St Albans’ Lib Dem candidate Daisy Cooper was on The World at One yesterday talking about how people’s voting patterns are shifting and people are turning to the Lib Dems because of our values.
St Albans voted heavily to remain in the European election and they have a Leave supporting Conservative MP who’s quite happy with no deal.
Listen to Daisy here – the piece starts at about 24 minutes in.
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3 Comments
Yes, okay. Hope she wins that seat. However one of the interesting features of both the Brecon, Hazel Gove and Huntingdon by elections is the apparent strengthening of the Conservative vote following its debacle since April. Have to monitor this during August, it could have an effect on our potential gains in Conservative areas.
On the subject of our values, this seems like a good place to repeat some thoughts I posted in another thread yesterday about the Tory MP Philip Lee, who has said he is ‘taking the summer to think about’ whether to defect to the LibDems.
I don’t know what conversations Vince or Jo have had with this chap, but I don’t like the fact that he seems to think our party is passively sitting and waiting for him to deign to defect to us, like an eager dog waiting to be taken for a walk.
I’m also not sure this particular MP will be a good fit for us. He is very good on Brexit, but his other policy positions don’t show a very Liberal bent. Plus, he keeps saying ‘I joined the Tories when John Major was PM, that’s my Conservative party’. Well, I’m old enough to remember John Major’s government and we LibDems fought it vigorously. If that’s what he thinks we are, we have a problem.
So I think we need to make clear that, while we welcome Liberal-minded people, we are not a dumping ground for deselected MPs who hate Brexit and have nowhere else to go. I think maybe Mr Lee would be better joining the ChUK or the Independent group – and then we would work with him as we work with them; he could be part of the broader Liberal movement, but not the party. I think it would do us no harm to politely reject him. It would show that we are putting a premium on our Liberal values – exactly as Daisy says in this excellent interview.
I expect I will be labelled ‘tribalist’ by some people now. It’s not the case – I am happy to welcome people from other parties, BUT I want to hear them talk passionately about what Liberal values they have, and how they believe our policies on the vital issues are the right ones (not just Brexit).
Shame they gave her so little time. It would have been nice to hear which of our values Daisy thinks are particularly connecting with people. Instead we got more from Conservatives and Labour discussing their angst on their parties’ current plight than we did on the party with a positive message that is changing things.