It’s vital to learn from failures. But it’s much more fun to learn from successes. So there is a lot of fun to be had in learning the lessons for the Liberal Democrats from the latest local elections.
Let’s summarise those successes with three numbers:
- +407 seats – the party’s second biggest gain in raw seats since the mid-1990s.
- +12 councils – taking the number of Lib Dem majority councils to its highest for at least 18 years.
- 20% equivalent national share – the highest on this BBC measure since going into coalition in 2010. (The alternative NEV measure was the joint best since 2010.)
However, it’s important to remember that not everyone who hoped to win did so. For colleagues who were seeking election but didn’t make it, it can be even tougher when all around people are celebrating. If you, or someone close to you, is in that position, my commiserations and thanks for all you’ve done.
Five in a row
Perhaps the most important element of the local election results is one that has been mostly overlooked. It’s that the Lib Dems have now made it five rounds of local elections in a row at which we’ve made net gains. You have to go back to 2002-6 for the last time we did that.
Another way of looking at our progress is the cumulative gains and losses so far in May elections during this Parliament:
- Lib Dems +637
- Greens +416
- Labour +318
- Conservatives -1,309
That’s the sort of sustained progress which has been an important part of the party’s strategy in this Parliament: investing in our grassroots campaigning support, for both stronger and weaker areas, concentrating on target seats at election time but expanding our areas of strength as we do. Sustained grassroots growth is what will make us a successful national party.
The most dramatic progress was against the Conservatives, and as in 2019 once again our vote share did best the more an area had voted Remain. In areas that voted Remain in 2016, our vote share was up nearly 1.5 points on average, though in areas that voted 60% or more Leave in 2016, our vote share was down just under a point.
But in addition, many groups primarily up against Labour managed to grow, including us becoming the official opposition on Sunderland Council.
Overall, in the places with zero or one Lib Dem council seat up for election this time, we made a net 21 gains, going from 32 councillors in these councils to 53. Four times as many of these smaller places went forward as went back and we went up in every region.
Map of Lib Dem seat gains in May 2023 local elections
Regional breakdown of seat changes in May 2023 local elections
Behind those numbers are all sorts of individual stories, including Syed Yusef, the first Muslim councillor in North Devon council, Kate Smith, the first-ever Lib Dem borough councillor on Amber Valley, and Chris Northwood winning in Manchester.
Plus of course behind every winning candidate is a winning agent and many winning helpers. Thank you one and all.
It also looks like we’ll go from zero to at least two Liberal Democrat council leaders from ethnic minority backgrounds – an important step forward for us.
What lessons can we learn from these successes? Off the back of initial number crunching and what we saw during the campaign – I’m glad to say that my visits around the country were more successful than Conservative Party chair Greg Hands’s visits – it’s possible to start drawing out some lessons.
Our capacity has grown
The local elections saw a welcome big step-up in the number of Liberal Democrat candidates, and we hit new highs for our volumes of canvassing (important in its own right and as an indicator of broader local campaign activity).
But our opportunities exceed our capacity
More candidates, more canvassing and more campaigning helped with our gains. But equally, it’s a common picture around the country that we could have won even more seats if we’d had the capacity to go for them.
Which brings lesson #1: the importance of building-up our campaign capacity, especially in going out to recruit new would-be candidates and in building up local delivery and canvassing teams. The places that were most successful were good not only at getting their own members involved but also in reaching out more widely in their communities too.
The best way to do that comes in lesson #2: the earlier people started on their campaigns, the better they did. The old rule of thumb is that for a May election, one leaflet before Christmas is worth two after. That’s even more true of recruiting more members, possible candidates and helpers.
The best messages are the three-pointers
There are three audiences for political messages – the public, who are the jury that cast their verdict at election time, the media, who are often an important way for voters to hear our messages, and our members, who need to be enthused about our purpose.
Which brings up to lesson #3: the most effective messages were the three-pointers: based on what voters said mattered most to them, made interesting for the media and rooted in our values.
It’s why sewage being dumped in our rivers and on our beaches, for example, was such a powerful message. Voters care about it, the media loves writing stories about it and members are fired up by it.
We spend too much time (poorly) reinventing the wheel
Templates, templates, templates. There are lots of high quality literature templates available, based on what’s worked in winning campaigns. You don’t need to artwork your own canvass leaflet, design your own direct mail or create your own social media look. There are templates available already, from Lib Dem HQ and ALDC, that cover all these tasks and many more.
These templates are more widely used than they used to be, but there’s still an awful lot of time and effort going into reinventing the wheel by creating new things from scratch. Which at best is a poor use of resources, and sadly is not infrequently worse than that – because the reinvented wheels are often not very round.
Lesson #4 then: don’t waste time trying to reinvent the wheel; use templates instead.
Casework wins elections
One skill I’ve tried to hone is picking up the right signals from a local party visit about how well things are really going. Looking at the notes in MiniVAN while waiting for someone to answer the door, for example, is a good insight into how much campaigning in-between elections really goes on. One set of signals I’ve grown to increasingly rely on is the signs of active casework – the more local casework stories in a leaflet, the better things are going.
The old-school approach of winning a ward by first doing a residents survey to find the casework, then doing the casework, then repeatedly reporting back on the casework via letterboxes, fell out of fashion for a long while due to Coalition and then Brexit. But it’s still highly valuable.
Which brings us to lesson #5: we do best where our councillors/candidates are in a regular cycle of surveying, casework and reporting back.
Bring on 2024…
If you thought this year was bad for the Conservatives, remember that this time they were defending a previously poor set of results and the elections this May were in parts of the country that were more Leave-voting than average.
Next year, however, the Conservatives are defending not a poor set of results but a good set of results. So they have much further to fall…
* Mark Pack is Party President and is the editor of Liberal Democrat Newswire.
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22 Comments
The good results are mainly due to the dedication of campaigners and effective local organisation.
However there is a trend of the Lib Dems overperforming in local elections compared to national support levels and then falling back again at General elections and I can see this trend continuing.
Mark, Mary Reid recently highlighted a report that 65% of our councillors are male. Are there any indications that the balance has been redressed a bit in these elections.
Attention should also be paid to those Councils where we have no representation at all including the several where we lost our last remaining councillor this time.
What support is being offered by the national party to paper candidates in these local elections? I would suggest a leaflet drop as a minimum requirement. I would be interested to know how many candidates are from working class backgrounds including council/social housing tenants and what efforts the party are taking to address the imbalance in social status?
It’s not so much that we over-perform in local elections as that the Tories and Labour parties massively under-perform. We get more votes at Generals than in Locals but a very high proportion of Tory and Labour voters don’t turn out except in Generals (and unfortunately, referenda). The Tories have the choice of calling the General on the same day as the Locals next year. It wouldn’t help them in the General but it would hurt us in the locals.
If our cumulative net gains in this parliament are 637 and those of the Greens are 416, then I would suggest that the Greens are a significant threat to our progress. In many ways they are occupying space that we should be occupying. Our over-indulgence of the Greens may be something we come to regret.
Marco, I don’t think that trend is quite the right word to describe Lib Dems’ performing better in Local Elections, more a fact that there are lots of Conservative voters and Labour voters who very rarely turn out to vote except for a General Election.
As Lib Dems, we are very good and work very hard at getting people out to vote for local elections, Labour and the Conservatives by comparison don’t work at it anywhere like as much, except in a few areas.
Hence any projection of potential General Election gains always overestimates our gains unless it makes a substantial allowance for this factor. Based on my experience hardly any do.
The other fact is that it is easier to persuade a wavering voter to vote for us if they believe we can win. This is easier at a local election, where a single good campaign can do it, but takes several years of persistence and progress before it starts to noticeably change General Election voting patterns.
That is what we did over many years in the 1980s, 90s and early 2000s in hot spots like Somerset, Devon and Cornwall in the South West, and gradually it spilled out into much wider areas as well. We had other hot spots in SW London, Scotland and the North as well. It is this long term effort and success that we are starting to build again now.
I think we can do it once again.
Graham, yes the Green’s are a very serious threat to us and over the next decade could well replace us. We are sleeppwalking towards that disaster.
A glance at the local election results shows not only the extensive gains they made but also how they are now very close to capturing a number of Councils. In the next round of elections, one can anticipate the media coverage if they take Bristol.. They have no love for us and we should have none for them.
Which then raises the issue of electoral arrangements. Nick Clegg’s bl…. coalition and Tuition Fees fiasco were the events that gave the Green’s their initial momentum. Another reason why should stay out of any suggested arrangement.
Chris Twells has been suspended by the Party, for what seems to be an innocent mistake. As a councillor in another area, who was eligible to stand in Tetbury with Upton (where he would only be a paper candidate), he did not expect to get elected and surely the DNO for the local party and the election Agent must share responsibility for the outcome. I can remember one time in my local Party where one of our Councillors moved nearly 200 miles away but remained a councillor for quite a few months afterwards before the council group decided it could afford a by-election. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-65560466
I agree with Marco. As a newbie member in the early 1980s, doorstep conversations soon convinced me that, even in local elections, somewhere between 25% and 33% voted on national party lines and issues. So, the lack of any coherent national programme to put to the voters created what I saw as a headwind which we had to struggle against making us uncomfortably dependent on differential turnout and tactical manoeuvres for wins.
I also agree with Graham and theakes. The number of LibDem councillors rose 33% but the Greens doubled theirs. That should be ringing alarm bells in party HQ very loudly.
Just in case the Great and the Good of this party have forgotten, may I remind people that we are in a ‘cost of living crisis’ which is a BBC way of saying that the government has screwed up the economy so badly that even the Bank of England’s Chief Economist warns that we must get used to being poorer. Hence the unwillingness (actually inability) to pay doctors and nurses… and the rest.
My view is that it’s going to be worse than the 1978/79 Winter of Discontent that ended Labour’s post war era and ushered in Thatcher.
And the LibDem plan to turn this around is….?
Paradoxically and as discussed on another thread it is actually the FPTP system that prevents the Greens from overtaking us. They have no real foothold in the system whereas we do so I can’t see them being a threat to us at the moment. If PR came in that could change things.
Ruth: there were some promising signs of progress in the diversity of our local government base, particularly going from zero to two council leaders from ethnic minority backgrounds. But I don’t think there’s a sign (yet) of a change in the long-term plateau in the proportion of councillors who are women, still well short of half. One thing I hope our relevant committees will shortly agree is a plan to have much better data on the diversity of our councillors, which will be a necessary (though not sufficient!) step to making more more progress.
Ian: you’re right about the importance of our smaller (or zero) groups growing too, alongside progress in the more headline-grabbing areas. It’s overall good news, though not unadulterated good news, that for places with 0 or 1 Lib Dem councillors up this time, we went forward in four times as many places as we went back. That’s progress, but we need to sustain it.
Mark, do you have any thoughts about how to deal with the Greens?
Chris: I think the most important factor is that they are often filling a vacuum in the local political landscape, and so they are growing where we haven’t managed to fill that space yet. Hence the main lesson is about the need to expand and accelerate our own grassroots growth.
Mark – maybe you are correct in a wider context in respect of a vacuum. However, where I live the vacuum has been created deliberately. That’s the danger! Clawing anything back from that is therefore going to be even more of a challenge – and that simply does not motivate people.
Everyone needs to be very careful as to whether they really want to let the Green genie out of the bottle.
An alternative approach is just to accept that the Greens will eventually corner that part of the electorate and focus on a different target market. Preparing for PR might mean establishing the Lib Dems as the party of four cornered liberalism.
Mark: what advice do you give to constituencies like mine in Canterbury where we fought a minimal campaign to get Labour elected in GE but now have a constituency (not District) where there are no tories and we are clear second
Thank you for this analysis – a good summary of the situation.
I feel that we are making good progress and sowing the seeds for future victories – theres so much potential
As others have said we need to look at the range of people who we put forward for election – looking at the different council groups the Lib Dems are largely pale, male and middle aged. I think we need to make a determined effort to recruit women, younger people and people reflecting the ethnic diversity of the population as members and then (hopefully) as candidates.
Where I live in Portsmouth for example we gained seats but of our 18 councillors only 3 are women – the same number of women as the opposition Labour group which is just over a third of the size (7 councillors). Whatsmore the men on the council have been around, it seems, for a long time and so it is hard to offer something new when it feels like its the same old men being put up every time. I feel if we had had a more diverse range of candidates we could have taken one or two more seats and increased the support for the LDs across the city. Is there anything planned to remedy this situation?
Hello Mark, I suggest you are a bit more careful with your choice of quick stats to make a point. When you say “that for places with 0 or 1 Lib Dem councillors up this time, we went forward in four times as many places as we went back” it sounds very positive, but of course places with 0 councillors can’t make losses.
Based on the Guardian’s data (maybe not perfect, but the most easily analysed), before May we had 0 seats in 57 councils where there were elections. In these we made no progress in 44, in 7 councils had a single success and in the other 6 councils gained another 15 between them.
In the 13 councils where we had a single councillor, 4 went back to zero, 3 still have one and 6 made progress (total net gains 18).
At a time where in two consecutive elections (4 years apart) we made massive gains, but our total lack of traction in so many areas should be deeply concerning. In those areas I don’t see any evidence of a central plan to deal with this problem. If there is one, perhaps you could enlighten us?
“our total lack of traction in so many areas should be deeply concerning. In those areas I don’t see any evidence of a central plan to deal with this problem.”
Inclined to agree with this.
Mark, that really interesting. 30 years ago I was in a council group with gender balance; don’t fancy shuffling off this mortal coil with it all going backwards 😢