Labour’s old coalition was always a coalition of convenience. On one side: socially conservative, economically anxious working-class voters, whose politics were shaped by trade unions, community, and a deep suspicion of those at the top. On the other: socially progressive, increasingly comfortable metropolitans, whose politics were shaped by universities, public service, and a belief that social liberalism was self-evidently correct.
These two groups shared little except a common enemy: the Conservative Party. That enemy is gone, at least for now. And without it, the coalition is falling apart.
Lib Dem CEO Mike Dixon sent members a thoughtful analysis of what happened in the Gorton and Denton by-election and what it means for us long-term. He said tactical voting was more fluid and more decisive than at any election in living memory, and we are better placed than any other party to receive anti-Reform tactical votes across a wide range of seats.
He concludes that the only barrier to success at the next election is our scale on the ground. Build the teams, recruit the candidates, deliver the leaflets, and the opportunity is ours, he says.
I agree on the value of a good ground game, but I fear that is only half the answer.
Ground operations matter enormously, but they are generally designed to motivate our supporters and those who are prepared to lend us their votes to go to the polls. They do not create supporters from nothing. What creates them is a clear, consistent national message about what voting Lib Dem will actually get you.
In the coming political melee, we need to be clear whose side we are on. That means policies that are worthy of the emotional punch our campaigns can deliver.
The Greens show what happens when you get this wrong. Their politics rest on a false premise: that environmental seriousness requires slower growth, higher costs, and less development. Growth versus nature as a zero-sum game. It sounds principled. It is actually a counsel of despair – and in the middle of a housing crisis, it falls hardest on the people who need the new homes.
The Lib Dem answer should not be a softer version of theirs. It should be a more serious one. Decoupling growth from environmental damage is hard, requires sustained investment and smart regulation, and will take time. But it is achievable. And it is more honest to admit the trade-offs than to pretend they don’t exist.
The risk for the Liberal Democrats is not that the Greens outflank us to the left. It is that we drift toward them without quite noticing.
There is a structural pull in that direction. Our activists, our loudest voices, our social media presence all tilt toward the socially progressive end of the spectrum. That makes it easy, almost automatic, to over-identify with progressive social causes while having nothing credible to say to people who feel economically squeezed.
That is not a winning position. It cedes the economically anxious entirely to Reform. It leaves us reliant on a base of already comfortable liberals whose votes we largely have already. And it means we are not speaking to the people who most need someone to speak for them.
The party has something real to offer. A strong team. Level-headed leadership. People who have been tested in local and national government and in opposition, who know how institutions work, who understand that competence matters and delivery is hard.
But competence without content is just management consultancy. Voters who feel economically left behind do not want a more efficient version of the status quo. They want someone who understands why the status quo failed them and has something serious to say about it.
That means being honest that markets sometimes fail. That housing, energy, and social care are broken in ways that require active policy, not just well-meaning sentiment. That fairness is not just a social value, it is an economic one.
Gorton and Denton shows that the political landscape is more open than it has been in a generation. Mike is right that the structural opportunity is wide and real. The Lib Dems are better placed than any party to benefit from what is coming.
But opportunities do not convert themselves. Scale on the ground is necessary. It is not sufficient. The party that wins the next election will be the one that earns broad trust: not just as the least-bad option, but as a party with something genuine to say about people’s lives.
* Tom Reeve is a Liberal Democrat councillor in Kingston upon Thames
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27 Comments
“Decoupling growth from environmental impact…”
Really?? It’s never happened yet.
@Jenny, it is not just about growth but how much growth, who benefits from it and how we create a fairer structure even if there is little or no growth. One thing that cries out from the by-election result and elsewhere is that so many people want radical change from what we have had in decades and unfortunately we Lib Dems are either not seen and heard or too often seen and heard as part of the establishment.
Thanks to Tom Reeve for all the time and effort put into his article.
Might we now start critically analysing “growth” including how it is measured, how it is shared and the sustainability of its apparently many manifestations?
“Build the teams, recruit the candidates, deliver the leaflets, and the opportunity is ours, he says…………… ” Well, it didn’t happen in Manchester did it ? And, who’s responsible for that given there are two nearby Lib Dem seats in Cheadle and Hazel Grove plus the ALDC HQ is in Manchester ? Did Mr Dixon and Sir Edward ever get past the top end of the Home Counties ?
As someone who joined the Liberal Party way back in the early Grimond days (and did my whack at amongst other by-elections Colne Valley, Chester-le-Street, Berwick, Bermondsey and Hull) what’s wrong with giving due credit to the Greens for running a first class campaign with an outstanding candidate ? To coin a phrase, sour grapes don’t butter many parsnips.
These days we don’t hear much about marching our troops towards the sound of the gunfire ….. much more like Neddy Segoon, ‘He’s fallen in the water’.
Large swathes of the UK suffer from decay, poverty and post industrial deprivation …. it’s all in the Alston Report commissioned by the UN in 1919, and Farage’s lot play on it with divisive hate, Liberals should respond, and once again in Grimond’s words, be a Radical party of reform.
Hi Tom, thank you for such an interesting article.
You talk about growth in this article, and I can see where you are coming from. However, the reason why you are seeing “voters who feel economically left behind” is because we are reaching a point at growth rates in western economies slowing.
This is because we are reaching practical and structural limitations to growth in highly developed western economies. Chasing growth that won’t come isn’t doing us any favours. Especially when in doing so we continue to aggravate the social-ecological crisis.
The policies that you discuss, and the policies suggested by environmental economists are *resource efficiency gains*. The “T” in the I = PAT equation can tend towards but never be zero, due to strict physical thermodynamic limits.
*The problem is that we are over consuming at unsustainable rates, so the “A” is far too big.* However, the structural mechanisms under growth always want to increase A. So trying to have a growth economy that has minimal environmental impact is in itself an oxymoron. Under growth, this is just not possible.
Resource efficiency and harnessing renewable energy is not panacea to decouple economic activity from economic growth. Such a suggestion is dangerous fantasy – our economy exists within our biosphere, and thus they are both inherently reliant on each other. Every economic activity has some environmental impact. Even service based economies. These require a material, physical and thus manufactured support network to operate. With current evidence, I cannot see absolute decoupling ever becoming reality.
Neo-malthusian arguments such as found in the Greens oversimplify the problem. We don’t need “NIMBYism or YIMBYism”. The problems we face are much more complex and interconnected than that. What we need is careful and sophisticated resource management to enable the correct economic development in the right places.
NB: IPAT has it’s limitations and assumptions and oversimplifies things, but it specifies the key variables that drive environmental degradation. STIRPAT allows for recognition of non-proportional impacts between variables, and is a more sophisticated model to use.
@Rodrigo: UK GDP per capita today (after adjusting for inflation) is about 3 times what it was in 1960. What makes you think that today we’re hitting some kind of ‘practical and structural limitations to growth’ which we hadn’t hit in 1960? What’s different about the situation today?
You might note that, although real GDP per capita has been pretty stagnant in the UK for the last 15 years, in the USA it’s grown at a fairly healthy roughly 2% per year. As far as I’m aware, the laws of physics are the same in the USA as they are in the UK, so that seems to rule out any explanation based on physical limits for our lack of growth. It must be that we’re doing something differently from how the USA is doing it 😉
>” Their politics rest on a false premise: that environmental seriousness requires slower growth, higher costs, and less development.”
The Green’s premise is correct, (older) people just want to stick their heads in the sand and hope it will all go away, it won’t. Things have got worse these past 30+ years not better. Young people, like Hannah can see and work that out. As Simon Robinson points out, we’ve had decades of GDP growth yet we are in a mess, perhaps it is time to stop worshipping economic growth for the sake of economic growth and start attending to the things that matter and result in a more sustainable society.
Nowhere in this thread so far has anyone mentioned the most cogent comment of the hew Green MO. ‘People are fed up of working hard to make other people rich’. Our party continues to offer no policies on redistribution of wealth and income that we used to believe in when I joined the Liberal Party 62 years ago. The party has swallowed hook line and sinker the tenets of the rich about income and wealth taxation. Wide disparities of wealth and income are known to lead to anger and unrest and we offer no policies that will reduce them. Instead we cling to the idea that growth is the answer, largely ignoring the environmental consequences.
@David Raw
These days we don’t hear much about marching our troops towards the sound of the gunfire”
Can I refer you to this post only yesterday: https://www.libdemvoice.org/ed-davey-the-uk-cant-be-dragged-into-an-other-protacted-middle-eastern-war-by-a-us-president-79216.html
If this not marching towards the sound of gunfire – what is?
A Strong Vision of Hope supported by a strong effort on the ground and in Social media.
Can’t expect a reasonable coverage from the media so paper through the letter box is still an essential element of connecting with the voters.
Thank-you @Mick Taylor for relating this back to economics. I think most Lib Dems believe in fairness and bristle at the seemingly ever-deepening cycles of neoliberalism, austerity and want. I’m sure the Labour party was elected partly on the back of people being sick of austerity, yet Labour have doubled down on it. It’s unfortunate that neoliberalism shares part of its name with part of ours, because when I talk about it, people pre-suppose I’m going to be in favour of it when I’m not! The Green Party doesn’t have that problem and are seen more to oppose it. We must keep in mind how weird and faddish neoliberalism is, and advocate for a less destructive model – Keynesian for example.
Sorry, Tristan, I’m afraid you don’t get it.
Jo Grimond’s comments were an inspiring piece of metaphorical rhetoric at Conference to Liberal activists about getting stuck in to political campaigning…… taking the political fight to the other political parties in a vigorous campaigning way. Something missing in the modern Lib Dems under Sir Edward (although I agree with his latest offering).
I’ve heard many inspiring political speeches by politicians of all parties in what is now a long life. Jo Grimond was by far the best in his ability to electrify an audience.
Maybe we shouldn’t copy their playbook, but we should try to copy the simplicity of what they say. Very often after I’ve listened to some of our people I really don’t know what they’ve said.
David Blake 2nd Mar ’26 – 10:52am……..Maybe we shouldn’t copy their playbook, but we should try to copy the simplicity of what they say…..
I watched her acceptance speech…VERY CLASSY….
As John Crace in the Guardian paraphrased it.. “She spoke of her pride in being a working-class woman from the constituency. That she understood how hard the cost of living crisis was for everyone. How she valued the way neighbours still looked out for one another. Multiculturalism had defeated the toxic politics of the right. It was an object lesson in grace after next to no sleep.”
expats 2nd Mar ’26 – 2:15pm
It was the best acceptance speech I’ve heard in years. It drew you to her. It made you feel that she was honestly saying what she thought.
We need to be loud on tackling inequality, it’s the root cause of most of Britain’s problems today and the greens have captured that into a distilled and simplified language.
We have very little messaging on it out there, where we could be shouting from the rooftops about land value tax as a means of curving this neoliberal hellscape we’ve found ourselves in.
The Lib Dem party of the pre coalition era isn’t coming back and in many ways that’s a good thing. That old party might have done what the Greens are now doing but grown up politics, being a party of government that understands trade offs and difficult choices is much better.
I’ve argued extensively elsewhere that the old terms of left and right no longer apply, or at least give a misleading analysis based on historic two-party politics. In a multi-party system there will be more fluidity, as it is unlikely that any single party will win a parliamentary majority by themselves (the danger may be that Reform UK end up with 250+ seats, not enough to win alone but enough to take power by reason of Conservatives abstaining in the Commons rather than actually supporting them). So alliances (not necessarily coalitions, more probably in confidence-and-supply arrangements) are almost certainly be needed for government to work.
So let’s look at the situations in the 632 constituencies in Britain, to see what pattern might emerge.
The fascinating result is that, while we might have clear differences from the Greens, we are not competing with the seriously in terms of target seats, or even potential target seats. LibDems are not challenged by the Greens in any of the 72 seats we hold, and the same applies in reverse to those seats held by the Greens. More important, those seats which are most likely to be gained by LibDems in a general election (essentially all of which are held by the Conservatives at present) do not face a serious electoral challenge from the Greens; conversely, the seats where Greens pose a viable threat (almost all of which are currently Labour-held, mostly in the inner cities) are not ones liable to be targets for LibDems at the next election. Look at the current standing in all 632 British constituencies if you doubt this! Of course, in theory we should be seeking to win in every constituency in Britain (except the Speaker’s); but in practice we know this is unrealistic.
Richmal Crompton of “Just William” fame described the British political scene as …….
“There’s Conservatives an’ they want to make things better by keepin’ ’em jus’ like what they are now. An’ there’s Lib’rals an’ they want to make things better by alterin’ them jus’ a bit, but not so’s anyone’d notice, an’ there’s Socialists, an’ they want to make things better by takin’ everyone’s money off ’em…….”
This passage probably needs an update especially for the “Conservatives”, but there’s still substantial validity in it. This is the way Lib Dems are viewed by many.
> ‘People are fed up of working hard to make other people rich’
Well done Mick for being the first to make the point. The system is visibly rigged. For instance treatment of renters. Especially it is rigged to provide the providers of Foreign Direct Investment with profit streams that are taxed lightly or not at all. Labour have chosen to accommodate the plutocracy and perhaps they hope the public would not notice.
@ Peter @ Mick,
I fully agree with Hannah Spencers comment that about working to make others rich.
It’s not likely to get any better under Labour. Many of the houses to be built to reach their housing targets will be financed by ‘private equity’. They aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. They want the revenue streams that will give them a high return on their capital. There’s no need to involve private capital when the government can borrow money far more cheaply than anyone in the private sector.
Lib Dems always used to against rentierism. If you’re looking for a policy imitative, explain the term to the electorate and say what you are prepared to do about it.
https://tlio.org.uk/an-englishmans-home-is-his-prison-labours-1-5m-homes-will-be-dominated-by-private-equity-firms-charging-huge-rents/
“For instance treatment of renters. Especially it is rigged to provide the providers of Foreign Direct Investment with profit streams that are taxed lightly or not at all”
I’m not sure this is true, unless of course you consider the standard corporation tax rate of 20% as “taxed lightly”.
https://hwfisher.co.uk/tax-considerations-for-overseas-investors-in-uk-property/
[Inequality] “is the root cause of most of Britain’s problems today”
I’d say lack of growth is the cause for the last 15 years or so , caused some very bad decisions (eg Brexit, failure to plan, and failure to maintain and develop the physical and human infrastructure) since (say) 1979.
That of course begs the question about how sustainable growth is, but the Green Party don’t seen to be very interested in the environmental argument right now.
@Simon, the problem is that since 1960, our position within physical systems has changed. Energy Returned on Investment (EROI) for oil was much higher in the 1960s than it is today, debt was lower, the natural environment was less depleted than it is now. Hence higher growth rates.
Obviously the laws of thermodynamics apply the same everywhere. But there are localised reasons as to why the US has experienced higher rates of growth than the UK.
The localised examples that economists point out such as higher productivity in the US are due to localised efficiency gains. Different countries choose to grow in different ways, different countries make different macroeconomic choices.
But there is an underlying fact that remains present everywhere: and that is that economic growth is being constrained by declining EROI. This is based on physical laws that apply regardless of state. Our natural environment in 2026 is more depleted than in 1960, look at the planetary tipping points in Earth systems science. A natural environment that is being depleted at greater scale due to growth will yield lower returns because it is more degraded.
So what I mean by practical limits is that Jevons’ Paradox applies. Greater rates of material throughput generally involve greater work done in the economy. This means harnessing more renewable energy, which requires building a greater physical infrastructure base. The scale at which this occurs despite efficiency gains will still lead to increased environmental depletion due to the almost exponential nature of growth.
If you agree with Ayres’ theory that growth can be driven by exergy, increasing rates of environmental depletion due to economic growth works against this aim. It just doesn’t add up.