Andrew Rawnsley had a wee spin in Yellowhammer 1, the Lib Dem campaign bus on Friday and we must have been nice to him because he has written up a broadly positive report in the Observer which reflects well on our strategy and targets. Here are some of the highlights.
First, the stunts:
There is method in his malarkey. Much of the battle for the Lib Dems is persuading the national media to pay them any attention. If he has to play the good-for-a-laugh centrist dad to get himself on TV and in the newspapers, he reckons the pratfalls are a sacrifice worth making. You aren’t going to see Sir Keir Starmer on a paddleboard. Since no one thinks Sir Ed is going to be prime minister, he doesn’t have to do the gravitas thing. He also looks like a man who is enjoying himself, which is more than can be said for the stolid electioneering of his rivals.
Then our ambitions:
This time they have what one Lib Dem strategist calls a “small but perfectly formed” list of targets chosen with a wary eye on the party’s constrained resources and a clinical one on what it is realistic to aim for. In some previous elections, the Lib Dems have marketed themselves as the “plague on both your houses” party, equidistant between Labour and the Conservatives. Sir Ed characterises this as an “ABC election” (Anyone but the Conservatives) and is pitching his party as the “Tory removal service” in places where the Lib Dems are the principal challenger.
Our chances vs the Tories:
The Tory pitch is much less likely to appeal to liberal, centrist folk in relatively affluent seats. Voters there are most animated by issues that the Lib Dems are using as their campaign themes, strongest among them being the dilapidated state of public services and the befoulment of our waterways.
And Keir is not scary to soft Tories:
Among the kind of people they are after, 2019 was a disaster for the Lib Dems in part because Jeremy Corbyn scared those voters into the arms of the Conservatives. Sir Ed thinks it a big help to him that Labour’s prospective prime minister isn’t alarming to potential switchers.
And our ambitions:
Their primary ambition is to gain sufficient seats to supplant the SNP as the third largest grouping in the Commons, the position they held until 2015. Third-party status would secure the Lib Dems a higher public profile in the next parliament as well as more members and chairs on select committees. It would also restore to the leader of the Lib Dems the automatic right to put two questions to the prime minister at every PMQs. While their campaigning implies that they want to see a Labour prime minister, they’d be best pleased if Sir Keir does not win by a massive margin.
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11 Comments
The Electoral Calculus speaks of up to 59 seats for our party, just 7 behind the Tories. Can this be the real world? Like everyone else I would hope so but…………….
For my own real world I expect and be very happy with 20 or even 25, that would be a solid enough block from which to advance.
I hope the target seat strategy is going to boost our support in sears where we are the main challengers but I am concerned that our falling share of the national vote may undermine this ambition. The Liberal Democrats raised its vote share to 11.6% in 2019, which was clear progress on the 7.9% of 2015 and 7.4% of 2017. But the latest Opinium poll is suggesting we are back down at 8%. If votes in target seats see our vote share going backwards, they will be less likely to believe that we will be the vehicle to remove the Tories when Labour appears able to win almost any constituency.
For those of us with long campaigning memories, the party often declines in the polls in the early weeks of the campaign and goes up later on. However, this an odd election, where FPTP may act work in our favour because our vote is so variable in different constituencies. As the Tories collapse they may reach a point where they lose a huge swath of seats as FPTP works against them. This could be magnified if reform get a respectable vote in Tory seats. Now none of this may happen, but what I am saying is that we can help it to by being flexible about tactical voting and vote switching. There is a small chance that the Tories could be reduced to a rump. I for one want to make that happen.
To my surprise, both Rawnsley and those commenting on his article online are mostly supportive of Lib Dem stunt-based campaigning. That may be because jokers, like Boris, can easily raise a smile from people who don’t actually intend to take politics seriously.
Stunts and jokes are fine, if their purpose is to gain attention and then put forward serious messages. But for Davey, it seems that the joke is itself the key message.
Scared of Putin? Terrified by climate change? Come to sunny yellow LibDemLand, where you can forget all your worries. Vote your way to happiness. If you want a serious government which will grapple with difficult real problems, vote for someone else.
You are completely wrong on this, David.
All the stunts have produced significant coverage of our policies; you can not only see this for yourself, but serious political commentators have affirmed it too, Andrew Rawnsley is only one example.
It’s simply nonsense to say the joke itself is the “key message” for Ed. He’s made quite clear in several interviews what the point is.
@Mary Fulton: Mary, it’s absurd to cheery-pick ONE poll. You need to take the poll average. We’re currently around 9.6% . And Mick Taylor is absolutely right btw regarding the slow start to LD campaigns. Frankly, I’ve been pleased that we HAVEN’T dropped back significantly.
@Chris Moore
Just to respond to your comment :
Firstly, I used that poll as it is the latest available.
Secondly, even if we are actually at 9.6%, that still represents a fall of 2% and my point was that falling support may undermine our argument that we are serious challengers.
Very well said Chris Moore.
Mary Filton – We raised our national vote share in 2019, but had a net loss of seats. Our NVS is irrelevant under FPTP. It is often forgotten that in 1997, our NVS went down, but due to tactical voting, we increased our seats from 18 to 46. 2024 will be a similar election for us. Ed’s stunts are brilliant as we are getting attention we otherwise wouldn’t get.
@Big Tall Tim
“Our NVS is irrelevant under FPTP”
Not entirely true.
From https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/rules-funding-political-parties
“How are the funds allocated to political parties?
The formulas used to distribute public funds vary according to the individual schemes.
Short Money is allocated to parties based on a combination of the number of seats won at the last general election and the number of votes they received. In 2023/24, parties will receive just under £21,500 per seat won plus £42.82 for every 200 votes they received in 2019. An additional Short Money travel fund is distributed in the same proportions as the general funding scheme. Parties with five MPs or fewer cannot receive more than £354,255 in Short Money (150% of the staffing budget of a non-London MP) nor less than £118,085 (50% of the staffing budget).”
Hello Mary, you can’t base anything on the latest poll. Apart from anything else, statistical variability on a single – and therefore relatively small sample – rules this out as a serious basis for any psephological judgement.
Big Tim Tall is right about 1997. And this has been graphically illustrated by the “latest” MRP poll from Find Out Now. This has us on 10% of the national vote and picking up 59 seats.
My expectation is that our vote share will rise over the next month, as Mick Taylor has suggested. All feedback from the campaign suggests that our policies are going down well. And that we are getting more coverage than we might have given our imaginative campaigning.
The big swings during the campaign are generally between ‘don’t know’ and the parties. You really have to dig for the don’t know figure. My guess is that ‘don’t know between Tory and RefUK’ is still all to play for. ‘Don’t know between Labour, Lib Dem and Green’ contains a lot of people who are going to vote tactically but don’t know who can beat the Tories yet. We will see more firming up as Labour than Lib Dem or Green because they have more battleground seats. Against that, Ed is getting more recognition nationally and our target campaigns may be taking some votes off the Tories,