The Liberal Democrats prepare for the next election

Bournemouth – site of the 2023 Lib Dem Autumn Conference

I haven’t posted for a month. I’ve been on holiday, and then last weekend I went to the Liberal Democrats conference in Bournemouth. This is the first in-person Autumn conference the party has had this parliament, since September 2019 in fact – and my first conference of any kind since then. It was lovely to catch up with friends and acquaintances, people-watch and sample some of the internal debates the party is having. But what did the event say about the health of the party?

Overall the party was in good heart after a series of spectacular by election wins and good local election results. This was widely expected to be the last Autumn conference before the next general election (a shorter Spring conference in March in York should go ahead) – which is expected next year in May or in September or October. It showed. Much passion was on display on the conference floor, and many excellent speeches – but little actual debate: few speaker’s cards were placed against motions or even amendments. It resembled the managed affairs of the Labour and Conservative parties. There was one notable exception, on housing, which I will come to.

The party leadership’s electoral strategy is clear: it is to increase the party’s representation in parliament to thirty or more seats (it is now 11 plus four by-election wins), almost entirely by winning seats currently held by the Conservatives (one or two SNP seats are in the sights, and perhaps the odd Labour one). The unspoken hope is that this will be enough to overtake the SNP as the third party in parliament, with a substantial increase in the party’s ability to influence the agenda there. It may also be enough to hold the balance of power, should Labour fail to secure a majority, and thus influence government policy in one way or another.

The contrast with 2019 could hardly be greater. The party then had momentum as a rallying point for those hoping to reverse the result of the Brexit referendum – and it talked of forming the largest party in parliament with its leader as prime minister. A lot of political capital was spent on the proposition that the party would not rerun the referendum if it won an overall majority. But the party was out-manoeuvred by Labour’s support for a second referendum (much good that it did them) and the bubble was burst in the December 2019. Following this debacle the party commissioned a post-election review by Baroness Thornhill, who, as mayor of Watford, was one of the party’s most successful politicians. Unlike most such reviews, which are generally discarded by the party managers before the next election arrives, this review has been taken to heart. Ambition has been lowered; the communications agenda is led by public opinion rather than activists’ priorities; efforts have been made to professionalise the party’s core workers and reduce staff turnover.

This gives a great deal of credibility to the party’s strategy. Early in the conference many activists were a bit glum after seeing a presentation by psephologist John Curtice that showed that the collapse in support for the Conservatives was benefiting Labour and not the Lib Dems. But what matters is what is happening in about fifty seats out of the 650, and national polls will not show this clearly. Another pollster, Rob Ford, showed that the party was doing well among better-off graduate voters, and that the numbers of these voters was increasing in the seats likely to be Lib Dem targets. The Tories’ courting of “petty bourgeois” voters by ditching green policies, and ratcheting up nasty rhetoric on immigrants, plays into Lib Dem hands here. In 2019, the Tory leader Boris Johnson was careful to nod to these voters; the current leadership knows no such subtlety. The Lib Dems should benefit from the collateral damage of the Labour-Tory contest for the petty bourgeois – rather as the Tories benefited from the collateral damage of the Labour-Lib Dem battle for the professional classes in 2019. The party’s prospects thus look good in a decent number of seats in the South-East commuter belt around London, and equivalent seats further north, such as Hazel Grove outside Manchester. The prospects are murkier in the party’s former heartlands in the west county, however, where the professional classes are much less in evidence – though with Labour relatively weak there, there must be some opportunities.

However this strategy is creating a lot of tension in the party. Listening to the electors and letting them set the agenda may be good for curbing arrogance and winning parliamentary seats, but party activists want something more ideological and radical. But the radicalism is being suppressed. The party will not explicitly campaign to rejoin the European Union, as many activists wish – a goodly proportion having joined the party in the first place because of support for EU membership. Rather like Labour, the leadership are sticking to a much vaguer line about better relations. A flirtation with Universal Basic Income (UBI) has been firmly squashed – though in general the party remains stronger on ideas for spending more public money that raising it or saving it. This conservatism led to the only serious, open conflict of the conference: on housing.

Housing developments are not generally popular in the rural and semi-rural areas that comprise the party’s best prospects. City-dwellers fume that this is “nimbyism”, but living in one such area (bordering decent Lib Dem prospect seats, though not actually in one) I can say that this is oversimplifying things bit. Many developments comprise mediocre-quality houses in environmentally sensitive areas, with inadequate plans for supporting infrastructure – because these are more profitable for developers. The Conservatives are in full retreat on their commitment to building more homes, and are attacking the Lib Dem national target of building over 300,000 houses a year (even if this commitment was in their 2019 manifesto too) – though this did not do the Tories any good in local elections here in Sussex. The Lib Dem leadership were worried enough about this to propose dropping this target in a new housing policy, while at the same time still committing to building roughly this number of homes, by increasing social housing, developing garden cities, and so on. But the Young Liberals organised a counter-attack. Younger voters feel as if they are the centre of a housing crisis, with increased rents and vanishing prospects of buying their own homes. The housing target has important symbolic value to them, and the policy looked like a retreat. The leadership tried to win by deploying heavyweight speakers, but their arguments were thin gruel. Former leader Tim Farron delivered a “barnstorming” speech in defence of the leadership position by shouting increasingly loudly that housing targets wee “Thatcherism” without explaining why. “Has he lost the plot?” my wife, next to me, asked. “Yes,” I said, and we both voted for the Young Liberal amendment, which was carried. That was the only act of defiance by the membership, however.

In the conference fringe, things were a lot more interesting. My especial interest was rural policy: how to turn around farming policy so that it helps restore wildlife and absorb carbon – without too much damage to productivity. For me this is a critical area: carbon policy will fail unless the land is made into an efficient carbon sink, and we end extractive farming practices – never mind ending the destruction of wildlife. I was encouraged by the party’s support for this, which is winning converts among many farmers. But hard choices beckon, as it is hard to see how this can work without a substantial reduction in the consumption of meat. I was also interested by the arguments made in favour of UBI at a couple of fringes. There is something deeply flawed in the conventional thinking about tax, benefits and public services – and UBI might be part of the solution. But if it is, it feels like only one leg of a three-legged stool and it will not work by itself. More on that on this blog later, as I gather my thoughts.

In his closing speech, the party leader, Ed Davey, harped on the familiar themes: outrage at water companies for dumping sewage into rivers and the sea, supporting Net Zero policies, and a new policy about health care and cancer treatment. What party activists were more interested in were his mentions of closer relations with Europe, advocacy of electoral and political reform and an attack on Labour for lacking ambition and caving in to Tory policies. He said about the minimum here, in comments that were not picked up by the media coverage. The attitude to Labour is interesting. There is no love lost between Labour and the Lib Dems. The two parties are battling against each other to win the Conservative held seat of Mid Bedfordshire in a by-election, in an interesting trial of strength. Activists were repeatedly called on the help there. The party needs Labour voters to come over to it in its key seats, and so is careful not to antagonise.

I think Ed is right in his overall approach. The next election will clear a lot of air, and hopefully the party can develop its more radical instincts afterwards. If Labour win, as seems likely, then the party will need to define itself clearly against it – and that will be a lot more interesting.

Will pragmatism bring success to the Liberal Democrats?

Conservative party members showed little self-awareness this summer. Under their party’s rules they had the final say on who was to be their party leader, and, as they never tired of telling us, the next prime minister. The rest of the country was appalled that such a small, self-selected body of people was playing such a pivotal role in the country’s constitution. The leadership candidates then vied for members’ support by offering ever more crackpot ideas to appeal to their prejudices. And when the winner, Liz Truss, took over as prime minister, she treated her promises made to this small body of people as more important than the manifesto on which her parliamentary majority was based in December 2019. But amid all this self-indulgence another British political party has been rowing hard in the opposite direction by trying to make itself more relevant to the public at large. It is time to talk of the Liberal Democrats.

This follows the party’s own moment of self-indulgence in 2019. It’s then newly selected leader, Jo Swinson, decided to make the party’s raison d’être to act as a rallying point for the overturning of the 2016 referendum on Brexit. This was very popular with party members, encouraging Jo to take ever more radical positions on the subject. The party’s poll ratings climbed; it outpolled the other established political parties in elections to the European Parliament (but not, significantly, Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party). It attracted defectors from both Conservative and Labour parties. At the 2019 election Jo delighted party members by suggesting that the party would win the election outright. But in the grim reality of a general election campaign, as voters confronted the awkward choices before them, this self-indulgence stuck in their throats. The party offered no reconciliation to the half of the country still determined to complete Brexit, and simply promised to keep stoking up a debate that was tearing the country apart. The party’s poll ratings sank, resources were deployed on an electoral strategy that was far too optimistic, and the end result was a dismal 11 MPs, a net loss of one on the poor 2017 result. Losses included Jo Swinson’s own seat in Scotland.

This disaster prompted much soul-searching. One of the party’s most successful politicians, Dorothy Thornhill (serially directly-elected mayor of Watford), was asked to head a review of the party. Disclosure: I am secretary of the party’s audit and scrutiny committee which sponsored this review, and which continues to monitor the party’s response to it – but the views expressed here are very much my personal ones. The review was unsparing int its criticism of many aspects of the party’s management. It’s leading recommendation was as follows:

Based on the lives of ordinary people in the country today, create an inspiring, over-arching and compelling vision which can guide the entire Liberal Democrats organisation for the duration of a parliament, ideally longer.

The party, under its new leader, Ed Davey, has taken this recommendation seriously, and especially that first phrase. Whether the party’s current vision is yet inspiring, over-arching and compelling is open to question. But that it is grounded on the lives of “ordinary” people is not in doubt. The policies that are promoted to the public reflect the concerns of general voters, and not those of activists: the energy crisis, the outflow of raw sewage in rivers and beaches, and many more specific, local concerns. To this Ed has now added the rising cost of mortgages, and the difficulty of seeing a doctor. It is, unfortunately, hard to meld such everyday concerns into something inspiring, over-arching and compelling, but the party is trying. This causes no little frustration to many of the party’s activists and members. They are dying to make a big fuss over the failures of Brexit, for example, and push radical proposals for political reform. But generally voters don’t want to reopen the wounds of Brexit, and have yet to translate their frustration with the political system into demands for reform. A further example of the party’s sensitivity to “ordinary” people was the cancellation of the party’s autumn conference, which had been scheduled for just before the Queen’s funeral. This infuriated many activists, who had booked hotel accommodation and were looking forward to the first in-person conference since covid-19. But it would not have been a good look to the public at large. The counter offered to this by some activists, that the public wouldn’t notice, was hardly an encouraging one.

This was the only party conference to be lost to the Queen’s death. Other parties, large and small, benefited from the traditional extra publicity that arises from such events (though in the case of the Conservatives “benefit” is a stretch). Last weekend the party attempted to make up for this with a set-piece leaders’ speech from Ed – which was dutifully covered by the BBC and the more respectable newspapers. The coverage mainly focused on his proposal of a fund to assist stretched families to manage higher mortgage costs. I didn’t find the speech especially uplifting, but that may be because I am on old cynic, and I was watching it on a Monday morning. But it was coherent and competent. Ed clearly focused the party’s political strategy on winning parliamentary seats from the Conservatives, implicitly part of a coalition to end their time in power. Ed only mentioned other political parties in the context of local elections – where he made an attack on the SNP, but he resisted the temptation to attack Labour. He did make time to advocate proportional representation, but that was the only political reform that got a look in. It did not beat raw sewage in its prominence. Since the Labour leadership isn’t even going that far with political reform, we’ll have to accept that.

Is the party’s new approach working? Membership has plummeted since the heady days of 2019 and the party’s prominence in the Brexit debate. Reduced means stretches the party’s infrastructure, both paid staff and volunteers. But the party is winning elections again, including three spectacular gains in parliamentary elections. It is slowly rebuilding a local government base – but it is very patchy. The party consistently polls around the 10% mark – better than it has been, but short of the party’s heyday in the years 1997 to 2010. This too was a time when local electoral pragmatism trumped ideological vision – only for the party to collapse once it tried to use its electoral mandate by joining a coalition government.

Political vision is a tricky thing, especially in a political system such as Britain’s. Too much and the electoral coalitions needed for success fragment; too little and the party loses its way at the grassroots, which is central to party’s electoral successes. Under Ed Davy the Liberal Democrats are attempting a balancing act. The party is basing its campaigns mainly on issues that resonate with voters, especially those in Conservative-held areas; at the same time it is trying to manage expectations about what it might do after the election (i.e. potentially support a Labour-led government). Meanwhile the party still holds to its core beliefs, on openness, on the environment, and on the need for political reform. This is a balancing act traditionally managed best by the Conservatives – until now.

The next election is Starmer’s to lose

Chris McAndrew, CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It looks certain that Liz Truss will become British prime minister this week, and British politics will take a dramatic turn. It is surely an act of political suicide by her Conservative Party.

We are, of course, urged not to underestimate Ms Truss – as so many of us have in the past. And yet, Matthew Parris in The Times tells us that this is a mistaken sentiment – just as it was for Boris Johnson and for Donald Trump – also politicians who won the top job against huge scepticism of their fitness for the job. She really is as shallow and dangerous as she looks.

I agree. During her bid to persuade first Tory MPs and then ordinary Tory members to vote her into the job, she has backed herself into a difficult corner. Her fiscal policies are inflationary; her economic ideas delusional, and she has shown little aptitude for the negotiation and compromise that are essential to any successful political leadership. She is also a stiff and awkward communicator. She enters the job in the middle of an economic crisis – it is hard to see that she has much chance of a honeymoon period longer than a month.

It gets worse for the Conservatives. They have built their political appeal on the basis of being a safe pair of hands with the economy. Whether this claim has been justified is another matter: while the austerity policies with which the party was associated from 2010 until 2019 struck most voters as being careful and sensible, most economists regarded them as being inappropriate at best. Now that reputation for economic competence is under water. Recent polling shows a Labour lead on handling of the economy, as its does in overall voting intentions. This is very dangerous territory for the Conservatives – and Ms Truss is going to do nothing to improve it. The sort of tax-cutting fantasies that are popular on the American right do not play so well with floating voters here. And it is hard to see that inflation is going to improve much under her stewardship – not without a recession, which she is claiming that she can avoid.

Still, many observers think the Conservatives can pull things back. Ms Truss will hit the ground running, as she has had plenty of time to prepare. A new cabinet will be put in place quickly – and the current government lethargy will be replaced by energy and optimistic talk. There is bound to be a honeymoon bounce. Ms Truss might even go straight into a new general election. This would be perfectly justifiable, to give her a fresh mandate, rather than the flawed manifesto of 2019. The Conservatives have been planning for this possibility for some time, as new, and more advantageous constituency boundaries come into effect. They will likely be better prepared than they opponents. But the polling looks dire – and she and all her hangers-on will be dismayed at the idea of throwing away their coup so soon. Opposition is a dismal place to be for those used to government. Still there is a certain recklessness about Ms Truss, and I wouldn’t rule it out.

The main reason that people seem to think that the Conservatives might win the next election is a lack of belief in Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader. He is uncharismatic and cautious. It is hard to say what he stands for, and his polling is weak. But is this a Westminster bubble thing? Activists on the left like their leaders to be charismatic and radical – and so do the journalists and others who follow them. It is easy to see their disappointment. But FT columnist Janan Ganesh warns that this bias against the uncharismatic, also applicable to US President Joe Biden, leads us to underestimate them. Floating voters like their leaders to be reassuring and middle of the road – and, I would add, especially if those leaders are from the left. Radicalism is not a positive attribute. The Conservatives are walking into a trap.

The main equation for Labour is whether they will win the next election by themselves, or alongside the Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dem leader, Sir Ed Davey, is no more charismatic than Sir Keir, though he is more experienced. He has made a lot of the political running in the last few weeks on the energy crisis – a subject he knows well as a former Energy Secretary. Like Sir Keir, he is relentlessly un-ideoligical. He is not trying to move the debate to the areas that his activists want to talk about – such as Brexit – but focuses on the areas that are close to floating voters top concerns. The other issue that the Lib Dems have been able to run with is the water companies’ disposal of raw sewage into rivers and the seaside. The Lib Dems are doing well in many Tory heartland seats where Labour is weak. The public ground is being subtly prepared for a coalition – or cooperation at least – between the two parties – in a way that it wasn’t before the Lib Dem coalition with the Conservatives in 2010, which saw Lib Dem support collapse.

It is reported that the Conservatives are preparing a campaign based on defeating the “Coalition of Chaos”, compared with strong and stable one-party government. This follows the successful deployment of this line of attack in 2015, which nearly wiped out the Lib Dems – though it failed in 2017, to the extent that the Tories are likely to avoid the slogan “Strong and Stable”, the basis of the 2017 flop. This line might gain traction if it looks as if a Labour-Lib Dem alliance will not gain enough seats to prevent the Scottish Nationalist Party from holding the balance of power. The SNP will not want to let in a Conservative government, but they will demand another referendum on independence. Labour and the Lib Dems are going to need to think through their strategy on that front with care, and not just hope that the issue won’t come up. But will the prospect of another Scottish referendum scare English floating voters? Probably not enough.

Sir Keir’s strategy was a risky one. He has done nothing to motivate his own activists – and gone out his way to insult the socialist left, the source of Labour’s most energetic supporters. He is unable to project the flair of Tony Blair, who previously made a floating-voter strategy work for Labour. But the Conservatives are playing into his hands.

I am going to be offline for two or three weeks.

A vindication for Ed Davey and Keir Starmer

The Liberal Democrat victory in North Shropshire is astonishing. It is the second stunning victory for the party in a year – Chesham & Amersham could be explained away by it being a Remainer seat and affected by NIMBY issues on house building and railways. No such excuses are on offer here, and the swing was even larger. In fact the last time there was such a large by-election swing between the parties (Christchurch in 1993) it was a prelude to the Tory meltdown in 1997. The Lib Dems have reestablished themselves as the protest party of choice in the Tory heartlands.

The first thing to say about this is that it is a vindication of the leadership of Sir Ed Davey. He has come in for much criticism, from inside and outside the party, since being elected last year. He wasn’t being radical enough, it was said, and in particular he should have spent more energy banging on about the failure of Brexit to deliver its promises. But that would have limited the party’s appeal to a rather well-off and well-educated elite, and probably failed even there with the party lacking wider credibility. He has been proved correct that the public mainly wants to move on. Instead he has revived the party’s focus on local issues, used to highlight the message that Westminster is out of touch. Importantly they were able to convince many Labour voters (the party was a comfortable second in 2019) that they had a better chance of winning in this seat – but the victory was founded mainly on scooping up doubting Conservative voters, and persuading others to stay at home..

Labour failed to do quite so well in the by-election two weeks previously in Bexley, in the London suburbs, in spite of the Lib Dems keeping their heads down there. We can’t read too much into the contrast, since evidently what proved fatal for the Conservatives in Shropshire were their evasions over Christmas parties in December 2020 in Downing Street and elsewhere – and that blew up largely after Bexley.

In fact the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, should feel vindicated too. He too has avoided stoking up told-you-so on Brexit; he has also avoided saying anything radical at all, notwithstanding his promises to Labour members before they selected him. Instead he has chosen to major on competence and “leadership”. In his early months he always stood in front of a backdrop with the word “leadership” in it. This was a failure at first. Criticism of Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, seemed to be a Westminster village thing that didn’t “cut through” to the general public, in the village’s terminology. Not long ago I was urging Sir Keir to be be more radical by advocating reform of the House of Lords and the electoral system, allying himself with the Lib Dems and Greens, and capitalising on disillusion with the political system. That has proved unnecessary – it would always have been a risky strategy, but playing it safe can be paradoxically risky too in politics. But now the government’s credibility is shot in the nation at large, and voters are not as frightened of him as they were of his predecessor. That Lib Dem by-election victory in 1993 (in fact there were two that year, like this) heralded a Labour victory after all. Labour is now leading in the national opinion polls.

For the Conservatives this defeat points to two big problems. The first is Mr Johnson’s leadership, the subject of my previous blog. As I said then, I get very tired of the suggestion that Tories tolerate the incompetence because he is an election-winner. What on earth is the point of winning then? The public can and did suspend its judgement on Mr Johnson, but that happy period seems to be over. Many Tories hope that with a stronger team of advisers, his record can be turned around. Mr Johnson is certainly resilient. But is he able to manage his advisers? Personally I doubt it. The party would be better off changing leaders, and fast.

The second problem for the Conservatives is their discipline over covid policy. Covid policy scepticism is rife on the backbenches, and it shows. The most visible sign was the lack of mask-wearing in parliament, before the Omicron crisis put the wind up them. But there has been constant carping, leading both to a big backbench rebellion on the “Plan B” measures this week, and to confused messages from government ministers. Should or shouldn’t people reduce social contact in the run up to Christmas? Many on the right have disappeared down the rabbit-hole of extreme scepticism – stoked up in their social media bubbles, and egged on by increasingly vocal owners of hospitality and other affected businesses. This occasionally breaks the surface – such as with the complaint that the NHS has become the “National Covid Service” by excessively prioritising the disease, and as a result it is neglecting other conditions. I guess they want the covid patients to be left in the car park. While the sceptics make some pertinent criticism of policy – such as how we prioritise saving life over quality of life – their overall position descends quickly into incoherence. More to the point politically, it is an extreme position and incompatible with winning middle-ground voters. Covid is a deadly disease, if not for most people, then a significant minority, often including people we know. People are worried about it, and want to take precautions, and want to know that the NHS will be there for them if they or their loved ones fall seriously ill. They can’t see how that happens if they follow the wishes of the sceptics. As the FT’s Robert Shrimsley points out, Tory sceptics aren’t interested in learning to live with the virus, they just want things to go back to the way they were.

Now I am sure that most Conservative MPs are quite sensible on covid policy, but their sceptical colleagues are making the whole party look like nutters, and are clearly having an effect on government policy. They need to be stamped out just as the rump of Remainers were when Mr Johnson first took the leadership in 2019. But first that means Mr Johnson has to articulate a clear strategy for dealing with covid that takes on some of the points sceptics make – on finding a way to live with the virus, and on quality of life. Which brings this second problem back to the first.

For as long as the Conservatives fail to deal with their leadership and discipline issues, the strategies of Ed Davey and Keir Starmer look to be sound. Moreover their apparent pact to stay out of each other’s way in Tory seats, but not try any formal arrangement, also seems to be vindicated – and is another echo of that 1997 landslide. That still leaves two questions for them, and especially the Labour leader. What happens if the Conservatives change leader? And what do they do if they actually win power at the next election?

Eschewing radicalism will help persuade soft Tory voters to vote Labour or Lib Dem – but there must be a point to it all.