On Wednesday night England went 1-0 up against Argentina, retreated to protect the lead, and lost 2-1. We invited the pressure, the pressure kept coming, and eventually it went in. Twice. On Saturday England play France for third place, the fixture nobody dreams about.
I couldn’t stop thinking about our party.
We are 1-0 up. Seventy-two seats, our best result in a century, net gains in eight straight rounds of local elections. And the draft party strategy now heading to conference reads like a team protecting a lead. It even talks about consolidating our “fortresses”. Parties that think in fortresses have stopped playing in the other half of the pitch.
Defence matters; ask any incumbent MP. But if defence is all you’ve got, it’s a strategy for losing slowly. In politics, attack means having something to say. Ask a Liberal Democrat what we’d do for pubs and you’ll get a decent answer: exempt hospitality from the National Insurance rise. High streets: cut VAT for cafés and back independent shops. Farmers: a billion more for environmental land management.
Now ask what we’d do about the economy. Watch the pause. That pause is our missing attack.
Some will say we’ve fixed it. In February, Daisy Cooper launched Get Britain Growing Again and a plan to break up the Treasury into a Department for Growth. Good; it was refreshing to hear a frontbencher talking about the economy at all. But when the country asked what we’d do about the economy, our answer was to redraw the Whitehall org chart. A department is a means, not a story. Nobody on a doorstep says “I’m worried about the machinery of government”. They say the rent, the bills, the wages.
We’ve been here before
In 2021, Conference passed a strategy promising to develop “a compelling and distinctive political narrative” with “emotional as well as rational appeal”. Five years and a record election win later, the 2026 draft promises, almost word for word, the same thing. We are pledging, for the second strategy running, to work out what to say. The consultation found members’ biggest worry is that voters don’t know what we stand for. The strategy’s answer is a communications plan. But you cannot communicate an answer you don’t have.
A wardrobe full of clothes, no outfit
It’s not that we lack policies. We have hundreds, and individually most are sensible. Lay them side by side and the trouble starts. We’re pledged to abolish business rates entirely. We’re also pledged to reform them. Our science policy says Britain should tax work less; our hospitality policy demands a National Insurance carve-out, which is taxing work differently, not less, and invites every sector to queue for its own exemption. One motion frees markets so consumers can choose; another lets councils ban chain shops from the high street. There may be good answers to these tensions. We’ve never given them. Each policy passed on its own afternoon, and nobody checked the wardrobe.
The gaps are worse. Search our recent policy for a story about how your pay rises. It isn’t there. A plan for housing costs, the biggest bill most families face. Barely there. An honest account of what we’d cut or tax when our promises meet a real budget. Silence.
The liberal answer is in our own documents
The raw material for a genuinely liberal economic story already exists, scattered through motions we’ve already passed. We’ve demanded a competition investigation into the energy market overcharging small firms. We’ve condemned the concentration of enormous power in the hands of a few tech billionaires, the supermarket squeeze on farmers, the absent landlords who leave shops empty. Our science paper quietly proposes the most radical idea of all: shift tax away from work and towards wealth.
Join the dots and you get a story no other party can tell. Labour thinks the answer to concentrated power is to move it to Whitehall. Reform would hand it to whoever shouts loudest. The Conservatives spent fourteen years pretending the problem didn’t exist. The liberal answer is to break power up and hand it back: to the customer facing the monopoly, the tenant facing the landlord, the small firm facing the giant.
This is not about tearing down the middle classes; most middle-class families are on the losing end of concentrated power too. It might mean a modest rebalancing, taxing large accumulations of wealth a little more so we can tax ordinary work a little less. That isn’t class war. It’s already implied by our own papers. We just haven’t said it out loud.
Get back in their half
The strategy names Reform as the threat to beat. Quite right. But Reform feeds on economic grievance, and you don’t beat grievance by parking the bus, or with an organogram and a bigger social media team. You beat it with a better answer to the same anger, played relentlessly in their half of the pitch.
We have the values and most of the policies. What we lack is the sentence that connects them. Before conference waves through another strategy that promises a narrative, members should demand the narrative itself.
Seventy-two seats is a lead, not a trophy, and sitting on a lead is how you lose one. Let’s get back on the front foot.
* Tom Reeve is a Liberal Democrat councillor in Kingston upon Thames
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10 Comments
Hmmn … maybe the Lib Dem’s could try going back to being well, you know, liberal and democratic? I mean you’ve caught my eye recently with 3 things:
– hatred of Welsh and Scottish self determination (to the point of proposing to make it illegal for the devolved parliaments to spend money on anything that might help independence);
– playing to the crowd by Ed going on and on about banning Argentinian players from their World Cup final for … holding up a sign;
– Ed joining the bandwagon against a (non existent) ‘woke’ decision to ban Churchill from banknotes.
I think, on the ground, LD Cllrs are doing well against reform, but the leader playing to reform tropes isn’t going to cut it and will just confuse, or worse, the supporters.
Hear, hear
Tom is right, that we are lacking the story.I think there is a national story to build here, and it’s around local focus and growth, which is exactly where we have credibility and are arguably strongest. Hand the high street back to the people who actually run it: scrap business rates for a Commercial Landowner Levy, so the landlord sitting on an empty shop has a real incentive to bring it back to life. Get the flats above those shops back into use and you add housing supply too. Let towns generate and keep more of their own wealth through local procurement, get young people into local businesses through apprenticeships and incentives. Do that and you have growth people can walk to. Isn’t the story we can confidently tell, and actually deliver?
“Seventy-two seats, our best result in a century”.
But, I’m afraid, Tom, that within a year, in 1924, the Liberal Party (not, the Lib Dems) got hammered, in part due to their own inadequacies and divided Leadership. As one historian has put it, “Chiefs without Indians”.
As for now, 72 seats (mostly concentrated in certain limited geographical areas) is nowhere near to forming a government. Whole swathes of Wales, the Midlands, the North and to a large extent Scotland, actually had “our worst result in a century”. Yes, by all means think about policy, but also consider the whole of the UK and a Leadership whose best gambits have been irrelevant stunts. The party ignores these places (often in the past with a strong Liberal history) at its peril.
Politics isn’t a light hearted game, it’s about using power to get a more liberal society – for all the people of the UK not just one corner of it.
Those ‘fortresses’ in the South look more like a Maginot line, heavily reliant on a soft Tory tactical vote. Most of the country gets ignored whilst Greens and Reform surge.
If LDs want to be treated like a national party, they need have messages underpinned by policies, which resonate with the whole country. With economy near top of the list.
I love this parallel you’ve made; I couldn’t help but think the same. Rather than responding to shots being taken in a defensive mentality, we are are struggling to paint a liberal picture of Britain. We need to move up the pitch with the answers, setting the agenda for the political discourse in our country. Otherwise, we will have to fight for 3rd as we seemingly enjoy doing.
I don’t understand why Ed decided to jump on the banknote bandwagon, when the overlap between the people who are bothered about that sort of thing and those who would consider voting Lib Dem is practically non-existent.
The Argentinian football players were in breach of FIFA’s rule about no political statements when they held up that banner. UK politicians are right to be aggrieved. Anyway seeing as TЯump has taken Argentina’s side, it’s probably the right move to take the opposite position. TЯump’s position should not be surprising, supporting a fellow economic corporatarian, social authoritarian leader.
The Greens are in decline which perhaps isn’t too surprising. They have probably put off quite a few of their former supporters after their shift to the ultra-left on the political spectrum.
So if LibDems are looking to “Get back in their half” and have a more positive message, pushing a more envionmental line with genuine Green policies should have appeal to their former power base.
You can’t defend your way to a World Cup… or No. 10
Wasn’t ‘defend [his] way to No. 10’ exactly what Mr Starmer did in 2024, with the Ming Vase Strategy?
Predicting the future is not easy. What we can do is predict trends. One of them is that many of our challenges as a nation are likely to increase inequality. Climate change, AI, IT will all potentially do so. So a predicition might be that inequality will increase. What are we going to do about it?