Tag Archives: LDV at 10

On 27th August, LDV will be 10 years old. In that time, we’ve brought you over 24,000 posts and published over 337,000 comments. Over the Summer holidays, we’ll take you on a nostalgic meander through a decade of Liberal Democrat history, seen through the eyes of our editors and contributors. We hope you enjoy our choices.

Cast your minds back to May 2010, when Nick Clegg walked along Downing Street as Deputy PM for the first time. How did LDV contributors take the news?

101 ways to win an election co-author Ed Maxfield described family tensions but looked at the opportunities the coalition offered. His comments about the way we campaign should probably have been more widely read:

Those entering government face an enormous responsibility – to deliver good government with a distinct liberal tone. But the wider party must also recognise this is potentially a moment of transformation. We have to start work now on winning the referendum on voting reform. We have to plan for the next election to be on radically different boundaries returning far fewer MPs (and on AV too). Hardest of all, perhaps, we have to ask whether the guerilla campaigning techniques that have served us so well for the last 40 years are ‘fit for purpose’ now.

I am unsettled but full of hope for the future today. Being in government is much harder than being in opposition.

On 27th August, LDV will be 10 years old. In that time, we’ve brought you over 24,000 posts and published over 337,000 comments. Over the Summer holidays, we’ll take you on a nostalgic meander through a decade of Liberal Democrat history, seen through the eyes of our editors and contributors. We hope you enjoy our choices.

Just in case you ever forget how awful Labour could be on civil liberties. With added video from Dr Pack.

On 27th August, LDV will be 10 years old. In that time, we’ve brought you over 24,000 posts and published over 337,000 comments. Over the Summer holidays, we’ll take you on a nostalgic meander through a decade of Liberal Democrat history, seen through the eyes of our editors and contributors. We hope you enjoy our choices.

As the party gears up for a potential snap election called by a Prime Minister on honeymoon, we can look back at the last time we thought, with a bit more certainty, that we were in this boat. I kid you not, one candidate actually cancelled a holiday to China because he didn’t want to be away for any of the campaign.

Of course, then, it never happened. Here is Stephen Tall’s analysis of the situation:

100 days in power, and the toughest decision yet faces the Prime Minister: does he seek a mandate, or does he delay calling an election?

A week ago, the decision looked a formality. Labour was riding high in the polls on the back of their ‘nobody mention the Blairs’ party conference, and a couple of polls suggesting double-digit leads over the Tories. Spool forward, and it’s all looking a lot less rosy, with a slew of polls indicating a narrowing of Labour’s lead.

If there’s one thing more stupid than taking too much notice of opinion polls, it’s taking no notice of them. You can bet the last penny in your Northern Rock account that Mr Brown and his advisors will be poring over every single psephological detail.

If – and it remains a big if – Mr Brown decides it’s too risky, and rules out a November election, he leaves a wide open door for the Lib Dems and the Tories: the carefully cultured image of a strong Prime Minister in complete control of events will be impossible to maintain after weeks of dithering culminating in a conclusion that he’s not popular enough to win, even with the following wind of a 100-day honeymoon.

It’s not only his prestige with the public and the media which will take a knocking – so too will his credibility among the party faithful, who have so far shown themselves to be devotedly in thrall to Mr Brown. He’ll have marched them up to the top of the hill, only for them to discover he forgot to mention there’s another peak beyond. Pretty demoralising stuff. The Labour party has trusted their leader to know exactly what he’s doing. That Mr Brown’s now boxed himself into a corner suggests he’s not the political genius too many people have assumed on the basis of not much evidence.

Of course, he may well still call an election for November. Until now, I’ve thought Labour would be sure-fire winners of such a snap poll. Not any more. Mr Brown is obsessed, it seems, with trying to understand the British psyche – in which case he should appreciate the very real possibility that the public could react in a ‘bloody sod yer then’ way to any cynical attempt to bounce them into casting their votes before they’re good and ready.

If there’s one lesson of the last three weeks’ opinion polls it is that the public has still to make up its mind about any of the parties, and wants to see all their leaders properly tested in the coming months. Force-feeding voters a diet of under-cooked policies in a rushed general election will just give everyone indigestion.

But what of now? I expect Lynton Crosby is champing at the bit to persuade Theresa May to go to the country. She has the chance to kill her opposition. I hear that senior Labour people at Westminster are pretty gloomy with some even thinking that they would be lucky to win 100 seats. The Tories are ahead in the polls and we’re in that Brexit phony war situation. The economy is likely to take a major knock. Things are going to get bad. If you were Theresa May, would you not want to secure yourself another five years before things get terrible?