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