In the elections on May 7th, Salford Lib Dems suffered an unexpected setback. We lost one of our two councillors (I’m the one who remains), and we came third and fourth out of five in our two target wards. In all three cases, we lost to the Greens. The story was similar elsewhere in Greater Manchester.
In only one of the three wards did we face an active Green Party campaign – the other two wards (including mine, where we lost my co-councillor) were won by pretty much paper candidates.
The councillor we lost was a fantastically hard working and capable councillor, who was outstanding at proactively dealing with casework and had a great reputation in the ward. There is no sense of him having ‘lost’ the ward – others won it.
I spent most of the campaign in one of our target wards with a truly outstanding candidate. Over a few months we knocked on 3500 doors and had many conversations. We ran a fantastic textbook campaign, supporting a great community activist with a big personality.
We lost to a Green Party that has no real local presence, did little to no door knocking, and put out a small number of generic leaflets, all inferior to our own.
So, what did they have that we didn’t?
I quickly found that on the doorstep, our young professional, left-leaning, urban voters were interested in the things that we don’t have sufficient answers for. I was asked about Gaza. I was asked about cost-of-living. I was asked about trans rights. I was asked about tuition fees and student debt. I was asked about war in Iran and Ukraine. I was asked about Europe. The people I was talking to live in expensive but nice city centre apartments with few immediate issues in their immediate area. There are no potholes for them (few have cars), there’s little in the way of litter and antisocial behaviour. They are focussed on big picture things. They are looking for transformational politics that provides radical change. They are concerned about the rise in AI, unstable employment, and many other challenges of being young in today’s world.
We’ve done lots of great community stuff nearby, but it quickly became obvious that stories of thousands of bags of collected litter, planting thousands of daffodil bulbs, and sorting out street lighting wasn’t really resonating. The Greens have captured the imagination and hearts of those who were voting.
I appreciate that the Lib Dems have a tricky balance to achieve, being more a southern Conservative-facing party than a northern Labour-leaning party, but we are nevertheless a party that operates fully across all parts of Britain. We must have a strong and credible retail offering for everyone. We cannot and should not be a party of the south, or of only the leafy suburbs.
On the doorsteps this Spring, I needed fully fleshed out and coherent policies to offer to counter the growing Green presence. You could argue that this year the Green strength was not yet fully understood and therefore it was understandable that the party’s offering had not yet caught up. Next year, that reasoning won’t stand – we understand the issue completely now. We now need a solution from the Federal Party which gives us the tools to compete for the hearts and minds of those who are looking beyond the three traditional parties for a home for their vote. We need something altogether more radical.
Time is of the essence.
* Councillor Jonathan Moore is Leader of Salford Lib Dems and Councillor for the Quays Ward, Salford.
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24 Comments
Yes as I keep saying, change change change and within 3 months.
Frankly we got the kicking our HQ deserved, forget Reform it is the Greens we have to hammer.
The party has been virtually non existent in large swathes of the country for years and it is getting worse.
Once the Tories revive, and they will, we will be at 8 seats again.
Back in the days of The SDP/Liberal Alliance there was a joke that The SDPs slogan should be “Lets keep Politics out of Politics”. That seems to be our current attitude too, We talk about how Hard-working we are but not about our Values, Our Politics.
Look at our policies & we are actually pretty radical but you would never guess that from Our messaging.
I don’t want to be too brutal here – but this is something I’ve read a lot ‘we ran a textbook campaign’
But did you. Or was it a campaaign that followed a particular set playbook that is deemed to be ‘textbook’. Back in the day the terrible phrase was ‘classic ALDC campaign’ and there was no such thing.
If people knocked on all those doors and had all those conversations what did they pick up in the data that said they weren’t winning comfortably.
If you are getting that sort of feedback on the doorstep then your campaign messages aren’t landing. Then change your messages and strategy. If there aren’t decent national ones then come up with some of your own. Its not like the Lib Dems historically relied on national policies to get local victories. Certainly its not hard to craft messages on Ukraine and Europe consistent with party statements
A lot of pieces on here read like the party has forgotten how to campaign.
Here in Surrey we of course take a rather more positive view about how we did.
In the 162 seats that comprise the new unitary authorities of East and West Surrey the Lib Dems won 96 seats, the Tories 30, Reform 14, Greens 8, Residents/ independents 10 and Labour nil.
Jamie – that adds up to 158 seats – who won the other 4 to make up 162?
Well spotted Nonconformistradical !
The Residents /Independents won 14 rather than 10 seats.
The Lib Dem nominal gains (the whole County authority of Surrey is being replaced, as are our boroughs, with the two new unitaries) were 68.
The 162 seats do not come up again until 2031.
When there are so many council elections across the country and the media relentlessly focus on their take on the party leaders, many voters use the opportunity to deliver a protest vote on the national situation. Unfortunately, councillors are swept into and out of office by the national tides. Reform endlessly runs the country down and offers easy answers to why you can blame ‘others’ for your problems. The Greens offer some positivity and focus on the most serious threat to our very existence, albeit with precious few ideas on how to keep the nation afloat economically. The success of Reform and the Greens surely represents protest voting from opposite ends of the spectrum. As a party we have repeatedly performed poorly at getting across to the nation what the LibDems stand for and therefore fail to inspire voters. I suspect that this is structural and the party puts too heavy a burden on the leader when a small support team with specialist skills needs to be in the public eye. Do voters even know who our experts are on the economy, environment, defence etc?
thank you John Reed for a good short analysis. We also suffer from lack of media attention; we are too often ignored even by papers like the ‘i’. Lots of people this time have voted according to the little bits of messages they have heard on national news.
@ Nigel Jones “We also suffer from lack of media attention”.
That very much depends on the quality of the personnel and the product, Nigel.
Time for changes that will appeal to the whole of the UK and not just the comfy corner of it.
A brilliant and thoughtful piece. I’m very sorry for your colleague. We experiencing the same in inner London. It was the same in 2022 and 2024 even before Zack Polanski. The Green Party has a much higher floor than we do, and so many of us in urban centres have been saying this for some time. Without a retail offering, it now looks like the Green Party’s floor is above our ceiling. It’s deeply frustrating and quite frankly infuriating. I’m tired of running our teams and myself ragged on the ground, with little to no air support.
I stood down from my very diverse ward in Birmingham and my successor was comfortably elected. Sadly, it is now the only ward in the city that has been continuously, successfully defended and won by the party this century. We lost votes to Reform, possibly, because we stood up to the flag hangers and stood by our eco-oriented community campaigning. But we gained from the collapse of Labour. Across the city the group has stayed the same size, depending where you count from, but this doesn’t reflect the enormous, unsuccessful effort made to achieve gains. I am writing a book.
Brilliant article. This tells me that the Greens vote isn’t just religion based which is what many are trying to paint it as.
Like you said, wars abroad and how the government is handling them is a concern for many especially since it’s impacting our cost of living. The discrimination of how they handled Ukraine in comparison to Palestine doesn’t sit well with many people and especially those minorities who have always been marginalised.
The university loans are the epiphany of what’s wrong with the disparity of wealth concerns. If you’re mum and dad are wealthy – you can get an education without crippling debt, if not, you will spend a lifetime paying back. Even those of us who are not impacted want to see this resolved- it is simply unfair. Fairness and justice would probably cultivate the greens message and hence their success.
Hype.
We made significant gains in our corner of West Sussex so we’re definitely in the ‘blue wall’ part of the country that is supposed to be benefitting from the current national strategy that seems to be failing in many other areas.
But what’s frustrating is that I don’t think the strategy is helping us here either. On balance, it’s probably not hurting us… It puts off some, reassures others… What we really did benefit from was the very positive reputation of our MP, Jess Brown-Fuller and it was noticeable that in the divisions outside of her constituency, we didn’t do very well.
What’s also frustrating is that I think it’s possible to have a national message that helps outside of the blue wall without harming us here.
Being consistently in favour of protecting the Palestinians is popular everywhere. We could easily combine such messaging with statements emphasising that Jews should not be labelled as supporters of the Israeli government and that pro-Palestinians have a duty to be vigilant not just for genuine antisemitism but for ‘grey area’ language that may not be racist but which nevertheless contributes to the fear felt by some Jews.
An economic message the majors on growth would also go down well everywhere we need it to be received well.
I am sure that there is a great deal in what is being said but isn’t there an issue local to Salford. I recall that a Councillor elected in Ordsall in 2022, moved to the Cotswolds and was elected there in 2023 but then refused to resign in Salford. Apparently he even carried on claiming expenses. He did eventually stand down but that wasn’t until 2024 when the damage had been done. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-65560466
And yet the Lib Dems do have positions on the things you mention as being of concern to the voters you mention, with those positions being ones that they’d likely be sympathetic to. So, query how it is that they don’t know that and/or that LD representatives talking to them seemingly didn’t know it or weren’t able effectively to communicate it.
Lib Dem’s did well in Stockport. Think Green leader is a nutcase. Doesn’t pay tax, doesn’t vote. Criticising Police for the way they delt with someone that had already stabbed two people. Still had a knife wearing a rucksack that could have contained a bomb. Think Manchester Arena. Greens got the disaffected Labour vote. Bring back Caroline Lucas
Lib-Dems could do with re-brand ‘Democratic Party’ maybe time for a new leader too? Not a member, just saying ….
This is exactly the situation we found in Islington. We could not have run a better campaign, the greens just came out of nowhere. We need a national message, the greens have one, and so does reform. We just don’t, and it doesn’t help then when people ask what we stand for!
This article resonates with activists in Lewisham where entrenched Labour was swept away by Greens, despite fewer leaflets and less door-knocking. My teenage grandchildren tell me that almost everyone they know will be voting Green. My eighteen year old grandson says he looked up Libdem policies and was surprised to see that we are left of Labour.
“I was asked about cost-of-living. I was asked about trans rights. I was asked about tuition fees and student debt. I was asked about war in Iran and Ukraine. I was asked about Europe.” If we’d been asked any of those questions we’d have had the answers they wanted to all but the first (and nobody has a good answer to that).
My guess would be that the Green voters are the ones we couldn’t get to talk to: the ones in HMOs or living with parents. They get their information online and we have almost no presence there.
Thank You Jonathan. Your article isn’t just spot on, it’s the BEST reasoning I have ever read on this dilemma facing the Party. What you have found on the doorstep. You have done the research. You have clearly read the room. I hope the readers are inspired and energised by you. The North West region of the Party should use it as a blueprint starting today. No time to wait for the federal party. Tomorrow is too late.
My motto is ‘Tempus Fugit’. Time flies.
“You could argue that this year the Green strength was not yet fully understood”
This really isn’t a valid excuse, the signs were all there, they overtook us in national opinion polls late last year, that alone should have been unthinkable and ought to have triggered the sorts of discussions that are happening right now. And even that didn’t come out of nowhere, as of 2021 it became the default that the greens would always get more votes in urban council wards where neither party campaigned and would reliably defeat us where both campaigned.
This played out at the constituency level where the greens overtook us in most constituencies where we were second to labour (including seats we previously held) despite not campaigning in them.
Furthermore over the course of 2023 it became increasingly clear that labour support was going to crater among young voters and then Muslims as well, these votes had to go somewhere. They could have gone to us but our national party did literally nothing to make this happen, so inevitably it all went to the Greens.
Polanski and the by election only accelerated a process that was already happening.
Anyone who couldn’t see all this frankly shouldn’t be making decisions for the party.
The Greens and Reform both claim to have the answers but we know they are basically just charlatans who try to appeal to their respective demographics. Following a populist agenda is dangerous in the long term and not what we are about as a party. The attraction of the Libdems to me in 2016 was that it did not jump on the Brexit bandwagon but stuck to its position even though it appeared at the time to be less popular.
Most people in this country voting in local elections have nowhere near enough information to be able to make a balanced and fair decision on the rights and wrongs of the painful and difficult Gaza conflict. While such issuesn may seem like “low hanging fruit” to parties of protest, like the Green Party, I believe that the Liberal Democrat party’s integrity is such that it does not chase votes by providing easy-sounding answers to difficult questions. If we follow the Greens down every one of their rabbit holes we may never emerge. We should be campaigning on issues which really affect people’s lives – like rejoining the EU.
I am sorry about any lost LD councillors, but sometimes you have to tell people what they don’t want to hear, and sometimes people appreciate the honesty of a politician who does not claim to have all the answers.