Bit Ed is major part of the problem…..He is not seen as a visionary with exceptional communication skills by the public. If any organisation seeking to recruit a national figure head interviewd him he would surely fail on so many criteria. We are ceasing (or have ceased ) to be a national party and no amount of denial will solve this.
David Raw, agree with you 100%, obviously failed to make that totally clear, in which case my bad.
There has to be an immediate change of approach and direction.
I will confess that I didn’t vote for Ed as leader, but I think he’s done a good job. We’ve gained MPs, he has a strong link to the key issue of social care, he comes across as mature and sensible, he has one of the highest (if not the highest) approval rates out of all the major party leaders, and he’s in the media more than I’ve seen us in a long time. Yes, we may cringe about the stunts, but sadly they’re needed to get us noticed.
We’re facing a lot of problems, but Ed isn’t one of them. Finding a clear, national message and being able to get that out to the public is a bigger problem, and it’s difficult when the world is, sadly, looking towards populists offering simple (but ultimately ineffective) short term solutions to complex long term problems.
If some change of direction is needed with some clear national policies, is it too rash of a party doing well in the south to make constructive proposals to narrow the inordinately wide wealth gap between the North of England and London and the home counties?
We can learn from Germany, where steps were taken after the Second World War to avoid excessive centralisation. Thus the Supreme Courts are mainly at Karlsruhe, 400 miles from Berlin. So why not put our Supreme Court in Newcastle? Germany has TV and Radio controlled from various points away from the centre. Can the BBC HQ not be moved to Salford or elsewhere in the north? The marked infrastructure bias towards the South East has to be tackled. Any mention of changes will led to an outcry, of course, so they must be handled sensitively and with assurances that reducing the imbalance would be good for the whole economy in the long run
I find the constant defence that Ed Davey is the most popular party leader intentionally misleading. He isn’t – he is almost never cited as the leader with the highest positive rating, he is just too unknown to be considerably disliked – giving a net rating that is vaguely reasonable.
Not one to usually quote The Crown but the reference to Charles Mackay seems pretty apt:
“You have no enemies, you say? Alas, my friend, the boast is poor. He who has mingled in the fray of duty that the brave endure, must have made foes. If you have none, small is the work that you have done. You’ve hit no traitor on the hip. You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip. You’ve never turned the wrong to right. You’ve been a coward in the fight”.
Not to call Ed as an individual a coward – he has achieved much both personally and politically and should be celebrated for getting us to 72 MPs but our general position as a party and unwillingness to recognise the political landscape has changed IS cowardly.
@Joan Summers, I agree we lack a coherent party vision and that goes with policy but although we have loads of policies we need to bring them together into a coherent message about how we can improve people’s quality of life. One major part of that must be dealing with inequality; without that even proposals for economic growth will do little to give many people the hope they thirst for. It also surely provides some material for attacking Reform, showing up the continued weakness of Labour and the long established trickle down theory of the Conservatives. I do however agree to some extent with those who say Ed lacks the best way of talking for ordinary people, though he is much better than Starmer.