The fallout from this year’s local elections has sparked an important conversation about where our Party goes next. I was recently one of just eight Lib Dem candidates elected to the Council in Haringey, where we worked the soles off our shoes to win twenty-one seats from a base of seven. Without any door-knocking, the Green Party won one of our safest seats and set us back in others. Our experience has been mirrored in other metropolitan areas full of disaffected Labour voters, including other boroughs of London, Manchester (see Jonathan Moore’s “What did the Greens have that we didn’t” and Shaun Ennis’ “Standing Still”), Sheffield, Bradford and Birmingham.
In contrast to the Greens, we lacked coherent national messaging. Apart from Ed boycotting the King’s banquet for Trump over Gaza, which was mentioned positively at the door, we ceded ground to the Greens on agreed upon Lib Dem policy. Erstwhile Lib Dems told me that they didn’t see the Party on the screen, nor know what we stood for any longer. Even an affluent progressive voter told me she felt unrepresented.
By contrast, the Greens have been far more successful at projecting a coherent, values-based identity. Voters saw Zack Polanski as bold, willing to challenge injustice and take clear positions, even where doing so carries political risk.
Palestine is clearly part of that picture.
Voters are looking to be inspired by parties willing to stand up consistently for international law and a values-based foreign policy. The Greens’ vocal and highly visible stance on Palestine has enabled them to fill that space, and there is growing evidence that this has translated into electoral gains in Labour-facing urban areas where we might otherwise have advanced.
In Birmingham, for example, the Greens climbed from 2 seats to 19 while the Liberal Democrats remained static at 12, despite expectations that we would emerge as the main opposition to Reform. This must surely bear some relation to the Greens’ greater clarity on Palestine in a city with four universities, a highly educated Labour vote, and many Muslims, who feel besieged by anti-Muslim Labour and Tory messaging, never mind Reform.
In west Haringey where I met only a few Muslims, I nevertheless spent significant time speaking about Palestine at the door. When I explained that the Lib Dems have called for the immediate recognition of Palestine since 2017, stand by international courts, and call for an arms ban and no trade with illegal settlements, this led to encouraging conversations with once Labour voters. Even on election day, a disaffected Labour activist wasn’t going to vote until we spoke. She later confirmed she had, and I asked her to hold me to account.
Committee members in Birmingham and elsewhere in London report similar experiences: Palestine is not a marginal issue, but one increasingly shaping how some voters – particularly young people, ethnic minorities and soft-left voters – are making electoral choices.
That such voters are turning to the Greens should worry us – not simply for electoral reasons, but because the Liberal Democrats are naturally well placed to speak to their concerns. As a Party rooted in internationalism, human rights and the rule of law, we ought to be capable of articulating a confident and consistent position on one of the defining moral issues of our time.
On paper, our position on Palestine is strong. Unlike Labour or the Conservatives, our leadership acknowledges that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza and our policies call for tougher measures to end the illegal occupation. Our MPs have consistently pressed ministers on the Government’s inaction. But strong positions matter little if voters do not hear them.
This reflects a wider tendency within the Party to play it safe on progressive issues for fear of alienating Conservative-facing voters. Whether on immigration, LGBTQ+ rights or foreign policy, we can seem reluctant to enter difficult debates or speak with clarity and confidence on complex social problems. Meanwhile, the Greens have shown that there is political as well as moral value in communicating principled positions clearly, consistently and visibly.
The lesson from these elections is not that the Liberal Democrats need to change who we are. It is that we need to be far more confident in communicating what we already believe. If we fail to do so, we should not be surprised when voters who share our values look elsewhere.
* Imaduddin Ahmed is a newly elected Councillor for Crouch End in the London borough of Haringey, and is a member of the Liberal Democrat Friends of Palestine Executive Committee.
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12 Comments
Thanks for sharing! Your experience in Haringey proves that ground-level voter engagement requires visible, confident, and value-based national messaging.
Thank you for sharing your insights and congratulations on your election.
There is definitely a sizeable risk in downplaying where Lib Dems have a strong set of values or trying to tell voters what they should be caring about rather than finding a Lib Dem response to what they are bringing up in conversations.
To potentially play devil’s advocate for a second, I would also say there is also a danger in overstating an international issue especially in elections where potential actions to be taken by local councillors are generally limited. One voter shared with me that they were turned off by any party talking about international affairs when council elections are about the local area, potholes and the like. It’s interesting to compare and contrast experiences, especially when someone has been elected (I haven’t) and has really valuable insight from this. Your conclusion is a powerful one.
I’m going to go out on a limb here – maybe our messaging on Palestine *did* have some cut-through, and people didn’t like it!
In the muslim-majority inner-city wards in Birmingham, there were independents who made Palestine the core message of their campaigns, whereas we were emphasising the bread-and-butter issues like fly-tipping and potholes. The city council can do little or nothing about the situation in the Middle East, but this didn’t matter to the voters there, and there was little we could do about that.
However, away from those wards, there is deep scepticism about calling Israel’s actions in Gaza “genocide”. Hamas attacked Israel, remember, in a brutal way, taking many hostages as part of that attack. Expecting Israel not to respond is naive to say the least. Whether their response was proportionate is up for debate, but when we call it a genocide, I have Jewish friends who laugh hollowly, and say “‘Call that a genocide? I’ll show you what a genocide looks like”‘, and with good reason. And it isn’t just Jewish people that feel that way.
Hamas have called repeatedly for the destruction of Israel. They don’t attract much sympathy from people not ideologically aligned with them. Appearing to side with them is going to repel many voters aware of the history of the Jewish people over the last century and why It was felt necessary to establish Israel in the first place. Evidently it is still necessary, and we should recognise that and act accordingly.
Congratulations Imad on winning your seat in the tough inner London & extremely diverse Haringey. Your points on how we had virtually no national message that resonated with urban areas, & were practically silent on Gaza are well made. The majority of the party, and the country support an end to the ongoing horrors in the West Bank and the genocide in Gaza, so it’s disappointing we didn’t talk about our policies & left the field open to the Greens.
The Greens have no doubt benefitted from their clear moral stance on the genocide in Gaza, and will have picked up Muslim votes in the local elections, as well as those of others who have campaigned for justice for the Palestinians. Many of us believe successive governments have reneged on solemn promises made when Britain took control of the Palestine after WWI, and feel opposition parties in parliament should have done more to rein in what many call complicity by our own government in Benjamin Netanyahu’s crimes. All local elections are to a degree a judgement on the performance of parties at the national level, and Immad is right to say we needed to be more assertive about our values in the recent elections.
Israel and Iran’s actions are driven by their leaders’ pathological hatred of each other, and those less emotionally entangled, like the UK government, ought to be able to impose reason on the participants. In the absence of that, the suffering of those involved goes on, and we are now all experiencing the economic fall-out of the war having spread to the Persian Gulf. Self-interest shouldn’t be one of the core values of a political party, but the results of both the Conservative and Labour failures to act over Israel’s descent into barbarity under Netanyahu’s belief that peace processes come out of the barrel of a gun, is plain to see, and affects voters in all elections, whether local or national.
I must question the use of the words “Greens” and “coherent “ in the same sentence.
Heaven preserve us from the Greens’ greater clarity on Palestine. The Party has been colonised by people who were kicked out of Labour for anti semitism. The Greens have got away with it so far because they are being Jew washed by Zack Polanski who, like all populists, appears to have little in the way of fixed principles. But like Corbyn, he will be found out.
Once the Lib Dems start going down that route, chasing sectarian votes on Gaza or other allegedly and undefined “progressive” causes because it works for the Greens in Haringey or Hackney, we will really be in trouble.
@Sandra Fayle – we are alreadly losing some people through calling what Israel has done in Gaza “‘genocide”‘. My Jewish friends hear that and give a hollow laugh – they know what a real genocide looks like, every one of them lost family members from previous generations under the Third Reich.
Hamas, an organisation that calls for the destruction of Israel, launched a savage attack on a peace festival, killed many people horribly and took hundreds of hostages. Were we to expect Israel to do nothing? Yes, the current Israeli government is led by maniacs, but that does not excuse Hamas, and to give the impression that we in any way side with them will do us no good in the long run.
@Chris Bertram
Expecting Israel to refrain from killing tens of thousands of civilians (including the careful targeting of children with snipers and drones) and attempting to starve them through restricting food supplies whilst burning their farmland in no way amounts to expecting Israel to “do nothing”.
In an attempt to bring the conversation back to the points Imad was making… firstly congratulations on your very well deserved win!
In my own experience (and I am a proud owner of two of those ‘top canvasser’ badges) conversations on the door step need to reflect what the person rather than I want to talk about, whether that be potholes, well-being, planning or international issues (often all of them). I know that people absolutely do want to talk about the horrors in Gaza – from the day of the by-election in Mid-Beds (the day after my dad’s funeral), to Wiltshire before the general election, local elections last May, and Swindon this May. As Imad says, Lib Dems are leaders on related policy and to some extent on track record. So where is the clear and consistent message from the top of the party, enabled by clear and consistent comms from HQ? This appears to be a blind spot and I trust that it isn’t driven by something more sinister. Lib Dems need to reclaim the progressive moderate space in politics by being bold, anti-populist and human rights driven; I look forward to seeing that.
One of the reasons I am a LibDem is I want to see far greater devolution of power to local areas. The Local Elections should have been about local delivery: housing, schools, rubbish collection, recycling, social care – and yes, the endless potholes. The Greens successfully turned it into a debate out Gaza, over which local councils have ZERO control. I really don’t want us to become a party of virtue signaling – there is nothing Haringey Council can do about Israel’s barbaric actions in Gaza, Donald Trump or any other number of global issues.
I think a major problem with this article is the title. It claims we have a message on Palestine, we do not. Just because our spokespeople have asked a few questions in parliament about an issue does not mean we have a message.
And frankly whilst our policies are better than labour’s, they are still wishy washy, especially after the government recognised Palestine. Merely sanctioning settlements and cutting off the few remaining weapons that the government isn’t going to do anything, even if it spurs other European countries I to doing the same.
The only policy that will work (if other countries follow at least) is Russia style economic sanctions. That is Green policy, and if we want to compete with them (and do the right thing) we have to offer the same.