Election 2024: Are the Tories heading for a wipeout?

It’s less than a fortnight to go until polling day, thousands of people have already voted by post, we’re in the home straight of the election campaign. Going against perceived wisdom, the polls have not tightened in favour of the Conservatives, instead they’ve been hitting some of their worst ever numbers. Before the election many idly speculated that there could be a complete meltdown akin to what happened to the Conservatives in Canada in1993, where the right of centre vote was split and shrunk so they were left with only two seats.
This would be quite the reversal of fortune, considering the last election gave the Conservatives their biggest majority since 1987. Some people are predicting the Tories will get under 100 seats – last time out they got 365, their modern era baseline is 165 seats in 1997. Could the Conservatives really be heading for a once-in-a-century level extinction event? It’s certainly enjoyable to talk about it – let’s weigh up all the factors in play . . .

Tory wipeout: the case for
Looking at the last five years, the Conservatives would say they’ve been battling exceptional headwinds in terms of the Covid pandemic, the Ukraine – Russia war and the cost of living crisis associated with both of these. Such rotten luck. If you’re not a Conservative you’d point out that choices the Conservatives have made in office have made these crises worse – the spike in electricity and gas prices is down to how the Conservatives have framed the wholesale prices in utilities, for example. With regard to Covid – we had one of the highest death rates, highest long covid rates, we spent the most money and our economy went down the most, compared to our European peers.
It’s also the case that inflation has rippled around the world but the cumulative inflation total for the UK is worse than our G7 colleagues, the weak £ caused by Brexit has not helped us. It’s been one bad outcome after another – rising waiting lists, NHS dentistry in crisis, the GCSE pass rate started going backwards so they changed grades from letters to numbers to mask the lack of progress. The Tories claim to be the party of law and order but the backlog in the courts is so bad certain petty crimes have been practically legalised.

Ed Davey – planning to eliminate the Blue Wall, Keir Starmer at a Taylor Swift concert this week – he had music lessons with Fatboy Slim you know

I live in a true blue Tory heartland, for many years my neighbours were happy enough to rubber stamp the local MP because despite all the moaning and wailing from the left about austerity they were happy enough. They only pretended to care about public services, but actually they were very pleased with house prices rising, inflation and interest rates being low and Council Tax/Fuel Duty being frozen.
Now my neighbours who are pretty much focussed on their wallets and nothing more are moaning to me about utilities inflation and the price of a pint. This is the Tory hardcore, they are profoundly unhappy, the Tories have lost a significant chunk of this vote for now, either they will stay at home or vote Reform as a protest.
Another thing that’s been noticeable in my local area is for years a lack of concerted effective campaigning for the Tories. For many elections in my ward they didn’t need to, then they faced a challenge from the Greens last year and they were hopeless because they’d never done it before, so they got wiped out. In my local town of Sevenoaks, the Tories were so bereft of voluntary resource they paid for leaflets to be delivered via Royal Mail.
This is part of a bigger picture nationally. Since 2016 the Conservatives have lost 2,637 councillors in the annual local elections, that’s not counting by elections and defections so the total net loss is in the region of 2,800 – 2,900. That’s a huge loss of experienced and skilled local activists and family/friend support groups around them.
Anecdotal reports are that across the country visible signs of support for the Tories are minimal and the Conservative ground game is virtually non-existent. For my part, going to campaign in London last time I had to drive through the posh village of Hartley to the local train station, in election week every third or fourth house had a stakeboard for Gareth Johnson, the Conservative candidate for Dartford (majority 19,160). I’m yet to see a single sign up for him this time.
What of the press’s role in shaping opinion? I think the past five years has been exceptional in terms of the print media’s role. As we know most of the politically partisan media is right wing, however the Conservatives have lost the business press – the FT and Economist no longer support the Tories, and the rest of the newspapers are having a lost weekend. They’ve never been more out of touch with the electorate – there are two agendas will prove to be counterproductive, the obsession with the Red Wall and the War on Woke. Droning on about the Red Wall backfires because most people don’t live in the Red Wall and many people in the Blue Wall feel excluded by that narrative, they actively resent it. The War on Woke is unhelpful for the Tories because largely people simply don’t care, the fact that the National Trust might give some commentary about the unethical past of someone who built a stately home 300 years ago doesn’t matter to someone who’s struggling to put food on the table, pay for their kid’s nursery etc.

Because the modern media and think tanks have no concept of overkill, they’ve obsessed over the Red Wall for five years. The 95% of the population that aren’t in the area are a bit tired of it

Last but not least is the sheer incompetence and fecklessness of those in government. Reports vary but there have been estimates of the Tories wasting £100+Bn on things like ineffective PPE and Covid support fraud, not to mention the costs of the Rwanda deportation scheme and Voter ID. All of a sudden the Tories have been splashing the cash on vanity projects and have lost their reputation for financial rectitude and having a base level of competence. Add in shenanigans around party gate, and the latest scandal – election day bet gate – it’s obvious to those who aren’t that politically engaged, aren’t that ideological that the country could be run better.
These days what achievements can the Conservatives actually point to? A while back it would’ve been ‘we’ve got Brexit done’ and ‘vaccine rollout’ – Brexit, remember, was the most salient issue in the last election and was the Tories’ flagship policy. Because it’s gone as badly as Eurotrash remainiacs like myself said it would they barely mention it. Imagine that, you hoover up 14 million votes pretty much on a single issue, then five years later you sweep it under the carpet. As for the vaccine rollout, our vaccination rate only stayed ahead of our continental neighbours for a few months so it was a very transient achievement. It barely resonates at all now.

Tory wipeout: the cast against
Before we get too triumphalist, we need to consider why predictions of Conservative demise might be overblown. I think we can all be confident they’re going to lose, it’s a question of by how much. A feature of this election is wall to wall polling being a major part of the narrative, as opposed to policies and personalities.
People are setting way too much store by the polling and the MRP calculations predicting individual seat outcomes. Remember the MRP predictions from 2019 were mostly way off, and what we see is that 1% increase or decrease in any direction leads to a hugely different outcome. Seat numbers are hypersensitive to any small movement, like cracking a safe almost.
Carl Sagan once said that an extraordinary claim needs to be backed up by an extraordinary level of evidence.
The predictions that Labour will win well over 400 seats and that the Tories will get under 100 are extraordinary, you have to go back to 1931 for a result when a single party got over 450 seats, and that’s happened just the once since we’ve had universal suffrage. The outlandish MRP seat predictions are made off the back of extraordinary polling numbers, with the Tories regularly polling under 20% and occasionally in third behind Reform.
My nose has been put out of joint by the MRPs because they regularly show us Lib Dems in Sevenoaks trailing behind Labour, despite the fact they’re not campaigning in the seat, have no councillors and usually finish behind us in General Elections. If the MRPs can’t pick up local activity factors, our campaign in Sevenoaks is x 4 what it was last time, you wonder what else they fail to detect.
For the last 12 months pundits have been pouring scorn on the polls. Data gathering methods have changed with polling companies migrating from phone polls to internet polls. A crucial difference here is while companies still try to be scrupulously even handed in getting a sample from across the country, gender balanced, socio-economically representative etc, they’re now relying on people signing up to do surveys. With voter intention opinion polls this, the sceptics believe, has led to a high-engagement bias, I.e. political zealots are very keen to give their opinions, thus crowding out those who have average or below-average levels of political engagement but still do vote. This would benefit Reform, the Greens and the Nats, and take a little away from Cons, Lab and Lib.
If failing to account for the high-engagement bias of responses to opinion poll requests has led to skewed data, there might be an underestimate of the Tories’ true level, combined with the historic phenomenon of the ‘Shy Tory’ who fades into the background in polite society when they’re particularly unpopular but still puts an X in their box come election day. Those who waved a flag for Gareth Johnson in Hartley in 2019 but have passed on stakeboard this time around still might be voting for him, just with less patriotic fervour than before.

Is it sympathy, or is it good old British deference to wealth and privilege? Rishi Sunak elicits positive responses in vox pops to this very day

Sometimes it’s difficult to know what the polling data really means – recently Rishi Sunak’s personal ratings have been dire, but a huge amount of vox pops show people have sympathy, or feel pity for the situation he’s in. Whether that’s picking up a genuine strain of goodwill for him the pollsters can’t see, or reflects the singular attitudes of people at a loose end in town centres during the working week we’ll find out on July 5th.

Horizon – a 25-year scandal

In the last week I’m sure many of you will have watched the TV drama, read newspaper reports and heard radio phone-ins about the Post Office Horizon scandal. There’s so much out there I won’t repeat the basic fundamentals in this blog but I do hope to make a few original points which you should find useful. There’s so much misinformation out there, and it’s an issue that will run and run.

1999 – the millennium bugs we missed
The Horizon scandal starts in 1999 when, for reasons best known to itself, the Post Office buys Horizon software, a benefits payments package, after it had been rejected by the Department for Social Security (now DWP). Within months end users – staff in Post Offices – are reporting problems with the software, the Post Office’s senior management is unsympathetic and unmoved at the time. To boil things down in very simple terms, when it comes to IT there are two types of procurement you can make – generic off-the-shelf software and hardware, and bespoke specialist products.
So, for example an IT department making generic purchases around the turn of the millennium buys in new desktop PCs made by a multinational company like Dell or HP, with Microsoft Office bundled in, and no Lotus Notes because staff have told IT they don’t like it. While Horizon wasn’t bespoke, presumably Fujitsu hoped to sell it to many public admin bodies that make payments, it was brand new. This made Post Office staff guinea pigs in 1999. Post Office IT managers should’ve been hypersensitive to this at the time – if they were doing their job properly.
If effective command-and-control procedures were working top to bottom within the Post Office, the bugs in Horizon software should have been clearly identified within months of it coming on stream with a clear line of attribution back to Fujitsu, and if they’d been competent in negotiating a contract, there should have been contingency clauses for dealing with bugs in the software too. Computer Weekly, one of only two publications alongside Private Eye that have covered this scandal adequately observes, “During questioning, former Post Office Horizon programme director David Miller was asked about a National Federation of Subpostmasters (NFSP) executive council meeting over two days in June 1999. That meeting’s report said: ‘There was general discussion on the severe difficulties being experienced by subpostmasters who are already running an automated system. Seven sheets of comments from [North East-based subpostmasters] have been passed to David Miller.’
Tim Moloney (KC at the public enquiry) asked whether Miller thought there was anything he could have done, given the knowledge he had, to have prevented the subpostmasters being blamed for shortfalls. Miller said he ‘bitterly regretted what had happened’, but said he only became aware of the problem during the 2018/19 High Court trial.”
So that’s the best part of 20 years of delay, denial and negligence by IT management within the Post Office finally exposed.

Sub Postmasters went all the way to the High Court to seek justice

New Labour – unquestioning faith in IT projects
The political origins for Horizon date back to 1994, with the idea of computerising payments and moving away from Girocheques being proposed by Social Security Minister Peter Lilley. It needs to be understood, however, that a brand new IT system for the Post Office and DSS fitted in perfectly with the New Labour ethos of using tech to transform anything and everything. While of course we commend New Labour for investing in public services and trying to modernise them, a dogma and naivety that came with this contributed to the £10Bn NHS IT fiasco, and dogs the party to this very day.
My friends in the IT industry tell me it’s almost impossible to deliver a major IT project involving new code on time, on budget and working flawlessly. If there’s one ; out of place in one line of code, where there will be 10,000s lines of code, the programme won’t work. This is why only a few large companies are known for producing bespoke software and when you ask them for it they will issue forth a large intake of breath, just like a builder, and say, “Ohhh it will cost you.”

New Labour – well intentioned but placed too much faith and trust in IT systems, a lack of critical friends pointing out the potential downsides cost them dear

As far as I’m concerned New Labour ministers are on the hook for this – problems with the system emerged in 1999, prosecutions started in 2000, they presided over the problem for 11 years. Moreover there has been no contrition or self reflection from the Labour movement. Tony Blair still touts ID cards, but nobody in the Labour Party tells him it’s a hideous waste of money going into the trough of the IT industry as well as an authoritarian disgrace.
Due to the lack of lessons learnt by Labour, an IT bungle has contributed to the bankruptcy of Birmingham City Council – managers requested a bespoke rewrite of Oracle’s Fusion Cloud system, costing £10s of millions. I’m no expert, but I’d say avoid bespoke products at all costs, especially when you have no money!

Coalition Lib Dems – taking hospital passes
You’ll have noticed the knives have really been out in the right wing press for Ed Davey in the past few days. Ed was Postal Affairs minister for 19 months of this 25-year scandal. Part of the outrage is political points scoring, part of it is down to the fact that a minister for Postal Affairs was a pop-up vehicle, it only existed between 2009 and 2015. I assume the post was created in order to oversee the part-privatisation of the Post Office. There were ministers with the Post Office brief before and after, but you won’t hear much about the post-2015 ministers Anna Soubry, Margot James, Andrew Griffiths, Kelly Tolhurst, Paul Scully and Jane Hunt despite the fact that they achieved diddly squat in resolving the Horizon scandal, because they had different job titles.
The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that the Postal Affairs post was created under Gordon Brown, the first ever minister with the brief being Baron Anthony Young. This is because Labour ended the Royal Mail’s 350-year monopoly on postal deliveries and teed up the Post Office for privatisation. Only a back bench Labour MP revolt stopped it happening under Gordon Brown’s watch.
What of the flak coming Ed’s way? Well it’s a combination of the vile and the servile, one of Thatcher’s cheerleaders in the form of Kelvin MacKenzie, and Andrew Pierce, who is an investigative journalist in the same way that Ian Botham is classically-trained actor because he did panto. I’m confident people looking to vote against the government this year will see the smears against Ed, and today against Keir Starmer, because apparently when you’re DPP everything’s your fault, for what they are.
While I don’t believe that Ed, and his successors Norman Lamb and Jo Swinson, did anything wrong in their time as Postal Affairs minister they also didn’t contribute much to solving the Horizon scandal and you have to ask why they agreed to take on such a role when privatisation of the Post Office was not popular with the general public and post office workers.

Toby Jones as tireless Post Office campaigner Alan Bates

Trial by TV
What are the next steps for those still blighted by the Horizon scandal? In the UK we’re not really used to class action suits in the same way America is. Some have suggested there should be an Act of Parliament to give blanket exoneration to the victims. If that’s the best way then so be it. There’s a few other points to mull over – at present being a whistleblower for corporate wrongdoing in the UK is a totally thankless task. There are, no doubt, other examples of malpractice that have not seen the light of day because whistleblowers are not protected and often have their careers ended by going public with bombshell facts about their organisation. That’s got to change. This could be part of a wider root-and-branch reform of corporate affairs going hand-in-hand with abolishing or reforming Ofgem, Ofcom and Ofwat.
Also, what are we to make of the standard of mainstream media journalism in the UK when two relatively specialist titles – Private Eye and Computer Weekly – were the only ones willing to report on the Horizon scandal to any degree of detail over a prolonged period of time? The fact that it’s taken an ITV drama to propel this issue into the national conversation properly is an indictment on national print media brands, especially the titles that are not sympathetic to the Conservatives – Guardian, Mirror, Independent, Financial Times – what were you playing at?
There’s another obscure, but important point to make here, evidence points to the National Federation of Sub Postmasters effectively being captured by the Post Office, In 2015 NFSP General Secretary George Thomson hung his members out to dry spectacularly, he told a select committee hearing, “Over the 15 years, the Horizon system has been fantastically robust. Horizon a very strong system from day one. Sub-postmasters sometimes think that the problem has to be the Horizon system when in effect it was mistakes by members of staff or misappropriation. With regard to the Post Office and Horizon, it has done nothing wrong.” Far be it for me to start a witch hunt but if there’s a villain of the piece that needs to be cross examined again soon, look no further than Thomson. Sub Postmasters deserve better, they deserve their reputation, and their money back.

Lib Dems review of the year – 2023

I’m sure in years to come we’ll look back at 2023 as a very difficult year for Britain, but the calm before the storm as many important events, a UK general election and a US presidential election, will take place next year. How have things worked out for the Lib Dems? We’ve continued to rebuild our presence in Local Government, and cement ourselves as challengers to the Tories across the South of England. These are positives, on the downside we continue to oscillate in a low range in the opinion polls despite the unpopularity of the government, and the timidity of the opposition. Many of the structural weaknesses of the party – not having big money donors, not having a media home, not having a nationwide club/office network, not having substantial real life social networks – remain unaddressed, though of course it would take a huge amount of time and effort to work on these away from campaigning. Anyway, here’s my take on 2023 from a Lib Dems perspective.

Our victory stunt in Somerton and Frome, because everyone involved in politics has an impeccable sense of humour and a keen eye for perspective, this was met with universal acclaim

Key moment of the year
What’s that sound? It’s the sonic boom from a Lib Dems victory cannon signalling our intent to ‘get these clowns out of No. 10!’. Somerton and Frome was another emphatic by election victory. Sarah Dyke regained the seat for us, overturning a 19,213 majority with a 28.4% swing after previous MP David Warburton got embroiled in a sexual harassment and cocaine scandal. Having racked up spectacular victories in other parts of the country in previous years, Somerton and Frome was a test for the party in the South West. The pressure was on and they delivered. There are many points to make about this win, firstly in Sarah Dyke the seat now has an MP who genuinely understands the area and will go out to bat for the rural economy – something Tories in safe shire seats can’t be bothered to do. Secondly the huge swing is a function of establishing primacy and reaching out to all voters, who were open to the idea of tactical voting in significant numbers.
Our win was quite a contrast with the other by election on the same day – a shock hold for the Tories in Uxbridge and South Ruislip. Ultimately this could come back to haunt the Government as they played anti-ULEZ and ‘war-on-the-motorist’ cards, getting people with ULEZ-compliant cars, even zero-emissions electric cars to vote for them. This is a deception they can’t get away with for any length of time and have regressed to a low level in the polls since.

The launch of Dartford food bank – one big joke for the local Conservatives present, having three million people have to avail themselves of charity for essentials because welfare payments are too low is of course hilarious. Only the Lib Dems have a plan to make food banks history

Best policy of the year
So the Lib Dems had a major overhaul of their policy offering this year in the pre-manifesto document For a Fair Deal. In the past we’ve had a bold, transformative suite of measures for tax and benefits, indeed the IFS calculated in 2017 that our tax and benefits policies were more redistributive than Labour’s. That’s Corbyn’s Labour, one of the most left-wing iterations of Labour since 1945. This is something that we Lib Dems only mention in passing, but we need to talk this up a whole lot more, and it’s never been more important in this age of economic hardship. As it stands we’re the only party willing to lift the two-child cap on benefits (both tax credit and universal credit), and we’re the only party that has committed to raising Universal Credit above inflation, as a means of reducing poverty.
These generous benefits policies go hand-in-hand with a set of tax policies that include a windfall tax on oil and gas, reversing tax cuts on the banks and capital gains, and closing the tax gap via better enforcement of existing tax laws. These measures would bring far more revenue than Labour’s proposals, and though practical measures like closing the tax gap don’t grab headlines (they’re not popular with who owns the media), they would effect a multi-billion £ difference to our finances. So I commend our tax and benefits policies, and if you’re a wholehearted Lib Dem, you should too.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – our Arts policy came in from the cold too

Most important policy of the year
As Lib Dem voters go beyond a broad church – they’re more of a really loose coalition, often we give up on playing to the base, as the base is so disparate. That means we risk losing sight of who votes for us and why. In the last few years we’ve not played to the base well at all. There is a straw in the wind though, it’s our Arts & Entertainment policy. This covers off the wants and needs of two million people in the creative industries sector and millions more that enjoy TV, gigs, films, art galleries, stand up comedy, reading books, even playing computer games. For years we barely had a policy, when major developments happened, like the threats to Channel 4 and BBC 4 we were pretty mute – certainly not leading the conversation.
Now we have a new Arts & Entertainment policy that recognises the value of the TV status quo, the ongoing threat to the music industry caused by Brexit effectively destroying European touring, and the need for more funding at a time when a significant number of arts venues – theatres, pubs, specialist small music and comedy venues – are under threat of closure. Often Arts & Entertainment are seen as ephemeral in the public affairs sphere, certainly not as important as education, healthcare or defence. However, if the Lib Dems want a decent number of members in the future it has to appeal to bases – arts is one, science is another, and public sector senior managers have been loyal to us for years. Those who’ve backed us from Creative Industries have done so in spite of our support for their sector, not because of it. It’s time they were allowed in from the cold.

Biggest own-goal of the year
Until the week of our conference the party had pumped out more tweets this year about puppy smuggling than it had about Europe in 2023. Ed Davey’s speech included a short section about repairing our broken relationship with Europe. It got a standing ovation, I’m told that’s extremely rare. It’s pretty obvious that we have a substantial hardcore of Europhiles in the party who are frustrated by the party hierarchy putting our EU policy on the back burner. Internal emails explain and justify this, saying the EU has been overtaken by cost-of-living, the pandemic and the Ukraine/Russia war in terms of voter salience.
While that may be true, it’s not hard to critique Brexit, we’re now in the real world outcomes phase. It’s pretty straightforward to point out the shortcomings, and if possible, what we’d do about them, as well as being sensible enough to say certain things are a long way off. This is something I explored in my ‘Let’s look at Rejoin’ blog earlier this year – the standard accession timeline is now between eight to 10 years. If no fasttrack rejoin is on offer, then yes we need to be honest and upfront about how time consuming the process is. At the moment we have a sensible, realistic policy, but it’s not being explained, or articulated – that’s a whole set of opportunities that are going a begging.

Best local groups of the year

Mid Devon
If the Tories thought they could make any headway in Crediton or Cullumpton this year they were spectacularly wide of the mark. Mid Devon pulled off the biggest numeral gain in the Local Elections, up by 21 seats taking outright control of the council. This was part of a pattern of success all across Devon, with the exception of Torbay where the Tories only gained the council because we stood aside for independents that saw their vote collapse.

Mid Devon Lib Dems – smashed it

Stratford-on-Avon

The party is reluctant to expand its list of target seats, but surely it will have to make an exception for this part of Warwickshire where the local group took control of the council with a net gain of 15. In Manuela Perteghella the local group has a great figurehead to rally around for what would be a totemic win – turfing out Nadim ‘my tax affairs are complicated’ Zahawi.

Lincolnshire
So many great things happened in Lincolnshire this year – regaining control of West Lindsey council, joining a NOC coalition in South Kesteven, winning seats in Lincoln city and even in the Brexit citadel of Boston. The local group topped off the year with one of our best by election wins in North Kesteven. With the exception of the by election they did all this with no outside help. As Lincolnshire is one of the heaviest leave voting areas in England, along with South Essex, all of these were massively against-the-odds wins.

Surrey Heath
The local government map of Surrey is largely amber with the odd fleck of blue or indie grey. Surrey Heath is part of our success there, but it’s no ordinary success. Back in 2014 the British Electoral Survey deemed Surrey Heath to be the most right wing constituency in the country. Years of austerity, mismanagement and Brexit disappointment has put paid to that. Surrey Heath Lib Dems stormed the council, taking control with 14 gains. It’s achieved this with an extremely active local membership that is present at every by election across the country and has one of the biggest twitter following of any local group. There’s a lot to admire about how they operate.

East Riding of Yorkshire
This is the one group I’d like to highlight that didn’t flip the status of a council. Nevertheless the local group can be very pleased with themselves this year, turning a safe Tory council into a minority one. East Riding Lib Dems gained 14 seats, leaving the Tories to rely on the kindness of independents. As in many councils where we didn’t quite get over the line, we’re now the main challengers and have a realistic chance of becoming the largest single party next time.

East Riding Lib Dems celebrate massive gains in May

Lessons of the year
Campaigning contrasts: I went into the main town of my district on polling day – Sevenoaks. I was shocked to hear that the local Conservatives had done hardly any campaigning, to the point where they’d paid for postal deliveries because they couldn’t get any activists to do it for them. Unsurprisingly Sevenoaks Lib Dems swept the board in Sevenoaks town and there’s a pathway to flipping the council outright next time. Tory motivation and organisation is collapsing in some very True Blue parts of the country – something we can really exploit next year.
At the other end of the spectrum we got a rude awakening in Mid Bedfordshire, again I came to this campaign late on. I had people pushing our leaflets back out through the letterbox literally seconds after I’d put them in. People were sick and tired of the campaign – not entirely our fault as Nadine Dorries’ choices created a four-month long by election. Campaign fatigue among the public was pretty obvious, however. This shows us that the sheer volume and intensity of campaigning doesn’t always work, although we’ll never have another by election like Mid Beds. I hope at least what we learn from Mid Beds is to be a bit more relaxed about short timelines for elections, because five weeks is enough for most people to make their mind up.

2024 – my Goldilocks scenarios

I’ve just had the most amazing vivid dream, all about next year, it’s pretty eventful and everything goes my way for a change. It was just a flight of fantasy, none of this could possibly happen though could it? Or could it . . .

January
The Five Eyes Alliance (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) meet in secret and it decides that Ukraine CANNOT lose to Russia. It resolves to increase weapons shipments, or in the case of Australia, Canada and New Zealand actually start sending weapons.

February
Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts both give the BBC a Billion US $ each. In a joint statement they declare, “We had such a laugh on the Graham Norton Show we decided to pump some air into the BBC’s tyres with some of our loose change”. After some mysterious behind-the-scenes lobbying the BBC decides to spend most of the money creating new content for BBC4. Andrew Graham-Dixon and Waldemar Januszczak are only available for comment after a 168-hour party at The Groucho.

Andrew Graham-Dixon in lengthy series with a decent budget shocker

March
Renowned ethical businesswoman Sam Roddick heads up a consortium that starts publishing a Lib Dems supporting national newspaper. Roddick says at the launch, “As long as there Is poverty, disease, conflict and single-use plastic in this world we have a mission!”

April
In a surprise move Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni openly endorses Rishi Sunak. She says, “There are huge risks associated with supporting someone who is unpopular, divisive and widely regarded as a political extremist but, fuck it, you only live once, I’m backing Rishi!”

May
The Tories lose 500 council seats in the Local Elections, in line with Greg Hands’ prediction which he made despite the fact he’s no longer party chairman and nobody asked him. Susan Hall finishes a distant second in the London Mayor race but receives a glowing testimonial from Andrew Eldritch, lead singer of The Sisters of Mercy, “Susan wears black all the time, is socially awkward and has a relentlessly nihilistic world view. This is the first time anyone’s reached out to us Goths, we’re flattered.”

June
Elon Musk decides to cut his losses and sell twitter to a group of celebrities that includes Stephen Fry, Stephen Colbert, Brian Moore, Kathy Burke and Susie Dent. Musk says, “When you see people you respect on your own social media platform openly saying they’re also on LinkedIn, that’s when you know it’s over.”

July
The Olympics, all the events in Paris are upstaged by what’s happening in Tahiti. The world is gripped by the Olympic surfing competition in the Pacific. Extensive footage finally brings home the reality of climate change to the industrial world leading to a wholesale attitudinal shift. Millions of people in the UK rip up their drives and turning circles and plant front gardens again.

Surfing grips the nation, people actually do environmental stuff as a result

August
A General Election in high summer. No one saw it coming – a very hung parliament! Labour are largest single party with 290 seats, Lib Dems win 105 by virtue of winning all 91 seats they’re currently 2nd in. Labour and the Lib Dems cobble up a coalition agreement so through gritted teeth Keir Starmer agrees to the following:

• Rejoining the EU
• Proportional Representation
• Raising the level of Universal Credit
• Reinstating HS2 in full
• Cancelling Sizewell C nuclear power plant

Years later Starmer says in his autobiography, “Raising benefits and saying no to nuclear power were two really bitter pills to swallow, but Ed drives a hard bargain.”

Sir Keir to Sir Ed, “I played violin with Fatboy Slim you know. You’ll never have that.”

September
The Coalition agreement is updated thanks to surge in business investment, a rise in the £ and credit rating upgrades which means public finances have improved dramatically. Keir Starmer announces that Leeds is going to get an extensive underground system. Grainy CCTV clips showing Ed Davey attacking Starmer with an orange mallet in the corridors of 10 Downing Street are downplayed by both government parties.

October
Mark François wins the Conservative party leadership election, beating Kemi Badenoch, Suella Braverman and Famine, one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Famine, who beat Liz Truss to make the final four run off says, “This was a dry run to be honest, I was just testing the waters. I’ll probably take it more seriously when there’s another contest after we’ve lost in 2029.”

November
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beats Donald Trump in the US presidential election. Trump says the day after, “Yeah okay she beat me fair and square, good luck to her. Good luck to America. Losing by 10 million is quite a hiding, I’ve got a lot to learn. I only ran to stay out of jail and to distract people from the fact I’m incredibly unpopular in Scotland.”

AOC wins, Republican strategists can’t find a workaround to women having the vote

December
Following a string of heavy defeats in Ukraine, there’s a popular uprising in Russia. Vladimir Putin accidentally falls off the top of a Moscow skyscraper while smoking a cyanide flavour cigarette. Jeremy Corbyn appears on Iranian State TV saying, “People often say I’m the unluckiest anti-racism campaigner in the world. Well now I know someone who shares my worldview who was even unluckier than me. It’s not all good news for the Corbyn family though – Piers will have to look for another source of funding now.”

Being bold: Lib Dems election strategy

The Liberal Democrats are the only major party pledging to raise Universal Credit repeatedly to lift people out of poverty.

THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS ARE THE ONLY MAJOR PARTY PLEDGING TO RAISE UNIVERSAL CREDIT REPEATEDLY TO LIFT PEOPLE OUT OF POVERTY.

THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS ARE THE ONLY MAJOR PARTY PLEDGING TO RAISE UNIVERSAL CREDIT REPEATEDLY TO LIFT PEOPLE OUT OF POVERTY.

I thought I’d start this blog with one of our bolder policies – one that only I seem to be interested in, I don’t see anyone else mention this across social media or in face to face meetings with fellow activists, I guess you’re all too middle class for it to affect you. Yes, I’m being provocative to get a reaction from you.

Ed Davey – 700 council seat gains and 4 Westminster by election victories under his watch. We’ve returned to being a formidible force in elections, do we need more radicalism to cut through?

A smarter comms policy for the media
I write this blog in the aftermath of a letter to The Guardian this week that caused a few ripples in our Liberal pond. It was signed by several senior party members calling on the leadership to be bolder. The rationale behind the letter is perfectly sound – we have a government fundamentally failing to produce positive outcomes in our every day lives, and an opposition acquiescing to a lot of government policy, if I were a Labour member I’d be screaming milquetoast at Keir Starmer. In that context why aren’t we Lib Dems doing better? We should be back to polling 20% given the vacuum created by Conservative failure and Labour timidity.
My initial response to the letter was negative, I said it missed the mark – I’d like to point out I didn’t think it was wrong in principle to write such a letter, or that the content is problematic – none of the policies mentioned contradict what the party stands for. It’s my contention from a comms perspective it will have fallen flat. The letter mentions our pro-EU stance and support for HS2 Northern, I believe Guardian readers already know we’re a pro European party, and as for HS2, I’ve been reading the Guardian since 1980, it’s taken a hysterical anti-HS2 position more vehement than its opposition to any other infrastructure project. You want to impress readers and writers of a news brand take that to the more Europhile Independent or the pro-development Financial Times instead.
Yes we should absolutely engage with the broadsheet newspapers, but to do that more effectively far more thought needs to go into what would impress the readers and the writers of that newspaper – I didn’t see that in the boldness letter. You need a tailored message that would be different for the Guardian, the Independent, the Times and the Financial Times. (I wouldn’t bother writing to the Telegraph, its circulation is down 70% this century and has fallen down a far-right, conspiracy theory rabbit hole).

Lib Dems: bolder in supporting the Welfare State, compared to Labour

Our current platform – where’s the boldness?
If you take our For a Fair Deal pre-manifesto document there are bold, differentiated, quintessentially liberal policies in there if you care to look. Having pored over every Lib Dems manifesto since 1992 I know that we don’t make wholesale changes from one election to the next, but our next manifesto will contain far more detailed policies on Housing and Education compared to 2019. We’ve been pretty radical in terms of the Welfare State, social justice and redistribution for a while now, the IFS calculated that our tax and benefits policies were more redistributive than Labour’s in 2017 (the IFS didn’t do a comparison in 2019), that’s Corbyn’s Labour, one of the most left wing versions of Labour since 1945. Lib Dems activists mention this occasionally in passing – the lack of emphasis on this astounds me. I really wonder, if we are going to wear boldness on our sleeves what definition of boldness works best? As free-thinking individuals getting universal agreement among Lib Dem activists is like herding cats. Perhaps that’s not necessary, maybe there are 10 versions of boldness all bound up within our current policy platform, pick the one that works for you, or you think will play well in your area. Just don’t rely on the leadership to articulate your personal agenda, we’re a ground-up organisation, you’re free to articulate our boldness on your terms any time. Do take the time to think about what is salient and what is original for maximum impact. In the lead up to the next election my focus will be cost-of-living issues and our arts and entertainment policy. Cost-of-living because it’s important and will remain super-relevant up to election day . . . arts and entertainment because we’re reiterating an arts policy after a long period of not having one and it should play well with our key demographics in London and the Home Counties where I will be campaigning.

Pete Tong used to DJ at a hotel a mile away from my primary school. I will be going out to bat for entertainment – London has lost half its nightclubs in the last decade – because no one else will

Going beyond the manifesto
Beyond questions of how should portray ourselves as a radical, differentiated party that resonates with voters, there is the issue of whether our policies are bold enough. I’ll delve into one policy area to highlight the dilemmas in getting the balance right.

To be fair to the party, in government we’d improve Local Government finances with a bigger central government grant funded by taxing corporations and closing the tax gap (enforcing existing tax laws more rigorously). Not changing Council Tax structure at all is popular in affluent target seats such as Esher & Walton, Winchester, Cheltenham and Ash & Godalming.
Why do I call LVT foolhardy? I’m not opposed to LVT, but it’s much talked about, rarely delivered, and represents a radical departure that needs to be explained to voters in the UK. If you were given a mandate to be a radical transforming government perhaps you’d go for it and revolutionise property taxes, but just remember how unpopular the poll tax was and all the unintended consequences when it was implemented.
Can we afford to take such a risk? I feel strongly Local Government should be funded more, a debate will run and run about the best and fairest way of delivering that, it’s possible to improve funding through boring, dry measures like hiring a lot more HMRC officers and it’s possible to try something completely untested at a national level in G7 economies around the world, like LVT.

The comms challenge for Lib Dems – it’s a thankless task for Layla Moran to be the voice of moderate, intelligent grown up politics when mainstream media political forums have been reduced to a Punch-and-Judy show, like Question Time

From underdogs to rabble rousers
The example of property tax is very deliberate. During the coalition years we really bombed out at council level, losing 2200 seats, mostly to Labour. Since 2015 we have regained 1500 seats, mostly from the Conservatives. In terms of our 2024 election strategy, the party is likely to focus on 50 – 60 target seats in order to effect a net gain of 25 seats. All but two of these seats, Sheffield Hallam and Mid Dunbartonshire, are held by the Conservatives. Whether we like it or not, the main opportunity lies in chasing Conservatives and floating voters in Chelmsford, Harrogate, St Ives, Eastbourne and Dorking. The fact is we’re a Conservative-facing party at the moment – in that we’ve won lots of councils from the Tories and our immediate future is winning more Westminster and council seats from them. That, to an extent, informs our official comms strategy right now, but it doesn’t always have to be that way.
If we return to the giddy heights of 40 seats or more, we’ll attract more media coverage, more donors, we’ll earn more respect, we can afford to walk taller and, yes, we can be bolder in our approach to politics in general. We have to earn our stripes, though.

My version of boldness
I love my country, but I’m not happy with the status quo, I’d love Britain to be a fairer, more equal society with higher standards of living and a better quality of life. Everyone passionate about politics should’ve thought deeply enough about policy to come up with their own ideas, or be comfortable with unfashionable, unpopular positions. To make the tax system fairer and more redistributive, I’d go a bit further than the current Lib Dems position and deploy a suite of taxes on luxury lifestyle choices.
This means raising revenue from things like 5* hotel rooms, hyper cars, luxury perfumes and private jets. From watching Dragon’s Den I know the margin on a lot of luxury items is huge, that end of the market can afford to absorb more tax. If you can afford £2.8m on a Gordon Murray hyper car, you’re not price sensitive, you’ve almost certainly paid an accountant to minimise your lax liability elsewhere, and you can afford to pay a super tax on it. Luxury lifestyle taxes are so niche in terms of who they apply to, you’re not risking losing 10,000s of votes from a socially liberal yet stinking rich demographic.
We’d all like to see more boldness in politics after 13 years of sustained mediocrity. There is an empty-headed insincere boldness vested within populism that offers simple yet unworkable solutions to really complex problems. There is the boldness that involves creativity and originality and a departure from the status quo. It is true that the Lib Dems leadership could flag up our bolder policies more, but with a tired ineffective government, and an opposition that wants to win by default it’s still my contention that the Lib Dems are the boldest and the brightest force in British politics.

Lib Dem Conference Highlights

The Lib Dems have just completed their first in-person party conference since the last election. As a party that lets members set policy, our events are a bit more decisive in setting the agenda for us, compared to Labour and the Conservatives. Because this was the first event in a while I’m sure there were a lot of pent-up feelings flowing out. So many speeches and so many policies voted on, I’d like to single out what I think are the best, or electorally the most important parts of the conference this year.

Kira Rudik’s speech
Kira Rudik is an MP in Ukraine’s parliament, the leader of our liberal sister party Holos. Kira shares the same liberal, democratic, capitalist values that we do. Since the Ukraine – Russia war started she has, apart from President Zelenskyy, been one of the major political voices representing Ukraine to the rest of the world, speaking to English language broadcast media in the UK, USA, Canada and Australia most days. We’re now 18 months into the war, it’s easy for people in the UK to grow compassion fatigue about the war. The fact is that Ukraine is winning, but it needs more help to push it over the line. Nothing less than total victory for Ukraine is acceptable and we’re effectively appeasing an aggressive imperialist country in Russia if we let Putin win. This is the single most important event that’s happened in Europe this century so I’m extremely pleased we had someone from Ukraine speak. Kira extended many personal thanks to Lib Dems members for hosting refugees and donating to the humanitarian charities operating in Ukraine. In terms of the war effort she said, “Give us bricks and we will throw them at Russians”. This indicates the sheer strength of the will and highlights the fact that it’s not complicated in terms of offering support – the ranged artillery in the form of Storm Shadows is important, but the basics such as bullets, uniforms, night sights and medi-packs are needed too. I’m proud of our support in terms of British government policy and individual support, I hope it continues until the war is won and we help with the reconstruction effort too.

Kira Rudik – an inspiration to us all

Connecting communities – transport
In the past few years the Lib Dems have had a suite of policies for both public transport and active travel. It’s important to reiterate and update our policy in the face of cuts to local services and the savaging of a national flagship public transport project – HS2. Bus cuts and train cuts have been happening everywhere, even in places that have the best public transport provision such as London. In my own area the bus service is now the worst it’s ever been, one bus that ran seven days a week to Dartford for 50 years now only runs on Sundays. If you want to get a bus, any bus, from my local train station, Longfield, to my village three miles away in the evening rush hour after work, you’re now out of luck. The backward steps made with transport are recognised in the latest conference motion. In response here are some of the headline measures:

• Giving local authorities more powers to support and fund new bus services, including powers over franchising and introducing simpler tickets.
• Removing the ban on local authorities creating their own bus companies.
• Extending half-fares for bus, tram and train tickets to cover everyone up to the age of 18, while they remain in compulsory full time education.
• Introduce a Young Person’s Buscard, similar to the Young Person’s Railcard, for 19 to 25 year olds, giving them a third off bus and tram fares.
• Establish the new Great British Railways before the next election to act as a ‘guiding mind’ for the railway, ensuring that the needs of passengers and freight are put first.
• Establish a ten-year plan for rail electrification to increase the number of passenger journeys covered by electric trains prioritising freight routes in the first five years to move more freight to rail.
• Supporting rural bus services and on-demand services where needed.

The policy also includes a proposal to divert funds from the new roads building budget towards maintenance instead, i.e our cause célèbre – potholes! If the policy has a flaw it is light on detail when it comes to backing specific new rail schemes, apart from an overt commitment to HS2 we need to be clearer about which new overland rail lines and metro schemes we support.

For a fair deal – let’s talk tax
The party launched a wide-ranging pre-manifesto paper entitled ‘For a Fair Deal’ that covers off most of our current world view. There’s so much in it, I’ll just focus on one particular area when it comes to the economy – tax – because that’s a lightning rod for a lot of the voters we’ll be targeting in affluent parts of Southern England. It’s hard to overstate how vital our tax policy is and how much we’re treading on eggshells here. Before the 2019 election I went to a rally at the Battersea Arts Centre, I met an activist from Esher & Walton. He was really agitated, asking when the manifesto was going to be released (no party had yet), because he was being asked repeatedly if we had a Mansion Tax or not (probably not popular in that part of the world). What’s emerging in terms of our tax policy is a commitment not to raise income tax, to tax the oil and gas sector, the banks and water companies more (water co’s a new development). What I believe is also new is closing a loophole on unearned income – abolishing the Capital Gains tax-free allowance, and a return to a coalition-era policy – closing the tax gap via more enforcement (assume this would be more rigorous if the Conservatives aren’t a coalition partner).
Personally I’d like to see a number of luxury lifestyle taxes to increase the burden on high net worth individuals. However the tax changes haven’t been fully costed yet, so it will be interesting to know what they amount to in the final reckoning.

Ed Davey – placing the burden on corporations, not individuals when it comes to tax

Caring for the carers
In the past year I’ve learnt a lot about the care system, my niece has worked in a care home in North London. Residential Care seems to be a bad situation all round – the care home workers are on or near minimum wage, the residents themselves are paying well over £1000 a week and are seeing their life savings melt away quickly. Furthermore they’re miserable and frustrated by the set up, they all tell my niece they want to go back to their old home, and if a family visits they’re not allowed to take the resident out – it’s effectively a prison.
The Lib Dems have been developing a policy focused on Domicile Care – to enable people to stay in their own homes for as long as possible – this takes pressure off Residential Care and the NHS, and it’s what people actually prefer. These are the key tenets of our Social Care policy:

• Ensure no one has to sell their home to pay for care by introducing free personal care based on the model introduced by the Liberal Democrats in government in Scotland in 2002.
• Hire more social care staff, provide training and advancement, and pay them a higher wage by introducing a Carer’s Minimum Wage.
• Increase Carer’s Allowance so that unpaid carers have the support they so desperately need.
• Introduce a statutory guarantee of regular respite breaks for unpaid carers.

Note that the Carer’s Allowance, paid to those carrying out Domicile Care, often for a parent or child, get the lowest value benefit in the Welfare State – just £76.75 a week for a minimum of 35 hours of care provided, so it’s a major social justice issue that these hard working, often isolated people are valued more highly by society.

A splash of celebrity
Last year Elton John joined our virtual conference to speak up in support of Europe and how the music industry, especially those on tour, are really suffering because of Brexit. This year we had video messages from Steve Coogan and Carol Vorderman, both emphasising the need for electoral reform – a policy we’ve backed for decades. It would appear a head of steam is building up around PR which is often seen as a background issue. Peep Show’s David Mitchell also spoke of the need for PR and how a more honest politics and a new landscape would emerge if we had a more representative voting system in a recent TV interview. People talk of how disengaged and alienated they are by politics and the system all the time. The solutions to this always seem a long way off, however. I’m sure we Lib Dems will always back PR but we can’t do it by ourselves and we need to be brutally honest that the offer of AV as a new voting system via a referendum was a big mistake. I’m a multi-member STV man myself. It will be interesting to see if what version of PR we back at the next election and how much external help we have in putting a proposal forward.

Carol Vorderman speaking to conference: ‘We desperately need to end a system where only marginal seats matter, end a system which delivers parliaments that fail to accurately reflect votes cast and end a system where only the winner’s votes count.‘

A new Arts policy!
In the past Liberals have been hugely connected to the Arts. John Maynard Keynes, the greatest Liberal of them all, bought dozens of famous impressionist paintings for HM Treasury during World War I, was part of the Bloomsbury Set, and went on to found the Arts Council. We had a flagship policy of increasing arts spending to the EU average in the 1990s. Recently we’ve dropped the ball, however, we haven’t published any policy papers on Arts and Entertainment since 2002. It’s a pleasant surprise to see a new Arts policy in the For a Fair Deal document, therefore. Seeing as we’ve articulated nothing for so long the policy needs a lot of work, but it’s a start, and it acknowledges feedback sent to the party (by people like me) about protecting our broadcast landscape and getting a better deal for live music. The key points are:

• Protect the BBC and Channel 4 as independent, publicly-owned, public service broadcasters.
• Promote creative skills, address the barriers to finance faced by small businesses, and support modern and flexible patent, copyright and licensing rules.
• Negotiate free and simple short-term travel arrangements for UK artists to perform in the EU, and European artists to perform in the UK.
• Protect sports and arts funding via the National Lottery.

I hope that a fully-formed policy, beyond these bullet points emerges that means that all local areas have a healthy arts amenity landscape with good theatres, museums, art galleries, independent cinemas and rehearsal spaces. The UK creative sector is two million strong and is growing, those involved often have liberal instincts but have recently voted for us despite our lack of support for their occupations. It’s time we showed them more love, it would be a major vote winner.

Never mind the detractors

The Lib Dems launched their Local Election campaign this week, it was another visual stunt that gained plenty of attention and a fair bit of carping. I thought I’d take a look at what the party is doing and make some wider points about communications and campaigning. First off, let’s compare the impact of the three main party launches. The Tories did it in secret, not telling the press that Rishi Sunak’s visit to the Black Country Living Museum last week was, in fact, an official campaign launch. It’s only generated column inches in retrospect for being so cowardly – sure sign that the party’s in a tailspin. Labour launched their campaign a day after our’s, it involved speeches and a few policy announcements – fine as far as it goes but Labour’s twitter account has x 3 the audience of the Lib Dems – none of their tweets were viewed as much as the one featuring Ed Davey crashing into a wall of blue hay bales.

The battle for awareness
As a passionate Lib Dem I love my party but I also know what our limitations are, we don’t have the hedge fund/landed gentry/trades union money, we don’t have the partisan media support and we don’t have the nationwide club and office network that the two main parties have. Every day I wake up and think, “We’re media homeless, no one knows what we stand for.” That’s why I project policy pretty much all the time, often unprompted – if we don’t sell ourselves no one else will! I’ve learned it’s something you have to do all the time too. Many moons ago I was a convenience retail journalist, I learned a lot about how multinational corporations operate and how they sell their products. I can tell you when I covered the grocery sector Coca Cola was the most well-known consumer brand in the UK, not just the most well-known grocery brand or soft drink brand, the most well-known consumer brand. It had a recognition level of 99.5% – hats off to the 1 in 200 people who somehow had no awareness of Coca Cola, that’s quite some achievement. Coca Cola was also the only soft drink brand that advertised on TV every week of the year (probably still does). I’m sure the other brands would’ve loved to have done the same, they didn’t have the budget. The execs at Coca Cola could, in theory, coast on their high level of awareness and not advertise for a while, I’m certain people who buy Coca Cola on autopilot wouldn’t notice, but they’re No 1 by a country mile and it’s their job to stay there.
We Lib Dems are a million miles away from the brand awareness Coca Cola has, and the tractor bale smash was all about brand awareness. From time to time co-workers and relatives say to me things like, “Oh what’s happening with the Lib Dems Matt, are they still going?”, it’s banter, they don’t mean anything by it, but it’s instructive – being media homeless means we’re constantly trying to keep our head above water when it comes to visibility and recognition – no one would say the same about the two main parties. I’m a Lib Dem because I learned about the classical liberalism of Bentham and Mill, the new liberalism of Masterman, Hobson and Hobhouse, the actions of Gladstone, Asquith and Lloyd-George as Prime Minister and the philosophy, economics and social policy of Russell, Keynes and Beveridge. It all resonates with me greatly, I’m happy to concede most of the electorate neither knows, nor cares about any of these men now and if you mentioned them today they’d say “That’s ancient history”, or “What relevance are they to my life?”.

Condition of England – a must-read for politics students, sadly not rivalling JK Rowling’s sales totals

Most people don’t think about politics at all most of the time. Having the press cover a photo-op that isn’t serious is often the only way you’ll cut through to the general public. I’m sure Willie Rennie didn’t get involved in politics to care for baby Badgers, Willie isn’t stupid, he knows it’s that sort of thing that gets coverage in the absence of a newspaper/radio station/TV network that supports us all the time. Until a highly-principled Billionaire buys or launches a Lib Dems-affiliated mess-media outlet we’ll have to persist with the stunts and gimmicks to compensate for the lack of support.

Lib Dems campaigning outside of elections has been limited due to events beyond our control, that will change if you want it to

Back to our roots – high-minded humanitarianism

In contrast to the blue bale stunt, there was perhaps the first Lib Dems-affiliated demonstration in Central London since the last General Election on Monday. It was a demonstration in support of Refugee Rights and a call for Safe Routes for Asylum Seekers at Parliament Square. Because this was organised on the fly, we didn’t draw a huge crowd. There were, however, four MPs, one Greater London Assembly member, one Peer, one Parliamentary candidate, several Cllrs and ex-Council group leaders in attendance. Our relative lack of campaigning activity since the last election has a lot to do with the pandemic of course, but we’ve fallen out of the habit of putting on our own demos, hopefully this will be the start of more regular activity. All credit to Chris Maines and Anton Georgiou for putting it together. While it wasn’t a mass demo, at least we turned up – there was just us and the Socialist Workers Party, no mainstream Labour, no Greens and unsurprisingly no Conservatives turning out to support Refugee Rights. These events are important – we’re showing the world what we care about, and our actions differentiate us from the other parties, we’re loud and proud about our advocacy of the most vulnerable people in the entire world.

Smashing the blue bales – not to everyone’s taste, but it did the job

For those that are frustrated at the Lib Dems being known as the party of stunts, I hear you, maybe we haven’t got the balance right between gimmicks and high-minded humanitarian campaigning. Hopefully there will be more issues-based campaigning outside of election time to give those committed to causes something to chew on. If you’re not happy with the stunts channel your passion into something positive. I hope the event on Monday plants a seed and we’ll see more people coming forward with public activism ideas. Remember, we’re a movement with 100,000 members and supporters and we’re a bottom-up organisation too – we’re not defined by what the leader does. Anti-tractorists – your move!

Lib Dems review of the year

Brett Anderson, lead singer of Suede, is one of the more thoughtful men in rock, he likes to talk about the lifecycle of a band, for Suede has been through all five stages of the cycle. The stages are: Obscurity -> Success -> Excess -> Downfall -> Redemption. Most bands don’t get from stage 1 to stage 2, and many that reach stage 4 for don’t reach stage 5 either. It could be argued that during this century the Lib Dems have been through many stages of a lifecycle, and we enter 2022 during a positive phase, though we’re not selling out Alexandra Palace quite yet.

Suede – a comeback to give us all hope

I passionately believe in liberalism but I didn’t begin 2021 with any great optimism, perhaps I’ve been worn down by multiple existential threats in the last few years. The Lib Dems fought the 2019 General Election by saying ‘vote for us, this is the last chance to stop Brexit’ – it was sold as a massive point of reckoning, we didn’t achieve our aim and I came away feeling massively deflated and defeated.
Pretty much the whole of 2020 was not life as normal or politics as normal. We Lib Dems suffered in the polls partly because our ‘respect the science, obey public health instructions’ message was not what many people wanted to hear. I feared a major reverse in the May Local Elections because we bet the house on stopping Brexit and we find it almost impossible to get the public to listen to more than one of our policies at a time. Did people see us as still relevant? How much would people remember about our hardworking councillors if they couldn’t campaign due to Covid restrictions?
The Conservatives did remarkably well in the Locals for a party in power, though I believe that’s down to factors that can never be repeated – the furlough scheme, a stamp-duty holiday fuelled house price boom, a misplaced sense that the pandemic was nearly over and seeing the vaccine roll out as a major achievement. Professor John Curtice said that we treaded water in the Local Elections – I’ll take that in the context of the party’s low morale and inability to engage on the doorstep. The Local Elections did yield three important results – we now lead NOC coalitions in Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and County Durham. These three authorities have a combined budget of around £2Bn p.a., while some in the major parties might scoff at our emphasis on local government, this represents real responsibility and control of large amounts of money. The sour grapes shown by Oxfordshire’s opposition Conservative group shows where they’d rather be.
Below the headlines of county councils being flipped I spotted a trend in May that would prove crucial throughout the rest of the year. The Lib Dems performed particularly well in rural areas (except Cornwall), a welcome surprise considering this was where the house price boom was in full effect. Places like the East side of the Pennines, the Lincolnshire Wolds, the Cotswolds around Gloucester – things were looking up. Could it be that continued austerity – mediocre primary schools, expensive and infrequent bus services, no train lines, the poor state of roads, badly drained playing fields, rubbish play parks, shabby leisure centres, no police stations in small towns – is starting to outweigh frothy house prices in the countryside?

Champions of the Chilterns
Soon after the May elections came our first landmark moment – the Chesham and Amersham by election. This was the first in-person campaign opportunity for many party members since the General Election and perhaps it proved a cathartic release for them. Corporate high-flyer Peter Fleet was overwhelmed by it – perhaps he now knows the meaning of hard work. The Lib Dems got their mojo back in Chesham and Amersham and it proved to be a major reality check for the Green Party. The Greens did fantastically well in the locals, gaining nearly 100 seats and establishing themselves on several councils they’d never had a presence on before. Their hopes were high as they’re an ultra-NIMBY party and they hoped to trade on anti-HS2 sentiment. The Greens now know the definition of an intense campaign and they’re not quite capable of delivering that yet.
As for Labour, they couldn’t have tried harder to select an inappropriate candidate – not local and a prominent trades unionist (nothing wrong with that, just won’t work in somewhere like Chesham and Amersham). Keir Starmer never visited the constituency and in one interview pretended to forget her name (Natasa Pantelic), I want to say thank you to Keir as much as I want to say congratulations to Sarah Green our fantastic new MP! To my mind winning in Chesham & Amersham was indeed history, we hadn’t won in Buckinghamshire in 100 years but wasn’t out of the blue, it’s a stone’s throw away from St Albans and is next to Three Rivers/Watford councils which we control. To voters it wasn’t fanciful that we might win when we’ve had success just down the road in places socio-economically similar. We’re in the process of building a power base in the commuter belt North of London that could stretch from Chesham and Amersham to South Cambridgeshire via Hitchin and Harpenden.

Green by name, Green by nature, Sarah Green spent her first day on the job talking to a chalk stream preservation society

A Shropshire lass
What tops overturning 100 years of history? Overturning 200 years of history. Just like when I turn up to an old friend’s wedding with an attractive girlfriend, Helen Morgan managed to upstage Sarah Green with an even more spectacular success in North Shropshire. In the week after Owen Paterson’s resignation the New Statesman’s Stephen Bush opined on Newsnight that North Shropshire voted 60% leave, had a low number of graduates so the Lib Dems had no chance. What he didn’t know is that the party had already delivered several thousand leaflets and knocked on several hundred doors by the time he spoke. Our party strategists worked North Shropshire from the b of the bang, this enthusiasm and diligence was set to pay off big time. You could sense even from a distance that something special was happening in North Shropshire – more interest in our candidate, more members donating to the campaign, more new people joining.

Helen Morgan – all smiles arriving at the by election count

As much as we like to celebrate the individual and not be constrained by conformity we have to acknowledge that the herd mentality is a very powerful thing, success feeds on success, more will join the party in the future because they know what we’re capable of. The Lib Dems are the major challengers to Tory dominance in English seats south of the Mersey – Humber line where there is any rural hinterland, sounds awfully harsh but I’m going to say it anyway, Labour can’t win here.
Aside from the incredible performance by Helen Morgan, who held herself with amazing composure in the middle of a political maelstrom, I’d like to pay tribute to the major figures within Shropshire Lib Dems – Matthew Green (former MP for Ludlow), David Walker, David Vasmer and Rob Wilson who were instrumental in our victory. We have incredible talent in our party, this is often overlooked by the mainstream media but when it sniffs an opportunity it can be devastatingly effective. At the end of the year this prompted politics professors David Cutts and Andrew Russell to observe, “As ever with the Liberal Democrats, when voters deem the party as the credible challenger and firmly on the front foot, there are few party campaign machines across the world that can match the conversion and mobilisation competence, cold-bloodedness, and mercilessness of the Liberal Democrats.” We probably don’t recognise that mercilessness in ourselves but we do have a bird of prey as our mascot so . . .

The full text of the Cutts and Russell blog can be found here

Orpington all over again: why the North Shropshire electoral earthquake means the Liberal Democrats have turned the corner on the road back to recovery

If there’s a notable common thread spanning the two by elections it’s the role of the Young Liberals. At the risk of sounding sniffy about certain new members, we tripled our membership between 2015 and 2019 on a strong Europhile ticket. I always suspected some of these were LINOs (Liberal in Name Only) – it was really noticeable at the time how much new party members would respond to the Brexit-related discourse but not to mental health, soft drugs reform, renewable energy, refugee/asylum seeker support or our progressive tax and benefits policies. Young Liberals who have joined since the General Election couldn’t have got involved when the party was more unfashionable or unsuccessful – I take my hat of to them for swimming against the tide, which is what true strong-willed individuals do.
What lessons can we take away from our by election successes? With regard to the lifecycle we’re in a sweet spot – the general public see as an underdog and now wish us well in elections, but we’re not so insignificant that we can’t win – a vote for the Lib Dems in the right seat is not a wasted vote. More time has elapsed since the end of the coalition than it existed for so barbs about tuition fees and benefits freezes don’t wash any more – progressives can’t really point to anything positive that the Conservatives have done in six years since we left office. We’re in a post-coalition world. Winning Chesham and Amersham, with all the feedback about neglect shows we’re approaching a post-Covid world with politics returning to normal – it also shows that in 2020 that the right-wing press did a job for us. The Daily Mail, Sun, Times and Telegraph went on about the Red Wall endlessly, this has clearly got up the noses of those that don’t live in the Red Wall (95% of the population). Finally winning in North Shropshire – a 60% leave seat shows we’re living in a post-Brexit world. We’ve cleared multiple hurdles so we’re ready for meaningful redemption now.

As it’s the festive season I’ve picked out three songs for the major UK parties:

Lib Dems – Simple Minds – Alive & Kicking – hello baby we’re back!!!

Conservatives – The Associates – Party Fears Two – enjoy your work meeting hangover next year guys

Labour – Pete Wylie – The Story of the Blues – can Labour convert the Tory voters they need to regain power?

We’re on a road to Zero

Recently American magazine The Atlantic published a feature titled ‘How the U.S. Could Slash Climate Pollution by 2030’, it was an unusually unsatisfying piece for an otherwise high-brow publication, short on context or detail. It skirted over the when, the how, the why and the how much – the basic tenets of journalism. America has had one President after another that has been indifferent or hostile to the green agenda I guess it’s understandable their internal debate has not caught up with the rest of the industrial world yet. Joe Biden is the greenest President ever (by default), if the US ever wakes up it will probably own most low carbon intellectual property, until then the UK is ahead of the curve in terms of implementation and technology. Unlike America we’ve got a pretty good idea of how to decarbonise because we’ve been doing it for a decade or more. Let’s take a look at how we can push things forward.

Wind turbines in the North Sea – set to increase in capacity in the next decade

A Fossil Free future

Britain is on a path to net zero carbon emissions, there is a political consensus for that, the main debating points are how long it’s going to take us and how we’re going to do it. Sir Ed Davey recently stated that the Lib Dems policy is to have 80% of UK electricity generated by renewables by the year 2030. This is a stretch, but will be like moving from 4th gear to 5th gear in a car (I’ll get those combustion engine references in while people still understand them). Since 2010 renewables market share has moved from 6% to 40%, so the pace of change to get to 80% only has to increase slightly. It’s not quite as straightforward increasing the current forms of renewables to reach 80%, however, as the dominant form is wind – intermittent and unpredictable. As we phase out fossil fuels, all of which are ‘on demand’ and flexible, I.e. a thermal power plant can operate from 1% input to 100%, the reliance on electricity that is not constant – solar – or wind, which varies hugely, means we’ll have to deploy a lot of grid-balancing and storage infrastructure to keep the power flowing. Certain forms of renewable can be ‘on demand’ – biomass, biogas and geothermal, others such as wave and tidal can be constant – all of these are not deployed to scale in the UK yet but they all could be . . .

These charts show electricity usage over different timeframes, the one on the far right shows how we’ve switched from coal to renewables since 2012

Lightning strikes twice

Many people I’ve spoken to who were hold outs against the transition to renewables I believe were instinctively clinging onto a raft – Britain has been incredibly lucky in having ample coal, oil and gas resources, which we’ve exploited hugely since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Why not just keep on drilling? Aside from the climate change aspect of fossil fuels, their supporters overlook the emasculating geo-politics of hydrocarbons – there’s been four oil shocks in my lifetime, and we’re currently suffering a gas hike, all of these are down to events far beyond the UK’s control – the Yom Kippur War, the Iranian Revolution, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and growth of demand in China. This winter’s gas bills will be painful, but we can make it our last hydrocarbon shock if we want to.
Renewables offer good news for the world and for the UK. Instead of countries being rich in hydrocarbons or totally deficient, every country around the world, even landlocked ones will be able to tap into at least one form of renewable power. Mongolia, for example could use solar PV, heat pumps and concentrated solar power. Hopefully this will blunt the scramble for energy resources and lead to a more equal and peaceful world in the future. The UK won the lottery with fossil fuels, we also strike lucky with renewables – we can tap into all the major ones. Two forms, we’re especially rich in – wind and tidal – we’re the windiest country in Europe and have some of the strongest tides in the world in places such as the Pentland Firth. The potential is huge, but nothing is inevitable so I’ve modelled a few scenarios for 2030:

Bad case
The UK only progresses to 60% renewables, it’s still dependent on significant nuclear and gas generation. There has been increases in deployment of wind, solar and biomass but the rate of installation has slowed compared to the 2012 – 2020 period.

Average case
The UK reaches 70% renewables, nuclear and gas are reduced but still in the mix. As wind is taking up a bigger share significant grid-balancing and storage is in operation, the UK has made tentative steps to tap into new forms of renewables – biogas, wave and tidal make up a few %.

Hitting target
We took some risks, we pioneered a load of technology but we made it to 80%! As imports make up 10%, nuclear and gas are reduced to a small rump of the electricity market. Wind has been capped at around 50% of the market and the remaining 30% is made up of already established solar and biomass, but the newest forms – biogas, wave, geothermal and tidal already feed several gigawatts into the National Grid.

Hydropower was almost the exclusive form of renewable generation until 2000

For those who have got this far who are sceptical that this is possible or it’s a disruptive and costly change I would point out the following. If we had a conversation about electricity back in 2000, if you championed the existing forms of electricity and dismissed renewables it would be no surprise, aside from hydro no renewable had been deployed to scale around the world, the
rest all had to prove their worth. The increased commitment to renewables under the coalition government means that we’ve decarbonised our electricity by 67% between 2012 and 2021. The past nine years have shown that renewables can move from fringe to mainstream, they can do so very quickly and that there’s no significant increase in electricity bills by doing so. Going from 40% to 80% will be more difficult, it will cost more money. However, if you’re conservative you have to recognise the financial advisory maxim: ‘past performance is a good indicator of future outcomes’ – we can turn on the renewables tap and we can make it work, we know what that looks like. All of the forms of renewable power mentioned here are either available to deploy (wind, solar, biomass), have been proven to work in other countries (geothermal, tidal), or proof-of-concept has been shown and could be scaled up (biogas, wave, tidal). We’re not talking about end-of-the-rainbow tech like nuclear fusion.

R & D and economies of scale have taken the cost of mainstream renewables below gas and nuclear

In conjunction with COP26, the Think Tank Onward published a report ‘Thin Ice?’ This looks at changing attitudes in Britain to climate change and net zero policies. In an ideal world the UK public should have ‘got’ global warming the 1980s, climate science took a quantum leap thanks to the analysis of 140,000 years of ice core data which documented the long term carbon cycle and showed how temperatures since the start of the Industrial Revolution have gone off at a tangent (funnily enough this work was done by Soviet scientists at their Antarctic base before their oil drilling programme really took off). During the last decade, however, as we can see by the graph, acceptance of climate change has become a cultural norm.

Every age group now shows a strong majority concerned about climate change, finally!

Opinion varies slightly across the UK towards the concept of net zero, with heavily industrialised areas still less keen. What does this mean for the Lib Dems politically – pushing a strong green agenda in London and the South East is no problem, but what of our historic heartlands the South West and mid-Wales? If a selling job is possible then the potential for offshore wind, geothermal and tidal needs to be established for Cornwall and Devon, and biomass/biogas for mid-Wales. Overall I think the public has given the green light to clean energy and hope that future governments match the Lib Dems aspiration.

This map documents relative levels of support for net zero, green showing the most, purple the least

Liberals in the UK have made a huge contribution to the global environmental narrative – Lib Dems President Des Wilson’s push for cleaner air in the 1980s has prompted the worldwide eradication of lead from petrol. Sir Ed Davey’s policies in coalition have set a global template for decarbonisation in a major economy which is now being followed by the US, China and Japan, who have all set net zero policies in the last year. When the Chinese needed an expert to show them how to clean up their polluted cities they asked Sir Ed to appear on their version of Question Time – they know his work is globally significant. We are not the Green Party but we are part of the Green movement, and long may that continue.

Des Wilson – a hero to all Green Liberals