There have been a number of articles in Lib Dem Voice about what the Lib Dems stand for. Tom Gordon MP asked this in what was partly a reflection on the recent local elections in the UK, and others like Peter Black have followed it up. But such discussions too often turn into a wish list of policies people would like the Lib Dems to support or perhaps campaign on harder. What the Lib Dems stand for is best seen in terms of a more general approach to politics, though it does have implications for policies.

In an earlier piece for Lib Dem Voice I referred to Ed Davey’s speech to the Liberal Democrat Spring Conference in March 2023, when he declared that ‘community politics is something our party is built on. It is what sets us apart from other parties.’ The leader talked of candidates being ‘connected to the communities they represent’, ‘hearing their concerns on the doorstep’ (as opposed to making cold calls on a phone) and of ‘first winning their trust – and then ultimately their votes.’

This way of identifying a distinctive Lib Dem approach to politics is often misrepresented as a mere fixation with ‘trivial’ local issues, rather than facing the ‘important’ issues that matter at national level. Hence the Tory leader Keni Badenoch waded in with her own definition of a Lib Dem as ‘somebody who is good at fixing their church roof.’ A pretty positive thing to do, one might think, but Badenoch was again trying to hint at a fixation with trivia – at least when viewed in national terms. ‘They don’t have much of an ideology other than being nice’, she went on. ‘They are like “Fix the church roof, you should be a Member of Parliament”’.

Right. We get the picture. ‘Community politics’ is all about mobilising people to deal with the little things that bother us at local level – holes in the road, bins that aren’t properly emptied, and of course those leaking roofs, while doubtless neglecting the things that matter – like the billions that need to be spent on urgent new military equipment. Tanks, battleships, submarines – these are the important things. At the very least, they’re a bigger priority than getting a team together to mend a leaking roof.

If people think like that, I’d ask them to read an article by Elisabeth Braw in The Guardian published on 2nd June and entitled Weapons are one thing but if war breaks out, Europe’s best resource is its people. The article mentions some of the practical things that citizens in the Nordic and Baltic countries are doing in order to improve homeland defence. It may be cybersecurity, it may be training in the use of motorcycles, it may be radio communications and dog training, it may be practical survival skills, it may be learning to build and operate drones (children and adults are working together on this in Lithuania), it may be the government programme ‘Always Ready’ which includes survival, first aid and military skills in Poland, and which 400,000 (nearly half a million!) people have signed up for. This is effectively the building up of a Home Guard in several countries that feel threatened by Russia after its latest invasion. It is done at the local level by communities who volunteer to work together.

‘Yes, the threat from Russia is considerable,’ Elisabeth Shaw suggests, and she points out that the Baltics together with Sweden make up only a fraction of the Russian population. ‘But they have citizens who are willing to stand up for their country even when the odds are not in their favour. That’s worth even more than lots of whiz-bang weaponry.’

Starmer’s government with its ‘deliver, deliver, deliver’ mentality turning citizens into customers will doubtless commission a lot of new whiz-bang weaponry from the USA (which is what Trump really wants him to do) and military chiefs will be happy to lay their hands on the latest expensive stuff (which may or may not be as useful as the drones that Lithuanian children are learning to make). But the expensive stuff might not be enough. Recognising how to jointly manage the task of coping with blackouts, cyberattacks and other ways of disrupting our lives may prove far more important. Helping people to develop practical skills at the local level might matter more than lobbying ministers to award a huge defence contract for the building of a few billion-pound battleships so that we can be left to sleep soundly in our beds.

Civil defence shows that a grassroots approach to political action matters from minor repairs to buildings right up to the most important task of government, which is national security. Ms Badenoch needs to think past church roofs when she considers the value of community politics.

* Mark Corner is a UK national, who teaches economic history and philosophy at the University of Leuven, is married to a Czech EU official and lives in Brussels. He has just published A Tale of Two Unions suggesting that Brexit may damage the British Union unless the UK becomes more positive about the way the European Union is structured.