As Liberal Democrats, we pride ourselves as being “local champions”.

It’s on every Focus leaflet, in every direct mail. Our spatulas, fitbits and our friends and family who are oft abandoned in favour of doorknocking on a Saturday morning can attest to the fact that we are community people who believe in community politics.

But how can you be a champion of a community that doesn’t exist?

This is the question that has been running around my head after speaking to hundreds of residents in my ward of Waterloo and South Bank, the most central ward in London, in the lead up to May’s elections.

I remember meeting seven people on the same estate who had the same long-standing disrepair issue. But they’d never met each other. Young professionals living in the area for under a year and unable to name the street parallel to theirs before they’re priced out. Families living in social housing longing to move out because the nursery their kids go to was closing.

And those were just the people you could meet – there’s a whole hidden electorate behind intercoms and concierges, inaccessible to the humble community champion. Inhabiting space without any concept of where they are, who they live with, or what the problems may be.

I missed out on being elected in Waterloo and South Bank by 86 votes.

Josh Mitte and Patrick Stillman have both already written on LDV about why campaigns like mine came up short across London. Much of what they say is absolutely spot on, and if we are to win in new places we must have another layer of messaging on top of being a “community champion”. (The Greens won votes in my ward with a paper candidate because their message didn’t rely on locality. “Hope” is a pretty universal concept.)

But though it is no longer sufficient, it is absolutely still essential that we Lib Dems continue to be community champions.

As Tim Farron said in our 2024 General Election Review:

“Community politics is in our blood. […] There is no human silver bullet to deal with the evil that is seeping into western politics, but we Liberal Democrats have found the closest thing to it. If we are to defend our country against the rise in populism, we will do so by forensically loving and serving our neighbours so that they do not feel the need to reject “the system” and opt for the extremists. Sometimes the most important lessons are the most obvious ones: we need to redouble our commitment to genuine community politics if we are to rescue our country from the abyss. There is no calling more noble.”

But loving and serving your neighbours assumes you can find them, and that they’ll still be there to be served. Look at what’s actually happening in the places we’re trying to do this:

Population turnover in Lambeth went from 10.1% a decade ago to 13.5% now. The 16 highest-turnover local authorities in the whole of England and Wales are all in London. Only 31% of Londoners think their neighbours can be trusted, against 40% everywhere else and 57% in the countryside. And nationally, the seats we already hold as a party are, on average, the least deprived and lowest-community-need seats in the country.

You can’t elect a community champion if you don’t have a community. We do well where community already exists. We struggle exactly where it’s disappeared. That’s a hard electoral truth. 

But that’s not where this ends. We believe in community not solely because it wins us seats but because it’s good for society.

As I look forward to future elections in my patch, the challenge is no longer simply to be a community champion, but to help foster a community to champion. Here’s what that’s going to take:

• Real grassroots campaigning – not just leaflets through doors, but conversations that turn into coffee meetings. TRAs and Friends of groups getting the backing they need. Residents meeting each other and realising their power as a collective, as well as meeting their candidate.
• Making affordable housing the priority – you can’t be a villager if you can’t afford to be in the village. This is the biggest lever we actually have to help people feel rooted in their communities. We must prioritise affordable housing at every opportunity, so that no one is forced to move away simply to find a better price. 
• Fighting for our third spaces – the pub, the library, the community centre, the bit of green space with a bench on it. We should champion these and keep up our great work nationally on protecting high streets and hospitality.

The Tories dismantled community and called it freedom – right to buy, market individualism, let people fend for themselves. Labour try to patch the hole with the state, and call that community too, when really it’s a shoddy replacement. We’re the only ones actually arguing for the thing itself – not shrinking it, not replacing it, but building it back up and empowering people to stand up for themselves. Let’s be loud about that.

Many have rightly recognised that we must have a stronger national message to win in our cities. But that doesn’t mark the end of community politics. It’s the start of community building.

* Elin Kingston stood as the Liberal Democrat candidate for Waterloo and South Bank in the 2026 Lambeth local elections. She can now increasingly be found making Liberal noises about housing and other issues online (@elinrkingston).