Could the Greens ever overtake the Lib Dems?

It’s election year and it’s no great surprise to see a number of hatchet jobs on the Lib Dems across the print media, especially the right wing tax exiled/foreign owned press. Part of the reason I write blogs is to be a (low circulation) liberal counterblast to the partisan media that generally does us no favours. Some of the stories lately have been trumped up and specious attacks that I won’t dignify with a response. One piece however, by George Eaton in the New Statesman, hypes up the Greens prospects in Bristol, and asks a serious question – Can the Greens ever overtake the Lib Dems? My short answer to this is that it’s possible, it’s happened in other Anglo-Saxon countries, but it’s unlikely in Britain in the foreseeable future. Let’s get into it . . .

Goldilocks scenario for the Greens – a warning from Australia
The 1973 oil shock reverberated around the industrial world, causing social and economic problems for a decade or more, and reset politics in a few countries, in both Britain and Australia it benefited the third force, eating away at a post-war two party status quo. For Britain that was the Liberals, for Australia it was the Democrats. The Democrats were led by the charismatic Don Chipp who was known for the phrase ‘Keep the bastards honest’ – acceptable as part of mainstream discourse because bastard is not an offensive term in Australia and the level of cynicism towards the political elite is particularly high there.
People were comfortable with the Democrats offering competition to the two major parties and keeping them on their toes. The Democrats then blotted their copybook hugely when holding the balance of power in the upper house, they voted with the Liberal Party (equivalent to our Conservatives) in the late-90s several times, thus acquiescing to a number of right wing measures including the highly controversial and regressive Goods and Services Tax (a version of VAT). In the 2004 and 2007 elections the Democrats collapsed, following what is now a familiar dynamic of the public giving the junior partner in any power sharing agreement (especially a liberal left one) a really good kicking.

Don Chipp of the Australian Democrats – very self-aware of his role in his country’s politics

Throughout the 2000s the Democrats were overtaken by the Greens as the third force in Australian politics. Australia’s political culture and electoral system allows for minor parties and independents to be a permanent fixture in parliament. Unfortunately for the Democrats, when people are looking for an alternative they no longer look in their direction. Thus in the 2022 Federal Election there was a massive upswing in independents, some of them dubbed the Teals, with centrist views similar to the Democrats, but not running on a Democrat ticket.
Is there a way back for the Australian Democrats? I wouldn’t count them out but they have to fight their way past assorted Indies and the Greens to regain their former position. It’s a distant prospect at the moment. The harsh lesson dealt to the Aussie Demos was actually a major spur for me to join the Lib Dems, because in 2015 we bombed out just like our Antipodean cousins had a few years beforehand, and I didn’t want to stand idly by while the party I loved atrophied away and was consigned to the margins. Thankfully I wasn’t alone in thinking that way.

Green growth in Britain – starting to triangulate
Not unlike their Aussie counterparts, Greens in Britain have been on a slow march to electoral success. Their big breakthrough at the Euro elections in 1989, when they finished 3rd on 14.5% proved to be a false dawn – the Lib Dems were just getting their act together as a merged party and sudden scrutiny of the Greens ended in tears with a notorious appearance by David Icke on the Wogan show where he revealed himself to be a nut job (he had recently resigned from the party but it remained tainted by association for some time).
You don’t need me to tell you that the party has been gaining momentum in the last 15 years in Britain, often people compare this to the rise of the Greens in Germany and how this signals a form of post-materialist politics – the most affluent no longer chase more money at all costs as this conflicts with a good quality of life.

Petra Kelly, leader of Die Grünen in Germany, a pioneer of environmental politics

It must be an immense source of frustration for the Greens that they are now in a range of 750,000 to 1,250,000 votes at General Elections but they can’t get beyond wining a solitary seat in Brighton – they get the rawest deal from First Past the Post out of everyone. When people are being optimistic they ask where the Greens might win their second, third, fourth etc seats. The speculation about Bristol strikes me as a bit bizarre, for the Greens to win a second seat there they’d have to leapfrog past Labour’s Thangam Debonnaire who’s polled 47,000 at the last two elections – that’s close to an all-time British record. Taking a closer look at their prospects in places like Bristol and other progressive university towns is fair, however as there are plenty of crossover Green/Labour voters.
George Eaton poses an interesting question of the Greens – they’re now moving on from being a niche urban hipster party or having a fringe presence in the Home Counties ‘muesli belt’ to taking on a number of rural councils such as Mid Suffolk and Forest of Dean. Can they triangulate and offer a radically different agenda to people in small towns and the countryside compared to the big cities? In my experience rural Greens are being voted in on an ultra-NIMBY ticket that actually means they’re closely aligned to the Conservatives they’re unseating.
In practice what happens when the Greens unseat Tories in the countryside? I’m well placed to answer that as it happened my ward last year. There has been an improvement by default – i.e. the Tory councillors did precisely nothing for the local community, the Greens have been active with organised litter picks in my village, but the monitoring and reporting side of things haven’t changed. Drains are still blocked, street signs are still dirty, road markings are faded, country lanes are still caked in litter. As for anything major like tree planting, more wild flowers or dew ponds to help insects – the Greens didn’t aim for any of that, so it hasn’t happened.
Will small changes be enough to satisfy people long term? That could be difficult for the Greens, often people don’t notice the voluntary work you’re doing, or don’t know who’s doing it unless you ram it down their throat.

The Greens like to do things differently – Jonathan Bartley and Siân Berry were their first co-leaders. Figures like Dale Vince keep the Green movement in the public eye. The Green Party has gained strength in Bristol – but the Labour MP in their target seat is hugely popular

Potential pitfalls for the Greens
When the Greens started out as the Ecology Party in the 1970s they offered a genuine point of difference to the political mainstream. It didn’t take long for many environmental policies to be adopted, in the 1980s we saw the removal of lead from petrol, the desulphurisation of coal-fired power plants to deal with acid rain, global agreements to phase out CFCs to protect the Ozone layer and end commercial whaling. All with Reagan and Thatcher in power on both sides of the Atlantic.
Those were great wins for the Green movement, we’ve moved on with the current agenda around climate change, net zero, habitat loss, biodiversity etc. Politically there is always the risk that the Greens become victims of their own success. At present there’s not a huge difference between the Greens’ environmental agenda and that of Labour and the Lib Dems. There’s some important differences with the Conservatives, especially with Sunak in change, and Reform is a genuine antithesis, albeit a fringe one.
Around the turn of the decade the Greens could be in the invidious position of trumpeting progress on renewables, insulation, heat pumps, electric cars and habitat restoration that’s largely been implemented by Labour in central government and assorted non-Green councils at a local level.
As the Greens lack distinctive or popular policies in other areas – healthcare, education, children’s services, social care etc – there is always a danger of other parties parking their tanks on the Green lawn and the party having nothing else to offer. Certainly its recent messaging about Israel/Gaza, essentially lecturing Israel for existing at all, shows a complete lack of nous about foreign policy (amplifying a long term naivety demonstrated by wanting to leave NATO until Russia attacked Ukraine).

Future competition in prospect
So, could the Greens overtake the Lib Dems? Certainly they’ve converged in the polls and they’ve ticked up at council level, they’re right to be optimistic about their immediate future. As a Lib Dem, however, I’d point out that our party is likely to make bigger gains in the Local Elections, may overtake the Greens in London (both in the Mayor vote and assembly members), and will make more seat gains at the General Election.
First Past the Post is not fair, it warps outcomes and we want to ditch it, but primacy does matter. The four parliamentary by election wins this term shows the Lib Dems are still the go-to as an alternative to the two main parties. The Greens were hugely talked up as a prospect in Chesham and Amersham on an anti-HS2 ticket. That the Lib Dems won instead is testament to the effectiveness and intensity of campaigning that the Greens are yet to match.

The Lib Dems General Election strategy may not be particularly revolutionary, it may not generate a huge amount of press coverage, but if we go from 15 to 40 seats it will be optimal

There was a possibility of the Lib Dems/Greens pecking order being upturned in 2015 and immediately after, but for now that window of opportunity is closed. The long term rise of the Greens is a game-changer, however. During the coalition years the Lib Dems lost 2,200 council seats, mostly though not exclusively to Labour. Since 2015 the Lib Dems have regained 1,600 seats, mostly but not exclusively from the Tories.
If there’s a Labour government the Lib Dems will be looking to make further gains, but from Labour, especially in places we’ve had success in before – Liverpool, Manchester, inner London boroughs. In doing so they will be in a dogfight with the Greens, the like of which we’ve not seen before. We’re in for interesting times.

Success City – London elections preview 2024

2024 is a massive year for elections in the UK, not least because on May 2 London – the most important city in Europe – goes to the polls. Our capital city has been electing a City Mayor and an assembly since 2000. In the past the political agenda for London hasn’t changed greatly between one election and the next. Despite the fact that the last election happened only three years ago (thanks to a pandemic-related delay), 2024 feels really different from the last one with several new talking points. Let me take you through them . . .

London’s blue light services
I don’t think anyone pretends that being a Police Officer in London is an easy job, however people who are willing to be critical of public services have long recognised that problems with the Met Police stretch further than a few bad apples. In 1992 there was a question on an LSE politics exam I took (presumably recycled for many years) ‘Are the police institutionally sexist, racist and homophobic?’ – in 32 years what’s changed?
That academics were willing to ask such a question, rather than a drug dealer on a sink estate should worry everyone who wants high quality law enforcement. I’ve known people in London who’ve been victims of crime subjected to insensitive lines of questioning playing on stereotypes just because they were a student. Heaven knows how bad it is if you’re not a white British middle-class male.
Has long-running dissatisfaction with the Police gone from fringe to mainstream? Look at America – from time to time there’s an outrage surrounding a Police Brutality incident – Rodney King or George Floyd – that precipitates a riot, the police back off for a bit, then things regress to a dysfunctional norm. Mainstream US politicians aren’t prepared to challenge the police strongly enough and for long enough to effect significant change.
Could the UK be any different? Rob Blackie, the Lib Dem candidate for Mayor is making history by being the first ever mainstream politician to run for major office on a ticket of Police reform, his most prominent slogan is ‘fix the Met’.
I must stress that as Liberals the Lib Dems aren’t an anti-Police party, one of our former London Mayor candidates Brian Paddick was a deputy assistant commissioner in the Met. We are willing to admit that institutions aren’t perfect and that the culture and quality of recruits in forces could be a lot better, however.
Which brings me to the Fire Brigade. When I first visited City Hall in October 2022 I got wind of a report being drafted about London Fire Brigade by Nazir Afzal. Afzal is former chief Crown Prosecutor for North West England, whenever he appears on broadcast media I think ‘that guy has a brain the size of a planet’, to my mind he’s one of the most impressive figures in British public life. A very authoritative voice, therefore.
The report he helmed is ‘Independent Culture Review’, this was produced in response to the suicide of trainee fireman Jaden Francois-Esprit in August 2020. At the time Afzal’s report was damning, The Guardian commented thus, “The independent report into the London Fire Brigade includes the anonymous accounts of more than 2,000 staff members detailing abuse by co-workers, including from a black firefighter who had a noose placed above his locker and a Muslim colleague who had bacon and sausages stuffed in his pockets. Female firefighters reported being groped, beaten and having their helmets filled with urine.”
In the two years since the report came out we’ve heard platitudes from senior management at London Fire Brigade, but not a great deal of response from the Mayor about precisely how to tackle the alpha male wannabe culture within the organisation. Is Sadiq Khan the right person to take on a hitherto respected and trusted institution like the Fire Brigade? He has the mandate to get tough with any institution under his wing, but does he have the appetite and nous to bring about any culture change? We haven’t seen the change we need yet . . .

The Lib Dems vision for London, Rob Blackie Lib Dems mayor candidate, all four major candidates at a Jewish Community hustings

London’s night time economy

We’ve had declarations of emergencies in the last few years – climate and cost-of-living – now I’m calling it – we have a night time economy emergency. Pubs, restaurants, night clubs, all forms of night time entertainment – comedy, cinema, theatre, are in crisis. This isn’t an overnight sensation though recent events such as Brexit and the spike in energy costs have made things a lot worse. This is a long term structural problem, in between 2010 and 2017 London lost half of all its night clubs, as documented by Vice magazine. The night club sector is particularly dynamic, but what happened is that a load of clubs shuttered after the global financial crisis and nothing came along to take their place when the economy started to recover.
Brexit has hit the restaurant sector hard – it has pushed up the price of many foodstuffs sourced from the EU and many Europeans that were working front and back of house have gone home since 2016.
All restaurants serving European style cuisine have had to jack up their prices and many have had to shorten their opening hours due to staff shortages. It’s not clear how these problems are resolved without the UK joining the Single Market/Customs Union or full Rejoin. As that’s not on the table for now, the UK government and Mayor need to look at other measures, most obviously support for energy costs and perhaps business rate relief or tax breaks on alcohol sold in restaurants. Without serious intervention pubs, clubs, nightclubs, cinemas, all entertainment venues will continue to wither and perish in London.
What of the Mayor’s record on hospitality and culture? I like to give credit where credit is due and the Mayor set up a new body called the Creative Land Trust in 2019. Its mission is to establish more studio space for artists – this is an important intervention because usually such space is less profitable than mainstream commercial, retail or residential space so it has been declining and crowded out over time.
I’d like to see the CLT given a bigger budget and its remit widened to provide rehearsal space for musicians and performance arts space for dance and drama.
By contrast, one of the Mayor’s most high-profile employees is the Night Czar Amy Lamé. After several years it’s extremely difficult to know what the Night Czar does and what her achievements are – she’s had a hand in stopping the closure of one high profile night club, that’s about it. This is a role that needs to be given meaningful powers or abolished.
What other pro-entertainment policies are out there? The Lib Dems have adopted the Music Venues Trust policy of a levy on large venue revenues to be redistributed to smaller venues. For context the stadium concert end of the market is booming – Wembley stadium has a record 12 gigs this summer, beating the previous record in 1988 when Michael Jackson did eight gigs as part of his Bad tour. If only a couple of % of that revenue could be trickled down to the 50 – 200 capacity venues throughout the capital, what a shot in the arm that would be (a 3.5% levy exists in France).

We need more support for entertainment venues so characters like Alex Lowe’s Barry from Watford can survive and flourish

London transport – in recovery mode
The last time I campaigned in London was for the 2022 borough council elections and it was clear that immediately post-covid that London transport was in poor shape, even in relatively central areas. People told me unprompted in Blackheath that they were suffering from both bus cuts and train cuts. Since then Crossrail has opened, its passenger numbers are stellar and in general tube, rail and bus user numbers are crawling back to their pre-pandemic levels. This has made several right-wing newspapers that take a lot of advertising from Big Auto who predicted the end of public transport look rather stupid.
On the one hand we can now be optimistic about a sustained post-pandemic recovery in London’s public transport, on the other there are no substantial capital projects being built or signed off for the foreseeable future. The West London Orbital, Bakerloo Line Extension, DLR Extension to Abbey Wood, Tramlink extension to Sutton, splitting the Northern Line in two – we have no clear idea as to if or when any of these would happen.
Transport policy discussions have evolved to address the damage that the pandemic has done to London transport, there are calls to reverse the bus and train cuts, and to address the growing maintenance backlog that is starting to affect services such as the Central Line.
In a world of lowered horizons the Lib Dems have quite rightly called for more of the smaller scale projects to be advanced – TfL has a long-term programme to make all tube stations step-free, for instance. This has advanced at glacial pace for some time. After Silvertown tunnel is completed next year, where will the capital projects budget go? At the very least we could speed up the step-free programme, it’s a poor lookout that we are a long way from completing this in 2024.
When it comes to transport, to a large extent London is hamstrung by a hostile Tory government that is trying its best to hang the capital out to dry. That does not mean that the Mayor has no discretion with the resources at his disposal however. If I’m going to be critical, I believe the Mayor has forsaken a lot of revenue via a multi-year fares freeze, and that the Friday fare cut exacerbates that. Along with the £2.2Bn spent on the Silvertown tunnel, there’s a number of executive decisions made that one could take issue with.
For what it’s worth, I’m in favour of more river crossings East of Tower Bridge in principle. When you look at Silvertown in detail however – it’s only a few hundred metres down river of the Blackwall Tunnel, there’s no separate provision for cycling/pedestrians, it extends tolling for crossings East of central London (users of the Dartford crossings were lied to about them going toll free, they have to retain a charge because there will be a toll on the future Gravesend – Tilbury Lower Thames Crossing) – it makes less and less sense.
While it can’t be rowed back on now, it’s a huge shame that directly after completing Crossrail we didn’t maintain that momentum and crack on with other smaller and easier rail and tube projects around the capital instead of TfL’s budget being blown on Silvertown. Somehow the next Mayor needs to come up with a funding model for new lines, because we now know there is an appetite for them.

The central section of Crossrail, now wildly popular with usership often reaching 700,000 a day

Housing – staying safe and avoiding rip offs
Traditionally the debate around housing in London was a bit of a pantomime, a Mayor would set an ambitious housing target of 50,000 a year and achieve 20 – 25,000 instead. Rinse and repeat. Now we have a regularly updated London Plan bursting with ‘opportunity areas’ which should in the long term lead to a much more permissive planning environment. Whether that will make much difference to numbers overall in the long run we’ll just have to wait and see.
Unfortunately for London the debate on housing has moved onto much darker areas. London’s social housing and high-rise sector is still reeling from the Grenfell Tower disaster. This flagged up fire safety issues as a result of construction industry short cuts that were going to haunt us at one time or another. It’s also in turn shone a light on the iniquities of leasehold, and the folly of shared ownership. This is something flagged up by George Orwell as effectively a scam as far back as the 1930s, but because our political culture supports major landowners so much nothing has been done about it.
Thousands of leasehold flat-owners and renters across London are now being gouged by service charge hikes. These are due to a number of reasons – post-Grenfell safety remediation measures, rises in energy costs, passing on mortgage rate costs etc.
Even council house rents have gone up far above the rate of inflation, sometimes with virtually no notice. One way or another Londoners are being ripped off by property costs in unprecedented ways, a major headache when the average rent in London is £1200 a month, that’s £200 above the national average.
How would the Lib Dems accelerate house building activity? The 2021 manifesto floated the idea of a London Housing Development Corporation. At the time this was to enable more conversions to residential schemes, many of which have been developer-led and of poor quality. Lots of opportunity and room for improvement there.
The London-wide developer is an idea that’s been carried forward to this year’s manifesto but with a greater emphasis on taking closer control of brownfield sites that could be developed, in partnership with public bodies such as TfL or the borough councils.
London is a part of the country where private developers wanting to build mid-market or luxury housing need no encouragement so I’m pleased to see the Lib Dems housing policy concentrates on social housing, and establishing a legal fighting fund so that tenants can take on ALMOs, Housing Associations, and Peter Rachman style landlords that are mismanaging properties. Low quality social housing and bottom-of-the-market private housing has always existed, it’s just a question of how much the political class acknowledges it and tackles the problem.

Peter Barber-designed Hannibal Road Gardens in Stepney Green – London needs a lot more of this!

I still say No to ID cards

We can be pretty certain that later this year there will be a change of government and that the Labour Party will regain power at the General Election. Quite apart from drawing parallels between the electoral outcomes of 1997 and now, we also need to be mindful of Labour’s policy DNA and what might happen in the coming years. What have they got up their sleeve they didn’t have time for in the 1997 – 2010 period?
The idea of ID cards is now fringe in terms of political debate, but occasionally I see data science nerds and the chief architects of ID cards, Tony Blair and David Blunkett, continue to advocate for them. Will this be part of the Labour manifesto? One of the first things the coalition government did was to axe the scheme, something I was incredibly pleased about. Let’s revisit the idea of ID cards and I’ll explain why I feel so strongly against them.

A return to authoritarianism
While many people quite rightly decry the populism of Johnson and Trump and the trampling over constitutional norms that they brought to both side of the Atlantic, Tony Blair brought a particular brand of strong arm authoritarianism that we haven’t seen before or since in the modern era. As a Liberal I found myself supporting the public sector investment and good economic management in the New Labour years but I had a major problem with the civil liberty constraints emerging, such as:

• Blanket CCTV coverage, the highest per person of any democracy
• Use of kettling to pin peaceful protestors for hours
• Introduction of high responsibility, low status ‘Little Hitler’ PSCOs
• Infiltration of peaceful protest groups by plain clothes police
• Badly worded Anti-Terror law used to arrest people for harmless activity in the public realm
• Continued deployment of notorious Police units such as the Territorial Support Group

ID cards were the next cab off the rank in terms of a control freak agenda. Time ran out on the idea, and for good reason, a national ID card scheme was set to cost much much more than all of the above combined.

Expensive and pointless – we can ill afford it
Supporters of ID cards jump through mental gymnastics to explain how having an ID card is really really important in addition to having a driving licence or a passport. If you’re actually keen on an Orwellian police state you could argue that identity cards are an idea that’s been and gone – they’re no longer needed. With so many cameras everywhere, including ones in your phone, and GPS tracking in smart phones, the digital world means you leave a footprint everywhere you go, voicemails, phone calls, emails can be tapped or hacked, the only thing that’s really private these days are your private thoughts.
Those in favour of ID cards also back them no matter the cost. When the idea was first floated in the early 2000s the initial estimate was £4Bn, by 2007 that had gone up to £5.75Bn. This is typical of mega projects, where to justify their existence costs are always underestimated and benefits overstated.
What would be the estimated cost today? Around £10Bn perhaps, but the real cost, because large IT projects always overrun, closer to a £13 – 15Bn range. When the estimate for the ID card scheme went up, even New Labour loyalists started to question the logic, the government had been burnt by the NHS patient records IT fiasco that ballooned out to £12.7Bn (original estimate £6.4Bn). New Labour had put misplaced faith and trust in technology, and didn’t seem to be learning any lessons (it was keeping problems with the Post Office’s Horizon software under wraps at this point, though problems were known about it dating back to 1998).
The problem with IT projects is that despite the fact that technology improves, delivering a new bespoke IT system is incredibly difficult and it never gets any easier. I have friends that code for a living, they tell me that if one semi-colon in thousands of lines of code is out of place, the program will not work. It’s small wonder than many early versions of well-known software are full of bugs. Double checking, triple checking code until it’s impeccably clean is a very time-consuming and difficult task, so getting excellent IT systems in place for something that’s straightforward as issuing a separate photo ID card will cost you. Creating a national ID card scheme will never be cheap or quick. If today’s Labour adopts such a scheme, alarm bells should start ringing – it shows it’s learnt nothing from the worst public policy and spending mistakes from its previous time in government.

The idea of ID cards was put to bed in 2010, will we see a return with the next Labour Government? Keir Starmer is yet to make his position clear

Changing the relationship between the individual and the state
I’ve always noticed that those who advocate for ID cards are exclusively white British males living in Britain who in pretty much every respect are in the cultural mainstream, nothing would mark them out as being part of any social group on the fringe of society. Such people would not feel threatened being approached by a Police Officer or would never have to talk to other arms of the state, such as a housing officer, to avail themselves of certain public services. They have no consideration for ethnic minorities, travellers, sex workers, religious minorities, people with special needs, the LGBTQI community – anyone that has a problematic relationship with the rest of society or with the police specifically.
In 1992 I took a politics exam at university, one of the questions was ‘Are the police institutionally sexist, racist and homophobic?’ An intellectual debating point more than 30 years ago, in the intervening time what’s changed and improved? We’re still looking for a root-and-branch reform of dysfunctional forces like the Met today.
The fact so much time has elapsed and so little has improved suggests it will take a huge amount of resource to improve the police force and weed out the bad apples that would abuse the existence of ID cards. Will the next government have that appetite? Past performance suggests otherwise.
There are long-running debates about the merits or the legality of suspicionless stop and search of pedestrians minding their own business, or the flagging down of cars by that are driving normally by traffic cops. Opponents of suspicionless stop and search describe it as a sledgehammer trying to crack a nut, it creates sufficient ill will to be counterproductive as a law enforcement tool. Issuing a national ID card, then placing the onus on all individuals to present an ID card to the police at all times feels like stop and search on steroids.

March 2023 – Parliament Square – it’s nice to go to a demonstration against Government policy and not be kettled for hours, as was customary during the 1997 – 2010 period

From a philosophical point of view it fundamentally changes the relationship between the individual and the state in a free society – that is at present our expectation is that we’re left alone as law abiding citizens by the police and do not have to jump through hoops when we interact with the law.
This particular relationship was of great concern to Orson Welles who spoke often about it, this particular clip encapsulates his thoughts really well:

Towards the end of this clip he talks of a potential ID card, but one issued on your terms, not the state’s and he says, “I see that card fitting into a passport, with a border around it in bright colours, so that it would catch the eye of the Police. The card itself should look like a Union Card, or the card of an Automobile Club and since it’s purpose is to impress and control officialdom, well obviously it should be official looking as possible, with a lot of seals and things like that on it. And it might read something as follows, ‘This is to certify that the bearer is a member of the human race, all relevant information is to be found in his passport. And except where there is good reason of suspecting him (or her) of some crime, he will refuse to submit to police interrogation on the grounds that any such interrogation is an intolerable nuisance, and life being as short as it is, a waste of time.
Any assault, however petty, against his dignity as a human being, will be rigorously prosecuted by the undersigned – ISPIAO – and that would be the International Association for the Protection of the Individual Against Officialdom.’”
Welles’ statement is a thorough and belligerent response to the notion of increasing powers being given over to the police set in the context of interwar fascism, communism across Europe (he regularly travelled to Britain, Ireland and the continent during that time) and the horrors of World War II.
This led to a brief flowering where the concept of civil liberties and human rights was extremely popular in the post-war period. Anglo-Saxon societies were hypersensitive to the notion of overbearing offices of the state, we’d fought, died or risked our lives to ensure freedom after all.
All Liberals should want a balance in the relationship between the state and the individual whereby the individual is left free to live their life as they see fit so long as they aren’t harming others and breaking laws. As far as I’m concerned that is a life where you don’t carry an ID card around with you every time you leave the house in anticipation of a ‘Where are your papers?’ moment when stopped by the police.

Six of the best: 2024 Local Elections preview

We’re less than a month away from this year’s Local Elections. I’m glad that they don’t coincide with a General Election. I believe local government is an important end of itself, and by being a stand alone election it gives opposition party activists a chance to really focus and stick it to the Tories, who deserve another chapter in their own version of Decline and Fall. I covered off what I regard to be five important and interesting contests in my previous blog. Here are another six councils where the Tories are likely to lose control, or offer some major talking points.

Gloucester – set to join the liberal family?
‘Glowster, Glowster’ comes the cry from the infamous Shed stand at Gloucester RFC when the cherry and whites are on song. Gloucester is a cathedral city with an edge. While the Lib Dems have had plenty of success in Bath and Cheltenham, not so much in Gloucester. ‘Oh but Gloucester is different’ is what the locals will tell you.
The social demographics are certainly not the same, it doesn’t have quite the feel of a genteel spa town, even if it’s rich in history. Nevertheless the local Lib Dems have been plugging away steadily and overtook Labour to become the main opposition after the 2021 Covid raddled election.
At that point the Tories had 26 seats to the Lib Dems’ 10, via by elections and defections the numbers have shifted to 21 plays 14. As Labour have two councillors, it will take only a handful more Conservative losses to make them lose their majority and flip the status of this council. A Lib-Lab administration is a realistic good case scenario, an outright Lib Dem majority in a goldilocks scenario if the Tories really collapse.

Gloucester – will the city turn yellow like so many other heritage hotspots?

Adur – another blue brick in the wall
Sandwiched between Hove and Worthing, plucky little Adur is a small brick of blue on the South coast, in fact the last Tory-run district council in the whole of Sussex. Adur contains the small towns of Shoreham and Lancing. Lancing College is a pretty successful public school, turning out the likes of Tim Rice, Evelyn Waugh and David Hare. If you were a retired Brigadier or Chief Accountant and you thought Hove wasn’t middle class enough you’d probably move to Lancing instead. In the distant past Lancing was controlled by Liberal/Alliance and Lib Dem admins.
As recently as the coalition years Lancing had veered so far off to the right it had a combination of Tory and UKIP councillors and has been in Conservative control since 2002. A few losses, however, and Adur could be in the hands of a Labour/Green/Indie coalition instead – certainly Labour have been gaining strength in Worthing and will send plenty of activists in. A nightmare scenario in May would also involve the Tories losing control of Runnymede and Reigate & Banstead councils in Surrey meaning a vast swathe of the home counties South of London would be completely Tory-free at a local level.

Southend-on-Sea – cruising towards a coalition
Southend – is a longtime playground of day-trippers coming out of East London, and its politics are entertaining too. The council is currently on a knife edge with a minority Conservative admin because the numbers stack up at Cons: 22 Lab/Lib/Green: 21, with eight independents not willing to back the slightly smaller liberal left bloc. An exchange of a handful of seats could see the status of Southend change.
Since it was established in 1974, Southend has been Tory outright five times and NOC seven times. It will be fascinating to see if the voters of Southend follow national trends or stay loyal to the Conservatives. Certainly this is a part of the world where the Tories do particularly well among the C2, D and E social groups due to cultural reasons. South Essex voted for Brexit, though Southend went ‘only’ 58% for leave.
A shift away from the Tories here could be a good barometer of how successful the Sunak stop the boats, culture wars, I’m backing motorists agenda will turn out. Certainly Southend has become a honeypot for petrolheads, hosting a car cruise for many years, much to the annoyance of the council (and many residents).

Southend-on-Sea – if Sunak’s agenda doesn’t gain traction here, he’s royally royally stuffed

Cherwell – time for Labour to grow up
Not unlike Adur, Cherwell is a hold out of Tory control, the only council in Oxfordshire still led by the Conservatives as the rest of the county contains four Lib Dems led authorities, and the Labour bastion of Oxford. Last year the Tories lost their majority on Cherwell Council due to a combination of gains by Labour, Lib Dems and the Greens. High fives and vegan canapés all-round – we’re heading for another rainbow coalition, the like of which exists in multiple councils elsewhere. Or so that’s what most of the opposition parties and the public thought.
Due to instructions from Labour central office, the local Labour Party refused to do a coalition deal with the Lib Dems and Greens. This precipitated a rather extraordinary turn of events, whereby Conservative leader Barry Wood was voted out of office on May 17 last year, and then voted back in as leader on May 23, due to the power vacuum created by Labour’s unwillingness to work with anyone.
Again, if Cherwell follows national trends then the Tories will lose more seats and be even more distant from being able to form a credible administration. No one knows for sure what will happen in Cherwell, but it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that the big three parties will end up with roughly the same number of seats and Lib/Greens/Indies will form a very precarious chewing gum coalition . . . unless Labour sees the error of its ways.

Sunderland – a case of regrexit?
Up until recently, Wearside has not been hotbed of liberalism, with all due respect to our decent showing in Newcastle and Gateshead down the road. On the night of June 23rd Sunderland was the first straw in the wind that we were heading for the EU exit door, it voted emphatically to leave, despite the fact that the area’s biggest employer, Nissan, largely depends on exports to the EU. Hard to understand looking in from the outside. Are Mackem leavers regretting their choice now?
For decades us Lib Dems couldn’t make much headway in Sunderland. While the council has had a solid Labour majority ever since formation in 1974, there has been a decent sized Tory opposition at times. Apart from a brief flurry in the early-1980s when the SDP/Liberal Alliance was at its zenith, the Lib Dems have never really featured until 2018 when the party started to pick up. Wearside Lib Dems crossed a rubicon last year, becoming the official opposition for the first time, with 15 councillors.
What’s their secret? According to reports from party insiders the local group is extremely well organised, very hard working and are going down the grass roots community politics route. When you have an incompetent or lazy Labour group that’s been in charge forever, people are willing to look for alternatives. If you’re not that ideological you just want your roads resurfaced, drains flushed out, street signed cleaned, litter picked up and graffiti removed. This is simple monitoring, reporting or voluntary work that Labour often isn’t willing to do, but we are.
While Sunderland is still a relatively safe Labour council, a few Lib Dem gains here courtesy of Paul Edgeworth’s team might make it competitive, keeping the ruling party on their toes – never a bad thing.

Paul Edgeworth, leader of the Lib Dems group on Sunderland City Council, keeping the pressure on the ruling Labour party

Solihull – who’s going to win the lottery?
Solihull, just to the South East of Birmingham, has developed into a topsy turvy four-way fight at council level. I say topsy turvy because it’s not uncommon with the wafer-thin margins at play for a party to increase their vote share and come away with seat losses. The thirds election cycle means that the Tories could lose just enough seats for their majority to disappear.
That’s possible if Solihull follows the regional trend outside of Birmingham that saw really solid Tory councils in the West Midlands lose seats or get flipped last year (East Staffs, Cannock Chase, Lichfield, Bromsgrove, North Warks). An added reason why Tory voters would stay at home is that their MP, Julian Knight, lost the whip two years ago and is subject to an ongoing Police investigation.
While the local politics of Solihull are complicated, from the outside it seems that Lib Dems, Greens and Labour dovetail enough to mount a challenge to the Tories. If the Conservatives do lose their majority, all eyes will be on a small group of Independents to see if they’re prepared to prop up a very unpopular party nationally.

Lorely Burt – fantastic Lib Dems MP for Solihull 2005 – 2015, sorely missed from parliament today

The only way is Wessex: Local Elections 2024 preview

We’re just over a month away from the first big elections of the year – the Local Elections and the London Mayor/GLA contest (which will be covered in a separate blog). I’d like to draw your attention to some of the more interesting and significant contests happening up and down the country. The big picture is that 2641 seats are up for election, spread across 107 different councils. The Conservatives currently hold 985 seats, Labour 966, Lib Dems 410 and the Greens 107.
My main hunch is that the Tories are going to lose 250 – 500 seats, quite who will be the main beneficiary we’ll have to wait and see. On the one hand Labour have ticked up in the last year when it comes to parliamentary by elections, on the other many Labour councillors and hardcore activists are unhappy with Labour’s leadership for various reasons so this year could be a major opportunity for the minor parties to come to the fore. What we can be sure of is that the Tories will definitely lose a lot of seats and their activists will barely campaign. This is either because they’ve thrown the towel in completely or they’re lulling us into a false sense of security, just like they did in 2019.

A Map of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude Fawley – aka Jude the Obscure, but will the Lib Dems write their own script in May?

The glittering prize: Dorset
Dorset Council is one of only four unitary authorities up for election and it’s a gold-plated opportunity for the Lib Dems. Dorset is a relatively young unitary, having been created in April 2019, a merger of the old County Council with every district apart from Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (a NOC council that is led by Vikki Slade of the Lib Dems). Remember that in early 2019 the Lib Dems had barely improved much on their low water mark of 2015 and Vince Cable was being goaded on Newsnight because we languished under 10% in the polls. We also fretted about the foundation of Change UK and how that presented an existential threat to us. After that the Lib Dems had a golden spring with 700 gains in the locals and had a fantastic Euro Elections too. It’s fair to say those 700 gains took us by surprise and our expectations and capacity to deliver results in Local Elections are different and better now.
How things change in five years, in 2019 we were feeling our way in Dorset as part of early stages in our recovery mode nationally. Now we know it’s possible to flip the status of the council, and precisely where to target. The council has 81 seats with the Tories holding 43, and the Lib Dems on 27.
The ambition is for the Lib Dems to become the largest single party, so that the Tories cannot form a coalition with the independents or a minority administration. Here the Greens have five seats and Labour two – it’s possible they might tick up a bit but Joe Public will mainly be looking to the Lib Dems to win the eight seats needed gain parity with the Conservatives. This is a realistic ambition, given how well we’ve done in Devon and Somerset in the past two years in local elections.
If the Tories do indeed lose Dorset it will be fascinating to see the response of the most famous Dorset Tory, Sir Michael Take – long term parliamentarian now social media pundit. He will probably blame left-wing media such as The Sun, Express, Mail, Tatler and Telegraph and point to unwelcome social trends such as veganism and the rise in the popularity of cycling, especially Freestyle BMX.

Sir Michael Take MP – Dorset’s favourite son – only features in thoroughly-researched and well-written newspapers like The Mail

Runnymede – more Tory misrule punished?
Running Runnymede should be pretty straightforward, it includes incredibly affluent places such as Virginia Water and some pretty average commuter-belt hinterland such as Egham and Chertsey. Despite that Runnymede has the fifth highest debt per person of any council in England – it’s in hock to the tune of £638m, which amounts to £7,270 per person (only Woking, Thurrock, Warrington and Birmingham are in a worse financial position, and have been well documented). Why is Runnymede so indebted? For the same reason as Woking – it was encouraged to take a punt on commercial property at a time when investing in retail became an extremely bad idea. Surrey Live reported at the end of last year that Runnymede had borrowed 71 times its core spending power to fund an investment portfolio that is yielding less than 1 per cent (not great when we’ve recently seen inflation at 10 per cent). At the time Lib Dem group leader Don Whyte said that the Government needed to take a significant amount of responsibility for ‘giving out loans via the Public Works Loans Board with minimal due diligence.’
Whyte will be leading the Liberal charge in Runnymede, which is a curious Conservative outpost on the Surrey/Berkshire border surrounded by Lib Dems councils such as Elmbridge, Woking and Surrey Heath. There’s currently a Conservative minority admin, with 18 seats out of 41. This is because the opposition is split between Lib Dems, Labour, Greens and localist groups. A few Tory losses could lead to a Localist/Rainbow coalition including the Lib Dems, however.

The Daily Express mapped council debt across the country, you look at Surrey through the gaps in your fingers, Tory-inspired debt will be a millstone for Runnymede and Woking for years to come

Disappointed of Tunbridge Wells
Tunbridge Wells, arguably the richest part of Kent with incredibly well-heeled villages such as Lamberhurst, Benenden and Sissinghurst is the kind of place you’d expect the Tories to govern forever. Indeed up until 2021 the Tories had been in power for all but four years since the great Local Government reorganisation of 1973. A combination of complacency and incompetence has seen the Tories fall hard since then.
Perhaps the richest parts of the borough are indulging in post-materialist politics as this is an area that will have seen the same long-term decline in public amenities and infrastructure as the rest of the country. Anyway the Tories have fallen from 28 seats in 2019 to just 11 last year, with the Lib Dems leapfrogging them as the largest single party. Now Tunbridge Wells has moved from a thirds election cycle to all-up elections. It’s not a two-horse race as a localist group known as the Tunbridge Wells Alliance has gained significant traction in the past five years. Often independents in Tory facing areas form when people are unhappy with the local Tory group but can’t face representing the national opposition parties. As I follow a few Alliance councillors on twitter I’d say they’d be comfortable in a liberal left home, but having no national agenda might help them in villages where nearly every house is worth over £1 million.
Tunbridge Wells has developed into a four-cornered fight as Labour has been gaining ground here too so this might be one of the most competitive boroughs in the country. This is no bad thing with the general election coming up – there’s nothing better than a battle-hardened squad, and in Tunbridge Wells we have a parliamentary candidate, Mike Martin, who is a former Army Officer and is a senior fellow in Geopolitics and Conflict at King’s College London (not to be confused with Mike Martin, a fictional SAS officer in Frederick Forsyth’s The Fist of God).

Ben Chapelard – Lib Dem leader of Tunbridge Wells Borough Council

Peterborough – what the hell is going on?
Last year Peterborough bucked the national trend, where the Tories lost 1,000 seats overall. They actually gained two seats in Peterborough and resumed leadership of the council, just one short of an overall majority. Tory joy was shortlived, though, despite their against-the-odds success, two weeks after the elections four councillors left the Tory group to join a localist group. Few weeks after than father-and-son combo Mohammed and Saqib Farooq both left the Tories, citing a ‘toxic bullying culture’, they were joined by ward colleague John Howard (not the Aussie Prime Minister). This eventually signalled the end of Tory control, there is a minority Peterborough First admin, which presumably works with Labour and Lib Dems who collectively have 22 seats.
Seeing as all is not well in the Conservative camp at the moment, it would be major surprise if they repeated their success this year. Neither Labour or the Peterborough First group is likely to make sufficient gains to take the council outright expect more horse trading and coalition deals after the May election. Any Lib Dems optimism for Peterborough is fuelled by the fact we control neighbouring Rutland and Huntingdonshire councils.
At present Lib Dem Nick Sandford is ceremonial mayor of Peterborough. Nick comes across as a thoroughly decent man, he’s currently bound by protocols to stay apolitical, I’m sure he’ll have a tale or two to tell about Peterborough’s tempestuous recent past, when the time comes.

Preston – passport to a brighter future
If you consider Lib Dem success at local government level across the North in recent years it’s a surprisingly long list – leading County Durham for the first time, gaining control of Stockport, leading Derbyshire Dales, West Lindsey, winning the first election for Westmorland and Furness, becoming official opposition in Sunderland. It’s not been a bed of roses everywhere though, and we haven’t been able to catch a break in West Yorkshire or Lancashire. When things don’t go your way all you can do is keep your head down and graft hard. If you say and do the right things your neighbours and near neighbours will notice. Eventually you’ll gain some traction even if that’s not reflected in huge gains in one year. That’s the place Preston Lib Dems finds itself in. Preston’s group is led by one of the hardest working councillors in the country – John Potter. His energy and enthusiasm is infectious and I’ve noticed over time that his campaign narrative increasingly includes more volunteers. As Liberals we really believe in the power of the free-thinking individual but you have to admit that the herd mentality is a very strong part of human nature. Build up a critical mass and people get involved because they start believing in you. That’s definitely happening with Preston Lib Dems.
Preston City is a safe Labour council and like many places across the North results have been pretty static in the last few years. Will we see much change in these Labour-run councils? One straw in the wind is Pendle where the Labour group is in disarray this week with mass defections. This is part of a wider trend since October as dozens of Labour councillors have been unhappy with the party’s stance on Israel/Gaza, sometimes coupled with a typical top down arrogance (this was a factor in Labour deselecting 19 candidates in Leicester last year). While Preston Labour is not known to be an openly dysfunctional group it’s entirely possible that the councillor/activist discontent we’ve seen elsewhere could lead to an underwhelming campaign. If that happens Lib Dems could turn Preston from safe to competitive. That might not sound earth-shattering to some, but every local group has to work on its own success metric, whether that’s standing more candidates, increasing vote share, gaining more seats or flipping the status of a council outright.

John Potter (right) has no off-switch, but I see more and more people join his campaign all the time

Bye bye Benton, Bone and Bridgen

He jumped before he was pushed, Blackpool South MP Scott Benton resigned yesterday meaning he won’t be ejected from the House of Commons by a recall petition. Who says there’s no good news? In a crowded field Benton was one of the most abrasive and obnoxious MPs on the Government benches. This is the latest step in a long process of detoxifying parliament that will involve the ejection of a lot more Tory MPs later this year, hopefully.
What we already know about the General Election is a large number of Tory MPs are set to stand down, on top of several that have already been ejected due to by elections – Warburton, Paterson, Johnson, Parish etc.
I know it’s ungracious of me to celebrate the departure of Benton, Bone and Bridgen (not gone yet, but he has more chance of being the next James Bond than being re-elected), but they are part of a particularly boorish cohort of Conservative MPs that won’t be lamented. What informs their behaviour? Having the first significant majority since 1987 probably created a lot of hubris among Conservative ranks and quite frankly I expected them to become arrogant because of it. It’s also the case that we’ve been infected with identity politics since UKIP’s breakthrough in 2014 and that goes hand in hand with a populist mode that is confrontational, aggressive and vulgar.
This has been really obvious in the media – for months on end during Johnson’s Premiership ministers simply didn’t turn up to TV interview requests.
When the polls started going against the Tories they reappeared, either with a superior air (Adam Holloway, MP for Gravesham giving Newsnight unwanted advice on how to handle government ministers – Newsnight’s been on air since 1980, I think they’ve got the hang of it by now), or took part in car crash interviews (hello Matt Hancock, Liz Truss, Laura Trott, Michelle Donelan).

David Cameron on the day he’s elected leader of the Conservatives in 2005, part of an ongoing renewal process that right now involves bad apples being kicked out or voted out

Return to politics as normal?
Whoever forms the next government, and it’s safe to assume it won’t be the Tories, will be faced by a huge set of economic and social problems. It won’t be possible to wave a magic wand over anything, however the change in the dramatis personae does matter. As I pointed out in my blog about Rejoining the EU last year, for any change in that relationship we need a wholesale change in our political elite and media landscape. The architects, instigators and implementors of Brexit need to be out of the picture, never to return, otherwise the EU will be very wary of any attempt to Rejoin, even if elements of the British public and our political class are keen. That process won’t be completed by the next election but if we want a new relationship with Europe it will be helped by the likes of Dominic Raab and Bill Cash standing down, and John Redwood and Elliot Colburn being voted out.
Personally I’d prefer to live in a world where the increase in child poverty is much more important than a redesign of the England football kit. Will the shallow, superficial mindset of our popular press change after the next election? Almost certainly not, but hopefully cranks that are fixated on weights and measures will be banished to internet-only Talk TV or low-ratings big money loser GB News. There will always be a fervently Europhobic strain to British politics, however it could go from mainstream to fringe if the likes of Benton, Bone and Bridgen are not replaced.

Benton, Bone and Bridgen: not a provincial Solicitor’s firm, but a rogue’s gallery of where modern day Conservatism has gone spectacularly wrong

A lost weekend for the Tories
Prior to Brexit, the last time the Conservatives had a major reset was during the Thatcher era, when the post-war political consensus and Keynesian economics were ditched for rampant free markets and monetarism. After Thatcher the party tacked away from her agenda but at a glacial pace under John Major. When the public made it clear they were sick of Thatcherism and Thatcherism lite under Major the Tories had a lost weekend with several leaders obviously not equipped to become Prime Minister – having a talent pool of under 200 MPs really did seem to make a difference.
Hague, Duncan Smith and Howard were never going to win against Blair, it took the Tories a good eight years to get back on their feet again with David Cameron. We’ve seen a similar dynamic recently with five different Tory leaders in nine years, though this time they’ve been in power. Can the Tories afford to spin the leadership wheel several times in the next Parliament? They know if they make the wrong choice from a small talent pool they have no chance of winning in 2029. While I have no desire to see a Conservative revival, the party’s capacity for renewal is unmatched in the industrial world, which is partly why it’s in power 2/3rds of the time in Britain. Everyone on the progressive liberal left needs to be ready for it. A rebrand of the party will be much easier with the likes of Benton, Bone, Bridgen, and indeed Jenkinson, Gullis and Anderson out of the picture.

A young Iain Duncan Smith – signs that the Tory cupboard was bare in 2001

If the Tories are smart enough to move back towards the centre from next year onwards that will involve a new leader, a new shadow cabinet, and a slimmed down parliamentary party bereft of populists who are great at playing to three-pint heroes in Weatherspoons but little else. How that plays out is for us to be mindful of in 2025 and beyond, for now let’s celebrate a changing of the guard and maximise our opportunities in elections this year.

Bigmouth strikes again

A few years ago social housing campaigner Kwajo Tweneboa appeared on daytime TV, he’s been on several current affairs programmes fighting the good fight for council and housing association tenants. Kwajo’s great, we need more people like him. Across the desk was Reform UK’s Ben Habib, looking particularly gormless and for a few minutes he pretended to care. Asking someone from Reform about an essential public service like housing is a bit like asking your local WI members about Death Metal – the two worlds will rarely collide.
Over the past few years opinion polls have been relatively stable but in the last few months a new trend has emerged – the rise of Reform UK. Many people are sceptical of their success, but if there is a genuine groundswell they’re using the same media strategy playbook that UKIP used, which worked for them.

Roy Jenkins and David Steel – would they be considered effective in today’s media landscape?

The Sun always shines on TV
There’s two things to note about UKIP’s method, they didn’t depend on print media support (although The Express did back them, briefly), by contrast, they took every opportunity to get on TV. There’s a key date that ushers in the UKIP TV revolution and funnily enough they weren’t involved. October 22, 2009. That’s the date that Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, appeared on BBC’s Question Time. This was the first time in many years that someone from the far right appeared on a mainstream current affairs programme. I remember people in my office who weren’t normally that engaged with politics were really fired up about it (hoping to see Griffin put through the mincer I might add). The BBC had taken a risk in giving Griffin the oxygen of publicity but it gave them a major rating bounce, and populists have had ample slots with all our major broadcasters ever since.
The ubiquity of Nigel Farage on Question Time was so notorious that a meta-analysis was carried out comparing his number of appearances with pro-Europe MEPs (35 – 0 between 2000 and 2016). Not merely did broadcast media give multiple slots to populists like Farage and Johnson to boost their profile it provided a training ground. Prosaic as it is to say so, skilled politicians don’t come fresh out of a box, they spend years honing their craft when it comes to comms. Many opportunities simply don’t exist any more – it could be said that the great age of oratory has been and gone – many politicians in the pre-radio days were lay preachers or trades unionists who gave speeches on a weekly basis for decades. Andy Warhol said if you have an opportunity to be on TV take it, this in particular applies to our political class, you can never appear too many times and if you have a few braincells and an astute comms team you reflect and improve over time.

The contrasting fortunes of Lib Dems in the broadcast media, but you have to be there

All froth and no beer
There are limits to how far TV exposure can take you, and how useful it can be. For a few weeks in 2010 pundits talked of Cleggmania as Nick Clegg seemed to come off particularly well in three-way televised debates (will we ever see the like again?). The problem for the Lib Dems is we only had 45,000 members at the time, not nearly enough to follow up on the doorstep with a ground game that showed people we were really on the march in their seat. As a result we had a little spike in our vote share overall, but actually lost seats, especially in places like the South West where the demographic trend of pensioners voting Conservative more and more hit us hard. The Lib Dems were presented with an opportunity in 2010 but we weren’t geared up to maximise it and winged our way into coalition government.
Many pollsters are dismissive of Reform’s double-digit poll ratings as they are reflective of high-engagement bias that comes from online polling and thus far Reform’s by election performances are well below the peaks of UKIP in 2015. It’s also entirely possible that the TV prominence the party has had in the last year will count for nothing when the general election is actually called. Most people don’t think about politics most of the time and this is especially true of people under the age of 40 that don’t consume newspaper content either in print or online.

Above the fray
What of the Lib Dems – are they missing a trick by not appearing on shows such as Good Morning Britain, This Morning or Vine on 5? Our relative absence on the low brow shows dates right back to the SDP/Liberal alliance days where we talked about an adversarial political culture that amounted to a Punch and Judy show, part of breaking the mould was being above the fray and trying to cultivate something a bit more grown up and civilised. The Alliance got a lot of respect for identifying the low quality, childish nature of political debate as a problem but not quite enough people voted for us – we got within 2 – 3 million votes of disrupting the two party system but our vote was spread so thinly First Past the Post killed us in 1983.
Daytime TV political shows have a mix of the photogenic, provocative and populist on board. Some pundits do share liberal values with us – people like Marina Purkiss, Gemma Forte and Femi Oluwole – but they aren’t Lib Dems and people would have to pro-actively connect the dots between their best arguments and our own platform.

A slanging match between Terry Christian and Carole Malone about trade deals, Lib Dem politicians are not used to this kind of rhetorical street fight

People can criticise Ed Davey for not appearing on these programmes, but quite frankly his relative absence is the product of decades of us being a centre party that struggles to broaden its appeal with no senior figures that really speak the language of the C2, D and E social classes. Someone like Shirley Williams did, but we have to understand that comes from Shirley being the product of the Labour movement first. What would happen if Ed, Daisy or Layla went on these shows more often and rubbed shoulders with Andrew Pierce, Carole Malone and Quentin Letts? At first they’d appear like a fish out of water, sometimes these shows are little more than a shouting match, and we’re not about that. Certainly Richard Madeley’s appalling treatment of Layla Moran a few weeks after the start of the Israel/Gaza conflict shows that mainstream TV sees people from outside the two main parties as novelty acts.

Who do you think was the most effective Liberal performer on broadcast media post the Ashdown/Kennedy era? For me it was Vince Cable, that’s because Vince had done more interviews than you’d had hot dinners, was always unruffled by tough questions, and exuded a sense of calm, presumably based on the knowledge he’d have another go on another broadcast platform next week, so one single solitary interview didn’t matter that much. Practice makes perfect, being an effective communicator on TV is very very difficult but if we have one lesson to learn from our populist opponents it’s how to work TV exposure to the full.

There won’t be a nuclear war

If you’re a political anorak or a massive Fatboy Slim fan you’ll be familiar with the notorious ‘Daisy’ party political broadcast from 1964. It was shown in full only once because it was thought to be too melodramatic but it’s been talked about ever since. The purpose of Daisy was to portray Lyndon B Johnson’s opponent in the Presidential election, Barry Goldwater, as an extremist because he’d toyed with the idea of using nuclear weapons to end the war in Vietnam.
America had first deployed nukes in Japan in 1945, but after that the Soviets had created their own bomb and there had been sabre rattling from both sides. By the mid-60s there was a developing feeling that this nuclear-brinkmanship was an extremely bad idea and people were tiring with the permanent jeopardy that came with not merely having nukes, but very overtly threatening to use them.
The 1970s and 1980s brought arms reduction treaties, a lack of sabre rattling, and a relative lack of major proxy wars. After the break up of the Soviet Union in 1991 the Cold War was over. Happy days, we didn’t have to worry about nuclear war any more and we could dial right back on our defence spending. One wag even declared that we’d reached ‘The End of History’.

The notorious Daisy 1964 election broadcast, from an era where people were starting to tire of constant nuclear scaremongering

2024 – the return of empty threats
In the past few years we’ve seen a return to the nuclear question as Vladimir Putin has been thinking aloud about the use of nukes, as part of a wider imperialist aggression agenda. Not merely has Russia invaded Ukraine, occupied Georgia and Transnistria, but politicians and TV pundits talk openly about attacking European NATO countries such as the Baltics, or even Poland and Germany.
These threats are counterintuitive, the longer the war in Ukraine goes on, Russia’s rhetoric gets more threatening, but its conventional capability is being drained in the way that NATO isn’t. If Ukrainian MOD battle stats are correct Russia has lost over half its tanks, rocket launchers and artillery guns in Ukraine.

It’s in no fit state to roll over into another conflict with NATO. While European NATO countries have been spending far less than the USA, the continent still has the small matter of 500 Eurofighter jets, the finest fighter plane in the world, I wouldn’t rate the Russian Airforce’s chances against them.
So what to make of this return to nuclear sabre rattling? Putin is partly doing it because the Western broadcast media is naive to pass it off at face value and because it’s the last card Russia has left. Chess champion and Russian dissident Garry Kasparov has observed, “Putin is not a great chess player, he is not a strategist, but he is a poker player, and he’s bluffing the international community.” Dictators are ruthless, dictators will push their luck, dictators will lie, dictators will break the rules you abide by, dictators will exploit any signs of fear and weakness like a playground bully does.

Dr Strangelove – dark humour that reinforced how fragile our peace was

Nobody wins in a nuclear war
The passing of time since the end of the Cold War is something Putin is trying to exploit. It’s been so long that nukes have been a serious part of any national conversation there’s a lack of perspective and understanding about the consequences of nuclear war, apart from the fact it’s an extremely bad thing. The fact is no country at a high or mid latitude would win in a nuclear war, even if, for instance Britain managed to strike Russia several hundred times and we intercepted all their nukes with our freshly-minted laser air defence system. We’d all suffer. Perhaps 1 in 500 or 1 in a 1000 would survive the long term consequences.
If you didn’t die in one of the initial blasts because you were in an underground shelter, you’d almost certainly die within a year from radiation exposure, and if you somehow managed to survive that you’d starve to death from the nuclear winter lasting a decade afterwards, where temperatures across Europe would not rise above freezing during the summer, making conventional agriculture impossible.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists assessed the impacts of nuclear conflict from start to finish in a cheery piece titled, ‘Nowhere to hide. How a nuclear war would kill you – and everybody else’. This is what it has to say about a nuclear winter, “Using new climate, crop, and fishery models, researchers have now demonstrated that soot injections larger than 5 Tg (into the upper atmosphere, blocking solar radiation) would lead to mass food shortages in almost all countries, although some will be at greater risk of famine than others.

Globally, livestock production and fishing would be unable to compensate for reduced crop output. After a nuclear war, and after stored food is consumed, the total food calories available in each nation will drop dramatically, putting millions at risk of starvation or undernourishment. Mitigation measures—shifts in production and consumption of livestock food and crops, for example—would not be sufficient to compensate for the global loss of available calories.”
Who is ready to save their population in the event of a nuclear war? In terms of the industrial world, no one is. In order to survive the blast, the high radiation for months afterwards and the nuclear winter you’d have to build deep underground hermetically sealed shelters and underground hydroponic farms on a scale no one has achieved yet. The only country that’s approached any level of readiness is Finland, which has built the most underground shelter capacity per head in the world as it is rightly nervous of a repeat attack from the Russians.

Unfortunately this might lead to a stay of execution lasting a year for Finland’s subterranean survivors unless they could all migrate to the equator. It would take the best part of a century and £100s of billions to build the resilience infrastructure to survive a nuclear holocaust from start to finish. No major population country has even attempted it because it’s so difficult and burdensome. Russia is no more prepared and ready for the long term effects of a nuclear winter than anyone else is. Even the most aggressive looney tune wackjob in the Kremlin will be aware of this. Even if they plan in detail for a nuclear war in a way that the West won’t, they can’t escape the global consequences that will ensue.

Putin – an isolated murderous psychopath, but even he knows he can’t win a nuclear war

What’s to be done about Putin?
It’s safe to assume Putin will win his own Presidential election, and will continue to use very aggressive rhetoric for the remainder of his war with Ukraine. It’s not necessary to have a symmetrical response with our own sabre rattling, but two things are important, however. We need to see the nuclear threats for what they are – empty threats. No one has dropped a nuclear bomb since we learnt the extent of their destructive power in 1945 (now x3000 with today’s warheads), and no one country could handle the long term effects of nuclear war even if they possessed an infallible missile defence system.
Don’t be cowed by the threats, they aren’t real, what is real is the conflict in Ukraine which persists and Russia is emboldened by minor territorial gains.

Here it’s a case of deeds not words, if the West dials up its support for Ukraine, it will do so furnished with the knowledge that Russia will not take the nuclear option. The good news here is we already know what works – giving Ukraine more of what we have already but in greater quantities – artillery shells, bullets, MANPADS, anti-tank missiles and the long range stuff that hits their arms dumps and dockyards. There’s no great mystery as to how Ukraine wins the war, and we also need to be clear about what Russia is capable of and is likely to behave. That does not involve World War III because no one can survive that.

Francis Fukuyama’s much read post Cold War tome ‘The End of History’ has been revised and updated several times, shockingly enough!

Budget 2024: The day the roof caved in

You’ll have seen several takes on Jeremy Hunt’s budget already I’m sure, I’m going to focus on the built environment. You know we’ve got a climate emergency, a cost-of-living emergency, it’s also the case that we’ve got a public sector buildings emergency. There’s a massive repairs backlog for schools, hospitals, council houses, prisons, police stations, fire stations, MoD estates, leisure centres, law courts and minor roads. There’s a scarcity of public buildings too, we need to build lots of new ones, as well as repair the ones falling apart.
When Boris Johnson ascended to power I was struck by how awful his construction record was, within weeks of becoming London Mayor he cancelled the Barking Riverside rail link that effectively killed off development in the Thames Gateway. He proceeded to back a number of hare-brained schemes such as the Scotland-Ireland bridge, Cross-channel bridge, Garden Bridge and Estuary Airport that were never going to be built and put his name to necessary projects such as the Bakerloo Line Extension but actually failed to sign off as Prime Minister. Johnson is a tough act to follow in terms of sheer uselessness, but somehow Sunak and Hunt manage it. What little investment that is planned is on the wrong things and in the wrong places. Let’s take a look at a few key sectors . . .

Housing
Bigger picture: Britain built seven million council houses between 1919 and 1979. Since then we’ve stopped building council houses, sold a load off, and demolished a lot, now there are only four million social houses in total (council and housing association). Not merely does the Government not fund council house building, it made it extremely difficult for local authorities to build them off their own back. Only this week it was revealed that Stirling Prize winning council housing – Goldsmith Street in Norwich – is subject to several Right to Buy applications only five years after it was built.
The significant discount on offer means Norwich council will have built these houses at a loss – a serious disincentive to building anything new. What’s in the budget? A capital gains tax cut for housing sales, a reversal of Right to Buy receipt retention for councils only two years after it was introduced (depriving councils of £200 million), and a £242 million grant to help build 8,000 houses near Canary Wharf.
Anyone with a knowledge of the Canary Wharf area knows those houses will be built, grant or no grant, and it’s a stone’s throw away from other major housing masterplans – 20,000 for Thamesmead/Abbey Wood, 15,000 for Swanscombe/Ebbsfleet, 13,000 for the Hoo Peninsula, 6,500 for Bexley Riverside. That £242 million for East London compares to £170 million for Wales (population 3.5 million) and £300 million for Scotland (population 5.1 million). So the Government is making it harder to build council houses during a property costs crisis and is actively making the country even more lopsided.

Goldsmith Street in Norwich – widely regarded as some of the best council housing ever built, could now be sold at a loss after a few years as regulations are weighted against councils that build

Electricity
Bigger Picture: Renewable energy has progressed from 5% market share to 45% in the last 15 years, contributing to a 70% decline in carbon emissions from the grid. This decarbonisation has been possible due to an almost complete phase out of coal use. The market share gain of renewables has largely been in the form of wind, solar and biomass. The UK has huge wave, tidal and geothermal resources but we’re yet to tap into them. We’ve decarbonised our grid more than any other country in the industrial world, this has happened despite the fact that we haven’t opened a new nuclear power plant since 1995 and since then we’ve closed 12 nuclear power plants. Earlier this year several nuclear plants went offline for maintenance, our nuclear production dipped from the normal 4.7 gigawatts to 2.5 gigawatts, but the grid coped just fine.
It’s pretty extraordinary in this context that the only significant announcement in the budget was to support Small Modular nuclear reactors (SMR). There is no working prototype of a SMR anywhere in the world yet, solar panels and wind turbines already exist and improve every year, wave and tidal electricity sectors have been prototyped to death. The UK had a world lead in wave and tidal, we’re about to be overtaken by the Faroe Islands, which plans to install 200 megawatts of tidal power in the next few years. The UK could very easily up its renewables market share from 45% to 80% (adopted policy of both Labour and Lib Dems) by doing more of the same (wind and solar) deploying new forms that have been thoroughly tested (wave and tidal), or are used elsewhere in the world (geothermal).
The latest generation of nuclear power plants in Europe are taking 15 – 20 years to build and are subject to massive cost overruns (hello Hinkley Point C). They’re such a drain on the public purse they are often supported covertly by the fossil fuels industry in order to take money away from renewables. It’s hard not to see the mystifying push for SMRs as a form of sabotage. Knowing what we know now, why wouldn’t you commit to cheap, clean, safe, homegrown renewable energy that can fulfil the needs of the grid in full over 24 hours? The same cannot be said of either fossil fuels or nuclear.

Jeremy Hunt – would rather put money into expensive, inflexible and untested SMRs rather than well-established, cheaper and safer forms of renewable power

Schools
When the RAAC in schools scandal broke in September, courtesy of a Lib Dems FoI request I wrote extensively about how we got there. School building activity oscillates between feast or famine with very little in between. At the tail end of the New Labour years we had a feast with £10 Billion a year spent on Building Schools for the Future (BSF), City Academies and the Primary Capital Programme. The school buildings budget was slashed by 62% at the start of the coalition and BSF was replaced by the Priority Schools Building Programme, a real penny-pinching scheme, reducing the budget for building a secondary school from £25 million to £17 million.
Things regressed further with the Schools Rebuilding Programme, a plan to rebuild just 50 schools a year.
Considering that there are 4,000 secondary schools in England, 50 a year means it would take 90 years to rebuild the whole estate – barely keeping pace with replacement rate. While the current Government is not responsible for the use of RAAC, that happened between the mid-50s and the mid-80s, our failure to demolish and replace the worst post-war schools means the problem is more serious than it should be.
As long as the Schools Rebuilding Programme is retained in its current form it is not nearly enough to address the needs of the schools estate. Things are likely to get worse as Munira Wilson, Lib Dems spokesperson for Education noted after the budget, “Despite the shocking state that our schools are in, the Chancellor has delivered a real terms cut to school buildings spending.” The government knows how bad the situation is in the state sector, but deliberately refuses to do much about it.

Building Schools for the Future brought new players, new designs and fresh thinking to school building, will we see such ambition and creativity in the public sector again soon?

Public Transport
Whether it’s a Prime Minister cutting half of the biggest rail line in a 100 years in HS2, a mayor in Bedford trying to stop East West rail, or councillors in Bromley trying to block the Bakerloo Line Extension, Conservatives make it clear they hate public transport. They make it more expensive every year compared to motoring and they’ll do everything they can to stop new train/tube/tram lines being built.
I guess it’s no great surprise, therefore, that the budget contained no announcements about investment in public transport. For a few years the government has put a major squeeze on London because it resents Labour, Lib Dems and Greens being so popular in the capital. That means as of now there are no major public transport schemes being progressed in earnest. There are plenty on the drawing board – West London Orbital, DLR extension to Thamesmead, Tramlink extension to Sutton, tramline extension to Crystal Palace, Bakerloo Line Extension, even Crossrail 2 – but they are all floating around waiting to be delivered. Seeing as TfL draws a lot of money from the congestion charge, business rate retention, advertising and commercial rents, if TfL can’t afford to build new lines there’s little hope for other cities in the UK.

Just imagine going on a rugby league away day from Featherstone to Otley by tram. That’s the dream – will it ever happen though?

Intriguingly plans for a £2 billion Leeds – Bradford tram system were announced this week by WYCA Mayor Tracy Brabin. Leeds has the dubious distinction of being the largest city in Europe without a metro system so I welcome the scheme wholeheartedly. We’ve been here before, however, plans for a Leeds Metro were at a pretty advanced stage before being cancelled in 2005. I remain a sceptic until full details of funding, route and construction timelines are revealed. Presumably Brabin is banking on a far greater commitment to the North than we’ve seen from the current government, although Sunak claims he’s Yorkshire through and through.
Post pandemic we’ve seen passenger numbers recover on the railways, but no backing from central government, after 25 years of significant growth in ridership up to 2020.

In conclusion

When Rishi Sunak cancelled the Northern half of HS2 with zero consultation he showed us what many people already feared, Britain is now not a serious country capable of making a plan that requires a lot of time and money and sticking to it. In resolving to build 40 hospitals but not coming close this government has also demonstrated that it’s not serious about the NHS. In having a schools building programme that falls well below what is required we have a government that’s happy to leave teachers and pupils in squalid conditions forever. A government that throws billions of £s at demand-side schemes such as Help to Buy, instead of actually being the client itself building council houses is a government that is comfortable with cripplingly high rents and entry level prices. A government that prefers to chase a nuclear rainbow when cheap renewables are available is one that is not capable of an honest cost/benefit analysis. A government that’s become extremely investment adverse is also one not capable of priming the economy and taking us out of the slump we’re in right now. I hope for better times, better infrastructure and a political elite capable of making the bold decisions that would mean we’d build ourselves towards a more prosperous Britain.

Lib Dem stars of stage and screen, Part 1

It’s election year, and I’m sure we’re going to see some ostentatious victory stunts from the Lib Dems, in the past we’ve injected razzmatazz into politics by involving showbiz stars, drawing on our strong links with the entertainment world. This reached a zenith in 2010 when the likes of Colin Firth, JK Rowling, Armando Iannucci, Daniel Radcliffe and Professor Richard Dawkins were on a list of high profile backers published by the party. For many their enthusiasm cooled when we entered government, enacted gay marriage, brought UK aid to the UN level, raised the income tax threshold and brought in automatic pension enrolment. I thought I’d take a look at a few famous Lib Dem supporters, some of whom you’ll know all about, some you won’t.

Brian Eno
Brian Eno first came to prominence as keyboard player for Roxy Music, then invented ambient music, produced David Bowie’s best albums and went onto work with U2 and Coldplay. For my money he’s in the all-time top five list of best rock and pop producers alongside Norman Whitfield, Nile Rodgers, John Leckie and George Martin. Eno has worked within the Lib Dems from top to bottom, happily delivering Focus leaflets in his local ward and was appointed as a Youth Advisor on the first day of Nick Clegg’s leadership in 2007. In 2010 Eno contributed to a pre-election book Why Vote Liberal Democrat (which included input from an electric mix including former DPP Sir Ken MacDonald KC and ex Gurkha Madan Kumar Gurung).
Outside party politics Eno has been a longtime supporter of charity War Child, which has delivered humanitarian aid to war zones since the Bosnian war in 1993, and a dogged anti-censorship campaigner.

Brian Eno from the 1970s through to present day, an avant garde innovator and contributor to pop culture, and a champion for free expression and human rights

Barry Norman
Film critic Barry Norman appeared on our screens as a film critic for 26 years. Like many with a long term career at the BBC Norman was very discreet about his political affiliations but switched allegiance from the Labour Party to the SDP at the point of its foundation in 1981, and remained loyal after our merger in 1988. He explained that Shirley Williams was his favourite politician. Aside from culture, Norman had a great interest in current affairs and technology, presenting Radio 4’s Today programme in the 1970s and The Chip Shop, a programme about home computers in the early 1980s.
Norman would weave references to cricket into his Film shows at every available opportunity and spent much of his free time watching games at Lord’s – my kind of guy.

Barry Norman, like most Englishmen of his generation would wear cable knit at the drop of hat

Ludovic Kennedy
Always a deep thinker, Kennedy had a brief foray into representative politics as Liberal candidate for Rochdale, first at a by election in 1957, then the general election in 1959, he didn’t succeed but increased the Liberal vote share and joined an illustrious list of notable figures to stand and fail to get elected for us that includes the likes of CB Fry. Kennedy was a broadcaster and author and got involved in a wide range of campaigns during his life, such as opposition to the death penalty and later in life voluntary euthanasia. Kennedy wrote several books about miscarriages of justice, the most famous being The Airman and The Carpenter, in which he contended that Richard Hauptmann did not kidnap and murder Charles Lindbergh’s baby, a crime for which he was executed in 1936. The book was made into a 1996 HBO film Crime of the Century, starring Stephen Rea and Isabella Rossellini.
Kennedy felt so strongly about voluntary euthanasia he resigned from the Lib Dems as Charles Kennedy was reluctant to adopt the policy, he stood as an independent Devizes in 2001, got 2% of the vote and subsequently rejoined the party.

Ludovic Kennedy, a leading campaigner against the death penalty

Helena Bonham-Carter
The Bonham-Carter family has been associated with Liberal politics since John Bonham-Carter became a Whig MP in 1816. Other major figures in the dynasty include Violet, daughter of H.H. Asquith and president of the party 1945-47 (known as an opponent of appeasement and supporter of family allowances), and her son Mark, victor in the 1958 Torrington by election, a landmark moment in the party’s post war revival (known as the first chairman of the Race Relations Board and a campaigner for granting British citizenship to ethnic minorities in Hong Kong). Mark is Helena’s uncle, throughout her career Helena has been tight-lipped about her political connections, perhaps not wanting to be defined by her family history but sometimes you can’t shake us Liberals off. Apart from roles in Howard’s End, Harry Potter, Alice in Wonderland, Helena is also known for sharing a school stage with Nick Clegg at Westminster in the Jacobean play called The Changeling. At one stage, she had to kick Clegg between the legs, making him collapse in agony.
‘We got it down to a fairly fine art of her missing the crown jewels, so to speak,’ Clegg recalled in an interview with the Mail, ‘But, once, she got it spot-on, and no acting was required.’
While Helena is busy acting let me assure that the Bonham-Carter political dynasty lives on, Jane Bonham-Carter is Baroness of Yarnbury, who is, fittingly enough, Lib Dem spokesperson for Culture in the House of Lords.

Helena Bonham-Carter in Howard’s End, she’s said Howard’s End is ‘absorbed into her life’, small wonder, her Grandmother was close friends with E.M. Forster and her Great-Grandfather H.H. Asquith was Prime Minister when it was set (1910)