Although the party consolidated our voter base in areas such as Surrey, Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire at the local elections, something which stuck out to me was the way that despite the best efforts of all our amazing hard-working volunteers, the party lost ground in Labour-facing urban areas such as Manchester and Sheffield as a result of being leapfrogged by the Green Party and I think part of the reason for this leads back to the Gorton and Denton by-election.
At a Q&A back in March, current Lib Dem leader Ed Davey was asked about the by-election, “wasn’t it the sort of seat we should be in contention in, the sort of seat we should be trying to win?” His response was the following: “We didn’t try because we knew we weren’t in contention to beat Reform… but what we do do though is where we think we can win, we put the resources in.”
I think this explanation was a massive middle finger to the Manchester Liberal Democrats from the leadership and I’m going to explain why I think the decision from the leadership to not give them a helping hand in Gorton and Denton was a massive mistake that proved detrimental to similar Labour-facing areas in the local elections.
The Manchester Liberal Democrats were placed in a very difficult position where they worked their arses off with what they could, like they always do and to say that ‘we didn’t try’ is such a disservice to them, because they did try, they tried their hardest to support Jackie and be a proud liberal voice for the people of Gorton and Denton – but what more could they have possibly done when they had no support from the leadership?
The leadership often complains about a lack of media coverage but I would argue the current approach is a factor in this because what is the point of us as a party if we see a high-profile Labour-facing by-election with an illiberal candidate like Matt Goodwin in contention and we have absolutely nothing to say about it? All because it happened to be in a seat we didn’t ‘stand a chance of winning’ in?
Because being a liberal voice for people is so much more than just having a name on the ballot, it’s about supporting them regardless of whether or not they can actually win, because supporting them means we grow our base, it’s how we get media attention, it’s how we retain our voter base in those constituencies and build on said bases when the local elections roll around.
Because in the end, when we actively duck from opportunities like Gorton and Denton to present an anti-Labour liberal vision and choose to stay invisible and willingly lose our deposits in by-elections, it’s not just Manchester that is affected, it’s areas like Sheffield and Liverpool and many more that have a strong liberal presence that suffer as a result, our current strategy is actively allowing our base in urban areas to be eaten by other parties because when big opportunities such as by-elections arise to show off our Labour-facing messaging, we are invisible – we saw the ripple effect of this in the local elections, Manchester, Sheffield, Lambeth and Islington – there were quite a number of prospective Labour-facing wards the local parties had worked their fingers to the bone to target where the Greens came from nowhere to eat our vote despite everybody’s best efforts as a result of the ripple effect caused by Gorton and Denton – all because “we knew we didn’t stand a chance of winning” in that by-election.
We cannot and must not allow ourselves as a party to repeat this mistake of short-term thinking again because it completely neglects where the Liberal Democrats of the 2030s or even the 2040s will find themselves, we cannot allow ourselves to be in a position where we willingly lose our deposit in every by-election that comes around, to only target ourselves solely at places where we can win at the moment, because otherwise there will soon come a point where there will be no places where we can win at all.
Just because the Conservative Party is dead today doesn’t mean they’ll be dead tomorrow and just because we haven’t yet surrendered all of our remaining bases in urban areas to the Greens doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen tomorrow.
Jackie Pearcey and the Manchester Liberal Democrats are fierce, strong liberals and they fought hard with what they could to give as strong a showing as possible in February’s by-election and continued to fight hard in the local elections.
But ultimately, what more could they do when the leadership didn’t even bother to mention the words ‘Gorton and Denton’ until after the fact?
* Olivia Walker was the Non-Portfolio Officer for the Young Liberals from 2022 to 2023.
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17 Comments
If Jackie was such a first-rate candidate, why didn’t she appoint an Agent who would allow her to raise and spend the money to fight a good campaign?
North Shropshire wasn’t initially seen as winnable but the Local Party pulled out all the stops and delivered the whole seat three times before nominations opened. What did Gorton & Denton do?
“Just because the Conservative Party is dead today doesn’t mean they’ll be dead tomorrow and just because we haven’t yet surrendered all of our remaining bases in urban areas to the Greens doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen tomorrow.”
Exactly.
May I repeat part of what I said a few days ago:
“Sad to say, the overall gain in seats is likely to be used as an excuse for cosy self-satisfaction by a blinkered coterie”. I think that is more to the point than the essentially demotivating comments by Ynys Mon Man.
The last few days has seen a deluge of correspondence on LDV. If the leadership of this party are not prepared to take on board the broad thrust of the overwhelming majority of these views, it does not auger well.
I suspect that the Green Party is a very different animal from what many of its recent supporters hope or perceive it to be. That could change, but that does not excuse our limp messaging and what appears to be a fundamental lack of support for our activists further north. (I live in West Sussex)
If that’s unfair, then let the leadership of our party demonstrate that this is so. Now!
It’s worse than Olivia says. The story is in Liberator 434 see: http://www.liberatormagazine.org.uk
We had it on good authority that Jackie Pearcey was willing and able to pay from her own money to have a Freepost leaflet printed and delivered across the constituency – rather than as happened for only one ward in Gorton – so only some modest assistance from the party would be needed to get this distributed. This was though still not forthcoming on the grounds the seat was unwinnable.
I trust that we are going to put up a bit of a fight in at least one of the impending Scottish by elections. I can remember when Aberdeen South was a sort-of target seat.
“We didn’t try because we knew we weren’t in contention to beat Reform… ”
Imagine if Tony Greaves and Steven Pearson had taken that approach regarding the BNP in 2002-ish
“I can remember when Aberdeen South was a sort-of target seat.”
It was a held seat! (caveat – same name, probably different boundaries)
@ Olivia Walker writes, and I see no reason to doubt her,
“Ed Davey was asked about the by-election, “wasn’t it the sort of seat we should be in contention in, the sort of seat we should be trying to win?” His response was : “We didn’t try because we knew we weren’t in contention to beat Reform… but what we do do though is where we think we can win, we put the resources in.”
So there it is. Not in the leafy prosperous two car ‘Middle England’, and it’s a bit of a drag to get there from Euston. Not exactly the words from an ambitious future UK Government. I well remember my late good friend Michael Steed getting over 36% in the Manchester Exchange byelection in 1973 because he made an effort.
So the next time I get one of those frequent ‘DONATE’ letters from HQ I know what my response will be.
And why still no PPC for NE Somerset & Hanham where a by-election may be coming before long? It’s an area with large pockets of LD local govt strength, but will go to Reform unless we get our act together.
Whilst I agree with this in spirit, it would be wrong to say that we could have carried on as we were but then suddenly thrown loads of resource at the by election. The reason we were not competitive in the by election was not just a lack of campaigning it was because the Green party has made it very clear both through policy, rhetoric an extensive social media campaign that reached out to various young content creators that they were the progressive alternative to labour, and the only party that wanted to tack action over what had happened in Gaza.
We had done precisely nothing in that direction and in the few instances when we’ve really attacked the government it’s been from the right.
Fighting a strong local campaign whilst the national party continues like this would have produced the same painful result that so many council candidates faced.
And really we needed to not lose third place in G&D to the greens at the general election. They didn’t do this by campaigning on the ground.
This happened because over the course of 2023 and 2024 the labour party kept finding new ways to alienate young progressives and Muslims, these voters were actively looking for an alternative, but our policies and national messaging barely made us seem better than labour, but it was obvious to them that the greens were, despite thier lack of coverage.
Ed Davey : “We didn’t try because we knew we weren’t in contention to beat Reform”
“Isn’t this the kind of “progressive cooperation” so many are talking about? “
@ Tristan Ward “Isn’t this the kind of “progressive cooperation” so many are talking about? “ No, my dear Tristan, it’s straight forward defeatism and sends a message that “we couldn’t give a monkeys about the people of the North of England,…. end of”.
Don’t be too surprised when the people of the North send back a message, “and we couldn’t give a monkeys about the people of so called ‘Middle England,…. end of”.
Well we should still run a second tier campaign for places we don’t expect to win, to maintain a national presence even if we score 10% to 15%
I read a comment somewhere (I think on a LibDem FB group) that Manchester LibDems agreed with the decision not to do much in Denton & Gorton. This was because there was next to no infrastructure in the seat and not much history of recent activity.
The commenter however also said had activity started right after the former Labour MP announced his intention to stand down, then it would have been worth it to do more in the byelection.
I did not know, nor did the comment mention, that Jackie had offered to pay for a freepost and that this wasn’t taken up.
When I was a much younger Liberal we used to use ‘hopeless’ by-election contests as an opportunity to start a revival in the seat concerned. We aimed to establish a working local party and to identify a ward or two where they could start to build support. David Raw is right to say the current ‘oh it’s much too difficult’ attitude is defeatist.
The elephant in the room is targeting, or at least the way we do it. The result of ruthless targeting has gained us seats, but has hollowed out local parties in many non-target seats to the point where fighting any election is difficult.
We need to have another, more pressing, target: Namely to make held seats self sufficient, in both cash and workers so that we can start to expand into areas where we have, so far, either made little progress or lost what we previously had. I see little sign that HQ/Campaigns are doing this and you can be sure we will all be asked to go and campaign in target seats in 2029 to the detriment of further expansion.
We also need a more radical and persuasive agenda.
I have never understood this argument that Targeting ‘hollows out’ everywhere else. The National Party cannot force anyone to abandon their local area and go and campaign elsewhere. Any determined group of local activists can fight a realistic campaign in their chosen area and seek to build from that. Whether that is fighting a single Council ward seriously for the first time, or on a larger scale. Bar a tiny number of paid Party employees we are all volunteers.
The recent Helen Morgan example has already been quoted. I could add Chesterfield in 1987 who were asked to go to what was then called West Derbyshire but instead fought as full a campaign as we could in Chesterfield, then we built on that in 1992 and 1997 and won in 2001. Another example is Hallam and Hillsborough in Sheffield. Hillsborough came very close in 1983 and in 1987 Hallam and all the other Sheffield activists were asked to go to Hillsborough, which they did. But Hillsborough slipped backwards and in 1992 the Hallam team decided to stay and fight full on in Hallam where they markedly improved their position and went on to win in 1997. Chesterfield activists, voluntarily, provided some help in Hallam in Council elections pre 1997 which Richard Allen MP repaid by supporting my winning campaign in 2001.
In 2019 the National Party did try to dictate that all east Midlands activists went to a quite hopeless choice of Target Seat. Most of us directed our efforts into more productive areas. Volunteers cannot be forced or directed.
Having said all that I do agree that making some effort, even in the most hopeless of Seats makes sense in a By Election. Over the last 40 years I have helped in quiet a few ‘forlorn hope’ by elections here in the unfashionable Midlands and North. Paying for a Freepost leaflet and some leaflets for a promising ward or two, is a very small sum compared to what is thrown at a serious election -and it just might help start some long term growth (although often does not).
Well said Liv .. I think you are correct .. I was disappointed that we did not mount a vigorous campaign