The artwork for the Liberal Democrat campaign logo has now gone live on the extranet/huddle and is available for use on campaign material.
The slogan has been designed to reflect the key themes of our campaign – change and fairness. Throughout the campaign we will aim to demonstrate that we are the only party offering the real and substantive change needed to deliver a fairer Britain. The logo will be a visual indication of that commitment.
Our campaign will be built around four steps to a fairer Britain:
- Fair taxes: We will ensure no-one pays income tax on the first £10,000 they earn. 3.6m low-income workers and pensioners will be freed from paying income tax and millions more will have a tax cut of £700 a year. We’ll pay for it by closing loopholes that unfairly benefit the rich, a new tax on mansions worth over £2m, and ensuring polluters pay for the damage they cause.
- A fair start for all our children: We will get every child the individual attention they need by cutting class sizes. We will spend an extra £2.5bn on schools, targeted at children who need the most help. The average primary school could cut class sizes to 20. An average secondary school could see classes of just 16.
- A fair future: a rebalanced, green economy: We will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs with a £3.5bn green stimulus and job creation plan in our first year in government, fully funded by cut backs elsewhere. We will break up the banks and rebalance the economy away from unsustainable financial speculation. And we will be honest about where savings must be made in government spending to balance the books and protect our children’s future.
- A fair deal from politicians: We will introduce a fair voting system to end safe seats and make all MPs listen to people. We will ensure corrupt MPs can be sacked by their constituents and stop non-doms from donating to parties or sitting in Parliament. We will take power from Westminster and give it to councils and communities, with local power over police and the NHS.
Our four steps to a fairer Britain will represent the most radical change to Britain in a generation and they are underpinned by the action we will take to protect frontline NHS services, put more police on patrol, restore the pensions earnings link and deliver fair pay for our armed forces. Pledges we can make because we are the only party with a plan to balance the country’s books after the recession.
The campaign logo symbolises our determination to bring change that makes a difference to people in their daily lives. It should be used widely to highlight the promise of change and commitment to fairness, which are at the heart of our campaign.
* Jonny Oates is the Lib Dems’ Director of Election Communications.
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61 Comments
I’m going to ask ths question purely on the basis that somebody will, even though I know what the answer will be.
Where’s the party’s name?
Good question. Also what really differentiates us from the other parties here? The slogans themselves could come from any of the three main parties.
Solid foundations from which to build the four principles are long standing but perhaps better put than in the past… Hopefully with the election coverage and leaders debates we can push our unique position…
Party’s name is a good point, would be helpful although not essential given that this is unlikely to be appearing anywhere just as it is… Posters will have website/name on… Hopefully, it will be distinctively Liberal Democrat.
I do love the four steps, which to me seem a very clear and effective way of reinforcing our fairness agenda. However, the logo is appallingly bad. It’s straight out of a late 90’s supermarket marketing handbook, and looks ridiculously similar to the Somerfield logo. Does no-one check these things?
I am so glad I no longer work for the party, and no longer have to deal with Cowley Street attempting to fire me when I say this sort of thing.
Progressive is dead. Long live fair! 😀
In this age of long ballot papers and English Democrats, I find it’s easier/clearer to tell people to “vote for the bird” – even if spectres like the Literal Democrats are now illegal.
Anodyne in the extreme. If it were ice cream or sex, it would be vanilla.
I actually really like “Vote for the bird” as a slogan. It sounds like it comes from a previous, quirkier age of advertising. Though nothing beats “Upgrade to Cable”.
And it would, as others have suggested, be nice to know on what basis the decision was made not to feature the word “liberal” anywhere. People know it, just not in the context of politics, which should make it a distinctive handle. It looks to me like a bunch of people have sat down and tried to work out how they can make us sound as similar as possible to the other two.
Where is it? I have looked on the members site and I cannot find it anywhere.
As for fairness, I have just posted this on the Saturday debate thread, in answer to one by “Oranjepan”. It seems relevant to this thread so here it is again.
I agree of course that “redistribution isn’t a solution to CAUSES of the problem of unjust wealth distribution”! But it is a solution to the RESULT of the problem of any wealth distribution, inevitably an unequal outcome, whether just or unjust, being transferred into the next generation – the creation of inequality of opportunity.
It is seriously unjust, [unfair] from the point of view of young adults in each new generation, if some of them start off with the prospect or the fact of inheriting tens, hundreds, or thousands of millions of pounds, while others will never inherit anything at all. This serious inequality of opportunity can and should be reduced by redistributing the inheritance of gifted and bequeathed capital in the way that I suggest.
Calls for social mobility take as given the unequal starting positions in life. The point about greater equality of opportunity is to change these starting positions. That is what a £10,000 British Universal Inheritance at 25 would help to do in a modest way, financed by flat rate 10% Capital Donor Tax on the luxury expenditure of giving and bequeathing capital in tandem with and deductible from a progressive 10% and upwards cumulative lifetime Unearned Capital Receipts Tax.
I did incidentally persuade the Liberal Party to adopt this as party policy at the 120th Annual Liberal Party Assembly in 2005.
I have in the meantime have had no wish to help the LibDems, who are anathema to me because of their slavish pro-EU position (thank goodness they have had no power to take us into the Euro, as they unwisely would have done if they could have done), but reckon that at this stage there is no chance of them adopting this British Universal Inheritance policy before the General Election. So here it is, teased out by your Saturday debate!
It will be interesting to see if either of the main parties comes out with something similar. Being a liberal policy, either of them could pinch it! But the fact that it stems from a popular capitalist ideology rather than a dynastic capitalist ideology will probably put them both off for different reasons.
With any luck by the General Election after that we will have a Preferential Vote of some kind and I suspect that the LibDems will be sunk unless they change their approach to the EU in the meantime, rather as Labour were kept out of power by their outdated Clause IV nationalisation policy for twenty years. Pity, really!
But perhaps a new leader will come along and change everything. In which case I will look forward to rejoining them, if I am still able to do so, and to seeing the two liberal parties become one again.
“We will spend an extra £2.5bn on schools, targeted at children who need the most help. The average primary school could cut class sizes to 20. An average secondary school could see classes of just 16.”
This seems to be a reduction of something like 20% in class sizes, which is supposed to be funded by an increase of 2-3% in the budget. Is that really feasible? Or am I getting the sums wrong somehow?
I have to agree with David Blake, burkesworks and Alix. Regardless of how well expressed the slogan and the four fair steps from what the other parties are proposing?
I realize that the party’s policies will be presented more effectively over the next few months, but I’m strongly of the view that everything needs to be much punchier! It’s all so calm and gentle that the key message There are serious problems to be solved and we’re the ones to do it is getting lost.
Longer rant here.
Shoot, I shouldn’t be typing so late at night!
Should have been: “Regardless of how well expressed, how different are the slogan and the four fair steps from what the other parties are proposing?”
I’m not sure how branding us like a cereal box is going to help. To me it says we’re policy and substance-free and all spin just like that nice Mr. Cameron!
Also the blue stands out more than the yellow/orange. Who actually decided to bring in the blue which is, after all, the Tory colour?
It’s an ad-man’s view of politics. The ad-man is used to selling products devised centrally to passive consumers, so that’s what he’ll do. The ad-man has some vague idea of what politics is about from what he sees reported in the national media, and that fits into his ad-man’s view of the world – politics is about the leader and his politics being the product sold to the voters as passive consumers.
It does not occur to the ad-man that politics could be done in a different way. Neither does he have the passion, experience and commitment to do it another way. It’s just a brief – sell this product in the way you know how.
Politics in this way isn’t working. We are a democracy, politics should be about active engagement, people should feel the politicians are representatives of them, not consumer products. We should be selling active engagement with our party, not passive voting for it on election day. We need to break this idea that politicians are some alien species which is leading people to feel they don’t want to vote for any of them because voting is like endorsing aliens.
But if we do it this way – the politician is one of us, on our side against the aliens who run this world, the ultimate power of the vote in which we are all equal against the power of wealth and influence where we are not, democracy means we suffer the aliens only when we want to – then we are standing against all the ad-man, by his career, stands for. The ad-man stands for the power of money, because the power of money pays him. The ad-man stands for the consumer remaining quiet and buying what the ad-man persuades him to buy. The ad-man stands for cynicism and trickery because that’s what the ad-man’s job is.
That is why the ad-man just cannot sell politics in a different way, a way which is about active involvement, a way which is about the people taking power for themselves through getting together and using the mechanisms of democracy, about the true democratic renewal we really need.
I said all this, or something like it at any rate, when Mr Oates was appointed. I am sorry, as ever, to have been shown correct. What has been shown here is a boring campaign that will not win us the breakthrough we need. Our activists will have to do what the best of of them have always done – run the local campaign they know will work, one which is based on us being part of the people and not just a paid worker for aliens in a London headquarters.
I hope someone is going to get versions of the slogan ( and 4 steps) done Bi-Lingually for Wales,
and while we are at it how about other languages – we are a rainbow nation after all.
Lets be honest, it’s rubbish as a slogan and wouldn’t make it onto a FOCUS.
Your none the wiser after you’ve read it.
It’s too long and too vague
It’s not even in normal English – when was the last time you heard anyone say “change that works for you”
Fairness is so wishy washy as people have such individual ideas of what it means. Plenty of Conservatives view vast inequalities of wealth as “Fair”
Also using ‘change’ which is a word the Tories are using makes it look as if we are simply responding to their campaign.
Campaiging wise the logo is as bad as our four key policies are good, which franky is the way round I prefer it!
I’m keener on fairness than you Mouse – partly because it’s consistently worked well in winning election campaigns I’ve run or helped with.
Let’s analyse the slogan:
“Change that works”
Empty bombast from third party, claiming that something (unspecified) “works”! When did we last see government doing something that works? We’re all floundering with the economy, climate, society, etc. For the third party which isn’t in government to claim that what they propose is assured to work just looks silly.
Compare and contrast, the 2005 “real alternative” slogan made no such claim. It just said here we are, we would genuinely be different from Tweedledum and Tweedledee, we can readily explain in what ways (Iraq, tuition fees etc), so why not give us a try? A much better pitch. We could do a lot worse than just revive it.
“… for you”.
OK, let’s ignore what Obama’s “yes we can” taught us about inclusiveness and getting people on your side. Let’s go for a slogan that emphasises us and them, we’re up high handing out bountiful policies and you the voter are down there expressing pathetic gratitude, OK?
Fourth-rate stuff. Bin it and start again.
I rather liked Matthew’s suggestion – “on our side against the aliens who run this world” – but I have a feeling it’s already been used by David Icke.
Its too bland and instantly forgettable. It just needs more work.
What about something like “We’ll give You a Fresh New Deal, for a Change!”
I still wish someone could explain how class sizes can be cut by 20% by increasing the education budget by 2-3% …
I’ve recently donated some money to the central campaign. Now I’m beginning to regret it.
Yes, is this it now? Is there going to be any new stuff?
I was probably a bit riled when I wrote my blogpost “Blah blah blah fairness blah blah blah change” but in the cold light of day I think I stand by the things I think are presentationally wrong about the slogan, the logo and the four steps.
Anthony A – I suspect they’re not because, in abstract terms, your question makes no sense. There certainly is a relationship between %budget and %class sizes, but it isn’t x=x. I suspect therefore the onus is on you to prove that 2.5bn of the education budget can’t cut class sizes to 20.
Er, is the onus on us to prove that those alien lizards don’t exist, failing which, David Icke wins the argument?
Alix
“There certainly is a relationship between %budget and %class sizes, but it isn’t x=x.”
Of course not, but I find it very difficult to believe there can be a factor of ten between them. Don’t you?
Unless the plan is to increase teachers’ working hours, presumably one thing it implies is an increase in staffing levels of around 20%. If it’s possible to do that on a 2-3% increase in the total budget, that implies the cost of staff is only 10-15% of that budget, doesn’t it? Can that really be true?
And that’s without taking into account the need for a 20% increase in classroom space, and so on.
I’ve had a go at re-writing the LibDem case. OK I cheated and used 600 words rather than 400. And I prioritised what I think is strongest rather than the Four Steps. (runs away to hide)
David, why the default sarcasm? If Anthony wants to critique the figures (which is an excellent idea) then I daresay the party has provided the figures on the website for him to critique. There’s no point him coming on here and saying it doesn’t “seem” likely to work, is there? What can anyone do with that, other than suggest he makes a proper case?
Alix
“There’s no point him coming on here and saying it doesn’t “seem” likely to work, is there?”
Well, there’s not much of a point coming on here and saying anything!
As always, if you don’t want to discuss the question I raised, don’t discuss it – no one’s forcing you to. But please don’t pretend it’s an unreasonable question to ask. On the contrary, it’s such a blindingly obvious question that I’m sure you’ll hear it quite a number of times before polling day. Considering that this is going to be one of the party’s main manifesto pledges, perhaps it would be as well to have an answer ready.
AA, but you haven’t gone to read the policy paper and pulled the figures out of it and taken them apart. Now, it may be the case that the policy paper is actually inadequate/is more a press release than a policy paper/says something different to the headline policy/doesn’t actually prove the £2.5bn is enough to fund the policy at all. You’re quite right in saying we need to critique policy, but you’re not actually going to the paper and doing that. When you do, and if/when you find a serious problem, then maybe you’ll get a response.
Alix
“AA, but you haven’t gone to read the policy paper and pulled the figures out of it and taken them apart.”
Which policy paper do you mean? I have looked at Policy Paper 89, from March 2009. That appears to give no estimate of how much class sizes could be cut by, except that there’s an “estimate” of an _additional_ £500m over and above the £2.5bn to cut class sizes for 5-7 year-olds to 15 (I assume this has since been dropped).
So there appear to be no figures to take apart. Just some numbers in a press release that aren’t in the more detailed policy document.
Alix,
“Why the (default) sarcasm?”
Because the argument you used, basically that a bold claim by this Party should be considered justified unless a critic can prove definitively that it is not, is a dishonest argument. It is worth holding it up to ridicule, because, maybe that will dissuade people from using dishonest forms of argument.
It’s the other way round, of course. If the Party wants to claim that it can work wonders with a limited budget, then the onus is on the Party not to make a claim that can too easily be picked apart. Otherwise it won’t just be AASt making critical comments on a blog, it will be our opponents loudly proclaiming that those Lib Dems live in a fantasy world and deserve to be left alone there to dream on.
It’s the critics who are this party’s best supporters, because they want to see it do better!
AAS, hoorah, now we’re getting somewhere. So in effect the party has NOT put up an adequate case at all, has it? The next thing to do then is to take the few figures they have provided and see if it is at all possible that £2.5bn could pay for the number of teachers required to reduce class sizes by 20%. Numbers of state schools in existence and average pupils per school/teachers per school should be easy enough to uncover and we can at least attempt a calculation.
David, I suggest you’re being very disingenuous here. AAS started out with a fact-less query/assertion, which he complained no-one would answer. I suggested he go and find some facts. Now, he’s gone and looked through the policy papers, and revealed that there *isn’t* a soundly argued case. He has pulled out the only (rather paltry) specifics there are, and now we can set about testing them. I rather hope he is now going to go away and do some looking up on school, teacher and pupil statistics. We are getting somewhere now. We were never going to get anywhere while he just made broadly disparaging comments with no facts to hang them on.
As someone who claims to have the cause of sound policy at heart, surely you should be applauding this process?
I’ll applaud AASt for making a constructive response to some needlessly hostile comments!
Alix
Well, as far as I can see, the figures above actually imply a 30% increase in the number of teachers, which is currently more than 400,000. That’s 120,000 more teachers, so surely it’s clear enough that the salary costs alone would be substantially more than £2.5bn.
And then there is the cost of increasing the number of classrooms by 30%. How is that going to be funded.
Do you really expect me to do more research and provide more data in order to justify my scepticism? As far as I’m concerned it’s your turn to come up with something.
“Do you really expect me to do more research and provide more data in order to justify my scepticism?”
Well, sort of, yes, because it’s you who raised it. Those numbers sound good to me – if you provided sources and comps, we could get a proper argument together and send it to Clegg/Laws. I’d back you, if your numbers are right. You could get a whole campaign going if you wanted to. It would only be “my turn” to come up with something if I was fervently committed to the idea that the policy was correct and I’m not. I’m just waiting to be persuaded either way and you’re starting to do that.
David, from my point of view, AAS and I are proceeding perfectly civilly and well, so would you please explain where I have been “needlessly hostile”? I’m sure the mods wouldn’t want to miss anything.
To my mind, it looks depressing as though something like the following may have happened.
They had this £2.5bn figure in the policy document, which had presumably been properly costed by Vince Cable or whoever. It was to be spent by individual schools as they wished – not necessarily on reducing class sizes. When they came to do the press release someone said “Can we give some illustrative figures of how much this could reduce class sizes?” So somebody divided £2.5bn by the salary of a newly qualified teacher (£21K) and came up with a figure of 120,000 extra teachers. And – hey presto! – that would reduce class sizes by 23%.
Forget about employers’ NI contributions, forget about employers’ superannuation contributions, forget about the fact that newly qualified teachers don’t stay that way for long – so that in the long-term the commitment would have to be much bigger – forget about the enormous cost of building all the extra classrooms, and forget about all the other overheads that would increase if class sizes were reduced …
That sounds horribly likely, given that they’re using the conditional “could”. It makes even less sense when you consider that what is being offered here is (presumably) the pupil premium. I assume that’s why there’s this talk of the money being “targeted”. So any calculation based on instituting new teachers across the board would be useless anyway.
Of course, assuming the pupil premium will direct the money towards a small number of schools, it *might* still be possible for those schools to choose to reduce their class sizes by 20% and actually do it. But that’s clearly not where the calculation has come from, if your supposition is correct.
It sounds to me like a back-of-the-envelope calculation gone horribly wrong.
I hope these class-size numbers will be quietly dropped. A virtue of the present situation is that no one will be expecting politicians to deliver miraculous improvements in public services. But the flip side of that is that if they promise they will, then no one will believe them.
A fairer Britain would seem like a good thing but we have to look at the details.
If there is another bank bailout, then that does not seem very fair. The idea that breaking up banks is the solution is one that needs careful defending, not merely postulating. I have written about this on my blog
It’s simply delightful that several folks commenting on this post have been side-tracked from superficial marketing matters into a substantive policy issue. 😉
But I’m not noticing the original poster jumping in to respond to any of the points raised about the slogan or logo.
I guess this absence answers my question “is this it now?” We are stuck with this.
“Voter”
“A fairer Britain would seem like a good thing”, Too right!
Although I suspect that many LIbDems would prefer a fairer EU.
Anyway, a fairer Britain would be one in which every young adult received a basic minimum inheritance of capital in order to bring about greater equality of opportunity.
A British Universal Inheritance of £10,000 for all British-born UK citizens at 25 could be financed by a flat 10% Capital Donor Tax on all giving and bequeathing of capital in tandem with and deductible from a progressive Unearned Capital Receipts Tax, starting at the same 10% rate, on cumulative lifetime receipts of unearned capital gifts and inheritance. The average wealth of every adult and child in the UK is roughly £130,000.
If the word got around to all those who would never otherwise inherit anything, and to their parents and grandparents, British Universal Inheritance would be a vote winner!
But there is a middle/upper class media and politicians blind spot/taboo on the discussion of the redistribution of inherited wealth. So in spite of all the talk of the Opportunity Society and Opportunity for All there has been no egalitarian reform of Inheritance Tax, which is currently a Capital Donor Tax at too high a flat rate with too many vast and unlimited exemptions for lifetime gifts and agricultural, business and shareholding assets held by the wealthy.
For example, Rupert Murdoch recently gave £50,000,000 to each of his children, to be going on with. If he were a UK resident and he lived for another 7 years after the gifts, neither he nor his children would pay any tax at all on that, while other people never inherit anything during their lifetime.
So it is not surprising that ownership of wealth goes on becoming ever more unequal, in a way that is dangerous for the future stability of our country and is the very opposite of a fairer Britain with greater equality of opportunity for all.
@LW, indeed, I was just about to make the point that, if I had my way, education wouldn’t be in there at all. Partly because it will cost money and, rightly or wrongly, people will find it difficult to believe that can be possible, as Anthony pointed out.
But mostly because the glaring absence of civil liberties on the list is deeply, deeply disquieting to me. If it has to be four items, we should pick the areas where we are genuinely distinctive (and it’s terrifyingly easy to unpick the Tories on civil liberties so we really are distinctive there). The inclusion of education is a bad idea, because we can’t do it “better” than the big parties like we can tax and parliamentary reform. People can and will go elsewhere for promises on education funding. They can even *cough* go elsewhere for the pupil premium. But we can do civil liberties better, and best of all, the target audience for that is less likely to be stuck in its ways politically. We’ve got an entire generation of people who are actually taught in schools and universities about assaults on civil liberties these days, and they’re turning out for conferences, and joining No2ID, and we are throwing their votes away.
I agree about the absence of civil liberties. Goodness knows liberty doesn’t cost very much – in fact it can probably save us some money.
I also think it’s rather a pity that the environment isn’t really in there in its own right, but only as a “green stimulus” for the economy.
The party seems to have subscribed to the idea that environmentalism is essentially a fad which has run its course, and that if it’s going to have green policies at all it will have to think of other justifications for them (a while ago it was pushing “energy security”, but thankfully that seems to have been dropped).
But I think climate change is still a crucially important issue which the party should be pushing to the top of the agenda, regardless of changing political fashions. I’ve never agreed with Tony Benn about much, but I do think his distinction between signposts and weathervanes is a pretty perceptive one.
I agree entirely with both these last two comments: civil liberties and climate change are very important, are currently under-emphasised, and have the potential to be distinctively LibDem.
Oh, and – sorry for getting off the point – the logo and slogan are both pretty mediocre. But to be fair most political logos and slogans are.
And I can’t help thinking it’s more of a symptom of the general malaise of unprincipled, populism policy-making than a fundamental problem in itself.
Oh look, and Labour have just unveiled their slogan, and it uses the word “fair”. Well, that’s unsurprising They can lay a semi-realistic claim to it, in a way they can’t to a word like, ooh I dunno – “liberal”?
Whaddya think to that, Mr Campaigns?
I see that this is now being discussed in the Times – http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article7034246.ece
They don’t seem very impressed either.
This comment by Matthew Parris made me smile:
The logo currently adorning its website is “We’re the only party that believes in fairness”. Quick work with a spray can, I imagine, to remodel this into “We’re the only party that believes in fairies”, which would, at least, be bold.
Fairness is usallly used in context e.g. a Fair deal for Council X, a fair deal for pensioners, that OK for FOCUS, it’s naff as a nationla slogan with no context.
If you were writing a FOCUS you’d use “Labour deserve to lose, the Conservatives don’t deserve to win”
We all know it chimes with the views of 70% of the electorate.
Whether the logo is good or bad I’m inclined not to take the views of a former Tory MP too seriously as advice as to what would be most effective for us 🙂
“Mouse”
“A future fair for all” sounds good to me. But then so did “Opportunity for All”, and look where that got us!
The consultation process on “Opportunity for All” was given by Gordon Brown to a “Savings Incentives Team” in the Treasury instead of an “Opportunity for All Team”! So we got Child Trust Funds for the better off and Baby Bonds for all, means tested by parental circumstances at the time of birth. Opportunity for all would require the same amount for all young adults at, say, 25, means tested by being itself subject to taxation of cumulative lifetime receipts of unearned capital. “A future fair for all” ought to include such a scheme in this country and then encouragement for national universal inheritance schemes in other countries, particularly those in receipt of aid.
But there is nothing wrong with “Building a fairer Britain” either, if you are serious about it – in fact rather encouraging and surprising that it is not “Building a fairer EU”!
No we don’t all want yet more money wasted on the useless Police.
Civil Liberties & an attack on the surveillance/security state seems to be missing. Lose the Police & education populist garbage. We can’t afford it anyway.
The Police are surely the least cost-effective organisation in world history anyway. Cutting their salaries & budgets would be just great & would also cut the death rate amongst brazilians, glaswegians with table legs and newspaper sellers.
Don’t offer to spend MORE on EDUCATION. The voters are not stupid! They know the country has tremendous debts!
CUT EXPEDITURE by cutting back the notorious bureaucracy and inspectorate that have done so mach damage.
Allow teachers to design their own lessons suited to their pupils’ needs. Allow head teachers to run their own schools, inspire their pupils and support them with effective discipline procedures.
This will rejuvenate the system and save money!
SAVE MORE MONEY by abolishing the ridiculous scheme to rebuild all secondary schools and do what is needed.
Ask any teacher what they think!
I just don’t get it. What is the point in basing a campaign on what you’ll do when in power when there is not a single voter in the country who thinks that’s going to happen? If you want to get people to vote Lib Dem then you have to give them a reason to vote Lib Dem in spite of the nailed-on certainty that you’re not going to be forming a government. This slogan and those fours steps absolutely do not do this.
As others have said, it’s bland and could be anyone (and is nearly identical to Labour). People need to be reminded that the Lib Dems have consistently made the right calls when both the other main parties have consistently failed. The narrowing of the polls despite Labour’s appalling record in government, is because no one has any confidence the Tories will be any better. Thankfully enough people seem to remember how bad and despised they were when last in govenrnment. There’s been no better opportunity in my lifetime to provide a genuine alternative, backed up by the evidence of voting the right way when both other parties have failed to do so. I know it’s too late now, but what about posters with slogans like these, each illustrated by a striking image (Iraq war dead, Vince Cable, fragile Earth etc):
Vote for the party that opposed the Iraq War
Vote Liberal Democrat
Vote for the party that foresaw the financial crisis
Vote Liberal Democrat
Vote for the party of fair taxation
Vote Liberal Democrat
Support the party who want everyone’s vote to count
Vote Liberal Democrat
Vote for the party untarnished by MP’s expenses
Vote Liberal Democrat
Vote for the party that’s serious about climate change
Vote Liberal Democrat
Vote for the party that protects your civil liberties
Vote Liberal Democrat
Vote for the party that’s proud we’re part of Europe
Vote Liberal Democrat
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