Like many Lib Dems who stood in the 2026 locals, I’ve spent most of the last year walking around my ward knocking on doors, delivering leaflets and following the strategy that we were told gave us a really good shot. Our data looked great, we were making lots of contacts and many voters told us they were voting for us tactically against Labour. The race seemed like a clear two horse race, the Greens previously had less than half our vote and didn’t campaign in the ward. It sounded like we had the perfect chance, right?
Well, I thought so too and felt optimistic on polling day and on my way to the count the day after. Then, we came third. Against an insurgent Green party that didn’t even campaign in many wards. Looking back, I don’t believe there is anything different we could have done locally. We ran a great campaign.
It’s the same story in many wards across London, and in other areas where we do not hold the parliamentary seat, where good hardworking teams lost out in wards to parties who did little to no campaigning.
I am genuinely exhausted with seeing people claim this election was a great result for the party. Entrenching ourselves so hard into the blue wall that we can never expand as a party is not a success, and it tells activists like me who live in Labour/Green facing areas that we don’t matter and aren’t cared about by the party.
As a party, I feel like we have lost our way, and I am not the first to say it. My friend Tara Foster said as much yesterday. We have cemented ourselves so much as just being ‘not Tories’ and ‘not Reform’, that we don’t have a message outside of this. Most people my age voted Green because they ran on a message of hope. Meanwhile, I struggle to articulate what our party actually stands for. We have no national direction, and we have no message. That doesn’t attract young voters who are desperate to see real change. Young people are struggling with rising housing costs, student debt, low wages, a terrible job market and so much more. Our party rarely, if ever, talks about issues that directly affect young people and we often shy away from the issues young people really care about like Palestine, LGBT+ rights, racial equality, women’s rights and other socially liberal ideas. It has been incredibly frustrating as a member to see us hide away from actually being Liberals.
I don’t believe our party’s situation is terminal, but we cannot shut our eyes and pretend everything is fine because we won every seat in Richmond. Party leadership has to take accountability that this was a poor result, and the blame lies on them for our poor messaging. It does not lie with the many activists who put their heart and souls into campaigns only to either come a poor second or even worse third.
If we cannot acknowledge our mistakes and refuse to take ownership, we’ll start to see even our held areas falling back as our voters choose not to tactically vote for a party with no direction. It’s time for change, and that change needs to come from the top.
* Rebecca Jones is the secretary of Lib Dem Women and was a local election candidate in Islington.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
A journey along the Welsh Border in 1963
Recipe for a real change of direction
Day 9304: So Farewell Then, Kier Starmer
Dennis
Chloe
Slamdac
Nonconformistradical
Mick Taylor
33 Comments
This hits the nail right on the head, very good article!
I couldn’t disagree more with this article. I fully appreciate Rebecca is an absolutely exhausted candidate, who rightly feels all her long, hard campaigning work was not reflected in her result. However, by any measure, the 2026 elections were NOT a bad result for the Liberal Democrats. We gained lots and lots of seats across the country. We gained the control of several Councils across the country. Gaining seats and Councils is not what a bad result looks like. We didn’t gain hundreds and hundreds of seats like the Greens or Deform, but we were starting from a much higher base. It’s perfectly understandable to be disappointed and bitter after not getting the victory you deserve, but this year’s results weren’t brilliant or astonishing, instead they were the 8th year in a row we’ve made net gains and we have continued to grow from a now already high base.
But where were those gains? Sure, in our held seats we made some big gains but in places we do not have the MP we made a net lose of about 20 seats. We, as a party, are supposed to be a national party. But it increasingly feels like we are becoming a regional rural southern England party with a handful of exclaves outside of this. We should have done far better in a year when both Labour and the Conservatives were crashing.
Big Tall Tim – perhaps you could explain why, with such excellent results, we had our worst national vote share in 8 years, comparable to the coalition year of 2011?
Also down 2% in London compared to 4 years ago, and our worst inner London result since 1978 when our party leader had just had to resign for trying to murder somebody.
Tim, with respect that is total complacency
T he party has been squeezed out of more wards, councils and constituencies.
Unless we recognise this nothing will improve.
Rebecca is 100% right and deserves our fullest support.
First of all – thank you for all your hard work, Rebecca. It deserved more on election night than you got.
Secondly – yes, you’re right. We do not have a message to take us up a notch again, we’re rather drifting right now. We aren’t making the most of our sitting MPs, we’re not out there fighting sharp-elbowed battles. Yes, we need to consolidate the 2024 gains, but we cannot let ourselves get locked into a single sort of voter; we need to figure out what’s next. Certainly, we can’t be just handing over young graduates to the Greens – they’re surely the next sort of voter we’d want in our coalition, given the sorts we won last time!
Sorry to hear you were not rewarded for your efforts Rebecca, and thanks for your link to Tara’s piece on Monday. I made comments there that I could repeat, but fundamentally we need a better vision and better messaging from the centre if we are to make the progress I firmly believe we could and should be making as Labour and Tories collapse.
To add to this, the rise of the Greens did not only kill our chances in much of London but also cost us a good number seats in the shires where the Greens resisted being squeezed. I lost by 34 votes to Reform while the Green vote share increased without any campaigning (their candidate getting 356 votes), despite our target seat level campaign from a held constituency – this division crossing between two constituencies.
A good portion of the electorate is getting to the point where they are choosing to vote for the party they most like, come what may. Without a stronger national message, that won’t be us.
@Big Tall Tim
1) We gained lots and lots of seats across the country. We gained the control of several Councils across the country.
Gains were concentrated in existing fortresses and affluent areas. That means that we are not effective at winning elsewhere, which puts a hard ceiling to maximalist future ambitions.
2) Gaining seats and Councils is not what a bad result looks like.
Seats are a means, not an end. So you have to look at the whole picture, not just the raw numbers.
3) We didn’t gain hundreds and hundreds of seats like the Greens or Deform, but we were starting from a much higher base.
That also means we have, on paper, better experience and infrastructure. We are also not a traditional government party, which puts us more in the challenger than the established camp. So I don’t think you can say that their lower base is necessarily that big an advantage per se.
@ Rob Blackie,
“perhaps you could explain why, with such excellent results, we had our worst national vote share in 8 years, comparable to the coalition year of 2011?”
This is because the electorate is more fractured than it used to be. So, theoretically if 5 parties had an approximately equal share of the vote the winning party would just need 20% + 1 votes.
This is also why Starmer’s Labour Party won so many seats with just over a third of all votes cast. The intervention of Reform split the right wing vote.
BTW You and I might think your former leader was guilty of attempted murder but the courts decided he wasn’t. So we should always err on the presumption of innocence. He deserved a couple of years jail time, though, for causing a dog to be shot! That was established in the court. Dogs don’t get much legal protection, unfortunately.
Can I be very Lib Dem and say that they were good, in the sense we further consolidated our hold on seats we hold / could win at the next election but also very problematic if we ever want to expand beyond our core areas. This now means explaining to people as to why they should vote for us rather than Labour when there’s no threat from the Tories or Reform.
It should be by no means be a surprise we have that problem as when you look at our values in charts there’s a massive overlap between those who vote for us and those who vote for Labour, so how do we differentiate that means we don’t alienate people in the seats we hold / can win?
I would also throw up the question of do we want to broaden our range if our main aim is to hold the balance of power after the next election and then be in a strong position to get what we want ie voting reform and much, much closer ties to the EU / rejoin?
@Peter Martin
Your using circular logic throwing your hands up and saying the electorate is fractured is just saying that people voted green and reform because people are voting green and reform.
When labour were last in power they lost support from similar groups of people but very few of those that wouldn’t vote Tory voted green or ukip, most such people went to us.
We now have more MPs than we did back then so it’s not because we’re in a weakened state, we just aren’t trying to appeal to any of these people in the ways that we did back then.
You won’t find anyone saying we did well that were in an urban area facing Labour or the Greens. Reform facing seats and rural seats are doing great but our current trajectory in under 35s is terrible, we have no message for them and we don’t speak to them.
@Big Tall Tim
Most of our gains were in in seats we currently hold. We took a net loss outside of lib dem constituency’s. Furthermore allot of gains were in those county councils which were last elected in 2021 when the Tories were still very popular.
This is not a sign of success, it’s a sign that we’ve hit a road block. And that’s very bad, we can’t do anything with 72 seats, we need allot lot more to win any serious power.
Having 72 seats should have given us more exposure that we could use to push a national message that would help us expand further, we’ve not done this, we used to back in the 2000s, but current strategy is to hang on to what we have just for the sake of it and not to get any further.
Tim, complacency.
Rebecca is spot on.
We are being squeezed out of more wards, councils and constituencies.
Something has to change and quick.
Yes, it is serious. we need an urgent new national strategy
The problem is thus: The Greens are hoovering up left leaning social liberals (despite their Momentum Corbybite rhetoric) but meanwhile centrist voters aren’t coming over in the numbers expected. Having clear, bold messages on Europe, cost of living, civil liberties and possibly education would help.
This is a tactical point (and not a criticism of this campaign but I’ve seen this said elsewhere.
Why when you had lots of contacts, lots of door knocking was the data looking good and the results not good.
There should be some digging into the data there was and how people are analysing it because if you have a decent slab of canvass data and interpret it correctly then the result shouldn’t be a total surprise. And when it does often reworking the data/analysis shows it shouldn’t have been!
@ David Le Grice,
You’re missing the point. Any party polling N% of the vote will win fewer seats if the opposition is one party with (100-N)% than if the opposition is two parties of (100-N)%/2 each. And if the the other (100-N)% is split 3 ways the benefit will be even more pronounced.
It’s just a matter of arithmetic. The more the opposition vote is split, and the more even the split, the better LibDems will do in terms of seats for a given % of the vote. It’s the same for other parties too, of course.
The relatively more even split in the right wing vote between Tory and Reform, in 2024, is why Labour had a huge majority with 34% of the vote, whereas they came second in 2017 with 40%. Lib Dems also benefitted in 2024, and for the first time reaped the reward of the numbers of MPs matching the percentage of LIbDem votes cast.
I firmly agree with this. Notwithstanding that I was part of the East Surrey team that won in a blue wall area that isn’t very blue anymore.
We lack a vision. It is not enough to not be the Tories, we need to have something to offer to people so that they will want to vote FOR us, and it has to contrast to the vision that Reform and Greens have.
It needs to be grounded in a vision for growth, abundance and the open, liberal society. Something akin to what D66 ran on in the Netherlands last year.
I don’t think this is that difficult. We just need to have the courage to grasp it.
Peter in a fragmented system with a given % share you would expect to win more not fewer seats! The problem was that the target LD vote went to other parties especially the Greens, mainly due to the cost of living in my view and in some wards due to Gaza.
Also worth saying that local issues played their part including how happy people were with their councils performance. The Lib Dems did well where they already run the council but much less well where they didn’t.
We made progress overall as party, but we are still stuck in our 2024 formula – except as Rebecca says, we have swapped ‘Tories’ for ‘Reform’ ie – ‘we need to stop Tories/Reform and only the Lib Dems can do that where you live’.
Our appeal is largely to educated, professional, ‘middle’ classes, probably owner-occupiers; which is fine so far as it goes – but what have we to say to the urban, economically-pressed inner city residents? The Greens have (where I live in north London – same party as Rebecca) occupied the ‘alternative to Labour’ position.
We have to argue for improved liveliehoods – economic and growth opportunities – and that means Europe. Not just calling for a Customs Union (what’s that?) but spelling out, producing a story/picture that being in Europe, in the single market, will produce a healthier, more productive economy and better jobs.
Our environmental policy must offer a solution – not net zero by 2050 (what’s that?) – but a move to renewables which means smaller price rises and energy security;
and fair, equal votes (not PR – what’s that?) so your voice is heard and you get politicians and councils/parliaments that you voted for. This last point – fair votes – is an open goal for us vs Labour as most Labourites (including the teller I was next to last Thursday!) back electoral reform – as do we – but their party machine silences them. What have we to lose?
This is interesting. I agree with everyone who says we are becoming too much of a regional southern party and have no message but then i listened to Ed in the Kings Speech debate and felt that he did articulate a very clear and Liberal messgae but it’s not getting the airtime. When I first joined the Party’s predecessor in 1975 we talked openly about workers and tenant’s cooperatives as part of a strategy of returing power to the people. The other radical policy which we have talked about but not majored on is a shift from taxes on income to taxes on unused wealth and land. Just some ideas for policies that may cut through on the media.
Rebecca – 100% agree. People who think these were good results given what we could and should be achieving reminds me of the person falling off a skyscraper saying to themselves ’60, stories high, and I’m fine; 50 stories high, and I’m fine, 40 stories high, and I’m fine…’! We need both a national message that it positive and speaks to people’s real concerns (which are not the EU or civil liberties, no matter how much they excite us), and we need a different leader to sell that message to the public. However lovely Ed is (and he’s very lovely) and however successful he has been (he has been very successful), he is not the man to take the party forward. We need to find the nerve that saw us remove Charles when he needed to go (for his own health as much as anything), and get a better communicator in place now. Increasingly the party reminds of a description that Blair used for Labour in the 1980s “a really good idea, just executed really badly”.
As someone who campaigned alongside Rebecca, I strongly endorse her comments. It’s clear to me that we need a compelling message that reaches the voters we do not manage to contact. Just one paid for delivery by the Greens in our target ward – of a national leaflet featuring Zac – but they leap-frogged from 4th to 2nd. Working out how we do this is essential if we are to have a chance of winning (in inner London boroughs).
We saw Greens defending Liberal Values while we didn’t. Is it surprising that New Voters went to them rather than to Us ?
We need to be more like The Greens & more like we have b been in the past – fierce & hopeful.
Probably we need a New Leader too but lets wait till Labour have got theirs first.
@Rob Blackie. Thorpe was accused of conspiracy to murder and therefore thought it right to step down whilst he defended the case. He was acquitted. Now, I didn’t have a lot of time for Thorpe., but to say he tried to murder someone is neither fair nor true.
Losing a seat or not gaining one is very frustrating, especially when you work your socks off. In 1977, my then wife was unceremoniously dumped as county councillor because many voters didn’t like the LibLab pact, despite most people saying she’d done an excellent job. In 1988, after 12 years as a councillor, including time as council leader, I was dumped because of the merger with the SDP. I (mistakenly with hindsight) stopped campaigning for the party for 10 years. I was very angry that after 12 years of very hard graft, the electorate chose a new and naive Labour candidate, despite agreeing that I’d done a good job.
In both cases the national narrative was crap, bit we’d won elections by good local campaigning before but that wasn’t enough when the chips were down.
Local campaigning is very important and a good national message helps. We’ve had good national messages in the past and still lost! It’s a combination of things that gets spectacular results and getting that right is very difficult.
In 1962, a large number of Liberal candidates found themselves being elected without much campaigning after Orpington, some even controlled councils we had only ever had one or two councillors on. It was a false dawn
@ Mick Taylor You are, of course, correct. He was found ‘Not guilty’ on the specific charge to which you refer. Whether lesser charges of intimidation or attempt to frighten would have succeeded we will never know. Richard Wainwright was right to demand his resignation
But it would be interesting to know whatever happened to the carpets at the National Liberal Club, the archive collection at the NLC (Bristol University ?) and whether any action was taken either by the Party or the authorities on overseas money laundering via the Channel Islands.
“I (mistakenly with hindsight) stopped campaigning for the party for 10 years.”
Does this mean I’m about to hit that point then @Mick 🙂
“It’s clear to me that we need a compelling message that reaches the voters we do not manage to contact.”
Again tactics not strategy – but basing things a lot on vote contact never seemed to me to recognise that it is a lot hard to contact voters. People don’t even answer doors as much now.
The Greens weren’t performing particularly well until Polanski became leader. He’s a classic charismatic populist in the Farage image, pushing a political agenda economically not much different to Corbyn, and arguably no less questionable. Under him the Greens are now picking up the protest vote that would have once gone to the Liberal Democrats. Ed Davey has done a good job in getting us to the current representation in the Commons, but we now need a more charismatic leader to counter the attraction of Polanski. Everything else is irrelevant.
Totally agree Rebecca!
We should have made significant gains in inner London, Newcastle, Gateshead, Sheffield, and Hull given how unpopular the Labour government in Westminister is.
Our grass roots activists and councillors work incredibly hard, and deserve a party leadership that puts the same level of effort into developing a bold and radically liberal national message.
To coin a phrase, I agree with Rebecca.
I am reassured that the balance of an opinion here is strongly in Rebecca’s favour too.