The past week has been marked by plenty of people asking what I made of Conference. My general answer has been that it was OK, but we still need to feel from our most prominent representatives that Liberalism is inspiring.

I don’t want to hark back to a golden era that may never have existed, but a feature of the Paddy Ashdown years – and to a large extent the Steel and Kennedy leaderships – was that, whatever our electoral fortunes happened to be, you tended to leave conference feeling “Yesss, I will go out and deliver some more leaflets!” That moment of inspiration was still missing in Brighton.

Let’s avoid the rabbit hole of whether we need a different leader. We might, but that might not solve the problem, because (a) a new leader may not be better, (b) there isn’t an obvious one, certainly from the 2024 intake of MPs for whom it’s probably too soon, and (c) the problem may not be the leader but the party. But I’m convinced the problem is not Liberalism – it’s the way we present it.

For the past three and a half years, I have coordinated an ad hoc ginger group called The Yorkists. We first met in York in March 2023, frustrated at the party’s lack of definition. If we want people to vote for us – whether tactically or out of conviction – we have to tell them what a vote for us would mean. At the very least we need to be able to sum up in three or four seconds what we stand for and where our party stands in UK politics.

The development that our strategy for the next general election will include a national narrative is significant progress, but at Brighton the problem of the Lib Dems’ lack of definition was still ever-present. I sat on the panel of a Social Liberal Forum fringe meeting on Sunday night, where we were asked how we define the party’s role over the next three years, and whether we have a pithy slogan that goes with it.

My suggestion was that we focus on three policies, of which one is our defining one, and the other two bolster the main one. I suggested Europe as the defining one, with the environment and modernising our democracy the other two (my slogan was “We are better than this!” though I’m not wedded to it). Sitting next to me, Will Tennison of the Young Liberals said Europe no longer cuts it for young adults – the topic has been and gone. Fine, but then what?

The results in the state elections in Berlin, which took place over the same weekend as our conference, illustrate why definition is important. The most successful party was Die Linke (The Left). The headlines were grabbed by the fact that the party’s candidate for mayor, Elif Aralp, is the daughter of Turkish refugees, which is notable at a time of anti-immigrant sentiment. But look a little deeper, and what Aralp and Die Linke did was focus on one policy (housing) and let themselves be defined by that. And they did so with hope, a commodity in short supply which we Lib Dems should be espousing. (For more on what we can learn from Die Linke in Berlin, see this opinion piece from The Guardian.)

Of course we must be careful not to extrapolate too much for the whole of Great Britain from the result of one city state in federal Germany. But what Eralp’s result shows is that you don’t have to go to the far-right to oppose the staleness of the traditional governing parties. Catch the public’s imagination with a policy that defines your party – at least for a given period – and there are still votes to be won without being extreme.

Another thing that struck me in Brighton was that we’re pitching ourselves very much to older voters. We restated our support for the Triple Lock at a time when virtually everyone recognises it’s not affordable, and we didn’t talk much about the things young voters really care about: the short-term practical issues of jobs and housing, and the long-term need for a healthy environment.

Might making housing our defining issue for the next general election be fertile ground for us? Again, I’m not taking too much from Berlin, where the culture is far more renting than buying (though perhaps we can learn something from that). But in a British political climate where the only approach to being priced out of property is for political parties to engage in unseemly auctions of how many houses they can promise to build, many of which will never be built anyway, a housing policy that looks to build some but bring many empty properties back into use via financial incentives and penalties might be a way for the Liberal tradition to provide us with that ‘Yesss’ moment lacking in Brighton.

* Chris Bowers is a two-term district councillor and four-time parliamentary candidate. He writes on cross-party cooperation, was the lead author of the New Liberal Manifesto, and is unofficial coordinator of the Yorkists.