These local elections were successful for many, and yes, we should be celebrating. But as someone who fought in Central London — a Zone 1 ward, as central as it gets — I can’t honestly say I feel happy.
Everyone keeps talking about the Lib Dem tortoise, the slow and steady march forward, but all I can think of is the Blackadder episode where they measured gains on the Western Front with a tape measure. Being a Lib Dem in Central London feels exactly like trench warfare.
It feels like we have out-of-touch generals sitting miles behind the lines, poring over maps, insisting victory is just around the corner, while sending activists over the top with bayonets against machine guns. Every election we’re ordered forward again into impossible territory, and every time the dispatches come back from HQ saying: good progress elsewhere, keep sacrificing for the cause. Meanwhile, the people actually in the trenches are exhausted, abandoned, and ignored.
I’m sorry, but we cannot carry on like this.
In two years, 72 MPs have done virtually nothing for communities like mine. People on estates in London are struggling now. Families need lower bills now, safer streets now, housing now, hope now. Instead, what do we get? Vague promises about half-price energy bills in 2035, and a leader who seems obsessed with church roofs while the country falls apart around us.
In this country today, working hard gets people nowhere. Rent eats wages alive. Young people have no future to buy into. Our party right now offers nothing to them — no vision, no urgency, no fight. We have nothing meaningful to offer people anymore except “we’ll fix some churches” and “we’re nice people.”.
That’s not good enough.
This party is at its best when it is bold and radical; when it remembers it wasn’t set up to protect the vested interests of the few in Surrey or Sussex, but to stand up for the many. Yet under the current leadership, it feels obsessed with protecting the well-off counties of our country and their churches, rather than fixing the broken housing market or having a plan so young families can have enough to thrive, not merely exist.
We need change now — It’s time for our leader to find a voice, and if he can’t, maybe it’s time for a change of team captain so someone who can speak from the heart can take over. We cannot go on being the party of the few when the many need us now more than ever.
* Kevin Chun was a Liberal Democrat candidate in Clerkenwell ward, Islington.
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16 Comments
Kevin describes the dispiriting situation many young people find themselves in; he doesn’t offer solutions – understandably, because there aren’t any easy answers.
My generation, the one that ate all the pies, look at the modern ‘precariate’ (whose jobs are insecure, assuming they can find one at all) with some guilt, although we didn’t really mean this to happen.
One of the causes is Blair’s wish for 50% of school leavers to go to university, but that has meant that when jobs are advertised, those who don’t apply within half an hour don’t get on the short-list. Where the baby boomers are more culpable, is the way some have ‘invested’ in the rental property market in order to enjoy a retirement funded by a parasitic attachment to young people who are earning a salary. Building more houses is a longer-term fix, but making renting unprofitable for landlords is a quicker one, and that has already begun. However, ensuring that more houses are built means both incentivising house-builders and finding enough labour with the right skills.
A property market which has been wildly inflated by banks and building societies since the financial crash in 2008 is another problem for young people, who now need to spend much larger multiples of their salaries to buy their way out of the renting trap.
I don’t think a change of leadership in the Lib Dem party is the answer, but perhaps those more economically literate than me will add some solutions in further comments.
Look, I’m not a party member any more and I’m not at all a fan of your current leadership but let me mount an attempt to rationalise the ‘church roof’ rhetoric.
The ‘people who want to fix church roofs’ insult was Kemi Badenoch attempting to dismiss her personal parody of the party: “A typical Liberal Democrat will be somebody who is good at fixing their church roof. And, you know, the people in the community like them. They are like, ‘Fix the church roof, you should be a member of parliament.’”
This was, for those of us who like me grew up in the Home Counties, a staggering attack from a Tory leader on concepts of civil society and community that are shared between the Lib Dems and older Tory heritage, (but enacted differently in both ideologies). So its entirely natural the leadership would gleefully seize on it with both hands.
But co-opting and re-using Badenoch’s cloth-eared insult against her is time- and locality- limited. Maybe it works if you want to win areas with stable populations and stable income or established savings and time to spend on civil society and volunteering. But I agree with Andy Daer that it says very little to the ‘urban precariat’, to either their work, their housing situation or their notions of doing good or volunteering.
The problem of Lib Dem parochialism and targetting has always been the erosion of a coherent national narrative. And in this crisis of political division, that’s something we all dearly need.
I’m sorry Kevin, but somehow you don’t seem to understand the realities of politics. You tell us
“In two years, 72 (Lib Dem) MPs have done virtually nothing for communities like mine. People on estates in London are struggling now. Families need lower bills now, safer streets now, housing now, hope now.”
The real truth is
In two years, the 411 Labour MPS in government have done virtually nothing for communities like mine. People on estates in London are struggling now. Families need lower bills now, safer streets now, housing now, hope now.
I’m sure there are many things you guys in Inner London or any other Lib Dem activist anywhere else in the UK could look at things and say the party has not said enough on the key issues that affect people in our patch, but blaming our team’s captain for the Labour team’s failures is not an answer.
Well said, @David Evans
Once again cliches about the “leafy” Home Counties, repeated frequently in several other articles post the local elections. Have the authors never been outside London or south of Oxford?
There is poverty in the “leafiest” shire. Sink estates in Surrey. Social issues in Bucks. Crumbling infrastructure.
Above all, working and lower middle-class people struggle to make ends meet in the Home Counties because of a comparatively high cost of living. The Party has drawn its core support from these voters. And have added more upper middle class voters in recent years, pushing us over the line in many constituencies.
BYW the wealthiest voters in these areas have by and large stayed with the Tories.
Remember, we were nowhere at a national level in the Home Counties till recently.
Our policies that appealed to AFFLUENT voters in the 2024 GE – NHS, social care, sewage – also appealed to NON-AFFLUENT voters. That is why we won in the south and south-east.
Like Kevin, I live in a LibDem Desert – Brighton and Hove – usually regarded as the most Liberal town in England but without a sole LibDem Councillor. I recognise his despair and as we only have elections once every four years it is hard to get candidates enthused. I suffered the indignity of standing for Parliament in one of our three Constitutencies and losing my deposit.
But we are in amazingly good shape as a local party and our morale is boosted by going to to neighbouring constituencies like Lewes and Eastbourne and working there. I would guess that most of my local co-members understand that LibDem HQ does really well on a shoestring budget.
Sadly Kevin, ‘they’ just don’t get it. I watched Ed Davey on a church roof, twice, thinking 1) what has this got to do with local elections and 2) Local Councils don’t repair church roofs.
I don’t think a single party political broadcast from any party was about local elections. Frankly despite the marginal difference in well run councils and disaster in the worst, it makes little difference who you vote for 90% of Councils. Serious people say councils control bin collection and potholes – really ? Bin collection is probably on a 14 year contract and the potholes have a £19 billion backlog nationwide. It’s not because councils don’t know how to tackle potholes. 80% of funding is spent on statutory (legal) requirements and the other 20% might as well be. Political choice usually comes down to 1 or 2% of the budget. 1% what to spend it on, and 1% what specifically what to spend it on.
In 1979, the average council house rent stood at £6.40 a week. (£32.11 in todays money) Three years later it was £13.59 a week — a 117% increase under Thatcher. The intention was clear from the off, council housing was to be destroyed as it made people vote Labour.
The average house price in London in 1980 was £27,760. (£120,850 in 2026 money)
Housing benefit in the UK has grown from under £5 billion to over £31 billion (in 2023/24 prices) by 2023. Claimants rose from 3.4 million in the late 1970s to over 5 million by 2022/23.
The housing benefit bill is just a fraction of the subsidy given to private landlords. Why don’t we have a benefit cap on Landlords so they can only get state subsdy for 1 property, not 10 or 10,000 ?
Which Party has any SMART targets about house prices over the next 5 years ? None. Just building more houses will not do anything to help the situation. We have enough housing, it is just the distribution is wrong.
It’s very frustrating as a 23 year old member living in a place the Lib Dems don’t do so well in. Most of my friends my age voted Green because they tried to speak to people lt age but we seem almost afraid to sometimes :/
I agree! It doesn’t help that our CEO works in the shires and seems to insist on strategies that his middle class neighbors like vs what’s meaningful to inspire enough voters to win government. Ed needs to find better advisors if he wants to stay as leader. We need economic plans to save the country. COE can fix their own roofs. They have billions to spare.
Thanks @Tim Leunig. We sometimes agree and sometimes disagree, but we always try to debate based on facts and analysis and not on pain and hurt (however real and understandable that pain and hurt is to all those good Lib Dems in Inner London like Kevin).
However, perhaps I was a little too harsh in the first sentence of my reply to Kevin.
Apologies Kevin.
Yes, we need some radical new policies, Kevin, and afterwards proclaiming our messages on social media. I have a radical plan for housing. Treat it like an emergency, as was done after World War 11, when 300,000 houses a year were built. Do it by adding powers and funding to the public sector. Now that we are having bigger councils everywhere, give them big powers and hypothecated housing funding. Regional mayors too, get them on board as well since they are promised bigger control of funding. I am proposing a motion for our Autumn Conference, which I am asking LGA people to front.
Extremely well said David Evans. We’re not the Government and we are fighting hard in Parliament for our country. To think 72 MPS can make the world right against 411 Labour MPs is just plain wrong.
A lot of these comments about how 72 MPs are powerless completely misses the point.
I don’t think people are expecting opposition MPs to change the world. What they are expecting is them to show up to debates and to stand strong against illiberal policies. A number of weeks ago a debate was held in Westminster Hall on the anniversary of the FWS judgement which stripped trans people like myself of meaningful gender recognition. There was only one trans supportive person in the room; our very own Marie Goldman. This example is not unique and it’s very disheartening to see LibDem MPs solely tending to their constituencies rather than standing up for liberal values and progressive issues. Labour MPs like Nadia Whittome and Clive Lewis manage it, as do almost all of the Green MPs, so why is it so hard for LibDem MPs?
I agree with Kevin – we must be better at telling people what Liberal Democrats stand for – giving potential voters something they can identify with – a sense of our values and the policies that demonstrate them. This is what has enabled Reform and the Greens to win votes without doing much (or any) work in these local elections. There are challenges (eg media coverage) but if we can’t articulate a powerful reason why we are worth voting for (especially in areas without sitting councillors or MPs) then we will continue to struggle.
I have to disagree with Tara about her point about our 72 MPs being powerless. They are powerful, but it can never be in the way she imagines, until they form a majority. Their power lies in their ability to expose the cosy lies and manipulation of the incumbent government and through their integrity and hard work, prove to ever more people that Lib Dem MPs are the very best.
Setting up meetings that have no power to implement any meaningful change is a standard tactic of bureaucracies to divert politicians from applying real scrutiny to find out what the bureaucrats are doing that is preventing real progress in key issues like the transgender rights mentioned by Tara. They may raise important points that junior ministers promise to look into, but too often they are then forgotten or a bland response indicating some level of support in future considerations is all they achieve.
Ultimately our new MPs have a key decision to make regarding what to do with their limited amounts of time – Do they attend meetings that will not deliver anything other than a few points made but ignored and a record of attendance or do they work on something that delivers for their constituents and makes it more likely they will be re-elected so they can carry on the fight?