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It is understood that output from the party’s General Election 2019 Review panel will be published this coming Friday.
In February, the party’s Federal Board announced Dorothy Thornhill, member of the House of Lords and former Mayor of Watford, as chair of the diverse team of 15 people with deep and varied experience of related fields. They were tasked, in the words of the party President Mark Pack, with conducting:
…a review into both the General election and the European elections. This review will be run independently of those who ran the elections, with a panel of experts who have a broad range of skills from knowing about grassroots election campaigns through to understanding what the very best decision-making processes in organisations look like.
Great efforts have been made to garner the views of all party members. On 8th March it was reported that there had been 22,000 submissions to the panel by that time, with more invited.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out some of the main themes that are likely to feature in the team’s report – just look through the comments threads of this website:
- The decision to help to usher in a December 2019 general election in the first place
- The “revoke” promise
- The “next Prime Minister” boast
- The failure to let anyone know what we stood for apart from “revoke”/”stop Brexit”
- The central party decision-making processes
- The focus on the leader
- Chaotic and inept targetting of resources
- Spending on centrally organised and paid-for-delivery leaflets that arrived, nicely ironed, through doors with Pizza menus
etc etc
It will be interesting to hear the team’s take on these and other issues, plus their strategic recommendations.
* Paul Walter is a Liberal Democrat activist and member of the Liberal Democrat Voice team. He blogs at Liberal Burblings.
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39 Comments
I recall that in Watford, after the mayoral election, there was a focus on actions with quick results, such as cleaning up graffiti, not just the most prominent graffito, but lots of them.
Paul Walter | Tue 12th May 2020 – 1:25 pm
“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out some of the main themes that are likely to feature in the team’s report”.
I did actually know a rocket scientist. A previous Prime Minister head-hunted the entire civil service to find someone to sort out a problem in the Home. Office. He came from the Ministry of Defence, to which he returned to work on an invasion of Iraq.
Richard
I have known several rocket scientists. All of them were or are members of the Liberal Democrats. I live near the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, which is why we have had quite a few rocket scientists living in our town!
I think we’ve missed a real opportunity here to have a truly independent review of the election campaign, totally separate from the party machine.
I look forward to the report but I’m not convinced the authors will have the courage to identify the real issues that include a HQ out of touch with the real world, which explains why they built a presidential campaign around a leader who was dreadfully unpopular with the public.
Another notable rocket scientist is Professor Richard Rumelt, who started his career as a systems engineer designing a machine to reach Mars (which it did), and later turned his intellectual skills to the study of strategy. He says the elements of a good strategy are essentially the same whether the aim is getting Voyager to Mars or defeating a competitor. His insights apply to politics too. We are due to update the party’s strategy; I’m glad I came across his ideas.
From a parallel universe with a Lib Dem electoral strategy in which we still got 11% of the vote and 11 seats, but many of our campaign decisions were opposite to the ones we actually made. I have no doubt that many of the same people would be complaining about:
Our refusal to support a December 2019 general election, whcih happened despite our protestations, and we looked ‘frit’.
Our failure to take an explicit anti-Brexit position, making us look like we couldn’t make up our minds on the biggest issue of the election, so losing us our anti-Brexit vote and making us look like we didn’t have the courage of our convictions.
Prevaricating on the questions of whether we could form a government and which party we would go into coalition with, so it appeared that we didn’t ‘believe in ourselves’ enough to be able to say our leader could become PM.
Can I just say Iv’e never met a rocket scientist.
The party chose a leader who was compromised by her part in the cruel terrible coalition. End of story.
Alex Macfie is right to point out that we can’t know that things would have gone any better if different decisions had been made. It is also true, in my opinion, that an election was inevitable because both the SNP and the Tories wanted one for their own party political reasons and had the votes to force it through whatever happened.
However I do not understand why Alex thinks that we did not have a clear anti Brexit position, which I opposed and caused me to withold my vote in both the General and European Parliament elections, before deciding to go all out for revoke. The decision to change to revoke appears to have been motivated by Labours move towards an anti Brexit position, which ironically cost them so many seats.
I suspect that one of the biggestr mistakes was election strategists, when looking at the Local and EU elections earlier in the year, failed to take into account that EU citizens who are probably more likely to vote for us cannot vote in General Elections.
Andrew Tampion: You misunderstand. “Lib Dems not having a clear anti-Brexit position” was part of my constructed alternate reality. As it happens I do not think we had any alternative but to go full-on anti-Brexit, since if we hadn’t then we would have been seen as trying to triangulate the way Labour was doing. Our principal failure in the election campaign was probably in campaign strategy and media management. For instance, no competent Lib Dem media manager would have tolerated the stitch-up BBC QT programme, in which the audience was stuffed with hyperpartisans based on the 2017 distrubution of MPs, so we got 2 supporters out of 100, and Jo was bombarded with scripted arguments from our enemies with no-one to stick up for us. I suspect that Jo and the campaign team didn’t know what was going on, since she should probably have walked out of the show once she realised she was being played. This walkout should have been followed by an angry public complaint about the format of the programme and the audience selection method. Sore losers? Well at that point we had nothing to lose. This is just an example. It was incumbent on our media managers to work behindd the scenes to ensure we were represented fairly in the media, and they failed.
The reason for Labour’s failure was not its Brexit stance (except in the sense of seemingly having no idea about it). It can be summed up in two words :”Jeremy Corbyn”.
He was also the main reason I got for people voting Tory instead of Lib Dem in the Tory-facing target seat where I live. Keir Starmer already seems a much more credible Leader of the Opposition, and his opposition to Brexit is unlikely to be a problem.
Alex Macfie I think you misunderstand my point which was that our Party already had a strong anti-Brexit position. The decision to go for an even more anti-Brexit position probably cost more votes than it gained.
Also why, if as you claim the reason Labour lost votes was it’s Leader not it’s anti-Brexit stance, were nearly all the seats they lost to the Tories in Leave voting areas? We will see what impact Kier Starmer has in time but I doubt he will be able to rebuilded the red wall without a change in position on EU membership.
Andrew Tampion: My hypothetical scenario is based on us having weakened our anti-Brexit position in the GE campaign.
Well, you could ask why Labour lost seats to the Tories in Leave voting areas when the Labour leader was, at heart, a Leaver. Keir Starmer was marginalised in the Labour campaign — he had no key broadcast appearances, while the senior Labour figure with the most key broadcast appearances apart from Corbyn and McDonnell was the pro-Brexit Barry Gardiner. Given the amount of airtime Labour gave to pro-Brexit figures, and the not-so-secret pro-Brexit leanings of their leader, one would expect Labour to have done reasonably well in “Red Wall” seats had it just been about Brexit. But it didn’t matter to Red Wall voters that Corbyn and his inner circle was actually pro-Brexit; it was the whole Corbyn package that they turned away from, i.e. the knee-jerk anti-patriotism and anti-Westernism, and all the rest of the 60s/70s student revolutionary BS. Corbyn’s Eurohostility happens to be part of that package, because he has always seen the EEC/EC/EU as a capitalist conspiracy. But it doesn’t seem to have warmed Red Wall voters to him, because the package as a whole did not appeal.
Keir (note spelling) Starmer does not have that hard-left baggage that so put off Red Wall Labour voters, and if anyone would have been able to sell the EU to Leave-inclined natural Labour voters, it is him.
Alex Macfie. But we had a pro second referendum position prior to revoke so logically your counterfactual argument should be if we had maintained our position and not changed it, or am I missing something.
As far as the Red Wall. Several Labour MP, for example Gareth Snell and Caroline Flint were interviewed on TV in the aftermath of the election and blamed the Labour’s anti-Brexit stance for their defeats, while acknowledging that JC was also a problem. Are you really saying that you know better than them why they lost?
“Great efforts were made….”? No one asked me but I was just an agent during this calamitous campaign, certainly the worst I have experienced – my first was 1966.
Andrew Tampion:
That would be Alex Macfie along with just about every political commentator and political polling analyst identifying Jeremy Corbyn as the primary significant factor. Then there are responses heard by our canvassers on the doorstep. The continued insistance that we rejected Jeremy Corbyn was not based on an ill advised whim, it was in direct response to how the Corbyn factor was affecting us.
A question: are you a Brexiter by any chance? (your first comment was unclear on this) It would provide a context to your comments.
Andrew Tampion: You are missing something, which is that the hostile environment in which we had to campaign meant that we would have been criticised whatever our position, whether Revoke or 2nd referendum. The 2nd referendum position has its own problems, which our enemies would have immediately latched onto. What would the referendum have been on? Johnson’s deal? Or a new deal, which a Lib Dem government would negotiate and then recommend people vote against? And would a Lib Dem government honestly go through with a withdrawal if Leave won a 2nd time?
One would expect Caroline Flint to blame “Labour’s anti-Brexit stance”, as she is herself a Brexiteer (as well as anti-Corbyn). People like Jess Phillips and Keir Starmer were saying something different. Labour’s Brexit policy was a contradictory mess. At least it would presumably be clear that Lib Dems would recommend a Remain vote, but Jeremy Corbyn said he would remain neutral in any 2nd referendum campaign. Labour may have had an officially stated policy of having a 2nd referendum, but it was doing all it could to downplay this in its campaign in Red Wall seats.
Martin. Since you ask I voted Remain but accepted that the referendum represented the will of the majority of the electorate and accordingly that we should leave the EU. Accordingly I refused to support or vote for my local Liberal Democrat candidate, with whom I remain on excellent terms. If that makes me a Brexiteer in your eyes then I am. I suggest to you that Alex and most political commentators are pro Remain and therefore have a vested interested in minimising the role of Brexit far more than a Brexiteer might have an interest in emphasising it. Four of the five seats we lost were in Leave areas (the exception being Jo swinsons loss to the SNP). How do you explain that if Brexit was irrelevant? And if Brexit cost us seats why would it not have lost Labour seats as well.
Alex. If Keir Starmer and other pro Remain activists accepted that their stance had cost the Labour Party so many seats then they would have to accept blame for the defeart so I suggest that itis in their interests to attributed the defeat to another cause.
I’d say rocket scientists have been somewhat overrated. In any case, the development of rocket engines and missiles is more engineering than science. A difficult challenge -sure. But, on a par with the development of jet engines and manned aircraft.
Speaking for myself, as a Physics graduate, the saying should really be “It’s not Quantum Science”. That’s not just difficult to understand, it is seriously weird !
@ Andrew Tampion,
“And if Brexit cost us seats why would it not have lost Labour seats as well.”
Of course it has. How else can you explain the loss of seats like Wrexham, Leigh, Bolton, Grimsby and all the ones in Stoke (plus many others) at the same time as Labour was winning in Putney and holding on to Canterbury?
Strange times.
Let’s see what happens in the next few years!
Peter Martin
“I’d say rocket scientists have been somewhat overrated. ”
I have always wanted to encourage a discussion about rocket scientists on this website. So I wrote a post about the general election review, intending to encourage a lengthy off-topic discussion on rocket scientists.
I am glad my ploy worked.
@ Paul,
Yes point taken!
I had thought that I might write in to say that it’s about time everyone stopped picking at the old scabs of the general election results and Brexit. The world has moved on and we all should too.
But I thought a discussion of rocket science might be more interesting! 🙂
Andrew Tampion:
Whoa there; that’s like saying “I voted «non-Conservative» but accepted that the election represented the will of the majority [or at least a substantial plurality] of the electorate and accordingly that the Johnson government should get to do whatever it wishes without opposition and without dissent.”
And following on that note showing such a fundamental misunderstanding of democracy (if one side wins the vote, then the dissenters have to shut up for all time, which is why dictators love referendums so much) I declare my part in this discussion over.
We had a referendum and one side won. Many on the other side accepted the democratic result. But many did not. They protested outside parliament. They marched. They demanded a second referendum.
These people were seen by the majority to be ignoring the democratic result and therefore democracy itself. Many politicians reneged on their election promises. Some defected to other parties. This party took an extreme antidemocratic view with its Revoke policy.
Eventually the 2019 election was held and the majority took their revenge. Many Individual politicians were removed with surgical precision. Parties were punished.
Politicians defy democracy at their peril.
It’ll be interesting to read the review. I don’t know what the review is going to focus on but it felt like we attempted two objectives:
1) To get defections from both sides of the political spectrum and give former Conservative and Labour MPs the resources to win seats as Lib Dems.
2) To target a new “core vote” of southern English constituencies which weren’t necessarily historically Liberal but contained large numbers of remain voters.
In terms of 1) we failed to get anyone re-elected. In terms of 2) we gained a raft of second places but no victories.
On top of that we a) Lost our leader’s seat to the SNP and b) did poorly in the few seats we were head to head with the Labour party.
Elections aren’t isolated events, if even one of the defectors remains involved and wins a seat at the next election it could yet work in our favour. Likewise those 2nd places could be the springboard for large gains, especially if the Labour party look less extreme and voters are more willing to look beyond keeping Labour out of government.
I think we were close to a good result but it didn’t quite work out and we need to try and build on the things that worked.
I’d be interested to know why we lost East Dunbartonshire while winning North East Fife and why we failed to retake Sheffield Hallam.
@Peter: The “Revoke” election campaign pledge was not “anti-democratic”, it was PART OF DEMOCRACY, as were the anti-Brexit marches. Campaigning in a democratic election to replace a previous democratic mandate is the whole point of democracy. What is anti-democratic is the idea that any specific mandate should be considered sacrasanct and unquestionable. The fact that so many people (such as you and Mr Tampion) seem to subscribe to this false idea of democracy for referendums explains why dictators love referendums so mch.
Alex Macfie. Whoa; that’s a straw man argument.
In the first place a referendum is not like a General Election because referenda, in this country, are used to determine specific questions of constitutional importance. General Elections are to determine which party should form the government. Yes I do know that unless specified otherwise referenda are “advisory so Parliament do not have to implement the result. However Parliament did decide to implement the result of the EU referendum so that’s an academic point.
Second accepting the result did not mean accepting the form of Brexit adopted. There was nothing stopping MPs seeking member of the Customs Union or Single Market. Indeed many did. But, in my opnion, the constant “Stop Brexit” message got in the way of this.
It’s not a strawman argument, it’s the direct implication of what you are saying. Whether election or referendum, the right to campaign against the resulting policy is an integral part of democracy. That parliament decided to implement the result is also irrelevant; it also implemented the Poll Tax, did that make the (in that case successful) campaigns against the policy undemocratic?
Of course Lib Dems could have settled for a soft Brexit. But for our anti-Brexit supporters, this would have been an even bigger betrayal than tuition fees, and it would have led to a further collapse in our support in the following election whenever that would have been. And for ANY policy to be ‘out of bounds’ for debate is anti-democratic. So saying “you can talk about soft or hard Brexit, but you can’t question the Brexit policy itself” is an attack on democracy.
@Peter: “Many Individual politicians were removed with surgical precision” Really? Then how come Lexiters such as Dennis Skinner and Caroline Flint were removed, while Europhile Jess Phillips survived? A pretty incompetent surgeon, if you ask me. But that’s elections for you.
Anyway let’s try to get this back on topic. We’ve had our Brexit election. Brexiteers, in particular those of the Tory variety, now own the project and I hope they are happy. The next election is going to be fought under very different circumstances, mainly on the real-world consequences of leaving the EU, as well as the government’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis. The Johnson regime’s present crisis bounce in the opinion polls isn’t going to last long. Which side of the barricades one was on during the Brexit debates is unlikely to be a salient issue in 2024.
This thread is supposed to be about the Lib Dem General election review, for which I said my piece in my submssion, which was similar to what I wrote upthread at 13th May ’20 – 8:17am. Andrew T 13th May ’20 – 6:02pm provides a good summary of what the review is likely to focus on.
The reason we lost East Dunbartonshire while winning North East Fife was simple: Jo Swinson, as leader, wasn’t in the constituency enough and we failed to shore her up when the SNP wanted her scalp. As for why we failed to retake Sheffield Hallam, probably that’s because Jared O’Mara was out of the equation and we hadn’t worked out how to campaign against hard-left Labour.
Richard Underhill 12th May ’20 – 3:00pm
His name was Chris Mace. I worked for him for a while. He accepted my advice that the difference between asylum claims at the port of entry and in-country was entirely artificial. He therefore made a takeover bid to straighten out this long running anomaly.
Asylum work is complicated. Immigration Officers asking applicants for the political element of their claims were missing the point. There are other criteria for meeting the inclusion criteria, such as religion.
Alex Macfie 14th May ’20 – 7:47am,
Liberal Democrats killed the Poll Tax in the Ribble Valley by-election.PM John Major and former challenger Michael Heseltine set about reforming it, removing the nastiness that Norman Tebbit liked. We also gave the Tory chairman an early bath. The replacement system suffers from the same fault which killed the preceding system of domestic rates, which was infrequent reviews causing unpopularity (under a Labour government). Ask Tony Greaves. He was there managing an old printer.
@ Alex Macfie,
“Then how come Lexiters such as Dennis Skinner and Caroline Flint were removed”
Caroline Flint would have lost the Don Valley in 2016 if the UKIP and Tory vote hadn’t been split. The loss of Dennis Skinner is perhaps more worrying for the Labour Party. The consensus view is that the demographics of the Bolsover constituency have changed rapidly since the closure of the mines and it is now semi rural commuter belt. That could be part of the explanation but I’m not totally convinced. In both constituencies It’s more to do with Labour’s growing disconnect with the working classes and the opinions of the MPs only partially offset that.
You should be more worried that the Lib Dems haven’t picked up enough support to save their deposits in either constituency!
A large section of traditional labour voters wete obsessed with getting out of the EU. They loved Boris Johnson for facilitating this and for his optimistic personality.
Our position on just ignoring the referendum vote without a second referendum completely destroyed labours chances, with numbers of their northetn voters directly switching to support get Brexit done Johnson. Just a complete disaster. But at least we now hve an excellent opposition leader in Starmer.
@ Alex Macfie “Jo Swinson, as leader, wasn’t in the constituency enough”.
Nothing to do with an overblown claim to be Prime Minister, or an unhesitating willingness to press the nuclear button, then ?
And nothing to do with an egalitarian Scots culture that routinely takes people down who are seen to get above themselves ? With your name you should know that.
Christopher Haigh: Once again, someone who imagines that the Lib Dems had a lot more influence in the election campaign debate than we actually did. It wasn’t the Lib Dems who destroyed Labour’s chances; we were barely present in most Red Wall constituencies, and it’s unlikely that voters there gave any thought at all to what we were saying. It was Labour who destroyed their own chances, principally by having such a weak leader. Note that I don’t think Brexit was “irrelevant”, as Andrew Tampion suggested I do upthread. Rather, I think Johnson’s “Get Brexit Done” campaign worked as well as it did because Labour ran such a poor campaign, with an ambiguous Brexit policy and a leadership that did not connect with the electorate (for reasons not necessarily to do with Brexit).
David Raw: On both of those things, as you well know, she was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t. If she hadn’t made a pitch for PM, we would have been derided as lacking ambition. If she hadn’t said she’d press the nuclear button, she’d have been attacked like Corbyn was for being unpatriotic.
As a candidate in a Remain Tory seat, I know what went wrong for me – Revoke, Swinson and (to a lesser extent) “tactical” voting. Those were the things I got on the doors time and time again as reasons not to vote for me. It had nothing to do with anything else in our manifesto, indeed some policies went down very well (especially a penny for the NHS). The problem is we chose to send out leaflets covered in Swinson’s face and trumpeting Revoke, and the centre didn’t change course on either until it was too late.
I’m not holding my breath for a thorough and honest review here, these things never are.
I’m more optimistic about the contents of this GE Review than about previous ones. The key questions however are going to be:
a) Will those pulling the strings on the London centered Committees that run the Party take any notice and implement the needed changes?
b) Will the new Leader, when we eventually get one, take any notice or go their own way regardless, as Clegg and Swinson did and as Farron in a different way did.
People who were unhappy about what the Conservative Party stands for were encouraged to think that it was membership of the EU that caused it rather than Conservative governments since 1979. So, therefore people voted Conservative to oppose what the Conservatives stand for. They wanted Brexit, thinking this will end the way our country has become one run by and for the leaders of wealthy international big business.
Meanwhile, we are seen as the true heirs of the pre-Brexit Conservative Party. We have been pushed by Labour telling everyone that all of us enthusiastically supported everything that the 2010-15 government did. But our national leadership has done NOTHING to contradict this, not in the 2015 or 2017 or 2019 general election.
So, there we are – we are seen as the party of the right, the Conservatives are seen as the party of the left and Labour as the party of the centre.
@ Matthew,
“So, there we are – we are seen as the party of the right, the Conservatives are seen as the party of the left…….”
The LIb Dems did have the most fiscally conservative economic policies. I’d say the Tories are the party of the anti EU left and and anti EU right.
“…….. Labour as the party of the centre.”
Not with JC in charge. They were the party of the pro EU left. Now they are more the party of the pro-EU centre.
@Peter
What I’m saying is more what ordinary people think, rather than what is the actual case.
I can assure you that many ordinary people don’t now think of Labour as the party of the left in terms of being the party that wants to make us a more equal society and give more power and income to ordinary people. Instead, Labour is just seen as a party of intellectual types who want to put themselves in power.