Dear Liberal Democrats on Twitter, Facebook and Liberal Democrat Voice,
I am tired of process stories.
I don’t need another analysis of Annette Brookes’ email, Nick saying where we work we win, Lib Dems 4 Change setting up a website on 22 May or Matthew Oakshotte’s self-indulgent polling.
The simple truth is this. In the euro elections we lost 10 out of 11 seats and got 6% of the vote, the same as in 1989 when we had all just discovered we were Democrats. In addition we lost a wealth of MEP staffers who helped their Regions grow and ensure even more Lib Dems were elected at local level.
Worse than that we have lost over 1,000 councillors in the past 4 years. For a party that prides itself on building itself up from the grassroots, it would appear that we are intent on knocking the foundations of our party out and letting the rest of the building fall in on our heads.
There is a great wealth of Liberal Democrat talent with much more intellectual capability than myself. Together we should be discussing in an adult manner the real reason for the recent failures, and how this can be changed so that people listen to our message in future.
What we have to agree on is how we can maximise our vote in 2015 not whether you agree with Nick or are one of his enemies.
The time has come, as we said back then, to seriously discuss the future of our party, to put loyalty to anyone person or faction behind us and put winning first and bitching about others in the party last.
So please before you write another process story tell me how we will win in 2015.
* Allan Knox is leader of the Liberal Democrat group on Ribble Valley Borough Council
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21 Comments
THIS.
We need to look forward now and get behind our leader.
I have done a lot of thinking and reflecting in the last few days, like many. It has occurred to me that Nick Clegg talked about changing politics and challenging the establishment in the leaders debates.
In coalition we have been managerial and haven’t really changed politics at all or done that much to challenge the establishment (see: Secret Courts).
We aren’t going to get credit for the boring old managerial stuff like:
Stopping the Tories doing bad things.
Saving the economy.
Pupil premium.
I could go on…(see Mark Pack’s what we have done in coalition infographic).
We might get some credit for putting money in peoples pockets with the 10k starting rate of tax.
I don’t think its even the tuition fees debacle that is doing us the worst damage.
I think it has been our willingness to put our values aside on changing politics and challenging the establishment to not rock the coaliton boat for the good of the country. This may have been right decision for the good of the country and probably was. But this has been seen to be unforgivable by the voters. Could this be at the route of our problems?
As others have said we need to be challenging the establishment. We need a rethink and we need to ditch the “coalition 2015 and beyond strategy” and get back to our values if we are to move on from coalition and challenge the establishment parties and get back our radical clothes on electoral reform back from UKIP.
If Nick Clegg was prepared to learn the lessons of our electoral disasters and change and get out of the coalition straight-jacket, while this may be his darkest hour, he could look forward to a bright future.
So your fed up with “process” stories – but winning elections is a process. You don’t have to hate Nick to want him to go. Do you think changing leader made no difference to UKIP or the SNP – yet you describe Oakeshotts polling as self-indulgent – and it has been described by Clegg and Cable as worse. Funny the real story has come out now about the first poll showing Cable behind in Twickenham – and look at the local election results there.
Everyone will pull together and flood the constituencies where our MPs need resource and footsoldiers. I stand ready to do that.
However, I won’t be told to shut up about the disastrous leadership of the party. Happy for Nick to remain DPM.
How to win in 2015 – Start by getting rid of Nick Clegg as Leader
Well said!
I have been following discussions here with interest but a sense that there is a parallel world to that here in Northumberland.
One thing that makes me believe we should keep Nick C as leader , is the thought of Nigel Farrage’s smirk if he claims his scalp!
Getting our policies across to the electorate is, IMHO, more important than the leader. At general elections part of the problem is people have to consider national leaders as well as the most effective local MP, many voters vote viscerally rather than intellectually. I don’t know how to change this, sometimes a longer conversation with a voter helps but the sound bite and ” more through the door” doesn’t.
You (and by you I mean the party, but more specifically the Clegg loyalists) could start by treating the electorate like adults and not as someone to be lectured. I cannot count how many times Lib Dems have patronised the electorate by saying “our message isn’t getting across”. You’ve been saying that for years now and it’s simply not true. We, the electorate, get your message. We know what you’ve done in government. And for four years now, we have told you, through the ballot box that we a) don’t like the message and b) we don’t like most of what you’ve done in government. Sure, coalition is about compromise, but you haven’t compromised. You’ve capitulated. Even if all Lib Dem MPs abstained from, say, the tuition fees vote, the Tories would still have had their way, but at least you lot would’ve been seen to be standing up for your principles. Same with the NHS deforms. Same with the way you’ve treated the sick and disabled.
We ex-LD voters KNOW your message. We just don’t like it. And your party will continue to be a laughing stock until you change. Almost everyone I know sees Clegg as the country’s biggest joke. The vast majority of your ex-voters and supporters such as myself will not even listen to a word you have to say until Clegg is gone. Rightly or wrongly, he is seen as a liar. A man who promised “new politics” and “no more broken promises” and then slapped his voters in the face by breaking promises and continuing with the old politics. He is the face of your “brand” (as no doubt his clever PR people would say) and the longer your brand is fronted by him, the lower your party will sink.
Bertolt Brecht once wrote “The people have lost the confidence of the government; the government has decided to dissolve the people, and to appoint another one,” It was in response to street protests in East Germany in the 1950s.
The trouble is we cannot “dissole the electorate and appoint another” can we? An it the ELECTORATE who have decided thaey don’y trust Nick Clegg. It is sad, it is unfair, but it is the reality. In some ways this is an echo of the Ming Campbell sitiuation, though actually our performance under Ming was not that bad. He knew time was up and he was getting in the way of the party’s chance, why is Nick so thick skinned that he can’t see it?
On doorstep after doorstep this year people told me they would vote for us locally because they like the work their FOCUS team was doing, but they could not support what we were doing nationally, and specifically they didn’t trust Clegg.
Do we listen to what our voters are telling us, or do we just spend the next 11 months telling the they’ve got it wrong?
If Nick goes now we can lance the boil and move forward with clear Liberal Democrat policies for the General Election. If hes atys we’ll see a repeat of Sunday night.
…sorry about the typos – spellchecker failure!
@Steve Comer
‘move forward with clear Liberal Democrat policies for the General Election.’
This is your problem, who will believe you?
You’ve got one narrative – “how well the Lib Dems have done in coalition”. It may or may not be a fairy story, may or may not be based in fact, may or may not be a great tale well told. It doesn’t matter – no one’s listening.
Some may listen rather more closely with a new storyteller. In truth, however, the narrative has worn thin. You could go back to the old line, “it’s us or the Tories” but that doesn’t quite have the same appeal as it once did… I wonder why?
The media don’t seem to have noticed where we gained or did not lose. There are fascinating lessons there and I am concentrating on the positive things we can do locally. Had we still had our excellent MEP it would have been a bit easier.
I am a longterm Liberal, so I don’t take success for granted.
Let’s work out how to win in 2015.?
Just seen Stephen Tall on TV say : “……. there is no magic bullet to turn this around…….”
But there is.
Simply come to terms with the fact, and accept, that the British public have a democratic right to determine their future over Europe, and change your policy to giving them an in/out referendum with no silly pre-conditions. Fire that one magic bullet, sit back, and watch LibDem polling fortunes climb upward toward May 2015. Of course, it goes without saying, that this could never happen under Nick Cleggs leadership.
John, I’m not against an EU referendum, but isn’t it stretching it a bit to say it would turn our polling around? 🙂
@John Dunn much as I hate to agree with Nick I think the LDs are right to not commit to that referendum. Europe is a low salience issue for the vast majority of people and committing to a referendum is a high risk strategy (losing is unlikely but a disaster on many levels) with very little potential gain, judging by the polling. People who care about this are vocal but a much smaller minority than media narrative and blog comments suggest.
Besides which, we’ve already had a referendum on that. I fail to see why it’s so special amongst our constitutional affairs that it deserves a referendum when virtually nothing else has had one. You can say that it’s more integrated than last time round but “ever closer union” was written into the treaties from the beginning. It should surprise no-one that closer union happened then!
@ DM
Low Salience or not, immigration issues are firmly dovetailed into the EU question. We simply cannot have any control of EU immigration AND be in the EU project. It is that simple. To get an Australian model of immigration management, we have to exit the EU. Also, people under 56 did not get the opportunity to vote back in 1975. In 1975 I voted for the EEC, (an economic community), NOT a federal political community. Indeed, it was probably the greatest and most deceitful miss-selling scandal of the 20th Century.
It is time NOW to ask the question of in/out again, and to not do so is equivalent to putting two fingers up to the voters and the results of last week’s elections.
In short, if you don’t listen, and don’t respond to what you hear from voters, don’t be surprised when you party sinks beneath the quicksand.
We can still trade with europe without being told what to do by foreign beauracrats.
We could have an immigration policy that only lets in people that benefit Britain without letting in european criminals & scroungers. We could have more money for our own country instead of giving it to the EU. We could have British jobs for British workers. We could run our own country.
We could have a vote on all of this but we have an undemocratic political class.
This is why UKIP are winning, its just plain common sense, not racism.
John Dunn
It is time NOW to ask the question of in/out again, and to not do so is equivalent to putting two fingers up to the voters and the results of last week’s elections
Most people who voted UKIP seem to have done so as a general “protest vote”, or because they thought UKIP had a magic way of turning the clock back to 1955, rather than because they had carefully thought through the issue of the EU. In Scotland there is not this anti-EU fervour or big UKIP vote, because there the protest anti-establishment party is the SNP, and the easy-peasy (i.e. it can be done, but it won’t solve the problem) solution to everything is independence from the UK. If the EU was as you and many others put it, wouldn’t the Scots too be feeling its oppressive force?
If asked, many people will say they are anti-EU, but if pushed the only thing they can say about the EU that makes them against it is immigration. Well, I think the political elite in this country is too willing to dismiss concerns about immigration, unable to see the point that they gain the most from it, but those at the other end of the scale tend to be left with the practical social consequences of dealing with it. However, the EU is not just about immigration. UKIP cheerleaders go on and on about “rule from Brussels” and the like, yet if you ask ordinary people what exactly is it that Brussels is doing to them that is so oppressive, you won’t get much of an answer. When people are moaning about policies they don’t like, all the talk is of policies coming from Westminster, not Brussels. If Brussels really were this great oppressive force, surely people would be able to say in some detail just how they are being oppressed.
It’s very common for people who are unhappy in life to be made to feel the problem is something other than what it really is, and for malevolent political forces to use this to whip up support based on some imaginary enemy. If you look at the history of this country, in past centuries anti-Catholic fervour was often whipped up by unscrupulous types who were using it for political advantage and to distract attention from other issues. In other countries and at other times, Jews have been the big imaginary enemy used in this way.
Well, now we have more UKIP MEPs than from any other party, let’s make them work. Let them give detailed reports on just what the EU is doing that is so bad. Let them tell us just what they are doing in their posts to try and stop that. No more swanning about making big expenses claims while doing little of the work you were put there to do. UKIP are in the position to provide us with the facts and details we need to make an informed decision. Let them do that (and the other MEPs can do so from their viewpoint as well), then we will be in a better position to decide. Also, let UKIP tell us all those other policies – in detail please – that will turn the clock back to 1955. Holding a pint and a fag and grinning is no substitute for detailed policy.
Stephen Campbell
Sure, coalition is about compromise, but you haven’t compromised. You’ve capitulated.
Try looking through a few Tory discussion groups to see a very different opinion on this issue. Many Tories seem to be of the opinion that their party has capitulated to the LibDems rather than the other way round. So I guess your view on this depends on where you come from. I’m not at all happy with the coalition, but I am convinced after seeing what Tories talk about when they are on their own that a reason why it seems like just a capitulation to the Tories is that the Conservative Party has itself drifted even further to the right than what it was when it was last in government, so a compromise between what it wants now and what the LibDems wants ends up looking like what used to be pure Conservative Party stuff.
The immediate thing to do is thank those who lost their seats at any level, those who worked their butts off in the elections, and those who voted for our party. I say ‘thank you’ too.
Second, get the representatives together from all local groups who won, lost, worked hard in the constituencies – and make a new plan to take to the Federal Executive. Please don’t leave it all to go through forums or you will surely get more of the same after analysis.
Third, try to make a POSITIVE image for our party and not look like the rabble we are being portrayed as. This can only be done by listening and using our principles in a constructive way. Look to the future.
Fourth, please stop the mantras of Party of IN, Fairer Society etc. and all those other sound-bites created by boffins who don’t realize how lame they appear to the public, even when they are correct. Be up-to-date not coasting.
Fifth, start again because what you were doing isn’t working. Clinging to the past can sink our principles into a sea of wrong sound-bites. Open eyes and ears!
Your only hope of winning much next year is a new leader now!