Election 2024: Those Lib Dem manifesto endorsements

The 2024 election is in full swing and this week is Manifesto Week. All the major parties have shown their hand and it’s gratifying to see a positive response to the Lib Dems manifesto across the board. If the Lib Dems play their cards right they can hit a sweet spot – differentiated enough away from the major parties to offer a genuine and interesting alternative, but sensible and evidence-based enough not to have a load of looney tune policies that would weigh it down, like the Green Party has.
The Lib Dem platform often receives praise from people not necessarily close to us – in 2019 it received a particularly glowing review from Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. However at the time our childcare, lifelong learning, and environmental policies were simply drowned out by the Brexit cacophony.
Hopefully this time round things will be different, although in what’s become a very shallow and superficial age it’s tough to get policies across compared to personality based content – hence Ed Davey’s long outward bound holiday. The following isn’t a complete list, I’m sure I’ve missed a few, but here’s a potted summary of the feedback we’ve received so far:

While Lib Dems have used It’s a Knockout style visuals to get onto TV bulletins there’s a lot of substance in our manifesto, drafted by Dick Newby (centre), now promoted by our party leadership

The Environment – Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace
Both major environmental bodies have given their thumbs up to the Lib Dems platform, they are no pushovers and often tell the government it isn’t going far enough with their commitment to the environment. The Lib Dems have policies to address Net Zero, promoting the decarbonisation of the electricity grid, improved building performance, decarbonising transport but also improving habitat and reversing nature loss.
Earlier this week Friends of the Earth said, “The Lib Dems have released their manifesto and it’s encouraging It ‘appears to be an impressive document recognising the interconnection of the climate and nature crises with existing societal inequalities’ – Mike Childs, head of policy at FoE.” By contrast FoE said, “The Conservative manifesto falls so far short of what’s needed it reads like the party has given-up on the long-held conservative value of protecting the environment for future generations.”
Yesterday FoE said of Labour’s manifesto, “We really needed to see firm plans on how the biggest long-term challenges of our lifetime will be confronted. Yet the Labour Party manifesto skates over so much of what’s needed to tackle the climate and nature emergencies.” Clearly unhappy with Labour backtracking on its £28Bn Net Zero investment plan.
As you can see from the tweet below Greenpeace is equally positive about the Lib Dems manifesto, interestingly enough it gives less detail and hasn’t even bothered to critique the Conservative and Labour manifestos, presumably because they’re so weak they don’t merit comment.

Greenpeace – thumbs up for our Net Zero policies

Housing – Shelter and Crisis
In the Autumn the Lib Dems published its most detailed housing policy document in a generation, there was a lot to like about it – raising design and build standards, changing the relationship between landlords and tenants, aspiring to build 380,000 homes a year, of which 150,000 would be social homes. This contrasts with Labour’s commitment to taper up to 105,000 social homes a year over the course of a parliament. In response to the Lib Dems manifesto Shelter said, “The Lib Dems manifesto includes a cross-government plan to end homelessness, plus a social housing programme & scrapping the Vagrancy Act. Now we need the same level of ambition from other parties and commitments to End Homelessness. Let’s Make History.
With homelessness at record levels these manifesto proposals would put us on the path to tackling this growing crisis and offer hope to the thousands facing the injustice of being without a safe home.”
Shelter produced a lengthy thread on twitter picking out highlights from the manifesto, this included, “We applaud the focus on delivering Social Housing and we urge all parties to prioritise building social rent homes, not just Affordable Housing. The difference is crucial for those in need. The Lib Dems aim to end rough sleeping within the next Parliament and immediately scrap the archaic Vagrancy Act. We strongly welcome a target to end rough sleeping, and rights to emergency accommodation.”

Layla Moran – a persistent and dogged campaigner for scrapping the Vagrancy Act

Women’s equality – Fawcett Society
The Fawcett Society campaigns for gender equality and women’s rights. It produced a detailed commentary on the manifesto and how it relates to women. It said, “A new right to flex working, comprehensive reforms to childcare, increases to maternity and parental pay and reforms to parental leave will ensure that more families have a genuine choice about how they bring up their children and balance this care with their working lives. We are particularly pleased to see
Lib Dems put quality at the heart of their offer with a workforce strategy, and prioritising training including in supporting children with Special Educational Needs. They’ve also included proposals to public gender, ethnicity and disability pay gaps, alongside diversity targets. This is another major Fawcett campaign that we are delighted has been picked up. We know that when social services fail, women are most often the ones who step in to cover the gaps. It’s fantastic to see Lib Dems coming out with ambitious policy on adult social care.
The reforms proposed would mean that both men and women would be better supported to care for their loved ones, and that those working in social care will receive proper recognition of the difficult work they do, including fairer pay and a proper career structure.
We commend the party for putting this issue back into the campaign, and urge other parties to explain how they would resolve the crisis in adult social care.”

The Fawcett Society recognises our female-friendly set of policies

Health & Care – The King’s Fund
The King’s Fund is a leading Health & Care charity, its CEO Sarah Woolnough commented on the Lib Dem plans, “The Liberal Democrats are currently the only major English party proposing much-needed reform of social care, with plans to introduce free personal home care and a higher minimum wage for social care workers in England.
Free personal care doesn’t cover all aspects of a person’s care, and it’s unclear if the policy only applies to older people or also covers working-age adults living with disabilities. But the plan would still represent a significant step forward and increase many people’s access to state-funded care.
The party’s pledges to rescue NHS services touch on many of the key issues for patients, but could be summed up as good on ambition, light on detail. The aim to speed up access to GP appointments by recruiting 8,000 more GPs is a laudable ambition, but as the current government has found, recruiting more GPs and retaining existing ones is not easy, and without more detail on how the party would achieve this goal, it is hard to see how their promise of faster access to GP appointments can be met.
The party has pledged £9.4 billion additional health and care spending a year by 2028/29. Of that, £1.1 billion a year is to improve NHS buildings and equipment, and £3.7 billion a year is for day-to-day NHS spending.”
Unsurprisingly because this is such a wide area of policy The King’s Fund doesn’t give unequivocal support to every Lib Dems policy but we fare better than Labour who are criticised for not going into specifics for social care and the Conservatives for not offering enough money and for causing a workforce crisis via Brexit.

A tabulated summary of care policies courtesy of The King’s Fund

Education – The Sutton Trust
The Sutton Trust is an educational charity (a genuine one, unlike the IEA), that promotes social mobility via improved access to education. It provided a very detailed critique of the Lib Dems education agenda this week.
The trust said, “For the early years, the standout pledges are to give disadvantaged children aged three and four an extra five free hours a week (making it 20), to be extended to two-year-olds ‘when the public finances allow’, triple the Early Years Pupil Premium to £1,000 a year, and develop a career strategy for nursery staff, with the aim that the majority of those working with children aged two to four have a relevant qualification.
The commitments outlined for schools are wide-ranging, with many geared towards tackling the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers. Above inflation annual school and college funding increases would benefit all pupils, and start to redress the stagnation of school funding we’ve seen over the last decade. The ‘Tutoring Guarantee’ shows recognition of the huge impact this intervention can have in tackling the attainment gap when targeted to disadvantaged pupils.

We’re nothing if not sensible and evidence-based, the Lib Dems have fleshed out a detailed set of education policies from the nursery sector through to universities and workplace training for the first time in a long time

It’s therefore welcome to see commitments in this manifesto for expansion of free school meals to all those in poverty (current FSM eligibility locks out 1.7 million children in families eligible for universal credit) and a qualified mental health professional in every school. More broadly, the pledge to remove the two-child cap on child benefits could have a major impact on tackling disadvantage and poverty.
The headline policy to reinstate maintenance grants for disadvantaged students ‘immediately’, to make sure that living costs are not a barrier to studying at university, is absolutely right. However that should also be accompanied with a rise in the overall amount, to make sure students have more money in their pockets.
Our research has shown that students are increasingly skipping meals and taking on extra paid work at the expense of their studies to make ends meet. The poorest students also graduate with the highest levels of debt – a barrier for some wishing to go on to higher education. This must be a priority for the next government.”
By contrast The Sutton Trust points to glaring gaps in Labour and Conservative education policies – director of research and policy Carl Cullinane said, “To achieve their mission, Labour will have to go way beyond the policies set out in their manifesto. The Conservatives’ manifesto is relatively light when it comes to the education sector, given the scale of the challenges facing the sector. There are clear issues with some of the well-trailed policies it contains.”

Emergency 2022

A few years ago The Economist said, ‘Since World War II every recession has been caused by financial crises and oil shocks’. At the risk of making The Economist obsolete, it pretty much nailed the major root causes of our economic problems in one sentence. I was born in 1973, I’ve lived through four oil shocks in my lifetime, and now one gas panic. All were caused by factors completely beyond the control of the UK.
The 1973 shock was caused by the Yom Kippur War and, after many years of talk, OPEC finally managed to engineer a spike in the oil price. The 1979 oil shock was caused by the islamic revolution in Iran, as despite initial assurances, Iran decided not to sell into global markets in the same way as before. The 1990 oil shock was caused by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and well-founded fears about destruction of oil wells in both countries. The 2008 oil shock was caused by a rise in demand from China, a booming economy at the time, something established oil producers had not planned for. Now gas prices are through the roof due to two reasons the UK can’t control – the war in Ukraine and the mass shutdown of nuclear power plants in France, which has reversed normal flows of electricity via interconnectors. France has hitherto been an exporter of electricity, but cross-channel connectors are now sending the best part of 3000 megawatts to France from the UK.

Little Cheyne Court – part of a UK electricity sector exporting to Europe

The fact that oscillations in fossil fuel prices can cripple the global economy is well-known, but we are closer to weaning ourselves off of fossil fuel dependency than ever before. Completely ditching gas for electricity production in the UK could take another 12 to 15 years. It’s possible at the current rate of renewables installation, however. It won’t be a quick or easy process, but aside from the environmental benefits the economic prize is huge – electricity from affordable sources at stable, predictable prices. It will amount to the difference between living at the foot of an active volcano and sitting pretty in the middle of a tectonic plate.
What of the current gas panic? The UK needs short-term intervention this winter, and beyond that an overhaul of the electricity market and how it’s priced up. There is much debate about the merits of interventionist schemes, the first proposal, from my party the Lib Dems, proposes a big windfall tax on oil and gas companies and repurposing of VAT receipts from petrol/diesel (which spike when the price of fuel is high) to provide support for bills. I’ve heard arguments against the fine details, but without a major intervention there will be a huge flow of money from households, businesses and public sector organisations to electricity and gas companies. People will get into debt, be evicted, get ill or die from cold-related illnesses if household bills rise to the £5000 – £6000 a year as is predicted. Businesses could be even worse off, all non-domestic users are not protected by a price cap, and some customers are being quoted future estimates that are 1000% price rises – that makes millions of SMEs unviable all of a sudden. An intervention on the scale of the furlough scheme is required to keep the lights affordable.

Wholesale changes?

As I mentioned before we’re on a road to Net Zero, dispensing with fossil fuels so why does the price of gas still matter so much? Many years ago I switched to a 100% renewables electricity supplier because I’m committed to the cause but also I believed, naively that I’d be paying a small premium at the time in exchange for a product decoupled from the snakes and ladders nature of oil and gas markets. The wholesale electricity market means no one can escape from the jeopardy of fossil fuel instability – wholesale prices are set at the level of the most expensive form of electricity at the time. Even if you want to buy just wind, solar, biomass and hydro, it will be priced up at the same level as gas, if gas is expensive. Looking at real time data for electricity generation on a sunny, windy day sometimes renewables top out at 70% market share, it used to give me an enormous sense of well-being. That was before I knew about the wholesale market pricing mechanisms – even with a few % of natural gas in the mix we’re saving nothing.
The market is clearly weighted in favour of producers, rather than consumers and consumers will continue to be gouged by price spikes until we get rid of fossil fuels altogether, or in the medium term reform the market radically. Changing the rules of the game comes with headaches, contracts have been signed, if we move to a new pricing mechanism electricity companies will almost certainly lose out and there will be legal challenges. I can’t claim to have the answer when it comes to a pathway for market reform but this has been explored by energy and sustainability expert Michael Liebreich. If you see his latest blog you can see it proposes splitting the market into component parts, and is an excellent explainer of how the market works:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/uk-energy-crisis-time-split-power-market-michael-liebreich/

If I were to deviate from his proposals of a low carbon (renewables/nuclear) and fossil fuels split, to would be to keep renewables separate from nuclear, nuclear has never been price competitive – the major forms of renewables no longer need subsidy and in the case of solar and wind, are sure to get cheaper. I would like to see an aggregate price for renewables, the UK could use all eight different forms of renewable – hydro, solar, wind, wave, tidal, geothermal, biomass and biogas – all have their strengths and weaknesses and are at different stages of development. The cheapest – wind, solar and biomass – could subsidise the introduction of new forms of renewable that have been on the verge of deployment but not seen yet – geothermal, wave, and tidal.

White Knights

I can imagine, if I was a grown-up in 1973, feeling incredibly emasculated by the oil shock, which was followed by a two-year recession. The UK’s economy didn’t really recover until the late-80s, all of a sudden your quality of life, career and standard of living could be buffeted by things happening in countries thousands of miles away that were hard to understand the UK had nothing to do with. Could the gas panic be solved by an external intervention that could be as helpful as OPEC has been unhelpful to the West? I ask this question because both the US and Canada are major global producers of Natural Gas, and although many production contracts are signed off for years in advance, these countries could, if they really wanted to, turn on the taps for Europe, just like Russia can turn the taps off. On a scale of 1 to 10 how much does the US want to avoid a global recession, and avoid Europe feeling compromised by its opposition to Russia in Ukraine? At the moment no one is floating this as an option, just more piped gas from Norway and a few extra LNG tankers from Qatar and Algeria. Help from those lower volume producers isn’t going to cut it. North America has the power to help the rest of the industrial world – will it?

Those forever changes

One thing we learned in retrospect after the first oil shock is societies scouted around for alternative energy sources and energy saving measures – the shock might have precipitated permanent change but we were too lazy to bother. By the mid-80s aspirational energy changes fell by the wayside and we were back to bad habits because fossil fuels had become cheap and plentiful again – e.g. the average miles per gallon of new cars went down for about 10 years then regressed to pre-1973 levels. In the motor market, structural changes with the long-term phase out of combustion engines mean we’re set on a course of ditching oil no matter what. In the short term the Gov’t appears to be losing its nerve when it comes to electricity with Liz Truss saying she’ll ditch the green levy (this will hold up, but not eradicate investment in new renewables capacity) on bills – so that’s £150 off a £5000 bill – not a transformative difference to a household but a dent in our commitment to sustainability. The best we can hope for is Gov’t policy being a short term blip as the current administration will be voted out in 2024, and be replaced by one with one determined to make the 2022 gas panic the last fossil fuel shock we ever experience.

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

Field of dreams: A Liberal revival in the countryside

While last month’s Local Elections weren’t much fun for the progressive left, there was one trend which should offer encouragement – rural voters are increasingly comfortable returning non-Conservative councillors. England’s rural hinterland is increasingly peppered with Lib Dem, Green and Independent/Localist representatives. The Conservatives ticked down in many counties – Essex, Lincolnshire, Wiltshire, Bucks, Herts, Salop, have a slim grip on power in Surrey, East Sussex and Gloucestershire and lost control of Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire. This was despite the strong tailwinds provided by the demob-happy atmosphere created by the perceived end of the Covid19 pandemic, the insulating effects of furlough delaying the economic hardship caused by Brexit and Covid, and a house price surge that’s benefited country areas disproportionately.

Labour can’t win here

The political landscape of the countryside is different from small towns and urban areas, draw a line between the Mersey and the Humber and Labour barely features in the countryside south of this (a few exceptions being Stroud and Chipping Norton). This means the political choice is effectively between the Conservatives, the Lib Dems as their main challengers and a growing presence of Greens and Localists. Country dwellers tend to be older than the national average, more likely to own their own homes and the value of those homes is higher than average. These factors make it hard for Labour as country voters are hypersensitive to any rise in property or income taxes and since 2010 they have quietly been very pleased about multi-year freezes in petrol taxes and Council Tax. For Lib Dems, this throws up questions about how much we want rural votes and how far we want to reform property taxes in government, aside from Brexit property tax was the major issue flagged up to Lib Dem canvassers in Esher & Walton, so our lesson from 2019 is, “Yes we despise Dominic Raab, Brexit is awful but don’t tax our mansions.”

Village Green Preservation Society

While the national conversation about services and amenities is about education, healthcare, adult social care, children’s services, libraries and leisure centres, the village amenity landscape is somewhat different. It’s my contention that a village with a population of over 1,000 should have the following:

Shop
Primary school
Playing field
Pub
Church
Village Hall

Of these shops, primary schools and pubs are under constant threat. There has been a long-term consolidation of primary schools, shutting down those with the smallest rolls, most of which are in the smallest villages. Often village pubs are the least commercially viable, unless they’re part of a recognised tourist trail. Beyond this the club/society landscape of villages is deteriorating as an ageing population means fewer sports teams, many cricket teams I used to play against in the 90s have folded, all in villages, not in towns or suburbs. It’s important to note the disappearance of these amenities because often it means the quality of life of villagers is going down while their asset wealth is going up.

Conservative shortcomings

Other pundits say that Conservatives in safe Tory areas are complacent and arrogant, my reading is a bit different from this. In my area they’re invisible. My Conservative district councillors don’t shop in my local shops, they don’t drink in my local pubs, they’re not members of local clubs or societies, I don’t see them when walking through neighbourhoods, local people wouldn’t merely struggle to know their names, they wouldn’t know what they look like either. I believe this is deliberate as the less recognition a councillor has, the less casework they have to deal with. The Darwinian principle of Economy of Effort is definitely at play. Aside from minimal engagement my local Conservatives have zero agenda apart from a managed decline of local services and strong strong NIMBYism, one campaign leaflet trumpeted all the promises they’d kept – this included retaining a weekly refuse collection – hardly a towering achievement. Long term neglect means blocked drains that should be flushed every year are silted up and left for 10+ years, roadsides that are caked in leaves that should be swept in late December are cleared in mid-May instead. This is the low-level neglect and inaction which is obvious to voters and all rural opposition parties are now playing on.

Not all countryside is the same

It would be a big mistake to characterise all countryside as the same and I’ve divided it into four types:

Big city rural hinterland:

This is the countryside within commuting distance of England’s top 10 cities, it contains some voters that are ‘overspill’ out of the big cities and will be packed with leisure amenities. E.g. where I live in NW Kent within a few miles there are three golf courses, Brands Hatch motor racing circuit, several horse riding stables, paintball ranges, motocross scrambling courses, an assault-course style adventure playground and a clay pigeon shoot.

Villages such as mine, on the Kentish North Downs, are home to significant big city overspill

Academic rural hinterland:

Look at an up-to-date election map and you’ll see jam doughnuts denoting certain university towns – a red centre an a big amber outer – this applies most obviously to Oxford and Cambridge, but also to smaller university towns such as York too. The commuter belt of these towns houses academics, academic support staff and a growing number of people working for companies spun out of universities – say biotech around Oxford or computer science around Cambridge. The increase in uni spin offs, employing highly educated and highly skilled operatives who retain an academic sensibility was probably a tipping point in flipping Canterbury to Labour.

These four election maps show the progression of Lib Dems and others across Oxfordshire from 2009 (left) to 2021 (right)

Remote rural hinterland:

This is truly out-of-the-way countryside that is a long way from the motorway network, no direct rail connection to London – it’s an hour or more to the nearest major city. Cornwall, Shropshire, North Norfolk, Cumbria and Northumberland – these are places Lib Dems either have done well in historically or are making gains today. Hospitality – BnBs or small independent hotels are more likely to feature than activities-based leisure. Lack of affordable housing and anxieties around second home ownership feature in local concerns.

‘Shat on by the Tories, shovelled up by Labour’ thankfully the Withnail family country cottage, Crow Crag (Sleddale Hall), featured in Withnail & I is in Lib Dem-led Eden Council

Middle England:

Not remote, not academic, not part of a big city commuter belt, these are the bits in the middle – Wiltshire, Dorset, Suffolk, Lincolnshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire. With no academic or championing of the geographically distanced angle Lib Dems have done the least well in these places. People often vote Conservative in Middle England as a social or behavioural norm even if it’s against their economic, professional or leisure pursuit interests. The recent success of Lincolnshire Lib Dems in the wolds – winning Gainsborough and Market Rasen – show it’s possible to win in heavily Brexity, socially Conservative places – but it’s harder work than in other parts of the countryside.

Middle England is tougher going that other parts of the country for Lib Dems but if it’s possible in Market Rasen it’s possible anywhere (image courtesy of the New Statesman/Ben Walker)

The challenge, the opportunity

Campaigning in rural areas obviously takes more time and effort due to lower population density. Notoriously hard-working Lib Dem Leicestershire County Councillor Mike Mullaney walked 28 miles on election day as part of a last-minute canvassing blitz (thankfully he won). Where the polls are against us this kind of campaigning isn’t for the faint hearted but remember, if it’s difficult logistically for you, it’s difficult for everyone else too. If the main opposition is a Conservative there’s a good chance they’re not used to campaigning, have little social capital despite being an incumbent and have nothing to show that’s new/improved as part of their record in power. In recent years intensive campaigning for General Elections or parliamentary by-elections has shown up that the Labour or Conservative vote is truly soft in their longterm heartlands that are neglected or subject to misrule. The Conservatives had a goldilocks set of circumstances for Local Elections this year but they still went backwards in large parts of rural England. It’s time we maximised our opportunities in places that aren’t left behind but are out of the way.