Post-General Election, there has been a slew of articles, in Lib Dem publications, about our strategic direction. Three interlinked commonplaces come up time and again. All, in my view, are wrong.
Let’s take them one by one.
1. There are not many plausible targets left.
In fact, there are twenty-five plus seats where we are in obvious contention. The majority are located in our southern heartlands and adjoin existing seats, easing the use of regional organisers and help from other local parties.
But twenty-five isn’t many, you may say.
Here is a short list of our best General Election results in seats since World War II.
2024: 64 gains
1997: 28 gains
1983: 12 gains
2005: 11 gains
All the rest were single figure gains or losses. In historical terms then, we clearly do have enough targets to be getting on with.
2. There is little else left to gain without significantly increasing vote share.
There is only a very weak correlation between Lib Dem vote share and seats. A few examples:
Feb 74: 19%, 14 seats
1983: 25.5%, 23 seats
2005: 22%, 62 seats
2010: 23%, 57 seats
2019: 11.5%, 11 seats
2024: 12.5%, 72 seats
We could significantly increase our vote share in 2029 and go backwards in seats. We could also take the twenty-five plus target seats with no overall increase in vote share. It depends on our success or otherwise in targeting and campaigning in individual seats.
Worse, the second commonplace gets it the wrong way round. Rather than aiming to increase our vote share to bring more target seats on line, we should be significantly increasing the number of targets to increase our overall vote share.
In 2024, we targeted around 80 seats. Say we ran serious campaigns in 160 seats. This would provide an uplift of around 2% in national vote share, if we put on 15% on average across the newly targeted seats. If we did achieve this, we would also win a good number of those seats. In contrast, increasing vote share by 2% in ALL seats would at most win us maybe one or two extra seats gross.
Like the immediately obvious twenty-five plus targets, most of the additional sixty or so seats would be in our heartlands. However, it would make good sense to designate target seats in other regions to give a fillip to morale and organisation. The north of England, for example, has some plausible targets based on local election strength and/or historical performance. For example, the Kingston-on-Hull seats, Redcar, Southport, Liverpool Wavertree, Leeds West, the border seats (both sides).
Stretching targets in this way would require regional organisers, PPCs in place early and disbursement of central funds to accelerate development. There is the risk of funds spread too thinly. But this investment will prove worthwhile, I believe, if done early, as with the eighty targets for 2024.
Those sceptics who suggest Liverpool Wavertree, for example, is not remotely going to fall in 2029, miss a point. The Greens have proved, with their three gains in 2024, that impregnable majorities are anything but in the face of sustained campaigning.
3. The party will need a single national message.
At the last election its selection of policies based on the core concerns of voters in liberal-leaning, middle class seats served it well, but was not… a platform on which to build vote share,
as Ben Rich puts it in an article in Radix.
But sorting out care and the health service are not merely core concerns of middle-class voters! They are core concerns of ALL voters! The same goes for water pollution.
Given our aging population, sorting out delivery of care and health is arguably the most pressing issue facing the country. Moreover, our policy ideas in this area epitomise a liberal approach to maximising positive liberty. The needlessly sick or the carer unsupported by government have their choices reduced and their lives cabined, cribbed and confined.
Alternative suggestions for the focus of our “national message” include education (nostalgic citations of 1p on income tax to pay for education); Europe and inevitably electoral reform. None of these issues offer more fertile territory than care and health. Europe and electoral reform, in particular, are the “core concerns” of a tiny minority of voters. And any strategy based on prioritising those Lib Dem activist concerns over voter concerns would see both vote share and seats plummet.
Our policies on care and health exemplify liberal ideology and a coherent national message. We should be bold about expanding our range of target seats to go along with our new relevance to the voters.
* Chris Moore is a Lib Dem member who lives in Euskal Herria. He has worked in journalism and finance.
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“In 2024, we targeted around 80 seats” I’m not sure where this figure comes from but I’ve been told that most of our gains were seats where only the local party had been told to campaign, so I would think the target list was not much over 30. Indeed that low number has been hinted at in party wide emails on at least a couple of occasions.
@ Chris Moore,
You should be making the working assumption that Reform and the Tories won’t be fighting each other at the next election. If they hadn’t been in conflict in July you’d have won 26 fewer seats. Depending on the assumptions you make that could perhaps be reduced to 20.
The Labour Party will likely be very unpopular at the next election and the formerly Tory voters whom you’ve targeted will very likely return to the fold. Rightly or wrongly the Lib Dems are seen as part of a loose anti-Tory coalition which is dominated by the Labour Party. If the Labour Party lose votes then Lib Dems will likely suffer too.
So you’ll be doing well to win 50 seats.
@David Grice: there were serious campaigns in around 80 seats (that includes seats already held.)
As I’m not a party insider, I’ve no idea how many seats outsiders were directed to campaign in by party e-mails.. If you’re right that there were only 30 such “targets” in that sense (plus 15 seats already held??) then you are perhaps inadvertently making my point for me.
We should be trying to run serious campaigns this time round in far more seats than in 2024. This does not mean we will be jet skiing outsiders into 160 seats! It means that by 2029, we should be able to run hard-hitting independent campaigns in all those seats.
@Peter Martin: you are merely alighting on one out of various possible scenarios. Tory and Reform unite by 2029: 25% probability.
In the 1997-2010 parliament, with an increasingly unpopular Labour government, the LD vote share went UP in 2001, 2005 and 2010, in spite of the close alignment of Lab and LD in 1997.
I think for a party like the LibDems, in the UK, with the present demographic, under FPTP, the ceiling is about 100MPs. That is, if London does not get fed up with Labour.
@ Chris Moore,
The Tories and Reform don’t have to formally unite. They simply do what the Labour Party and Lib Dems have started to do. ie Have a non-aggression pact and simply stand paper candidates in certain agreed seats.
The Lib Dem vote in 2010 was 23% (up 1% on 2005) but the seat count was 57 ( down 5 on 2005). So this is still evidence that your seat count will fall when the Tory vote recovers. This time you had the amazing total of 72 seats on just 12.2% of the vote. This is quite an oddity for Lib Dems.
There’s really no reason to expect this oddity will be repeated at the next and subsequent elections. It’s much more likely that a more normal pattern will be restored with your seat count falling drastically even with a slightly higher vote share.
It will be interesting to see what happens in this Parliament. Starmerism appears to be a variation of the old Labour govt from 1974-9 which includes corporate socialism and deference to the party’s paymasters ie the Trade Unions. Lib Dems will need to consider where they stand ie equidistant from con and lab or left of labour. Certainly the radical centre may be good in the mould of the former Alliance.
The Tories will come back wherever they decide to anchor themselves politically. What happens to Labour is perhaps more unpredictable. They had internal problems (more complex than we might think) before the election and they haven’t gone away. Authoritarian Labour leadership is not going to cut it with many supporters who Lib Dems should go after. So who knows? If we speak and act together in an open and liberal way that might be as important as policy decisions.
@ Peter Martin: well, Peter, LD seat count was up in 2001 and 2005 and of course was still higher in 2010 than in 1997. So it’s simply not true that an unpopular Labour government NECESSARILY leads to a drop off in LD vote or seats. it MIGHT do.
Then again, Labour may not be any LESS popular in 5 years than it is now. It’s popularity might even increase.
The scenario of Reform and Conservatives having a non-aggression pact would certainly make sense electorally, and is more likely than fusion. But again it’s merely a possibility. To myself and probably you, the current Tory Party and Reform seem quite close; but this is the NOT the perception of many Reform activists. Nor. of course, One Nation Tories.
The point I’m making repeatedly is that you are much too confident in your own predictions. It may very well not turn out as you imagine. That is the nature of thinking about the future.
@ Chris Moore,
“Then again, Labour may not be any LESS popular in 5 years than it is now. It’s popularity might even increase.”
What’s that saying about pigs and flight?
They aren’t actually that popular now. Starmer has somehow won a huge majority with fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn received in 2019. Lib Dems have won an extra 61 seats by increasing their vote share by just 1%. It’s not about making predictions by looking into a crystal ball or buying Old Moore’s Almanack.
It’s much more about understanding how a highly unusual voting pattern, caused largely by the split in the Tory/Reform vote has led to the electoral result we have just seen.
hello, Peter, there isn’t a single LD or Labour who doesn’t understand that having the right-wing vote split between Reform and Conservatives helped significantly in the election result.
What is more difficult to see is the future. You have a very confident idea of what that will look like in 5 years. I spend much of my professional life thinking about future possibilities. And I’m simply telling you you are far too confident in your own predictive abilities.
I mentioned the possibility that Labour might be more popular – let’s say get a higher share of the national vote – in 5 years. You have waxed lyrical about levitating pigs. I would translate your lyricism as a 20% possibility that Labour will increase its vote share. 30% it stays similar. 50% it goes down.
My perception is that few people understand what the LibDems stand for – apart from policy stances. Surely there is still an opportunity to galvanise support through promoting Liberal ideals, supported by policies? This simply has not happened to date. We have been lucky. Not being the Conservatives and/or not being Labour, simply isn’t enough.
There are huge holes in our organisation across the country. If my experience of selfish demotivation is anything to go by, there is much to be done – including encouraging activists rather than leaving them to rot.
Many people, such as Peter M, assume that the 2024 GE was a freak, and that ‘normal service’ will be resumed at future elections. I wonder though, whether we are seeing a more profound shift in voter behaviour, and likely election results. The Greens and the Lib Dems have maximised their potential, by identifying the seats where they have their best chances, and targeting their campaigns accordingly. Reform UK have yet to learn that lesson, but may do by the time of the next GE. We are thus likely to see a series of very different contests; the Greens will target Labour’s inner city seats, Reform will (if they have any sense), target labour’s red wall seats, whilst suburban and rural seats may well become a contest between the Conservatives and the LDs. This has already happened in the Home Counties and the South West. I think there’s considerable potential for the LDs further north, based on local election results – where Labour have either established themselves as the main opposition – or in some cases won seats – where they are not historically strong, and where, I suspect, voter allegiance is weak. Many in the LDs would like to see the party winning back support in working class, urban seats, but I think that ship has sailed. Success, for any party, in future GEs, will be based on how effective they can be in identifying and targeting their own slice of the electorate, rather than overall % support.
Enough of the fantasy football approach! What Graham Jeffs said on both counts!
It is interesting where Lib Dems go from here. At the election it positioned itself as a repository of anti-Tory votes in constituencies that Labour could not win. Recent pronouncements seem to show that it thinks of itself as left of Labour. The old Alliance and Liberals tended to see themselves as radical Centre, with equidistance between Labour and Conservatives. Already our Labour Government has done some awful things such as take away the Winter Fuel Allowance from most state pensioners and given huge rises to Junior Doctors and Train Drivers, showing that they have to do what their union paymasters tell them. Lib Dems need to go on the attack against this Socialist Government which will possibly wreck our economy. Lib Dems need to think carefully as to whether they are wanting Brexit reversed, whether they want tougher law and order and whether they support open door migration and whether they see themselves as anti-Tory and anti-Labour. What exactly is Liberalism?
@David Symonds
Junior doctors – it appears a lot of those we train in this country are sloping off abroad to earn more than they can here. You find that acceptable?
Train drivers – so how much do you think someone who may well be responsible for the safety of hundreds of people at any one time should be paid?
@Graham Jeffs. I strongly agree with your remarks regarding holes in our organisation. Part of the response to that should be designating target seats in areas outside our electoral heartlands in southern England. Another would be doing much better on ethnic minority membership and PPCs. (We have some serious holes in London, for example.)
Then you say this, “My perception is that few people understand what the LibDems stand for – apart from policy stances. Surely there is still an opportunity to galvanise support through promoting Liberal ideals, supported by policies? This simply has not happened to date.”
I’m not sure what Liberal ideals you are referring to or which policies you believe support them. The basis of my article is that improving the situation for social carers, to take just one example, is an intrinsically liberal policy. Unsupported carers have their liberty restricted. Maybe, leadership could bring out the liberal motivation behind our care and health policies more clearly.
If what you are arguing for, on the other hand, is a return to bashing on about perennial LD concerns like PR or the Single Market, then I regard that as going back into our comfort zone. it will not be electorally successful. Nor are such concerns particularly LIBERAL .You can be liberal and anti-EU and liberal and indifferent to PR.
I can assure you, Chris Moore, that I am totally in agreement about your comments on PR.
I would regard the Single Market as important – but that’s a policy in support of a party that should have an obvious philosophy. We are too shy in enunciating that.
Others have in the past touched on the preamble to the party constitution. Surely that’s the approach on which we can then hang our policies? If we do it the other way around we simply look like the other parties – producing policies to suit the local and national mood – a breeding ground for cynicism.
@Graham Jeff’s. 100% and as for “selfish demotivation”, I wish I had used the term first !
Bottom line: 72 seats great but are we happy with 12% of the vote including votes borrowed from soft Tories ? To raise our share of the vote do we go left after Labour votes or centrist after one nation Tories ? At the moment our instincts say go left, but we know the winnable seats are Conservative. Andrew Rawnsley articulated this problem in Guardian piece a couple of days ago.
At the moment we are fudging the issue as it is a source of potential conflict in the party and we don’t want to go there.
The first question we should be asking is how over the next five years we can speak and act for the improvement of people’s quality of life; if we only focus on where we can win seats we will loose our purpose and become like the populists. Putting people at the centre is our core value; e.g. the skills wallet policy proposes giving money to adults to choose how to use (with guidance) for their further education and skills.
The fundamental error of this government over winter fuel allowances is the failure to look holistically at the varied circumstances of senior citizens and their needs before making any decision about what funds should be available to them. Too much policy making in government and political parties (including the LibDems) is done in silos, thereby making a mess of how to serve individual needs.
Focusing on health is good because it’s something that is of direct concern to almost all voters. Social care might be less so in electoral terms because, although it’s a serious issue to a minority of voters, it is only a minority who need or interact with social care services. I think though that for both areas, if we want to be taken seriously, we do need to find a message that’s a bit more nuanced than, ‘Spend loads more money!!!‘ since most people outside political bubbles can almost certainly see that by itself that’s not a long term sustainable solution.
More generally, where we go next should first prioritise defending the seats we already have. 72 seats is in historical terms, a huge number of seats for us and includes a lot of places where having a LibDem MP is very unusual. In a do-nothing scenario many of those seats could easily revert to the Tories at the next election, particularly if we start diluting our focus. So while I’ll be very happy to take more seats, I’d also regard it as a big success if in 2029 we simply hold, and get more firmly established in, the seats that we already hold.
@Peter Martin – regarding a ‘non-aggression pact’ between the Tories & Reform, from where I am 6500 miles away it looks to me like the Tories despise Reform even more than Labour despises us.
Health is a really important issue for us to promote but if we are going to win young voters and especially stand up against the Greens as they take more votes from Labour in the future then housing will have to become one of our key policies.
@ Chris Moore,
You might find this surprising but I’d like to see the Lib Dems do well and establish a more viable centre party. The voters should have a clear choice which would included a socialist/green left, a liberal centre and a Tory/Reform right.
So we could then move the Labour Right and the one Nation Tories into the centre party! I appreciate you might not like that though.
But the point I was making is that you’re dreaming if you think you can do that without substantially increasing your vote share. It’s more a question of arithmetic than making predictions.
The same goes for an argument I’ve heard that you’re hoping to displace the Tories as the official opposition. On 12.5% of the vote? Come on, get real!
Graham, great to hear we are in agreement on PR!
@Peter Martin: Glad to hear you wish us well. As a Corbynite, I imagine you are pretty disappointed with the new government.
The fact remains that LD vote share and LD seats are very weakly correlated. You yourself have pointed out that the right-wing is split now. There are several plausible scenarios in which we become the Official Opposition on a quite puny vote share, if that split persists, which it MAY do.
But is it better that we have a higher vote share? Of course it is!.
How do we get that?
1. Campaigning on issues which are of prime concern to the voters. We have a proud – but mostly forgotten history – of introducing serious welfare reform. And of course Liberal thinkers pushed the notion of an NHS for many years prior to it being established. So I regard our focus on care and health as quintessentially liberal. And absolutely on the money.
2. Increasing the number of seats where we are seriously competing. This will raise national vote share. I appreciate there is a risk of over-stretching resources.
3. Sorting out issues which are holding us back: the one that is most pressing in my view is our very mediocre record at attracting BAME members and voters. Tories have done better on this to their credit. And I agree with Karen Pratt that we also need to do much better at attracting young voters.
Currently, being to the left of Labour on spending and taxation has clearly not damaged our standing with former Tory voters in our target seats. We won in those areas BECAUSE of that stance not in spite of it.
We don’t need to tack to the right to attract more voters from the Tories. We do need to be more organisationally present in the next tranche of seats we hope to take from the Tories. I don’t honestly see a downside to this. When it comes to 2028 say, we can make decisions at that time where resources will be prioritised. We need to be in the position where we do have the serious option to go for significantly more seats.
As for Labour, the fault lines are becoming clear. And there are a good dozen seats where it’s worth putting in a serious effort. Maybe more, if they become very unpopular.
A concern is that in the GE we only retained around 50% of our 2019 voters. A large of number of voters did switch from Con – Lib in 2024 but they may go back next time. The challenge of building a larger loyal vote should be one of the highest priorities and this would coalesce around 2-3 issues including Europe.
Every one of our seats can be held against a Tory-Reform alliance by being a great local MP, building our local government credibility and squeezing what remains of the Labour and Green vote. There may be some seats where we fail to do that but it’s mainly just what we do.
“Finishing the job” means twinning a lot of Tory seats where we came third. We need to gain credibility in those places fast. Unless we are lucky with bye-elections, that means winning credibility through local government success. Some serious resources have to go into taking Labour and Green council seats in Tory constituencies.
We also need to create enough second places to Labour that we can make gains as they get unpopular. We should look at this as an 8-10 year plan and again local government is key.
There are about 4 seats that could be won from Lab next time: S Hallam, Bermondsey, Cardiff East and Bham Hall Green. It would be symbolic to take any Lab seats. The 2019-24 strategy was very effective in taking Tory votes but weak in setting up targets from Labour and restricting the rise of the Greens.
Hello Marco, take a look at Burnley, Aylesbury, Montgomeryshire, Watford and Cornwall South East. These are all easier Labour-held targets than Cardiff East and Birmingham Hall Green. All also have the advantage of strong local parties.
@Peter Davies: I strongly agree with your remarks about winning Labour and Green council seats in Tory held seats.
Hi Chris,
Thank you for raising some very important points in your article. Whether people agree with your conclusions on the three arguments (I guess that is what you mean by the expression ‘interlinked commonplaces’ – even Google can only find four references to the expression, and three of them come back to your article here!) and on balance I disagree with you on two of them, it is good to see someone putting forward a view on our party’s chances looking forward based on some data and not just the fond hope of “We want nice stuff to happen and that’s good enough.”
The simple fact is we need people who are prepared to look at facts and consider what conclusions we can reach as too often we tend to refuse to consider that what we want to happen will not happen just because we want it. A failure to face up to simple facts (as during coalition) led to people refusing to accept that those facts showed things were clearly going very badly wrong from the start and so refusing to even consider that things needed to change, instead relying on soft homilies and any other delaying tactics to justify opposing any contrary viewpoints in order to avoid rocking the boat.
Regarding the points you make, I will give them some serious thought and come back to you with reasons on why I think you are mistaken later.
In the meantime, All the best.
Hello David, thanks for the very kind post. I look forward to your response.
And will definitely reply at some point. I’m away in highish mountains – possibly no cover – at the weekend.
There is a limit to how far you can advance using targeting and we are, in my view, getting near it≥ The price we have paid for our success is a swath of derelict seats and moribund local parties, most of whom cannot now mount a general election campaign
In the USA the Democrats have little local organisation , but every four years they go out and recruit volunteers to run their election campaign in presidential years. They have only a handful of paid staff, whose principle job is to recruit people to run the campaign.
It seems to me that what is now needed is a plan to recruit many more volunteers to make as many local parties as possible self sufficient and to rebuild moribund parties to be able to fight elections.
I am led to believe that our computer systems can identify likely prospects. We need to go and knock on their doors, unannounced and try to recruit them. We need to do it now and couple it with a drive to fight and win many more council seats.
We may still have to ask some people to campaign in n neighbouring seats at the next GE, but surely we should aim to have, at the very minimum, our held seats self sufficient by the next GE in 2029.
Chris Moore – Yes those seats require a lower swing but would be 3 way contests between Lab Con and Lib so people might not be persuaded to vote for us. Also in MONT we are currently 4th.
In CDIFFE where we are 2nd and BHAMHG parts of these seats were in LD held seats until 2015.
One other point I would make is that increasing vote share is worth doing even if it doesn’t translate into seats because it provides a mandate. Reforms 15% was the story of the election. The LD seat haul was due to the Tory collapse and does not demonstrate that the “targeting strategy” was actually a success.
@ Keith Legg,
“it looks to me like the Tories despise Reform even more than Labour despises us.”
From conversations with known Tories, unfortunately some in my own family, this doesn’t seem to be true.
However, I do know more about the attitudes of my own former party. Neither is it true that Labour members despise the Lib Dems. Many of them, including my own MP, have views which are virtually indistinguishable from those of the Lib Dems. She managed to mention she was a ‘humanist’ in her first Commons speech but the word “socialist” didn’t cross her lips. The only time it did was when I asked her directly if she was and she relied “Of course. I’m a Labour MP”. I’m still far from convinced!
I’ve often challenged the more right wing members of my own former party to state what their difference with Lib Dems might be. They are always hard pressed to come up with anything at all. Keir Starmer has provided one possible answer. The Lib Dems aren’t in favour of letting pensioners freeze in the Winter!
If the word ‘despise’ has any validity in the Labour Party it is about the factional battle that goes on between left and right. It’s toxic. We really ought to split.
That’s going to happen in the next year or so with the formation of the Collective Party. This is a factor that Chris Moore might want to take into account in his analysis.
Hello Peter,
Potential Collective Party would need to get those Independent MPs on board.
Can’t really see it as a Labour “split”. More a tiny sliver is pared off the Labour left-wing.
If the Collective Party does get up and running, an alliance with the Greens would make ideological sense.
@Marco. the advantage of the various 3-way marginals is that there is a much larger Labour vote to squeeze. If Labour declines in popularity we will be able to come through from third.
Cardiff East looks a better prospect than Birmingham Hall Green where we are on a princely 11.4%. We also start there in 4th, behind two local left-wing independents. So on the face of it, it’s not a realistic target.
BTW take a look at Leicester East where we have a really strong local candidate. This might be a better bet than BH Green.
Hello Mick Taylor,
We need to substantially increase the number of seats where we can run serious campaigns. If we get up to 160 such seats, they will need to be independent, as there won’t be enough “outsiders” to offer significant help in many of those seats.
The infrastructure for this has to be put in place now: regional organisers, membership drives, central funds.
25 seats is enough to be going on with if we also target increasing our national vote. This would be a sort of consolidation on this year’s result. It is essential we allow seats with little infrastructure to partially catch up so we are seen as a Party for all the country.