It is no secret that the party is narrowly focused on retaining the 72 seats we won at the last general election and expanding further into triple digits. Local election results in those constituencies are a sign that it seems to be working. Recently, the Guardian published a sensible editorial pointing out that it is imperative for the Lib Dems to achieve this goal to keep an unholy Tory-Reform alliance at bay in the next general election. Furthermore, it will maximise our influence over a Labour minority in a potential hung parliament. So yes, in our FPTP system, and facing the dire threat of Reform and Reform-lite, this ruthless commitment to target seats is the correct one.

However, pursuit of this goal has led to an overabundance of caution that is diluting the party’s messaging and enabling us to fade further away from the national conversation. We seem to have leapt at the opportunity to snatch Kier Starmer’s fabled Ming Vase and have been hobbling around with it for the past two years – afraid of saying anything too bold, too radical or too liberal. This matters because if we are ever to make progress across the whole country, we need to be present in the national political agenda to give our local activists something to build off. If we don’t establish the party’s identity now, a potential coalition may simply reduce us to the yellow branch of the Labour party and could prove existential in the event we do get PR elections. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, if we don’t actively go out and preach the liberal solutions to our country’s problems, we actively concede the intellectual ground to our conservative opponents.

The good news is that there is no reason to view the realities of FPTP and the desire to be bold as mutually incompatible. We don’t need to be shouting populist claptrap at every moment to offer a more compelling vision, and a more radical vision, to the country. Instead, we need to articulate our policies and beliefs more effectively – and immediately (especially if we do think there may be an early general election).

Take for example our policy on Europe. Everyone here knows that our next election manifesto will say something akin to ‘We support rejoining the European Union, when conditions are right, and in the meantime will seek membership of the customs union and single market. Brexit has done profound damage to our businesses and international relationships, and we need to start rebuilding them now”. We could have been bold, straight out of the gates in late 2024, and explicitly said this to the public (giving them 3-5 years for the message to sink in). Instead, we had a period of saying we’ll just join the customs union. Recently we added in the single market. And thanks to our tortoise-like pace, Andy Burnham has out-flanked us by being the first out the gate to float the idea of rejoining and is taking ownership of that political space as a result. Yes, we should be deeply sceptical of the PM’s commitments on Europe – and hold him to them! But we missed 2 years of opportunity to re-embed our party as the unambiguous home of pro-Europeanism and now we must play catch-up. There isn’t a particular electoral harm either given our current voters, and current conservative voters in our target seats, tend to view Brexit dimly.

Another example is on tax. The “big ticket” item at conference was increasing the tax-free personal allowance to £15,000. In 8 years’ time. Funded by growth (aka not reliably funded). It’s a bit underwhelming. If we are trying to establish our credentials on tax, we should have been bolder, with a much broader and ambitious package – promising to fix the broken tax system full stop. For example, at the same conference, our treasury team published a paper outlining how to get the country growing again – including a myriad of additional suggestions to improve the tax system. It identifies punitively high marginal tax rates as a serious barrier to economic growth – which is true (as well as a major disincentive to start a family given the withdrawal of free childcare) Pledging to partially fix this problem through universal childcare entitlement is the sole sensible suggestion to come out of the Tory conference (shamefully they then suggested funding it through nonsense civil service cuts). If we were bolder, we could have beaten them to it by committing to making childcare and the personal tax allowance universal (after all, there is a liberal case for universalism) and fixing the distortionary, inhibitive effects of high marginal tax rates on the workforce and tax regime. The cost could be partially offset through a small increase in the additional rate of income tax if we were concerned about being too generous to higher earners.

Personally, I’d go even bolder and promise to roll employee national insurance into income tax, scrapping the system where landlords and wealthier pensioners pay lower tax rates than workers and raising £20 billion/year. This is more than enough to fix punitive marginal rates and to unfreeze the tax-free personal allowance – allowing us to avoid taxing the state pension.

If we really wanted to spur growth and investment, we could scrap stamp duty on shares. Or replace regular stamp duty with an annual property tax. Alternatively, we could have reminded people of our belief in abolishing and replacing business rates, our proposed capital gains tax reforms, reversing Labour’s employer NI hike, reversing the Tory cuts to banking levies, etc. My point is not to argue that the party should have adopted all these ideas (even if I would like it personally)! But that we had a rare opportunity at conference to offer up a more radical and bold plan on tax that showcased our ambition to change our country for the better – but we didn’t grasp it.

As a party, we have always struggled for media attention. This isn’t entirely our fault as the media constantly sideline us – shifting the goalposts on which parties merit coverage. There isn’t a reliable and sensible way to get more traditional coverage either (a new leader would face the same problems). This means it is critical that we use the coverage we do get much more effectively (e.g at conference, and in our responses to current affairs). And we must urgently step up our efforts on social media; the current situation is not inspiring. We can’t keep blaming the algorithms if we don’t offer up anything interesting in the first place. We should be bolder with our policy offer, take the arguments of the day directly to our political opponents and show the country why they need the Liberal Democrats.

* James Hill is a Lib Dem member (for 7 years) in Oxford East