Lib Dems desperately want a message that cuts through.

Something that lifts our standing in the polls with the same gravity-defying ease as we’ve seen Reform and the Greens achieve. But I’m afraid there is no single magic phrase or policy position that will do that. (Nor, by the way, is there some charismatic new leader who could instantly rally voters to our cause. We don’t do leadership cults.)
If we want to cut through, we have to be authentic. True to ourselves. True to our values.

People are disillusioned with politicians of all stripes. They see no vision, just tinkering at the edges and broken promises. Politicians have been treating voters like consumers that want to be bribed with pleasing offers. But the focus-group approach to policy formation has failed.

Since voters don’t believe any of these bribes, they feel they may as well vote for the newcomers making the most outrageous promises. Give it another roll of the dice.
But voters aren’t stupid. One woman I called on in my local area is typical. Politics has let her down, along with others in her community that she sees struggling to get by. She wants to believe that things will get better, but knows it will take a very long time to put things right. “It’s too late for me. It’s my grandchildren I’m thinking of,” she tells me. “What kind of a future are they going to have?”

We need to fix what is wrong in Britain, but voters like this woman know it won’t happen overnight. Britain needs a generational shift in how the country is run. Today’s policies set the tone, but they should be just the starting point for a credible vision of reform stretching out over the next 25 years. Without that overarching vision, it ís as though our policies are just plucked out of the air or decided on the whim of the leader (which is ironic considering how democratically our policies are decided).

How do other parties do this? A century ago, when the Labour party replaced the Liberals as the main progressive party, it wasn’t by having a more appealing set of policies at each successive general election. On the contrary, Labour made huge missteps in the 1920s and 1930s. It finally triumphed in 1945 because it had built up a consistent vision for state socialism and welfare (with help from some key Liberal thinkers along the way) that put working people first. Irrespective of its specific policies, voters could see what it stood for.

Liberal Democrats are not going to form the next government, but if we’re going to build up our core vote, then voters need a sense of what we’d aim for in government. They need to know the bigger picture behind our commitment to carers and the NHS, our desire to fix the cost of living, our opposition to sewage in rivers, our commitment to PR and to Europe. Not just the values that we all share – a society in which no-one is held back by poverty, ill health or lack of education, where everyone is valued and empowered to choose their path – but a true sense of what that would look like.

The party strategy motion at Conference sets the operational context. But it acknowledges the huge hole where the vision should be. It’s not for me to dictate that vision – earlier articles will give you a sense of where I stand. Here are five steps forward I believe we must take as a party to start filling that hole:

• Don’t rely on the leader to conjure a 25-year vision – the grassroots must organize and lobby for it. Have those debates in the open, because when we challenge the leadership to be more radical, it helps voters understand what drives us.
• Resist attempts to define ourselves within the divisive, zero-sum politics of labor versus capital, poor vs rich. Our politics sets out to get everyone working together for the common good.
• Accept that redefining political discourse takes time. Some of our long-term goals will require many steps to complete, and not everyone will appreciate why they’re important until they begin to take shape. We’ll know we’re getting there when voters start to be able to say what we stand for.
• Take every opportunity to frame policy in the context of the long-term vision (many motions at conference fail this test).
• Tell stories about our achievements at every level of government in a way that reinforces that long-term vision.

We all know we have to do a better job of expressing what we stand for as Liberal Democrats. We have to stop expecting to stumble on the answer and start the hard work towards making it a reality.