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.
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16 Comments
There were fewer MPs speaking than I expected and one or two seemed to be always at the microphone.
Thank you for an article which presents the benefits of widespread attention-engaging policies.
Might a “Headline” policy of making the U K tax set up equitable/thoroughly progressive and transparent instead of the current, covertly wealth favouring, one benefit the U. K. and the L. D.s?
The policy of bringing derelict homes into use by means of grants (not exactly what was referenced here, but I have recently heard it in other political commentaries), is not new. I have learned from at least three YouTube channels that it has been running for at least two years in the Republic of Ireland. I’m sure there are sufficient energetic young couples either skilled or willing to ‘learn on the job’ to provide an impact if it were copied here.
Fully agree with Chris’ assessment. We should focus on one defining issue and that indeed should be Europe. That not be because EU membership in an end in itself, it is because it is in the national interest. We want the closest possible relations with the EU to grow our economy to alleviate our cost of living crisis, improve public services (NHS, social care, education etc.), and to afford defending ourselves properly against the growing Russian threat etc.
We have been far too cautious for far too long. A bit like Thomas Tuchel in the last half hour of that World Cup semi-final against Argentina.
I fear that like Mr Tuchel that is Ed’s mentalility. Winning in the leafy suburbs is all very well but it has its limitations. If we are to breakthrough big time we need to look beyond Kingston, Horsham and Torbay taking on Labour in its heartlands.
The late great Michael Meadowcroft often talked about the reactionary nature of the Labour party drawing on his wealth of experience living and campaigning in Leeds. I witnessed something similar in my home town of Reading.
We need to be the progressive centre left force for change and with the policies to match!
An interesting post by David Warren, and an interesting speech by the Prime Minister today promising PR, deeper relations with the EU, taking water back into public ownership, and a national care plan in England.
Interesting to see how Sir Edward reacts to it all.
Surely our defining issue must be the the preservation, improvement and extension of Liberal Democracy in this country and beyond. By all means support it with policies (mistakenly) closer to the hearts of non-anoraks. The other parties will have policisies on housing, cost of living, taxation climate change and so on, maybe not as good as ours, but not usps. Liberalism is in danger throughout the word and our usp is to preserve, defend and promote it. Yes, promote it, not keep it a secret for fear of upsetting people or being boring.
Housing is unlikely to be an election winner. Parties for decades have put forward targets for masses of new houses and schemes for bringing existing houses into use and then not delivered. They have also promoted ‘help to buy’ and ‘affordable housing’ schemes which ‘help people onto the ladder’. They don’t make any more space on the ladder so the same number of people get pushed off it. The mechanism by which they do that is higher prices.
For a political party to be really well-defined, you have to be able to say who they are against.
Because all politics is the art of trade-offs. There’s no such thing as a policy where everybody wins; al polities have winners and losers. So to really get an instinctive knowledge, a gut feeling, for where parties are going to stand on an issue you need to know who they are happy to see as the losers in those trade-offs.
We know who the Conservatives are against: people on benefits.
We know who Reform are against: immigrants.
We know who Labour are against: anyone wealthier than average.
We know who the Greens are against: landlords (and Israelis).
Who are the Liberal Democrats against? When it comes to policy trade-offs, who will the Liberal Democrats give the raw end of the deal to?
If people can’t answer that question, automatically, then the party doesn’t have a strong enough identity and people won’t know what it stands for.
Chris Bowers…Where is that ‘Yesss’ moment going to come from?
It looks like ‘from Andy Burnham’..
@Dav The Lib Dems are against “people who want a change to the status quo” – populists, socialists, independence parties, Brexiters, people making large planning permission applications, etc. etc.
It’s a role which needs to exist in politics, it’s one which the Conservatives are vacating so there might be room for a bit of expansion, it’s just really difficult to campaign excitingly on because “exciting” is the opposite of the point and it won’t in the current climate ever get you many more votes than you currently have.
“We know who the Conservatives are against: people on benefits.”
From a socialist perspective, and probably the perspective of most other people too (including Lib Dems), we shouldn’t be against the people who are on benefits but we should be against people being unemployed when they could be making a useful contribution to society. The ones who are capable but aren’t working are a wasted resource.
If people are receiving substantial benefits and are working then this can be corrected by raising their wages. Everyone who puts in a shift should be entitled to a fair share of the rewards.
The economy is often interpreted as being about pounds and pence. These are just part of the overall mechanism to encourage us all to work. A loaf of bread may cost us £1.50, or whatever, but the real value has been created both by nature in creating the conditions for the wheat to grow and by everyone else who has done something along the way to enable us to put that loaf into our shopping basket.
The Lib Dems are against “people who want a change to the status quo”
I’m not sure a party can credibly claim to be standing for the status quo while the only two of its policies that most of the general population can name, changing the voting system and joining the European Union, would both be massive changes to the status quo.
@Dav Re-joining the EU is just a return to the previous status quo, which the party fought to preserve. Going back to how things were ten years ago isn’t exactly radicalism.
Changing the voting system would be a massive change to the status quo for election nerds and have virtually no effect on anyone else – at least, not in the short term. Sure, maybe over a few decades there might be some realignment, but then we seem to be having one of those under FPTP.
I like both policies, but they’re hardly of the level of change of “what if we broke up the UK?” or “what if we turned the UK into a whites-only ethnostate?” or “what if we abolished capitalism?” or
similar that you can find in the parties which are against the status quo. It’s pretty much what being a centrist party *means*, it’s pretty much what your 2015 election campaign was run on, that “things should carry on roughly as they are” is the purpose.
Re-joining the EU is just a return to the previous status quo, which the party fought to preserve. Going back to how things were ten years ago isn’t exactly radicalism.
But everybody knows that joining the European Union from scratch as a new aspirant country would not just be turning back the clock ten years. We would have to accept lots of things we didn’t before, such as agreeing to join the Euro and not getting any rebate.
Not to mention that the European Union itself has not stood still all this time, so we would have to adopt all the new regulations passed since 2020 and also take on liability for the new debts incurred since then.
It might be a change for the better, but you can’t convince people that joining the European Union wouldn’t be a massive change.
Changing the voting system would be a massive change to the status quo for election nerds and have virtually no effect on anyone else
If it would have no effect, why are the Liberal Democrats so keen on it? But of course it would have a massive effect: instantly it would make it almost impossible for us ever again to have a single-party majority government. That’s a huge change from the status quo.
Thank you to everyone who commented on my post, even if, by the end, the responses had drifted into the realm of comments-about-comments-about-comments. I think expats’ observation that the Yesss moment may come from Andy Burnham has some substance, which is why our party leadership’s response to the PM’s speech has been disappointing. The point I want people to go away with – which I think most respondents have – is that Liberalism is an inspiring creed, but it needs to be sold well if it’s to really inspire. That is the challenge for the current leadership and the generation immediately behind it.