I won’t forget the 2024 election in a hurry.
Not only were there the expected wins of PPCs I had been excitedly anticipating sitting in the House of Commons for years, but there were a steady stream of wins in places where most people, or at least me, thought our chances of victory were somewhere between pretty low and non-existent.
It was the day we finally didn’t have a Tory government anymore.
Also, at a deeper level, it was the day when what Lib Dems say or do started to matter again. How much it matters is up for debate, but when the exit poll showed us back as the third party with record gains, it was clear that what we say or do is of far greater consequence than it had been a few short weeks before. In terms West Wing watchers will be familiar with, it felt like we were closer to the ideal of never doubting that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens could change the world.
Since then, the biggest crisis in Britain has been the riots. I struggle to imagine anything that could be more diametrically opposed to the values of community and care that ran through the whole of our election campaign.
So how did we respond then? In summary, and I did some quick google searching to check I hadn’t missed anything obvious, our response was to appoint a government advisor and adopt the relevant APPG’s definition of Islamophobia. Now, of course the government should have an independent advisor on Islamophobia and a legal definition of Islamophobia would help public bodies in taking against it, but I doubt that anyone seriously thinks that the lack of either of these things was a significant cause of the riots.
Surely the end goal of our policy must be that riots of this sort (and any other sort) are never seen again in Britain.
I won’t set out a full alternative response to the riots here, because there are so many substantial options that could have been taken. We could have discussed whether future riots could be prevented by changes in education and if so what changes, whether police and social workers are effective in stopping minor offenders become major ones or about how to get to the stage where the police have the operational capacity and the public trust necessary to protect the communities that were unsafe and felt unsafe because of these riots. The possibilities for a substantial Lib Dem response to the riots were and still are countless.
Put another way, I would have preferred a response that had more in common with tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime than Jim Hacker’s “I will appoint someone.”
Why then, does the Lib Dem response to the biggest crisis since the election leave, at least in my opinion, a fair amount of room for improvement? My personal theory is that our massive number of mostly new MPs are focused on their constituencies and are only just getting to grips with the massive job of being an MP and with most Lib Dem constituencies being “rather lovely” as The Economist recently put it the riots may even seem a remote issue.
But (and this is a big but), we have 72 MPs. We are the largest third party in as long as almost all of us have been alive. The Official Opposition is the smallest in the same timeframe and its leadership candidates are currently competing to see who can come down hardest against human rights. Also, the government’s primary concern is to try and appear tough, a government, which has a massive majority in Parliament on just a third of the vote.
Above all, there are people in this country who can only live without fear if our liberal values are strong. The importance of the quality of our response to the riots, therefore, is obvious.
We were right when we said during the General Election when we said solutions that Labour offered where out of proportion with the problems faced. We should hold ourselves to the same standard.
When we won 72 seats, we gained more power over politics in Britain, in parliament, in the media and with Ed’s well earned two questions a week at PMQs. Even before this we showed we can set the agenda for politics, as we did with social care and sewage.
If Spiderman were here, he’d tell us that with more power comes more responsibility. The riots were and are serious. The Lib Dems need to step up.
* Abrial Jerram is a Lib Dem campaigner in Cambridgeshire, Durham and London.
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9 Comments
Thanks Abrial; you raise some excellent points.
As you note, on this occasion I think we can all sympathise with the challenges of timing, but we do need to be ready in the future.
The riots were terrifying but also required urgent but also nuanced response. There are real dangers to liberal values in the UK when such disorder demands urgent preventative measures AND our prisons are already full.
I am sure the new parliamentary group will assert a powerful voice nationally, but this is a timely reminder that this needs to happen quickly as the legacy of Tory mis-rule continues to reveal itself over the coming months.
I think you are partially correct about the new Lib Dem MPs, but it doesn’t explain the shocking silence from our more experienced ones.
Whilst I think Starmer got the response broadly correct we should be raising concerns about the incredible nature of sentences and cilvil liberties concerns about facial recognition being used.
Why did the rioters riot?
A lot of people have a fear of Muslims (ie “Islamophobia”) and a fear of what appears to be out of control immigration, whether legal or illegal. The fear is strong enough that they are prepared to vote for a party that was expected not to win any seats, let alone form a government (ie Reform), and after a particularly gruesome set of murders that was wrongly rumoured on social media to be committed by a Muslim, many were prepared to go and riot, seeking revenge.
Most Lib Dem seats today, as the author pointed out, are too posh for this kind of thing to happen. But if we as a party want to tackle social injustice then we need our MPs to look outside their constituencies. We need to be asking why is populism a far bigger movement today compared to 30 years ago? We need to ask because this is a movement that opposes liberal values, it beat us on Brexit, it got Boris Johnson elected Prime Minister and at the last general election got Reform more votes than the Liberal Democrats.
I do not have all the answers to tackle these problems, but I strongly urge that as an important first step we have to take seriously what is going on and take seriously the people behind this illiberal movement. By that I mean stop demonising them as stupid, or racist, or as “gammons”. Stop imagining they will go away and can be ignored.
‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, organised citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.’
Margaret Mead, anthropologist, died 1978.
The West Wing was late to that particular party.
@Geoff you are absolutely right.
@Margeret you are also right, but I thought that lots of people will have first heard the quote from The West Wing
A very good and thought provoking article, and I wonder why so little is made of the richness added to British culture by the influx of people from Muslim countries. Whether the real root cause of the riots was fear of immigrants is open to question, and maybe at a deeper level those who felt ‘left out’ when they voted leave, still do, and are raging against what they see as unfairness and inequality, with Muslims chosen as a hook to hang those feelings on. If so, it is the wealth and income gaps that we need to close.
I’m a little worried by the assertion that the riots were diametrically opposed to Lib Dem values. No party has riots as part of their values, and it’s highly unlikely that any Lib Dems took part, other than in the vigilante groups who formed to protect asylum seekers in hotels. However, there must be many Muslim voters who noticed that there wasn’t much mention during the election campaign of the role the UK government has been playing in supporting the Israeli assault on Gaza, which from an Israeli perspective is largely a war against Muslims.
@Andy Daer I take your point, no party would outwardly support these riots, but some have entertained and stoked the rhetoric leading to it. What I was trying to put across was that the riots are totally opposite to the main themes that we chose to emphasise in our general election campaign, about community (which these riots are not in the spirit of) and also caring (same applies here)