On Monday, as our leader Ed Davey launched the Liberal Democrats’ 2025 local election campaign in Oxfordshire, he said that he wants our party to replace the Conservatives as the ‘party of Middle England’. This year, elections will be held in nineteen counties and local authorities whose councils are controlled outright by the Conservatives, most of which are located in southern England. These communities last voted for their local governments in 2021, when the Conservatives nationally had been buoyed by the fulfilment of Brexit and the coronavirus vaccination rollout but before Partygate, the mini-budget, the cost-of-living crisis and assorted scandals by their MPs.

We cannot fault Ed for wanting to pursue this strategy: it has a proven track record. Following our by-election gains in Chesham and Amersham, North Shropshire, Tiverton and Honiton, and Somerton and Frome, we got a total of seventy-two MPs elected to the Commons in 2024 by targeting Conservative constituencies primarily in the South of England. The Conservatives’ new leader Kemi Badenoch has done little to reposition the party either as an effective opposition or a government-in-waiting and is under the Damoclesian threat of removal in the face of losses in the local elections. We can understand the rationale behind this, but this should not be the be all and end all of our campaigning.

We must endeavour to extend our party’s geographic reach. As we targeted Blue Wall seats in 2024, eighty-two per cent of our current MPs represent constituencies in Southern England, a lopsided distribution that cannot be tenable in the long term. As there is a huge power and economic imbalance within the UK weighted in the South’s favour, our party may well come to be viewed as out of touch or elitist if we maintain this imbalance within our own parliamentary party.

While there is work to be done in Scotland and Wales – for which I will let more experienced and qualified voices speak – we should  consider the North of England. We have demonstrated our desire and ability to expand in the North. In 2024, we flipped the Conservative-held Westminster seats of Harrogate and Knaresborough, Cheadle, and Hazel Grove, centred on relatively affluent market towns similar to typical Southern Blue Wall seats. Despite the seeming focus on the south during this year’s local election, it is the North where we may bring a boon for our party. Hull City Council Leader Mike Ross is campaigning to become the first metro mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire, a position through which we can enact policies on a countywide scale and garner the same visibility and clout as Labour figures like Andy Burnham and Tracy Brabin. As there are local elections taking place in Conservative-controlled Northern authorities including County Durham and Lancashire, should we not be challenging them there as well?

As part of efforts to extend our geographic reach, we also need to consider how to challenge parties other than the Conservatives. We are living in a period in which allegiances to Labour and the Conservatives are weaker than ever. While the Blue Wall and Middle England may be conflated, although the latter may be conservative in nature, it is not sworn to the Conservatives and is more likely to vote for whichever party can run the most effective campaign. Their actions particularly following the 2019 election will have done little to convince these voters as to their capabilities. Labour, for their part, can no longer rely upon their Red Wall bulwarks of Northern England and Scotland, as demonstrated in 2015 with the Scottish National Party and 2019 with the Conservatives in Northern England. Eroding whatever support they may have had following the 2024 general election through a series of unpopular ‘necessary’ decisions, namely accommodating Trump and ‘Tory lite’ spending decisions, they have left many of their habitual progressive supporters feeling homeless.

The First Past the Post system has helped to prop up Labour and the Conservatives as the two major parties for the past century, the main argument that they have been able to present to voters being that voting for anyone else would allow the two of them they disliked more winning. Support for Reform UK and the Greens has been growing, most likely out of frustration with the two major parties, with the former showing strength in neglected Northern communities. As the vote-splitting argument no longer seems to hold sway, we should consider how we can attract disaffected progressive Labour supporters as well as aggrieved floating voters drifting towards Reform and the Greens.

* Samuel James Jackson is the Chair of the Policy Committee of the Yorkshire and the Humber Liberal Democrats and had served as the Liberal Democratic candidate in Halifax during the 2024 general election.