Tag Archives: european elections

I’ve had an individual membership of ALDE, the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, for a couple of years now. As our membership of the EU was under threat, it seemed important to be a part of that wider movement of European Liberals.

I renewed my subs recently and paid a little bit more for a “Fight like a Liberal” wristband. It’s the ALDE slogan for the European elections. Yes, that’s right, that monolithic superstate decried by Brexiteers was underpinned by a Parliament. It’s not perfect. It needs more powers, but democracies evolve. And the Brexiteers are howling with outrage as our own Parliament threatens to take back the control it was promised in the referendum. When we have a minority government doing catastrophic things, you rather expect that the more sensible MPs will step up and sort things out.

Anyway, my wristband arrived yesterday and it actually made me feel a bit sad. Because we should be gearing up to fight a European election. We shouldn’t be distracted by all this Brexit nonsense. We should be, as the slogan goes, fighting like liberals against the forces of hard right populism across the continent.

It made me think about all the other European campaigns I’ve fought or been aware of in my life.

1979 was the first proper Euro election. I was 11 and in Inverness. Winnie Ewing was always going to win that one and she did.

By 1984, I was heavily involved in the SDP and got into terrible trouble for propping up a Russell Johnston leaflet in my bedroom window. I remember delivering his leaflets in Wick as my parents were following me with Tory ones. It was a forlorn hope, though, because Winnie won again.

1989 was the disaster year when we were down to an asterisk. I was also living in Ayrshire where Lib Dems weren’t exactly in plentiful supply. I was the only one in our village.

By 1994, I was down in the East Midlands. North Notts and Chesterfield formed a constituency and we had a candidate, Susie Pearce, from Aylesbury. That campaign was hilarious fun. You have to wonder how Paul Holmes ever got selected to be MP for Chesterfield when he worked us so hard. Although I remember being told off as his campaign manager because he was just short of about 90% of the vote in that selection. Never one to underestimate anyone’s capacity for work, not only did he have us weighing out a million election addresses from a young council candidate’s flat, he decided we could stuff 40,000 target letters for a by-election in Bradford too.

We pulled a few all-nighters but we had some great laughs and got a good result locally. And nationally, Graham Watson and Robin Teverson were elected in the South West.

At that time we kept winning no-hope by-elections from Labour and the Euros were another staging post for the Council elections in 1995 (which didn’t go so well for us in the end) and Tony Rogers’ 1997 election bid which got us into position to win the seat in 2001.

By 1999, we had proportional representation and a real hope of winning our first Parliamentarian in the East Midlands since 1931. We’d survived the battles of zipping – making sure that the PR lists were gender balanced. And, do you know what? It worked.