In our internal federal elections for 2026, Josh Babarinde and Victoria Collins were elected as our President and Vice President respectively. I wish Mr Babarinde and Ms Collins the best of luck ahead of their tenures as their successes are our party’s successes.
In light of their victories, there is an issue facing our party which we need to address. Kamran Hussain, Ms Collins’ challenger for VP, stood as a candidate who would give the North of England a greater voice within the federal party. That is why I and members of my local and regional parties, among others in the North, supported Mr Hussain’s VP candidacy, and why I supported the Federal Policy Committee candidacies of Abrial Jerram and Andrew Haldane.
At present, our party is dominated by the South of England. Of our 72 MPs, nearly 82% represent Southern seats, with most senior party positions being held by MPs from this region. By contrast, the North of England has only four Lib Dem MPs, with the Northeast having none. While Lisa Smart, Tim Farron and Tom Morrison hold posts in the frontbench team, this continuing imbalance may portray us as a party of and for the South and put us bad stead electorally.
The North of England feels left behind in comparison to the rest of the United Kingdom. Yorkshire and Humberside and the Northeast are in the lowest third of English regions by GDP, with the former having a smaller GDP than the Southwest of England or Scotland despite all three having comparable populations (around 5,000,000 each). The North has rates of unemployment higher than the UK average and worse rates of poverty, deprivation, growth and investment than the South.
The North formed part of Labour’s Red Wall, but recent elections have demonstrated that Northern fealty to Labour is no longer a given. In 2019, the Red Wall collapsed to the Conservatives partly in rejection of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, with many seats in the region reverting to Labour in 2024 owing to vote-splitting by Reform UK. This year’s local elections were a clear rejection of the two-party status quo. While our party’s gains were concentrated in the South due to the continuation of our Blue Wall strategy, Reform’s were principally in the Midlands and North, with those in the latter including the councils of Lancashire, Doncaster and County Durham.
Reform’s performance in local government since May have been mixed. They have lost 38 councillors through resignation, defection, suspension or expulsion. Quarrels within Reform’s ranks have broken out. Spending has either been wasted through payouts for contract violations or cuts to vital maintenance works. Cases of ‘good’ Reform governance, such as Kent County Council’s call for more social care visas or Hull & East Yorkshire Mayor Luke Campbell’s support for his county’s renewables industry, saw breaks with party principles and emulation of the ‘establishment’ that they were meant to rail against.
Reform UK are not winning because of their policies but because of anger against the two major parties and their recent poor records in government. While we are picking up seats through by-elections following short-lived Reform stints in local government, we cannot rest on our laurels and assume that a lack of a plan will doom them by the time of the next general election.
Our policies of lowering prices, improving public services and investing in infrastructure theoretically have appeal in the North. However, we are not cutting through to voters, at least nationally. We must acknowledge that our policies do not address the specific needs of specific regions or communities, and we must recognise that Northern concerns are not purely economic in nature.
Viewed as a party of the South, we may by extension be viewed as a party of and for the middle class. Of the Northern seats we have won, they are usually centred on more affluent towns reminiscent of the Blue Wall, namely Harrogate & Knaresborough located within Yorkshire’s Golden Triangle. Having first seen the decline of heavy manufacturing which provided plentiful, proud work for unskilled and semiskilled workers, the boarding-up of high street and town centre businesses clearly marks another decline where fewer jobs are available. The university-level education now required in the modern job market is unaffordable or inaccessible to many and may be perceived as having little immediate benefit to afflicted communities. Within such environments, populist, anti-establishment parties calling for a return to ‘better times’ would have greater appeal.
While we should give special consideration to left-behind Northern communities, we must contemplate policy that is not just economic in nature but also social and cultural. When a community’s economy declines, quality of life and community pride can go down with it. This was what Bhutan comprehended in their national philosophy of Gross National Happiness, a system endorsed by the United Nations and the Young Liberals at their last Summer Conference.
* 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.
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15 Comments
The facts speak for themselves.
We are liberals, not socialists, and we are successfully replacing the Conservative Party as the party of common sense free market capitalism, with the state doing only what the state needs to do. T
hat approach does have national appeal (hence the Tories being in power for 75% of the last century) but clearly resonates more in some parts of the country than it does in others.
Our next step before seeking a Lib Dem majority government needs to be to finish off the Conservative Party as a serious electoral force. Fortunately the Conservative Party seems keen on helping us to achieve this, by abandoning any claim to social liberalism, or indeed free market economics.
I’m not entirely sure what this article is suggesting we should do. It claims that the problem is more cultural than economic but it doesn’t say what these cultural issues are or what exactly we should do about them.
And I get the impression the issue largely is economic. Back during the 2000s when we were doing increasingly well in the north I got the impression that integral to our success had been bold policies for supporting public services, easing the cost of living and helping the disadvantaged, and were therefore able to pitch ourselves as a progressive alternative to labour.
I suppose our high profile opposition to the Iraq war did help us allot in both Muslim and young metropolitan communities in 2005, and it is criminal that we made no attempt to do the same with Gaza, leaving the Greens, independents and workers party to mop up tons of votes in former lib dem seats, but we’re still going to struggle to compete with those parties without a compelling economic message.
Liberal Action believes that the Liberal Democrats have a lot to offer many voters, if they actually look past their preconceptions. We are never going to appeal to everyone, that’s politics.
Regarding northern party, we have a growing number of councillors up north and as a party we need to start shouting about the outstanding work done by the party at a council level more.
When you see the likes of Farage bragging about filling over 100,000 potholes across 12 councils, I would love to have seen the next day our response using our Gloucestershire council have nearly delivered that by themselves.
Or articles about councils selling off their housing stock, our Portsmouth council have purchased 800 new social housing properties.
Or councils cutting funds for community projects, our councillors in Southwark managed to secure over £4 million to allocate out to local communities and we don’t run that council.
With the collapse of Labour across the UK, Liberal Democrats have a chance to make progress in the 2026 and 2027 local elections, with eyes on a couple of councils in the Northern third of England.
In my opinion, at the moment our biggest issue is communication. We say a lot, but unfortunately often the audience have their ear buds in and nobody hears. Crack communication and we could fly.
I agree that this article is short on policies and some of the ideas seem to me to be middle class and “southern”. For example Samuel states that “The university-level education now required in the modern job market is unaffordable or inaccessible to many “(penultimate paragraph). This is misleading because many important jobs do not need “university” qualifications: electricians and plumbers for example.
One policy that I think that needs to change is the policy in favour of investments in London and the south: endless new public transport routes. The criteria for investment should favour areas outside London and the South East. I can think of several such projects in Suffolk, my home county, and Leicestershire, my adopted county. Similarly HS2 while sold as benefiting the Midlands and North really benefited mainly London and maybe Birmingham and Manchester. If it had continued to Scotland and also included a link to the HS1 line to the Channel Tunnel it would have been much more of a leveling up project.
Kamran was impressive when I talked to him. A Leeds solicitor who was not an MP. He could provide an original input. Mind it’s a great shame Prue was not elected President. She provided input from the local government non Parliamentary background in addition to her competence.
Excellent article Samuel.
While there may still be votes to be won from the Tories, our best chance now in order to develop our presence in the North and the Midlands must surely come from Labour voters switching to us rather than the Greens. In Birmingham next year the fight looks set to be mainly between us and Reform as the Labour (and the remaining Tory) vote look set to collapse.
As far as the general point about the southern bias of the Party is concerned, I do think it’s very unfortunate that our main Autumn conferences since 2014 have been in Brighton and Bournemouth. Prior to that we had two conferences in Glasgow and some rotation around England. This all goes to reinforce the southernness of the Party.
Whilst there is much in the article with which to agree, some of it is simplistic, to say the least! For instance, the assumption that everyone in ‘the South’ — which let us remember stretches from Cornwall to Kent — is “of and for the middle class” . Nothing could be further from the truth. And then again, there is no recognition of the distances involved: Bristol, whilst in the South West, is nearer to London than it is to Lands End, also of course in the SW. There is also a lack of connectivity: no motorway west of Exeter, and very few rail lines. Remember when most of Devon and the whole of Cornwall was cut off by a storm leaving the tracks swinging in the wind at Dawlish a few years ago…and sea level rise will almost inevitably repeat that at some future date. As another example,the town where I live has had no station or trains since 1968! Not every tale of woe is set in ‘the North’…..
Whatever Labour are in the South and however Lib Dems perceive them in the South, activists in the North are familiar with a reactionary and sometimes oppressive Labour Party. They have for years exploited First Past the Post and secured votes as the natural opposition to the evil Tories, It is now a hollowed out party and they are not sure what to do about disintegrating Conservative local parties. They know that they have a huge parliamentary majority not because of love for Labour but because of Tory chaos and corruption. There are places like Barnsley where Lib Dems have become the official opposition in local government. Hard work and hard thinking could be transformative for us over the next couple of years if the party nationally recognises the opportunities on offer.
I would suggest that it is not the Liberal Democrats that need to develop policies for the North but specifically the Northern Liberal Democrats in their regions (or together if they prefer).
@Andrew Tampion, The reason you are not getting investment is not that London is. If they can be justified as investments, there is no real limit on how much you can borrow to invest. Public transport in London is a good investment because we have very low car ownership and even many who own cars can be tempted to use trains because they are faster. The Elisabeth line is rapidly paying off its finance (which was largely raised in London).
I don’t know what the good investments would be in other regions but I’m sure there are plenty and the locals know them. They need their own assemblies taking those decisions.
AND The Midlands. .?
With 229 lost deposits at the last GE and with the Greens fairing even worse…
Outside of leafy suburbia and the metropolitan lanyard brigade is a – parallel universe…
@Peter Davies: There is a limit to how much you can borrow to invest, and you can see that most clearly if you think about the resources required for the investment. For example, there are only so many people in the UK who know how to plan and build railway lines. If you suddenly tried to build loads of new railway lines across the country, you’d quickly find that there aren’t the people available who can competently build them all at once, no companies who can supply sufficient trains to run on them and no-one who can drive the new trains. Repeat that logic for any other investment you care to make.
Of course that doesn’t take away that we should invest more, and that over time our skills and capacity can grow. But talking about no limits isn’t realistic.
@Simon The skills shortage is real and would limit how fast we could ramp up investment but not the sustained level. If we had a constant rate of improvement of our railways, we would generate the skills to do it better. The problem is always going to be the ability to find profitable investment not finding the money if you do.
Many factors are used when deciding who to support in elections. A sense that the Party represents all parts of the country is one, even in those areas that are over-represented. Many people have relatives and friends in different parts of the country and care about regional inequalities. If we are going to attain our dream of forming a government in Westminster we must show that we understand and care about the issues that all areas face.
@ Peter Hirst, “A sense that the party represents all parts of the country”.
That’s the problem, Peter. The party of, in Sir Ed Davey’s words, “Middle England”, clearly doesn’t in terms of needs, values and wealth. The location of the party leader compounds it.