In her monthly column on the Lib Dem website, Sal Brinton talks about how far we’ve come in the last month!
One thing is evident: the high calibre of our councillors and MEPs. We are back with a campaigning zeal and will be able to fight for residents, our country and against Brexit. I certainly plan to keep campaigning until we stop Brexit so they can stay there for the full five years until 2024 and I know you will too!
And on Friday we welcomed Chuka Umunna, MP for Streatham, to the Liberal Democrats. He has worked with us over the last three years to help fight Brexit, and defeat the Government. He recognises that we are the pro-European, liberal, centre-ground party and I am delighted he has made the decision to join us. He’s already working with his local Liberal Democrats!
I also want to welcome to the more than 20,000 new members of the Party this newsletter is going to for the first time!
She talked about our very clear message and how this has helped us cut though.
It’s clear that people are joining us from all parties and none because with politics as febrile as it is, we’re the one party that’s absolutely clear. We want to stop Brexit. “Bollocks to Brexit” was our clarion call during the European Elections and oh boy! were we heard!
She also dangles the prospect of more success – Welsh Lib Dem leader Jane Dodds as MP for Brecon and Radnorshire. But we all have to work hard to get her there.
You can read her whole column here.
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6 Comments
Right now we are one of 4 British Parties clustered between 20% & 23% of the Vote (probably), hence the hilarious headline about a “Boris Surge” when The Tories get 21%, in one Poll.
The fly in the ointment is that our 20% wish would get us 50 MPs or thereabouts. However, we now near the tipping point where our Votes would begin to get us hundreds of MPs, another 2-3% would probably put us over 100 Seats & the growth would accelerate above that.
The next Month could be even more exciting than the last.
I agree with Paul on the state of play for the Lib Dems in the polls. At present we are in line for having the same amount of seats in both 1997 and 2001, 46 to 52 seats. If a general election were called I suspect the Brexit vote will split the Tory vote, just as there was a split between Labour and the SDP in 1983. This could work to our advantage in the South, London and South West. A split in the the vote would allow the Lib Dems to take more seats on a smaller portion of votes high twenties. Normally to break the 100 seat barrier we would need to reach 30 percent. but with the polls so polarised , 25 percent would get us in to a hundred .For any party on present polling to get a majority government they would only need 32 percent. Reading other web sites, Labour is rattled , and the more our support grows the more they will attack. Their message is being lost. We have a clear message on Brexit, but over the next few months we need to be putting the meat on the bones of progressive Liberal policies, such as climate change, and how the country should move towards carbon neutrality . There is Green votes out there that we need to garner.
Ian Warren has calculated from the Euro results that we might win 97 seats. Our sight on 50 would be wasting a unique opportunity.
I have argued for over a year now that the logical consequence of our strategy to be the leading national anti-Brexit Party was that we would then have an obligation to provide voters across our countries with the chance to vote Lib Dem and that thie needed a radical (and probably one-off) ultra loose targeting policy.
However this meta-strategy, this positioning of the Party is not without risk. I am not referring here to targeting, you understand. Ben Williams a former team member in the Whips Office has written a fascinating blog https://fragmentsandreflections.me/2019/06/14/parliament-precedent-and-brexit-or-high-stakes-innovation-and-civil-war-what-next/
Along side a look at Charles I’s relationship with Parliament he has also focused on George’s attempt to make Pitt the younger his First Minister which was resisted by among others Charles Fox. (representing Parliament).
He asks us to consider that the duel between monarch and parliament in that instance led to the defeat of the Liberals and issued in a period of 18 years when they were out of power.
It is not a great deal of a push to see Mr Johnson as the rogue PM. Defeat to Farage would be a horror show but a popular administration led by Johnson and initially underpinned by an electoral arrangement with Farage, would be ‘something else’.
We have to be ambitious and aware of the stakes that we are playing for.
Charles Pragnell: If we ought to garner Green votes, would it not make sense not to steal but to share them, by adopting a policy of greater collaboration with the Green Party? Are our policies so very different from theirs? Are we still hampered by the mendacious economic label stuck on us by the Tories: “neoliberal”? We must not allow ourselves to be cheered overmuch by figures in a gesture poll that counts for little if Brexit cannot be averted.
And if it’s votes we want, not reciprocal internal plaudits, why are we not taking more noticeable notice of the ballooning topics, especially among the young — the urgent topics of Climate Change and of the degrading Environment? I believe the showing of the Green Party in the EU election is more significant than ours, which I fear is largely a gesture in the Bollocks to Brexit vein.
But Bollocks to Brexit is language we need more of: clear,energetic, frank, and popular, in the best sense of the word. Positively Johnsonian, Sir. And vice versa.
Charles Pragnell: If we ought to garner Green votes, would it not make sense not to steal but to share them, by adopting a policy of greater collaboration with the Green Party? Are our policies so very different from theirs? Are we still hampered by the mendacious economic label stuck on us by the Tories: “neoliberal”? We must not allow ourselves to be cheered overmuch by figures in a gesture poll that counts for little if Brexit cannot be averted.
And if it’s votes we want, not reciprocal internal plaudits, why are we not taking more audible notice of the ballooning topics, especially among the young — the urgent topics of Climate Change and of the degrading Environment? I believe the showing of the Green Party in the EU election is more significant than ours, which I fear is largely a gesture in the Bollocks to Brexit vein.
But Bollocks to Brexit is language we need more of: clear,energetic, frank — and popular, in the best sense of the word.
I am very glad that I dont have any responsibility for Targeting, we are caught between fear & hope & every decision will be out of date the week after its made.
In the past 6 Weeks we have come half way. Before May 3rd we were around 10%, now we are on about 20%, another 10% would put us in Number 10.