Farage and Musk are the past, not the future
Seeing someone called a “snivelling cretin” may reinforce all your worst fears about social media. But when it was Elon Musk saying this of Ed Davey, it counts as a badge of honour.
It also illustrates a bigger, and more important, point than ‘look how thin skinned and short of things to say a billionaire is when anyone stands up to him’.
It is about how little to say about our future the likes of Nigel Farage and Elon Musk have beyond nostalgia for an imagined version of our past. For all Elon Musk’s facade as a visionary man of the future, much of his vision is a shrunken, twisted piece of fake nostalgia: a world where the super-rich get to run things, democracy is an optional extra, international borders are high and only his favoured few select demographic categories are worthy people.
Their joint desire to turn the clock backwards is in contrast to our positive liberal vision for a better future. Just because someone is not like me is not a reason to dislike them. Just because someone has different views of religion than me is not a reason to fear them. And just because someone lives in a different country from me is not a reason to treat them as an enemy.
The likes of Farage and Musk excel at grabbing the headlines, but the quiet reality of 2024 was a year in which in Britain us Liberal Democrats took more political power. We won more council seats than the Conservatives and Reform combined in May – and then we had our best general election result in a century, gaining far more seats than Reform, in July.
General Election Review
An important part of building on those successes is our General Election Review, which was headed up by Tim Farron.
Thank you to Tim and the whole team for turning around the review promptly, so that we can get stuck into implementing its lessons as soon as practical in this Parliamentary cycle.
As with the post-2019 review, this one has been shared with all party members because, even though this review is a happier one, it is important once again that members can hold to account those in power at all levels of the party on delivering the review’s recommendations. As Tim explained in the email to members, there are some further recommendations on membership to follow.
The review is asking Federal Conference Committee (FCC) for time to present their findings to our Federal Spring Conference in Harrogate. Alongside that, the Federal Board has agreed to draw up an implementation plan for the recommendations, and you will get more news on that through these monthly reports.
Party Awards
Our Spring Federal Conference in Harrogate is now coming up fast. Which also means it is time to nominate wonderful colleagues for our next round of Party Awards too.
You can read about which awards are up this time, and how to make nominations, here.
Registrations for conference, both in person and online, are also open. I hope to see many of you there.
Congratulations to…
North Devon Liberal Democrats were the top recruiting local party in England in December, topping the charts for the second month running. All but one of the new members were recruited locally by them – giving the party’s local bank balance a handy boost too as local parties receive larger membership payments for locally recruited (or renewed) members.
Congratulations too to the top local recruiters in Scotland – Dumfriesshire and Highlands local parties, tied with each other – and in Wales – Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan.
Could it be you?
Winning public elections is central to our reason for existing as a political party. Running our own internal elections well is central to our being a democratic party. One of the important posts in achieving that is the Federal Returning Officer, and we are advertising for applicants as the three year term of office ends later this year. Details of the role and how to apply by 4 February here.
Further internal party elections and other party news
The Board has also agreed the timetable for the big round of Federal Committee, President and Vice President elections this autumn. You can read it here.
The Federal Board will also be proposing to Federal Spring Conference some changes to our internal election regulations. The changes are based on the recommendations from the big review carried out by Nick Manners, which consulted widely across the party. The Board then also ran a more recent, more specific, consultation on how best to implement some of the details of what the Manners Review had recommended. Thank you to everyone who took part in either or both of those consultations.
The Board report to Conference will include full details of the proposed changes along with the reasons for them. The change that is likely to be of the widest interest is the proposal to increase from 10 to 20 the number of nominations from party members required to stand for various party roles.
The reason for this is that both the Manners Review and the General Election Review recommended moves of this sort in order to help address the common complaint from members that there are too many candidates to choose between for some party committee contests, making voting confusing and harder. The consultation the Board carried out also showed general support for some increase, and so the Board decided to put forward a relatively small increase with its impact then to be reviewed after the elections.
The Board report will also cover a very short constitutional amendment the Board is proposing to how Liberal Democrats Limited operates, in order to provide the scope for directors with relevant expertise to be appointed in case we wish to use the Limited company for a wider range of purposes.
In my August report I reported that, “The party has also decided not to spend money defending a case about our previous complaints system taken by Natalie Bird. We have already acknowledged the problems with that system by replacing it entirely with a new complaints system, run by different volunteers and supported by different staff. The potential legal costs here were just disproportionate; we have chosen to spend the money instead on staff and campaigning.”
A costs hearing has now been held and the judge has ruled that, due to a failure to engage properly with the party’s earlier offers to settle the case, her costs claim will be reduced by 10% and the party will also receive its costs since August last year.
Next steps in the party’s strategy
As I reported last time, work is underway on developing our new strategy for this Westminster Parliamentary cycle, alongside the policy review being run by the Federal Policy Committee (FPC).
The Board has asked Federal Conference Committee for a chance to consult with members at the Harrogate conference. In addition, you can book a 75 minute Zoom call for the members of your local or regional party to discuss our strategy plans with me by dropping an email to [email protected].
* Mark Pack is Party President and is the editor of Liberal Democrat Newswire.
13 Comments
I’ve just been reading Michael Bloch’s biography of Jeremy Thorpe, which notes at one point that in 1959 Thorpe had built up the North Devon Association to 4000 members in 38 branches. I hope we’re nearing that figure again!
I find all this rather complacent. At 12% of the vote the party has barely recovered from the disastrous 2015 general election where we got 8%. We used to get 20% on a regular basis before the coalition.
In around 100 seats we are competitive and in around 500 seats we have little or no presence. We were fortunate at the last general election under our voting system to get the number of seats we deserved given out percentage vote for the first time that anyone can remember (ie 12% of the vote, 11% of the seats). This was acheived because we have a split right wing vote and if the polls are to be believed it is even more split now that it was before.
The main beneficeries of Labour unpopularity has been the Reform party, a party that is even more explicitly anti-liberal than the Tory party. If we believe their website (Kemi doesn’t) then Reform with 185,000 members is now considerable larger than both us and the Tory party. Should that not seriously bother us?
On the question of complacency, I don’t think we can directly compare our Vote now with Pre-Coalition times, the Electorate now are more fragmented. We have moved from Three-Party politics to Five or Six Parties. Its the same Pie but cut more ways.
@William Wallace, poor Mark will have to buy the party a hovercraft next!
@Geoffrey Payne – you talk about our 2024 general election result as if it was all down to luck and what other people did. I think as our general election review shows, and the contrast between it and the post-2019 one reinforces, much of what you describe was not luck or down to others, but the result of a deliberate plan on our party.
That we won so many seats for a vote share only up a little on 2019 was the result of a deliberate plan, executed across five years, to run a successful target seat campaign. It is why even if every Reformer voter in our target seats had voted Conservative, we would have still had a cracking result, gaining huge numbers of seats. The Con/Ref split certainly helped, but it was the cherry on what was already a huge cake.
@Mark Pack, it was luck relative to the bad luck that we normally have because of the voting system.
The metric that I think we should pay attention is the percentage share of the vote.
We always plan to win seats in a general election. When the Tories are doing badly we usually win more seats. If Labour do badly we win relatively few seats. In 2024 the Tories did unusually badly, hence we won lots of seats.
To be clear I cheered for every seat we won, and I took part in the campaign myself.
What remains to be the case is that in 500 seats the party barely exists. And why is that? Because the party does not stand out.
After the vote on Brexit it was broadly agreed amongst progressives that people voted leave because they wanted to shake up the system, they were “left behind”. What is the party saying about that? Not much because that is mostly where our 500 no-hope seats are. However that is where Reform are picking up, and lets be clear they would like to do to us what Trump is intending to do to the Democrats. So they are growing and all we can do is watch.
@Geoffrey Payne You say, “The metric that I think we should pay attention is the percentage share of the vote.” but that it was precisely what the party decided not to do. As political power comes from winning seats, our explicit plan was to maximise seats. And yes, we got roughly half the vote share of the Alliance’s peak in 1983 – but we also got more than three times as many MPs. On your metric, 1983 was a much better election result than 2024. I beg to differ.
We need to (re-)learn how to campaign against Labour. We have done it before, leading to what’s now our second best ever election result in terms of seats in 2005, which is the only GE ever in which we won a significant haul of seats from Labour. So it’s not inevitable that we do less well when Labour is in power and unpopular. We could and should have continued the 2005 trend in 2010, but we ran a poor campaign which was only saved (sort of) by Cleggmania (which also had its downside because it got local parties carried away and led to the de facto abandonment of targeting in favour of “one more heave”). We should not have lost seats to Labour in 2010, simple as that.
“The metric that I think we should pay attention is the percentage share of the vote.” but that it was precisely what the party decided not to do.
I don’t know what process the party went through to decide that. Did we vote on that at conference? But if we did it was in my opinion wrong. I would say it should not be one or the other it should be both. Replace the or with an and.
We will always target seats, always have done always will do. If the Tories and the SNP do badly, we will do well. If the Tories do well as in 1983, we do badly.
What has happened is that we have a Parliamentary party that is mostly based in the wealthiest seats in the country. And in these seats we say the government should not take these seats for granted. So that is where are priorities now lie.
Now it is good we have those seats, I far prefer to see them represented by a Lib Dem rather than a Tory. But it is not enough to be local champions in 100 seats. We need to be local champions AND a party that stands for something. But that is a whole other essay that needs to be written, I am running out of space. Suffice to say we need to really improve our economic policy.
We targeted effectively in 2024 and 1997; we didn’t in 1983, when the more than doubling of the Alliance vote share over the Liberal vote share in 1979 came from (what was left of) the national media hype surrounding the SDP. The few Parliamentary gains we made in 1983 were the result of strong local campaigns.
“One more heave” has never worked for us; not in 1983, nor 1974, nor 2010. Which of the two big parties was in {a|de}scendency isn’t so important. The result in 2005 shows that we can do well against a Labour government that is losing popularity. If we had continued with the 2005 strategy then we would probably have done even better in 2010, winning a further haul of seats from Labour.
1. Our seat tally at GEs is scarcely correlated with our percentage of vote.
2. If we increased our percentage vote 5% in every constituency in the country, this would win us 10 more seats on the strong assumption the party we are competing with in our marginal constituencies loses all of that 5%. So in reality, gaining 5% in every constituency would win us less than 10 new seats.6 would be a more realistic total..
So AIMING for an increase in national vote share is very inefficient in seat terms.
3. It’s much better to do it the other way round. We were serious competitors in around 80 seats at the last election. If we concentrated resources on our top 160 seats and increased vote share by 15% in each, this would increase our national vote share by only around 2%. But it would certainly win us significantly more than 6 new seats.
So we should think of increased national vote share as a side-effect of increasing the number of seats where we are serious competitors.
It’s simply not true that the LDs necessarily do badly at GEs when Labour is in power: 2001 and 2005 both saw increased seats. And even if it WERE true, that would be no reason to think this putative truth was immutable.
BTW All our “wealthy” seats have pockets of deprivation, where the party wins a lot of support. All wealthy seats also have many struggling middle class voters.
Point 2 is badly explained: I mean if we increased our vote share by 15% in the 80 newly competitive seats – seats 81-160, then we’d have a 2% increase in national vote, but also many new seats.
I mean point 3!!