Ed Moisson

Glass looks half full to me

By Ed Moisson | Sat 21st December 2019 - 2:29 pm

Trawling through the general election results, I see that the Liberal Democrats finished second in 91 seats.

Disappointed they didn’t finish first in all of these? Of course. Disappointed they didn’t finish first in even 10 of these? Yes, that too.

But the disappointment should be set in relation to the progress the party has made since 2015 and not just compared to expectations from earlier in the summer this year. For this, I’ve been crunching some numbers to see how Liberal Democrats have fared over recent general elections.

Following the 2015 election, there was a general expectation that it would take many years for the party to recover. That’s still the case. Remember, in 2015 the Lib Dems came fourth or worse in 524 seats. And in 185 of these seats the Lib Dems actually finished fifth, sixth or seventh.

So the party could potentially claim a respectable result in barely 100 seats across the UK four years ago. By contrast, in the 2019 election the party finished in the top three in 443 seats.

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged | 56 Comments
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Katharine Pindar

Here is what counts – our country needs the Liberal Democrats

By Katharine Pindar | Sat 21st December 2019 - 12:37 pm

Change will come and change will go, but the Liberal Democrats just keep going. Hopefully, usually forward!

We have been successful enough this year to attract both alarm and attempted derision from our rivals. Now we are being blamed for the defeat of the anti-Johnson alliance of smaller parties. Yet our leader did make us a force to be reckoned with in the Election by leading the anti-Brexit drive with the strong unique policy of possible Revoke.

However, in the over-confidence Jo showed in suggesting she could be prime minister she fired a rocket which, like the November 5 ones, shot up with a thousand stars – and then was extinguished. She lit the touch-paper herself and suffered the burn from it. But thousands of her colleagues in our party are still standing, and a few made it to the House of Commons.

So what? – disillusioned voters may say to us. You are irrelevant again – and more distrusted because it seemed by adopting the Revoke policy you threw away your one concession to Leave voters, that you would give them a chance for reconsideration in another referendum. You can apparently be as tricky as the biggest parties, voters may say, especially when the voting record of your departing leader in the Coalition is considered.

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Posted in Op-eds | 53 Comments
Mary Reid

It’s a long game

By Mary Reid | Sat 21st December 2019 - 10:38 am

If you are recovering from a hard fought campaign which did not produce the results you were hoping for, then you do not want to read ‘how we did it this time’ from one of the few successful constituencies. And this is not one of those posts.

Instead I want to offer encouragement and hope, reflecting on our history. In Kingston & Surbiton, we’ve been there before and we got through eventually, but it was a long game.

We first took the Parliamentary seat in 1997 on revised boundaries, which had worked in our favour. Lib Dems (and the Alliance before that) had spent many years building up our seats on Kingston Council.  I should explain that the constituency of Kingston & Surbiton covers 12 of the 16 wards on Kingston Council.

Until the early 80s we had no seats at all on the Council. The Tories had always won, with Labour always in opposition.

Our breakthrough came in 1982 when the SDP-Liberal Alliance won 7 seats. In 1986 we pushed that up to 20 seats and the Council went into No Overall Control for the first time. By 1990 the Tories were once again in control but we held a healthy 18 seats.

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Posted in Op-eds | 14 Comments
Nigel Jones

General Election 2019 – campaign positives and negatives

By Nigel Jones | Fri 20th December 2019 - 8:13 pm

Here are what I think were some positives and negatives about our campaign messages and strategy. They are based largely on the points made to me as a candidate by voters or members and other party activists have endorsed the points I make. They are not in any particular order of priority. Some of the negatives were to some extent beyond our control, but they are matters we need to face better in future.

Positives

  1. We said correctly that we are by far the strongest party for Remain.
  2. Our manifesto was full of excellent proposals and was the only credibly costed

…

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Mark Paine

Why I won’t be re-joining Labour

By Mark Paine | Fri 20th December 2019 - 7:00 pm

Currently I have a lot of people on my Twitter feed asking ex-Labour members like me to re-join the party to wrest control back from the Corbynites. For a fleeting second, I do feel a tiny pull, the old vestigial loyalty flickers for a moment but then just as swiftly dies.

Since I joined the Liberal Democrats just over a year ago after a long (too long) time in Labour, I have discovered that this party is the true home of radical, progressive politics. As someone on the Centre Left, I feel far more comfortable here than I ever did in Labour.

Why? First, because I feel that I have an equal voice in this party and a real say in policy rather than just being the canvass fodder I was in Labour; party democracy in the Lib Dems is real rather than a vague aspiration. Second, linked to the first point, I have been able to set up an official group within the Party (the Liberal Democrat Autism Group). As far as I am aware this is the only party Autism group in the UK; a great example of both the freedom we have as members and of our party’s inclusive values. Third, this party is a truly broad church – left-wingers like me can happily co-exist, debate and work with those on the Centre Right; in the Labour Party the different factions exist in a permanent state of cold war, hating and distrusting each other almost, if not more, than they hate the Tories and us.

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Mary Reid

Norman Lamb to head mental health trust

By Mary Reid | Fri 20th December 2019 - 5:46 pm

Congratulations to Norman Lamb who has been announced as the new Chair of South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. He will take up his post in March 2020.

Norman told the Norwich Evening News:

I’m delighted and really excited by it. Stepping down from parliament was a big decision and I wanted to focus on mental health in the future.

This is probably the most prestigious mental health trust in the country serving a disadvantaged part of London, so there are massive challenges that it faces.

It’s a fascinating and exciting organisation to be part of.

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Sebastian Field

Hard work and optimism will be our party’s salvation

By Sebastian Field | Fri 20th December 2019 - 3:35 pm

So it’s happened again. Despite hoping against hope that the polls were wrong, and that we were having an impact in the target seats way above our polling levels, we’ve been left with a diminished parliamentary party for the third successive general election.

We started with such high hopes, but end with the cause of Remain now surely lost, and a hard-right Tory government with a majority big enough to do more or less what it likes.

Are there any reasons to be cheerful?

The seeds of our possible regrowth are contained in our defeat. We must start by holding this government to account, exposing their lies and broken promises. Boris Johnson will surely get the Withdrawal Agreement through parliament now, but that is the easy part. The protracted negotiations that follow will be a major test for Johnsons’ government, and may well provide opportunities to score hits.

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Jack Davies

No. The Lib Dems should not disband, but we have got to change strategy

By Jack Davies | Fri 20th December 2019 - 1:01 pm

I’ve been involved in politics for five years – although it has felt a lot longer – and experienced three General Election campaigns. Each one has been disappointing for the Liberal Democrats and each has led to a lot of soul-searching after polling day about what went wrong. The answer is almost always the same: the Lib Dems got squeezed out by the playground bullies of the British political system and failed to stand out from the crowd.

That sort of answer then seems to lead directly to the usual articles in tabloid newspapers about the relevance of the Liberal Democrats as a political party. These articles, usually calling for the Liberal Democrats to disband entirely and be absorbed into the author’s preferred choice of either Labour or the Conservatives, rest on the idea that a political party which is not one of the two parties most likely to form a government in its own right is not relevant to political debate. This is nonsense perpetuated by columnists who fail to understand that it is the voting system, not the parties themselves, which dictates the government which is formed after an election.

While I could spend the entirety of this article explaining the reasons behind my support for a proportional voting system which would give political parties a share of the seats in the House of Commons which more closely aligns with their share of the popular vote, I want to focus instead on the Liberal Democrat platform which is so often derided as being centrist.

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Jeremy Hargreaves

Federal Policy Committee report – 16 December 2019

By Jeremy Hargreaves | Fri 20th December 2019 - 11:24 am

The first meeting of the Federal Policy Committee since the recent internal committee elections took place on Monday night. Clearly our discussions were much coloured by the General Election and some of its consequences, but nevertheless we had a constructive and positive meeting. It was great to welcome several new members of the committee: Helen Cross, Aria Babu, Alyssa Gilbert, Peter Thornton, Elinor Anderson and Rob Harrison. We were very pleased also that the party’s new chief executive, Mike Dixon, joined us for much of the meeting, which was very helpful.

First up was some committee business: Sally Burnell and Jeremy Hargreaves were elected as vice chairs of FPC, and Belinda Brooks-Gordon and Duncan Brack were elected to represent FPC at Conference Committee (FCC). We elected Lizzie Jewkes to chair the group which will carry out equalities impact assessments on policy proposals, along with Helen Cross, Mohsin Khan and Tara Copeland to be part of it. They will also involve others from outside FPC. We elected Lucy Nethsingha to represent FPC on the Federal International Relations Committee (FIRC) and as FPC delegate to ALDE Congress. We decided to co-opt the new chair of FIRC, the Young Liberals policy officer, and a representative of LDCRE to FPC.

We had a good discussion about how we can develop as effective as possible working relationships with party SAOs, AOs and regional parties. We very much welcome them being as involved as possible as we develop policy, and are keen to do whatever we can to encourage this. We will make a more pro-active effort to contact them with information about what we are doing, and we are as usual compiling a list of FPC members to be link people to individual groups. In the past we have had an FPC working group looking at what we can do practically to encourage more members to engage in policy – we agreed to re-start this, and they will also look at what more we can do particularly with party groupings such as these.

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Posted in Party policy and internal matters | 13 Comments
Christopher Curtis

What should we do first?

By Christopher Curtis | Fri 20th December 2019 - 10:15 am

I am reeling. It’s not just the catastrophe of this election, but what feels like our country sliding inexorably into darkness, to which we’ve been turning for more than a decade and which, despite our good intentions, could not have happened without LibDems.

One of the few benefits of disaster, is that it forces you to take stock and examine things you might never question otherwise. It drives you to redefine and rediscover what is really important to you: to find a firm foundation on which you can rebuild when everything else has been swept away.

We are in a new world with no way back. I don’t think this is a time to move a bit to the left or right, tweak a few policies, start co-operating with Brexit or Labour or whatever else. It’s certainly not a time to try to “get our old party back” to when things were marginally better than they are now. There’s no possible leader who can magically solve all our problems.

It is a time to revisit our core values and beliefs.

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged | 22 Comments
Tom Arms

Observations of an ex pat: That time of year

By Tom Arms | Fri 20th December 2019 - 8:56 am

t’s that time of year again. No, I don’t mean the season of good will, holly, mistletoe, reindeer, white-bearded elves, and midnight mass. I mean the time to look back and forward at the world political scene. And there is so much to write and so little space.

Britain has just had its Christmas election. America has had its Christmas impeachment. Hong Kong is still in turmoil. Latin America is going through another of its political crises. The Chinese economy is shrinking. America’s Democratic Party cannot decide which way to go. Iran, Iraq and the Lebanon are rioting, so are the French. The Eurozone has had a terrible year. Putin is as belligerent as ever. Turkey is becoming more obstreperous and Israel can’t reach agreement on a coalition government.

Boris Johnson’s landslide victory has for the moment put paid to the Brexit debate. He claims that his historic 80-seat majority on the sound bite slogan “Get Brexit Done” is a massive mandate for leaving the EU. That is an over-simplified misrepresentation. Opinion polls report that the country continues to be split almost 50/50 between remain and leave. The election result was as much—it not more—of a reflection of distrust of an ideologically-driven Labour Party than it was a vote on Brexit.

So Brexit is likely to remain a big issue with the focus shifting to the prime minister’s renewed No Deal threat if free trade talks are not concluded by this time next year. They are other worrying messages coming out of 10 Downing Street: A review of the relationship between the government and the courts and the role of the media are two indications that Boris Johnson will use his enhanced power to stifle dissent and move Britain to a more presidential style of government.

Unfortunately, Boris won’t be facing much in the way of an official opposition. The Labour Party is set for a bitter civil war between the far-left ideologues of Momentum who blame Labour’s defeat on everyone but themselves, and the more pragmatic wing who want a return to the old New Labour. The current election rules as set down by the party constitution put the Corbynistas and Momentum in pole position. This means a longer and more vicious blood-letting than previous leadership battles and raises the spectre of a Labour split and an open goal for the conservative government.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Donald Trump has this week become the third president in American history to be impeached. Because voting in both houses of Congress has become totally partisan, it is highly unlikely that Trump will be found guilty by the Republican-controlled Senate. But has his 2020 re-election been hindered or helped by impeachment? That question cannot be accurately answered until all the evidence has been presented in the Senate trial. So far everything that the House of Representatives has heard is second or third hand. This is because the president has refused to allow any White House officials to testify. There will be a battle royal to force into the Senate witness box.

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Chris Longstaff

Back to radical

By Chris Longstaff | Thu 19th December 2019 - 4:28 pm

A Radio 4 pre-election programme featured a ‘focus group’ which described the Lib Dems as “irrelevant” and “wishy-washy”. They were neither ‘left’, nor ‘right’, but somewhere lost in the middle. The Benny Hill tune was suggested as an appropriate Party theme.

This and the election result may be a distortion of the true representation of what the majority of people think, but for too many the Lib Dems are seen as stuck ‘hey-diddle-diddle-in-the-middle’ of nowhere, taking a little from both of the two major parties without constituting anything of great substance or profundity itself.

So, whatever the debate within the party might be about ‘centrist positioning’, for much of the electorate, Lib Dem positioning has little ‘relevance’; at best it insinuates a willingness to join a party coalition, and we know what a disaster that can be.

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Paul Walter

2019 was the party’s least efficient General Election campaign

By Paul Walter | Thu 19th December 2019 - 12:45 pm

If the objective of a general election is to win the most Commons’ seats we can (which I assume it is), then 2019 was the least efficient general election in the party’s history.

That is, if you define efficiency as garnering votes in such a geographical way so that we maximise the number of seats we win. The figures are as follows:

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 33 Comments
Paul Walter

Our party co-leaders want to hear from us

By Paul Walter | Thu 19th December 2019 - 11:15 am

Our current co-leaders, Sal Brinton and Ed Davey, have written to party members asking for their initial thoughts on the general election campaign and results.

They write:

…we know we have a lot of work to do and many lessons to learn.

In the new year, we’ll be conducting a full independent review of this election. This will include a chance for you to give us all of your views on what worked, what didn’t, and what we need to do differently in the future.

But we also want to give you a chance to share your views before the Christmas break.

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Posted in Party policy and internal matters | Tagged | 29 Comments
Web Magpie

Nick Tyrone: At least the general election result has buried the UK’s flirtation with direct democracy

By Web Magpie | Thu 19th December 2019 - 9:45 am


Embed from Getty Images

On his website, writer Nick Tyrone has written a post entitled “Here’s one thing that was definitely positive about the general election result”.

In it, he argues that at least the general election has killed off the UK experiment with direct democracy and led to a resumption of our historical representative democarcy:

One of the things that has infected UK politics since June 2016 has been this clash between direct and representative democracy, with direct democracy often being given the greater nod by both the public and the media. The Leavers began to treat the referendum result as if it was the ultimate democratic event for all time, one that trumps every other election that has ever been and will ever be; Remainers played the same game for the most part, campaigning for a second referendum. It was as if we had changed the entire constitution without anyone being consulted.

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Ruth Bright

“Thank you!” – an open letter to Jo

By Ruth Bright | Wed 18th December 2019 - 6:32 pm

Dear Jo,

As many others have pointed out in the last few days a bit of masochism never comes amiss if one is a Liberal Democrat. Pain and sorrow come with the territory.

When my 70-year old Mum cruelly lost her hard-worked council seat in 2014, courtesy of the Coalition, we got separated slightly from our colleagues after the count. We are not prone to emotion but, two dumpy ladies of 5ft nothing, we clung together as her result was announced and Labour activists surrounded us and screamed their glee. One of them trod on me in the hubbub.

Later, back home, as …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged | 46 Comments
Stephen Tilson

Reasons To Be Cheerful

By Stephen Tilson | Wed 18th December 2019 - 4:48 pm

I am absolutely not feeling cheerful. I am gutted that my party has once again been drubbed at the ballot box, and the loss of Jo just 5 months into her leadership feels like a kick in the teeth. Watching her in this campaign I always felt that although it wasn’t her moment just yet, her moment would undoubtedly come. Now I just despair at the senselessness of it.

And Boris Johnson! There is a woman in an Iranian gaol because of his carelessness! What is it about this man and his continuous affairs and in-numerate children that the British …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged | 20 Comments
John Marriott

Are we witnessing the Strange Death of Socialist England?

By John Marriott | Wed 18th December 2019 - 2:32 pm

Back in 1935 Anglo-American historian, George Dangerfield, described in his book ‘The Strange Death of Liberal England’ how the Liberal Party of Gladstone, Asquith and Lloyd George, succumbed between 1906 and 1914 to the multiple assaults of Irish Home Rule, the reform of the House of Lords, Women’s Suffrage and the militancy of the Trades Unions. I would, with hindsight, add to that the rise of the Labour Party, which, after being shielded under the liberal wing, eventually took flight and replaced its sponsor as the main rival to the Conservative Party.

Well, I wonder whether, following this latest Labour debacle, …

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Posted in Op-eds | 38 Comments
Jayne Richmond

Change one thing

By Jayne Richmond | Wed 18th December 2019 - 12:02 pm

The results are in. To say that I am disappointed is an understatement. I am sure many of you are feeling the same way.

To fight off the doldrums of despair, I’ve been looking at positive ways forward. To that end I am championing the ‘change one thing’ ideas campaign.

What is it?

Change one thing is simple. Challenge yourself and other members and supporters to think of one campaign which, if successful, would make a big positive difference to people’s lives.

We’re not just talking big things here either (though there is no harm in aiming high!).

It could be campaigning for more baby changing facilities in spaces accessible by all genders. Let’s not just shove the changing table in the women’s toilets please.

Or preventative, for example Cllr Emma Sandrey has suggested mental health check-up as standard. The mental health equivalent of a dental visit or eye exam. Embedding good mental health in to our medical routines and helping spot problems before they become crises.

Or strategic, Maria Pretzler highlights how giving more control over bus routes to councils can help local communities and reduce our reliance on cars.

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Posted in Op-eds | 13 Comments
Andrew Davidson

The General Election – it’s time to stop looking for someone to blame and take action

By Andrew Davidson | Wed 18th December 2019 - 10:15 am

In March 2017, I wrote a thought piece for this journal called “Brexit, it’s time to stop looking for someone to blame and take action”. I took my own advice (more on this later on) but it made me think it was important to write a similar article today simply changing a couple of words in the title.

When that exit poll dropped on Thursday night I was distraught.  Unlike in June 2016, I had feared this result would happen  as soon as the Farage/Johnson pact came out and given the way the  campaign had gone, but seeing it actually materialise was a fundamental blow.  Once again that sinking feeling, both for what it meant for the country but also how harsh it was on so many candidates and activists who deserved far better.

Like in June 2016, I fear for what the result will mean for the U.K (and to some extent this party) in the short, medium and long term. And like in June 2016, its easy to spend your time looking for someone to blame:

  • Should it be at all who voted for this General Election to take place?
  • Should it be once again be at Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and their cabal for putting together a campaign full of lies, most notably that ridiculous “GetBrexitDone” which is so far from the truth it is unbelievable.
  • Should it once again be at many sections of the media who failed to properly hold the Tories to account and call out the lies?
  • Should it be at all those that voted Conservative, against their interests, for the first time, for being persuaded by their false arguments?
  • Should it be those within the LibDems for the general strategy in the campaign including sticking with the Revoke Policy (which for balance I voted for at conference having listened carefully to the debate and thought was right when up against no deal) once a Brexit “deal” was agreed?
  • Should it be at Jeremy Corbyn for being so unelectable to so many of the population that those who would be inclined to vote Lib Dem (or Dominic Grieve in my seat) – or even tactically for an anti-brexit Labour MP, decided that they could not take the risk their votes could put him in Downing Street?
  • Should it be at the whole Labour Leadership for being hostile to any sort of anti-tory pact and then actively campaigning in seats they could not win (e.g. Wimbledon & Finchley) costing the Lib Dems the seats?

Like in March 2017, I realise that, although whilst all these points may well be justified, some more than others, just looking to apportion blame is not going to help. Of course you need to reflect and learn from mistakes but simply looking backwards will not help.

Well a few months after March 2017 I took my own advice, I rose up and took action.  Two years ago this weekend (15th December 2017) I started a new non-partisan twitter account building a community of regretful leavers called @RemainerNow!  It soon became a national campaign using various channels and I would like to think it became a key part in the anti-brexit movement (more on @RemainerNow).  We may have failed in our quest to get a Final Say and stop Brexit but I at least know that I (and the others that contributed) tried our hearts out.  But we have only lost the battle, we must win the war for our country’s soul.

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Paul Reynolds

UK complicit in biggest US cover-up since Vietnam

By Paul Reynolds | Wed 18th December 2019 - 7:58 am

It took a three-year legal battle for the Washington Post to force the US government to release the ‘Afghanistan papers’, a set of lessons-learned reports on the war so far.

The Afghanistan Papers not only reveal systematic lying by the US and UK governments to the general public about the aims and progress of the war, they reveal gratuitous mass killing of civilians in the policy fog.

As if that wasn’t enough to cast opprobrium on the military effort and the capability of the forces involved, the Afghanistan Papers reveal extraordinary confusion amongst senior military personnel, and a war without …

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Posted in Europe / International and Op-eds | Tagged and | 7 Comments
Mark Valladares

17 December 2019 – today’s press releases

By Mark Valladares | Tue 17th December 2019 - 9:45 pm

We’re back, or at least, the Press Team are back, and thus this feature returns…

  • Reckless Johnson risking sending the UK straight off the no-deal cliff
  • Brexit jeopardises pigs in blankets
  • New figures show 2.3 million EU citizens without Settled Status
  • Boris Johnson set to crash UK economy
  • Lib Dems: Whirlpool’s stained reputation on the line

Reckless Johnson risking sending the UK straight off the no-deal cliff

Responding to reports the Government is to add a new clause to the Withdrawal Agreement to make it illegal for Parliament to extend the transition period beyond December 2020, interim leader of the Liberal Democrats Ed Davey said:

This Tory Government’s

…

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Mark Valladares

A member of the Editorial Team responds…

By Mark Valladares | Tue 17th December 2019 - 4:58 pm

Dear Reader,

It’s been an “interesting” few days. As promised, we’ve let a “hundred flowers blossom”, and, for the most part it’s been interesting. But, and you probably guessed that there would be a “but”, there have been a few disappointments along the way.

So, for the benefit of some of you, might I offer the thoughts of Liberal Democrat Voice’s former Readers’ Editor, i.e. me.

Firstly, quoting from my piece a few days ago;

As you may guess from today’s content, Liberal Democrat Voice aims to be a safe place for some of that discussion. We’ll try to offer anyone with a constructive

…

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Chris Bowers

Guidance for selecting the next Lib Dem leader – keep it simple and human!

By Chris Bowers | Tue 17th December 2019 - 2:56 pm

It was just gone 7am, and Boris Johnson couldn’t resist it. ‘Let’s get breakfast done!’ he said, to great laughs. And therein lies part of the secret to why he won a general election with an 80-seat majority – it was a corny line, but people could relate to the awful humour.

There’s a massive lesson for us in that as we choose our new leader. Being embedded in the world of politics, we so easily overlook just how little politics resonates with most people in this country, in fact one polling analyst said the public engages so little with politics that he had even heard some people asking whether Nigel Farage was the leader of the Liberal Democrats. And we forget that some people vote simply on whether they see a politician as a normal human being or not.

This is where Johnson scores. A normal human being he is most assuredly not, but he makes the same kind of bumbling mistakes we all make in our daily lives, and that makes him relatable. His slogan ‘Get Brexit done’ was so effective as to drown out the inherent mendacity of it. The lesson for us is that the next Lib Dem leader needs to be relatable on a human level and to keep it simple.

To those of us who are Lib Dem members, we may wish more for a social liberal or an economic liberal, we may want someone who reaches across the divide to other parties or is more tribal, who respects the liberal tradition more than the social democratic tradition, or vice versa, who is uncontaminated by the coalition or not. All this is fine in terms of satisfying ourselves, but if we want to cut through with the voters, we need a leader the public can see in a largely positive light, who says things in simple terms that we can all understand.

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Michael Kitching

More out of Hope than Love

By Michael Kitching | Tue 17th December 2019 - 12:53 pm

I rejoined the Liberal Democrats this weekend.

I left some 18 months ago, agreeing with many that the party had lost its way over Europe. Our MPs voted for a referendum and then we denied its legitimacy.  It was a fair call to demand any deal be put back to the British people – but it was not fair to block and obfuscate at any attempt to ensure that deal kept us close to our European friends. I felt really angry that values we all shared had been eroded for short term political convenience.

In the end the party became a single issue Revoke campaign that appealed to absolutely nobody. We have ultimately failed to stop or lessen what amounts to a Hard Brexit. Combined, this is a crushing defeat.

So why rejoin?

This time for me, it’s more out of hope than love. I had a go at being part of something new, but as the last few years have shown, all these movements have been beset by the problems of ego and insular thinking. I came to the conclusion that the most likely way to create the country I’d like to see is by being part of changing our party from the inside. I don’t think it will be easy. Nor do I think there will be much point hanging around if, after a terrible election campaign, the party fails to listen and adapt.

Having had the chance to look from the outside and analyse our rivals, it’s quite clear the Lib Dems have lost their way as a campaigning force. As a former organiser I know how heretical it is to question our field campaigns – where simply slogging it out and dumping tonnes of paper through doors, regardless of what it says, will lead to ultimate victory. It hasn’t and it won’t.

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David Warren

Time for an electoral pact with Labour

By David Warren | Tue 17th December 2019 - 10:12 am

So the Tories have won again, no surprise there then, they usually do under our grossly unfair electoral system. The question is what do we do about it if we don’t want to see the Conservatives win power more often than not in the future.

Having a split opposition composed of centre left parties standing in every constituency against a right wing one is a recipe for further disasters. If we look at history we will see that on the majority of occasions when the Tories have been kept out of power have either been when there has been one dominant centre left party or when there has been some kind of electoral arrangement.

It was the Liberal Party back in the early part of the last century that recognised that the emerging Labour Party was going to damage its electoral prospects if something wasn’t done. What followed was a deal where in certain constituencies there was only a Labour or Liberal candidate facing the Tory not both.

Of course over time Labour supplanted us as the main opposition and the first Labour government only happened due to Liberal support in the commons. During that brief administration serious discussions were held regarding a change to a proportional voting system for Westminster elections. It is a tragedy that they failed.

It is no coincidence that the period of Labour’s high tide also coincided with the nadir of British Liberalism. Since 1974 Liberals have once again been a significant force in our nations politics and the Tories have benefited.

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Paul Walter

We did dreadfully badly amongst lower earners and those without university degrees – poll of 13,000 voters on election day

By Paul Walter | Mon 16th December 2019 - 7:23 pm

Embed from Getty Images

Lord Ashcroft has published the results of a poll his organisation conducted with 13,000 voters on election day.

The output from the 29 questions gives some interesting insights and can be read here, complete with clear graphs and downloadable xls data tables.

A few observations from me. Based on this sample:

  • It is noticeable that a high proportion of our voters were “AB” in socio-economic terms. 15% of ABs voted for us (two points of the across-the-board total of 12% in this poll). But

…

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Posted in News | Tagged | 66 Comments
Denis Mollison

The 200-year quest for fairer voting

By Denis Mollison | Mon 16th December 2019 - 4:45 pm

The first use of the Single Transferable Vote was on 17th December 1819, so the bicentenary will fall on the day when our new parliament assembles.

It couldn’t really be more ironic, with a Prime Minister claiming a “powerful new mandate” on 43.6% of the vote, and where a majority of votes were cast for parties opposing the Brexit deal that was the key policy on which he fought the election.

A meeting tomorrow at the Royal Statistical Society will celebrate the anniversary, and give an opportunity to discuss the prospects for electoral reform. Klina Jordan of

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Posted in News | Tagged | 12 Comments
John Grout

A practical, radical response to the election result

By John Grout | Mon 16th December 2019 - 2:30 pm

We see you. You, who would return our party to the comfortable, squishy, managerial centrism of the past. You, who would lay the blame for our defeats solely at the feet of a leader who had the temerity to be a young, outspoken woman. You, who are desperate to hark back to the 1990s when the 2020s are upon us in days. We see you and we will resist you, as we have at every previous election review.

It would be wrong to apportion any election result to a single cause. But let us not forget that Bollocks to Brexit was …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged | 49 Comments
Paul Hodgkinson

All I want for Christmas is my Party back

By Paul Hodgkinson | Mon 16th December 2019 - 12:16 pm

I’ve now had a chance to catch up on sleep and am able to think rationally about the election and what has happened to us as a party.

Go back to election day itself and, having spent 8 hours knocking on doors in Cheltenham in the cold and rain, I got home, had a hot bath and sat down to watch the BBC exit poll before going to my local count in Cirencester.

I can honestly say I loathe exit polls – I’ve only ever been pleased with two in my whole life (1997 and 2005) but the rest have …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged | 45 Comments
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