This election has revealed issues with the Party’s messaging approach, policy approach, and electoral distinctiveness. These need to be reckoned with very soon if the Party is going to remain relevant.
This election cannot be regarded as a victory
Many senior figures are calling this a victory. That we have “held off Reform, won more councillors than the Greens, and trounced the Conservatives.” – quoting directly from Ed Davey’s Instagram page. This take feels detached from reality.
We haven’t held off Reform; despite only gaining overall control of a handful of councils, they’ve elected over 1000 new councillors. We haven’t won more new councillors than the Greens, they’ve elected a net-gain of 441 councillors compared to our 155. In an election year where the Tories and Labour combined lost over 2000 councillors, it is appalling that we did not win more. What’s even more shocking is that many of these races were won by our opponents with far less observed work in the ward.
The Lib Dems can no longer depend on the progressive vote
In many inner-city areas, the Lib Dem campaign put in a monumental shift. People I personally knew in those areas spent the last year canvassing and delivering yet found themselves really struggling on polling day. In one area where I had fully anticipated a LibDem win, we ended up coming third. The Greens, who had done no serious work in the ward, came second, and the Labour incumbents held on. Many of our wins were holds, suggesting that we enjoy incumbency bonus, but there is little penetration of our messaging, despite all this work. Months of work yield little meaningful payoff, and our candidates come away demoralised and defeated. In summary, in the eyes of progressively minded people, the Lib Dems are no longer perceived as a progressive party and cannot command a tactical vote sufficient to dethrone Labour and hold off Reform.
Our air-war is shoddy and we need to step up our social media game
A key reason here is that a good chunk of Generation Z experience political content primarily through Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Contrary to the views of some within the Party leadership, I don’t believe that traditional methods alone can suffice. Polling of 18-24 and 25-49 age groups puts the Greens clearly ahead. These people live busy lives, aren’t often home, and frequently live in blocks of flats. That said, to their credit, HQ now has a huge new social media team, with a £450,000 price tag. Whether this will cut through remains to be seen. What the Greens have got right here is their social media presence is young and energetic, with fresh and relevant solutions.
We need to be more distinct
This dovetails with my final major point: the Lib Dems are not doing enough to meaningfully distinguish ourselves from the other Parties. In my view, from 2024, we’ve been electorally and politically stagnant, and the Party has forgotten how to be an effective campaigning machine. Many MPs are well-educated, but their expertise is being wasted. For example, we don’t have the tax experts working on treasury matters, and as a result we had Daisy Cooper come out with the politically-weightless idea of a Trumpian “Department of Growth” with a tagline of “Get Britain Growing Again.”.
This isn’t cutting through the noise because the Party elite won’t take risks. Our version of a ‘major announcement’ is Ed giving a milquetoast press briefing with substandard video production. If HQ’s intended direction of campaigning is meant to focus on making British people’s lives better, this must be clearly communicated and demonstrated – MPs must be present for debates and be a national voice, not just quietly tending to their constituencies. They need to be substantially more radical in their calls for change and push the excellent policy we already have, such as land value tax, health and social reforms for trans people, greater local democracy, and fighting social injustice. The current modus operandi is a vague opposition to involvement with Trump, and little else.
Conclusions
If we want to cut through a hostile and increasingly right-wing media landscape, we need to be loud about what makes us Liberal Democrats. We need to have leadership personally calling out Labour’s major failures. We need to be opposing the deeply anti-Liberal things this Government is doing.
If we don’t, then this Party is going to fail to be a meaningful antidote to the hard-right populist policies of Reform. A Reform Government, for people like me, would make the UK unliveable. The Party needs to be a lot better, or risk simply fading into the background and once again be remembered as the party that stood by and let louder voices have their way.
* Tara Foster is a LibDem campaigner from Southampton. She sits on the LGBT+ LibDems Executive as an Ordinary Member and is a prominent member of the Radical Association.
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Changes in status: Local Elections wrap up
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20 Comments
I would talk about the issues other parties don’t talk about like education for example. It is counterintuitive but talking about voters top priorities e.g the NHS doesn’t lead to differentiation.
Agree with all of this! To see everyone from HQ and Ed to local party group chats demanding this be seen as a victory based on narrowly defined criteria(we’ve never won this much on a cloudy tuesday!) is pure cope. We aren’t winning. We know this, polls say this, the election results proved it too. We aren’t making progress. Our comms isn’t fit for purpose. Our strategy shouldn’t be driven by a group chat in HQ. We should be leading and we’re falling further and further behind. It’s a travesty and HQ and the PLP need to face it head on.
With the permission of the moderator, I’m largely recycling my comment from Caron’s post a day or so ago.
We don’t talk enough about what liberalism is in either principled or practical terms, and that means we get taken for slushy centrists, competent managers or the least worst option. Below is a proposed short form version of who we are and what we believe, for on the ground consumption
‘Liberals believe that your life is your own, no-one else’s. We believe that everyone should be as free as possible, given real power to make the absolute most of their own lives, with as little interference as possible. We believe the role of local councils/county councils/the mayor/parliament/government (delete as applicable to the campaign) is to be the servant of individuals, families and communities, strengthening services, removing barriers to opportunity and addressing issues seriously. We believe in localism, community and doing real, practical things to help you to live your life as you wish.
For these reasons, our priorities in (name of area) are…..’
Then list local policy achievements/campaigning points/key local issues in properly liberal terms, rather than borrowing the language of either statists or populists.
Speaking as quite a left-liberal, we don’t talk about enabling liberty nearly enough, and we should do do more – it is our philosophical USP.
Just a thought – amendments heartily welcomed. Brilliant post Tara.
Agree with all of this, but if anything this understates the problem. It’s not just that we are quietly tending to our constituencies, it’s that when we do speak up about anything, it’s often in a way that actively undermines our identity as a vehicle for liberalism. The sight of our parliamentatians leading the charge to ban social media for young people outright, in the face of party policy advocating very much *not* that, leads me to believe that this is not so much an area of neglect for the party leadership as an active attempt to undermine and replace our identity with something more palatable to the One Nation Tories they have spent the last 5 years trying to hoover up, with what we now see are ever diminishing returns.
It definitely feels like there is a strong consensus among a number of recent posts here.
Activists worked their socks off, but that can only take you so far when there’s no clear national narrative (and even more so, when our lack of national narrative is competing with the easy answers of populisms).
The party need to cut this doom loop, or recovery will be as short-lived as Labour’s looks to be. And that means something has to change at the top of the party.
For a start we could say that we want to Rejoin The EU & repeat it whenever we get the chance. The Right-Wing Media would come down on us hard, getting us free publicity & perhaps beginning to get us a hearing from the under-50s.
Or even better speak to the benefits of re-joining the customs union/single market for the economy and all regions of the UK and revitalising our High Streets.
Very much agree with you Tara! We need a clear, distinct, bold, and (above all) liberal message to be projected across the nation.
When I was campaigning too many people told me they had no idea what the Liberal Democrats were all about. Even one young person I met on polling day, who was very knowledgeable about Kingston Council’s pension funds divestment policies, didn’t know it was a Liberal Democrat run council!
Couldn’t agree more, Tara – a well-written piece that I hope is read by The Powers That Be. *waves to Lord Pack*
On the differentiation point, I keep coming back to how Paddy Ashdown or Charles Kennedy – or even Nick Clegg – would differentiate the party in its current context, and I can’t help but think that they would do a much better job of giving the party the strong, and strongly Liberal voice, it currently seems to be afraid of using.
Smell the coffee. A regular contributor to this forum put the correct label after the 2015 as the party of 7pc. That is the core vote, the rest are none-of-the-abve protest vote. In 2019, the aim was to represent the 48pc and that was another disaster.
In 2010 the party celebrated as a huge victory when the first act of that government was to cancel the Heathrow 3rd runway. Whatever the merits of that case at the time (on ballace I recognise the need for a 3rd runway for increased national connectivity to industrial powers around the world) it was not and is not the voters FIRST priority and of little concern to those not in the LD’s south London target seats. It’s the economy stupid.
The prospect of rejoining the EU is almost vanishingly small for a variety of reasons:
1 – at best ot would require a future government to call a referendum, that referendum to be won (LDs have an awaful record in winning thei key referenda – IN/OUT called for by Campbell, and the PR called by every man and his dog)
2 – the UK is not high on the EU’s list for prospective members (some may block)
3 – the UK will not get the same favourable terms that we abandoned and the new terms would not be acceptable to the voters
4 – etc.
5 – even of there was a clear plan and a sunny day, tmembership in some acceptale form would be at least a decade away after condition 1
– none of that addresses the needs of the voters at the next national and local elections (recall that LD have already tried to represent the 48%)
Wake up.
Let’s boil it down to one point – we need to take more risks.
We seem to feel the need to work out policies almost as a piece of draft legislation (pages and pages in a conference agenda). Bold statements on Europe, wealth tax maybe, powerful slogans etc etc.
And broaden the spokespeople. Ed and Daisy can’t do everything.
It is not a question of waking up we know there’s unlikely to be another referendum. However it’s not impossible to join the customs union or single market like Iceland and be outside the EU. Labour are moving towards that position.
Exactly this, the results in East Sussex where nothing short of a disaster we almost ended up with less seats than the Greens and Reform almost won a majority in a county where they previously had nothing, we only held onto our seats in Eastbourne due to the collapse in the Conservative vote and made no gains in the east of the county and actually came 3rd in our main target seat of Brede Valley and Marsham.
There was an aggressive campaign against and reasonably successful ousting of local residents associations in Surrey.
I am curious where, if they completely dissolve, that voting base may shift to.
Very well said, Tara. I am in complete agreement.
“In summary, in the eyes of progressively minded people, the Lib Dems are no longer perceived as a progressive party”
May be voters don’t want a “progressive” party.
And what does “progressive” mean anyway?
I suspect most voters want things to get better (or at least not get worse) something to keep them busy, and for taxes not to go up to much.
There will of course some people who vote on the basis that it is a good thing if things get worse for other people, especially if those other people are different from themselves.
The analogy I used at our inner London count was it was like being an army with no air support we had to win our vote by delivering leaflets and letters every weekend / several times a month / monthly have thousands of conversations only for the Greens to get almost as many votes as you did with 1/100th of the effort on the ground.
Well said Tara, great piece and I hope HQ are listening. I like Jack’s version of who we are, it is better than anything our leader has produced. As I noted in answer to Caron’s piece the Thornhill review identified this as a key role for the Leader. In her piece for LDV in Feb 21, Dorothy noted “We have made less progress on defining and confidently asserting our party’s vision and purpose … the truth is many voters remain, at best, ambivalent to us.” That was five years ago. We are too often defined by what we are against, not what we are for, and are barely less timid than the current PM.
Re the voices above saying ReJoinEU is a non-starter, even voices within the Labour party are saying they should adopt this position – listen to Sadiq Khan on The Newsagents the other day. Surely we cannot afford to let Labour get to this position before we do??? It is our party policy to work towards rejoining – we surely have to be clearer about this.
But in my view our key USP is our belief in local government being the delivery of change. We need to be far bolder in presenting a holistic programme of political and economic reform that links greater powers to much greater funding and delivers proper devolution to the combined authorities that will soon be the norm across the country, and stop calling for regional government, even if that is a better solution it won’t be popular.