From the University of Bath website:
On the coalition negotiations in May 2010, William Hague is reported to have told his wife, Ffion: ‘I think I’ve just killed the Liberal Democrats.’
Well, William, it seems we have come back to life.
Some personal reflections on the campaign, if I may:
Firstly, I never thought we’d win Newbury outside of a by-election again after dear David Rendel was our MP from 1993 to 2005. During the campaign it became clear that the Tories had, more or less, given up. Two Tory stakeboards were spotted. They didn’t have a stakeboard campaign – this from the party who used to put up hundreds of posters in fields full of sheep throughout the constituency. The Tory GOTV effort on polling day was virtually non-existent. But well done to Lee Dillon and the whole Newbury Lib Dem team for years and years of hard work to get Lee into the House of Commons! It gives me goose-bumps just to say that.
Secondly, well done indeed to Ben Maguire and team on winning North Cornwall with a stonking 10K majority, overturning ex-MP Scott Mann’s 2019 majority of 15,783. The Conservatives have lost all their six seats in Cornwall! I didn’t dare to believe such a thing was possible!
Thirdly, well done to Tom Morrison and team in Cheadle. Fantastic. Tom is a great guy and will make a superb MP!
* Paul Walter is a Liberal Democrat activist and member of the Liberal Democrat Voice team. He blogs at Liberal Burblings.
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7 Comments
Very interesting to see how many “old” LD seats have been reclaimed.
This is a wonderful opportunity for the party. Well done everybody.
Perhaps these amazing results will now ‘kill’ all the moans on LDV threads about the coalition years? 😉
ALso notable how many fairly recently held Liberal Democrat seats were won from the Tories by the Labour Party. eg. Southport, Colchester, South East Cornwall, St. Austell & Newquay, Weston Super Mare…….
William Hague? Just remember his winning the 1989 Richmond (Yorks) By Election when the row with David Owen meant that the opposition vote was split between the recently created Social and Liberal Democrats’ and Owen’s surviving SDP’s candidates . Hague came first with 37.4% of the votes cast, against a combined vote of 54.3% of SDP and SLD. If only tactical voting had been alive and well back then, young Master Hague might easily have had to wait a little longer for the opportunity to grace the green benches!
We are very much alive however we actually have been almost completely killed off in labour facing areas; the Greens have now overtaken us to become the main opposition to labour in many places including former lib dem seats like Manchester withington and Hornsey and Frien Barnet.
We urgently need to take action to resuscitate local parties in these areas if we ever want to fulfil our ambition in 2010 of replacing/partly replacing labour as the main progressive party!
This could be done if we use our higher profile to start aping the greens in the national media, whilst at the local level sending in activists to help them at for at least the next round of local elections, which would repay them for having sacrificed their chances by helping our target seats.
As I have commented before, we need to be organised on a constituency party basis, not just District Council basis . Or have dual memberships of both levels (?)
It is now imperative that over the next 5 years we build constituency organisations capable of standing on their own feet and fighting elections to win. We need to take a leaf out of the US Democrats who fight presidential (and other) elections by finding thousands of volunteers, who take on organising their local area with minimal support from the centre or paid organisers. We should also ensure that every council by-election is fought with the aim of winning and that every seat is fought in all and any council elections. Training must now be started to achieve these aims. Without a fundamental change of organisation and a big push to recruit enough people to fight on a much wider front, we will never get beyond the foothills we have got back to after a 14 year struggle.