Tag: Lib Dems

Liberal Democrats: reaching for the sun

Picture from Libdems.org.uk

My life being what it is, my posting on this site will remain erratic. I do take time thinking about my posts and composing them – so I have to make time while juggling with other things. After an absence of over a month, I am planning to run a series of posts here on the British political parties after the election of July. We have entered a period of multi-party politics, with no less than six parties able to have a significant impact on the next General Election (Labour, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Reform UK, Greens and the Scottish National Party – I am perhaps being a bit dismissive of Plaid Cymru). I plan to have a look at each of these six.

I start with the Liberal Democrats, the party I know best. I joined its predecessor the SDP in 1981, and my membership has been continuous ever since. I have been active as a local party officer (Treasurer and Chair) and election agent. I have served as Treasurer of the London party, and on a couple of policy working groups. And I have attended many party conferences, though not this year. I am no longer very active locally, but I do belong to the party’s Federal Audit and Scrutiny Committee – so do regularly exchange with senior officials of the party, albeit only tangentially on the subject of political strategy. I gave the current leader, Ed Davey, his Chair’s reference so that he could stand as a parliamentary candidate in Kingston, before he first won the seat in 1997. I’m no outside observer, but I will try to comment as if I was – with a bit of inside knowledge. As a member of the family, though, I will refer to the main protagonists by the first names.

The party managed a superb result in July, with 72 MPS, the best result for it or predecessor parties since the days when the Liberals were a party of government a century ago. This was delivered on the basis of a relatively modest share of the vote (about 13%) that was actually a small decline on its previous performance. This has added immeasurably to its stature; it is taken much more seriously by the outside world, and its supporters are happy. It feels like a big moment for the party, which for the past five years has been teetering on the edge of extinction and irrelevance, and it poses the big question of who the party is and what it is for. It is worth looking at this in the context of the party’s history.

When the party was created in the aftermath of the 1987 election, from a merger of the Liberals with the SDP, the party was at a very low ebb. Its fortunes revived under the leadership of Paddy Ashdown. Paddy wanted the party to matter. It was his aim to enter government in coalition if he could, and to influence government even if that wasn’t feasible. As New Labour emerged under the leadership of Tony Blair he saw an opportunity to influence that party in a future government by working alongside it in opposition to the Conservatives. In the 1997 election Labour won a landslide, and needed the support of no other party. But it was a breakthrough election for the Lib Dems too (winning over 46 seats, up from 20 in 1992, although with a lower vote share). There continued to be a relationship with Labour, and it was possible to see Lib Dem influence, especially on constitutional matters. But the relationship was going nowhere. Labour did not see the need for it. Tony Blair was “unpersuaded” by the case for electoral reform for parliamentary elections, the Lib dems central objective. Paddy resigned and was replaced by Charles Kennedy.

Some people in the party look back on Charles’s leadership as a bit of a golden age. The Conservatives remained unpopular and the party was able to harvest disaffectedLabour voters. But there was muddle at the heart of it. This period peaked in the 2005 election, when the party won 65 seats, on the back of Labour unpopularity over the Gulf War in particular. With the third successive substantial result for the party, it seemed to be part of the Westminster furniture. And as MPs retired they were replaced, not by local activists as had been the way before, but by political professionals working internal politics, in the manner of the Labour and Conservative parties. There seemed to be (almost) such a thing as safe Lib Dem seats, not so attached to the personal local standing of the MP. These political professionals started to dominate the parliamentary party, and one of them, Nick Clegg, became its leader. The objective of these professionals was clear: to enter government in coalition, so that they could shape policy. This seemed like the natural next step in the party’s growth and maturity. But its offer to the public was not a clear one. To insiders the party was bound by its liberal and internationalist values, but this was less important to voters.

In 2010 the party did well to hold onto 57 seats in the face of a resurgent Conservative Party. With a hung parliament, this was the moment the professionals had been looking for: they entered coalition with David Cameron’s Conservatives. The party made a solid contribution to this government – it is striking how many successes over the 14 years of Conservative-led government have the party’s fingerprints (renewable power and gay marriage, for example), and how things went wrong after the party left (Brexit…). But the party’s left-leaning supporters felt bitterly betrayed. This was especially deep for three groups in particular: students, let down by the introduction of tuition fees in spite of promises made during the election; public and third-sector workers, who developed hostility to austerity, which threatened their jobs, into a near-religion; and working class voters, shocked at the party’s support for Tories. Nearly half the party’s support vanished almost overnight. Then the Conservatives, sensing weakness, pulled won over many of the rest by playing on the fear that the party would let Labour in. The 2015 election was a massacre – the party only just hung on to 8 seats. Third place in parliament went to the SNP. Like Icarus, the party had flown too close to the sun and were punished for their impudence.

The party managed something of a revival following Brexit, as the party most committed to opposing it, recovering to 12 seats in the 2017 election. New members flooded in. Under Jo Swinson, another of the 2005 intake, though somebody that had to win her seat from Labour rather than walking into a held seat, the party doubled down on its opposition to Brexit, while Labour vacillated and the Conservatives turned into hardline Brexiteers. The party launched a well-funded campaign in the December 2019 election suggesting that they might lead any government that emerged – as way of avoiding the question of which of the others they preferred. But they flew too close to the sun again, and support melted: they were limited to 11 seats, in spite of decent vote share by post-2015 standards. The high hopes of many members at the start of the campaign were crushed; quite apart from the party’s own poor performance, Boris Johnson’s victory meant that Brexit would indeed be “done” – something that they had become passionate about.

Ed Davey took over at this low point. It needs to be remembered that he has witnessed all this history first hand. I first remember him when he moved into our local party area in the late 1980s; for some reason I have it my mind that he was ex-SDP, though he must have moved in after the merger. He was working as an economist at the British computer company ICL (which was later subsumed into Fujitsu) but not long afterwards he took up a position as an economics researcher for the central party. He then became the parliamentary candidate in the Liberal council stronghold of Kingston, where he enthusiastically adopted the Liberal style of community politics, and won a striking victory in 1997, when his seat wasn’t one of the official targets (it didn’t stop me going to help…). He witnessed the evolution of the party in the period of its significant presence in opposition from 1997 to 2010, but he wasn’t part of the intake of 2005, who did so much to shape the culture of the parliamentary party. Nevertheless he became a minister in the Coalition, eventually at cabinet rank – and appeared to be having the time of his life. He took to being a minister like a duck to water. A lot of the credit for Britain’s remarkable progress on renewable energy is down to him, though he was building on groundwork laid by Chris Huhne. But he lost his seat in the 2015 massacre, though he won it back in 2017. I worked with him on fundraising for the Lib Dem London Assembly campaign of 2016, where his wife was a candidate.

Ed is not for flying close to the sun, unlike his predecessors Nick and Jo. The party reorganised with a highly professional Chief Executive, Mike Dixon, recruited from the charity sector (by Jo, to give credit where it is due). It focused on the mundane issues that were the primary concern of voters: health and social care, sewage pollution, and so on. It concentrated resources on areas where the party already showed strength – primarily in Conservative-held suburbia. Strong message discipline was developed; activists were encouraged to knock on doors to talk to voters. The reward, in July, was beyond all but the wildest dreams of activists (Lib Dems can dream wildly). This, of course, was a question of capitalising on the opportunities made by the other parties – especially the Conservatives and SNP, but Labour helped by not scaring voters. But experienced Lib Dems know all too well about having an opportunity and fluffing it during the campaign. Many of the victories were massive. In a parliament where there are an unusual number of close results, and MPs with under 40% vote share, the Lib Dems are in a relatively comfortable position (although there are a few close results, of course). They would have done extremely well even if Reform UK had not spit the Conservative vote. There are not many second-placed seats left, though I live in one of them. This sizeable number of MPs looks eminently defendable, though in some places campaign infrastructure needs to be built.

So, where on earth does the party go from here? The message from Ed is to show humility, and to keep working on the themes that party campaigned for – it is important to maintain the trust of the electorate. But how do you expand on such a good result, and what is the party building up its parliamentary presence for?

The party itself is more coherent than at its previous high of 2005. Its MPs look distinctly professional, and it draws a huge amount of its support from professional people. The working class supporters it used to attract have not returned, by and large. It is a party of middle class angst. When populists like Matt Goodwin rage against the “elite” and their “luxury beliefs”, they include people like Lib Dem supporters, who, in fact, are frustrated with their powerlessness. They want the country back in the European Union; they look sympathetically at the plight of refugees; they want to confront the black spots in British history; they wouldn’t mind a bit if an Indian or African family, or a gay one, moved in next door; they want state schools to promote these values. But these values do not have mass appeal. In polls the Lib Dem vote share hovers in the range of 10-15% and never beyond.

Still, there are two electoral opportunities. One is to keep mining from the seam that has already given so much: disaffected Conservatives. That party has to scratch the populist itch, and chase voters that supported Reform, the Lib Dems’ polar opposite. More liberal and pragmatic Conservatives will surely continue their exodus. And then there are disaffected Labour supporters. There are bound to be a number as the government faces grim choices on public spending, and the more liberal must choose between the Lib Dems and the Greens. There are very few Labour seats that are realistic targets for the Lib Dems, but attracting Labour supporters will help secure the Lib Dems’ existing gains, and even to pick off a few more Conservatives (for example in the seat where I live, East Grinstead and Uckfield, where Labour has a significant vote). In some relatively affluent middle class suburbs where the party is still third, they might be able to move to second place, to either party.

Some of the party’s members want to attack a distinctly conservative Labour government from the left – as they believe Charles Kennedy’s party did in the Blair years. But that risks putting off many of the voters that the party has drawn from the Conservatives. The party can push for closer integration with Europe, however – such as joining the Customs Union or even the Single Market. The party can’t afford to ignore people who voted for Brexit, but it is not nearly so much of a problem for them as it is for Labour. Brexit is widely seen as a disappointment, and the number of people who voted for it is in steady demographic decline. One day the party might even talk about rejoining the EU – but that remains a long way off. If there is an upwelling of support for electoral reform, the Lib Dems are ready to embrace it. Beyond that I don’t any big shifts in campaigning themes.

What’s it all for? The Liberal Democrats are a natural party of government, even if they so rarely exercise power. They are happy to engage in conversations about the sort of compromises needed to make things happen – it’s part of the mindset of a professional, perhaps. At conferences activists discuss detailed proposals for policy as if power was round the corner – to the incredulity of outsiders. And where the party controls councils, it is very pragmatic. For example, a neighbouring council to where I live is refusing planning permission for local housing developments regardless of their merit, and it is suffering fines as a result, because of implacable opposition by the Greens and Conservatives alike. Lib Dems protest that this is nonsense – the fines take away resources from desperately stretched public services. And they know that the shortage of housing is extreme. Instead they want to engage with the planning process and allow some developments and while opposing others. This pragmatism contrasts with the Conservatives, who gradually became a party of protest, even while in government.

That pragmatism will manifest itself with measured opposition at the national level, compared to hysteria from the Conservatives and Reform. But it only goes so far. The party is not engaging with the critical economic debate on how to balance taxes, public services and benefits. And how to balance the demographic need for immigration with the pressure it puts on infrastructure such as housing. Instead they complain about pressure on public services and cuts to benefits, while only suggesting half-baked gimmicks to raise extra taxes. This, of course, copies Labour strategy before the election – but the party shows no sign of engaging with the difficult policy choices that any government must face.

But the party now has an army of MPs, which will be supported by an even bigger army of paid researchers and the like. They will want something more than mere political survival. In my view the party needs to aim for working in coalition with Labour after the next election, if that party’s majority vanishes, as well it might. Perhaps it is still too early to think of such things, and the party needs to learn the lessons of the previous coalition episode. It would help if the party was on the up, and entering coalition from a position of strength.

Ultimately, if the party can’t fly close to the sun, it is unclear why it should exist. How far Ed recognises this I don’t know. But he does know how important it is to ascend with humility. And I am sure he is right there.

Britain’s politics is a function of its electoral system

The changed electoral map. Source: the Liberal Democrats

It was a dull election campaign but an earthquake of a result – not less significant for it having been widely predicted. Above all it shows just how much the country’s electoral system dictates its politics. That is how Labour won, and that is how they will stay in power.

I resisted the temptation to update my electoral predictions last week, as I didn’t have much more to add. If I had I would have talked up the Greens a bit, and also predicted that Jeremy Corbyn would win his seat of Islington North – notwithstanding a very dodgy local poll saying that he was well behind. I sensed that as people became more assured of a substantial Labour victory, with even the Tories saying so, that left-leaning voters, unenthused by the party’s relentless centrism, would vote for alternatives. The Tory tack of talking up Labour, referred to as the “Queensland Strategy”, to try and persuade people to vote Conservative to provide an opposition to Labour, was laughable. The Tories showed much more interest in fighting each other than opposing Labour.

The results proved me broadly correct, including those late predictions I didn’t publish – though I was surprised about how well the pro-Gaza independents did, unseating the prominent Labour front-bencher Jonathan Ashworth, for example, and nearly doing so to Labour big-hitter Wes Streeting. There were two main surprises for me though. The first was just how low was the overall share of the vote that Labour eventually got (about 35%) – much lower than the polling predictions, and with a much lower lead over the Conservatives (10% compared to a consistent 20%, though this dropped a bit in the last polls). This did not have much impact on the result in seats, though; a lot of this dynamic was happening in safe Labour seats, with Labour supporters moving to Greens and Independents, or not showing up to vote. The other surprise was quite how many seats the Liberal Democrats won. My argument had been that weakness on the ground would place an upper limit on the party’s performance of about 50 seats; in the event they won 72 – and nearly won a slew of others. There is an upper bound to Lib Dem performance – but it’s quite a bit higher than I thought it was. In about half the seats the Lib Dems won, pre-election campaigning was weak – but there was enough local council strength for the party to make the case for tactical votes, and there must also have been a bit of help from the national campaign, which managed to increase support for the party overall, over the course of the campaign (though it ended up in vote share more or less where it was in 2019).

Interestingly, the MRP polls, a big feature of this campaign, did not come off as badly as the ordinary ones, though they made similar mistakes with the overall vote shares for Labour and the Conservatives. The Labour victory was at the lower end of the range of these projections, but at least it was within it. They picked up more of a sense of how efficient the Labour and Lib Dem polling was in electoral terms, and inefficient was that for Reform UK and the Greens. They didn’t see the rise of the independents, and the projections for individual seats were often wayward, especially for the distribution of votes between the parties. As I suggested in my comments during the campaign, they exaggerated Labour strength in Lib Dem targets – allowing many a Labour leaflet to suggest that the party was in contention when it was in fact a distant third.

So the Labour victory was big but shallow, with many close results. Indeed, supporters of the previous leader, Jeremy Corbyn, noted that the party won fewer votes than when their man was leading – making the narrative of why Sir Keir Starmer’s stewardship proved so successful much more complicated than the mainstream explanation suggests. Labour did not win, so much as the Tories lost. Sir Keir Starmer did not win over many people to his party (and he lost a good few), but he did not scare as many Tory voters as his predecessor – allowing them to stay at home or vote for Reform.

To be fair on Sir Keir, he seems to understand the thinness of his mandate. He is not using the scale of his victory to suggest that he has public support for radical policies. He is trying to establish a reputation for competence – something the Conservatives lost in the wake of the Brexit referendum. Labour will, of course, relentlessly blame the country’s “14 years of Tory chaos” – never mind that these followed three years of Labour chaos, and that the first six years were not especially chaotic. But whether it was 8 years of chaos or 14 makes no real difference to voters. This is a sensible strategy. The populist right plan a relentless attack on Labour for being “woke” – attending to the “luxury beliefs” of liberals and the identity politics of some ethnic minority politicians. Sir Keir’s best hope of winning the next election is to contrast the wildness of these attacks with the unfussy competence of reality. Good luck with that. He has the discouraging examples of Francois Hollande in France, and Gerhard Schroder in Germany. Two uncharismatic but competent left-of-centre politicians who were/are unable to manage the stresses of modern politics. Still, those leaders were operating in a very different political systems. So long as Labour can keep the right divided, its chances are good.

On the question of the right, I continue to follow the writings of populist promoter Matt Goodwin. I like him because he is reasonably factual, unlike many of his fellow travellers, who trade in conspiracy theories and lies. He did not have a particularly good election. He was elated by the Reform surge after its leader, Nigel Farage, started to seriously engage in the campaign. He went on to breathlessly call an inflection point, with Reform surpassing the Conservatives, backed up his own polling organisation, which proved by some margin to be the least accurate of all those publishing polls. But then Reform flatlined, and Mr Goodwin started to talk about the French elections instead. Looking back on the election, he is now calling the Reform glass half full. It has indeed peeled off the working class/lower middle class part of the Tory 2019 coalition, but it is making little progress beyond that. The Conservatives outpolled them by 10% – and its much stronger ground organisation showed. A pile of second places is no use in the British electoral system – and you need a strong ground operation to turn those second places into wins – just ask the Liberal Democrats. Complaining about the electoral system doesn’t cut it. The chances of Reform doing that on their own in more than a handful of places looks thin.

That leaves a stalemate on the right. Clearly it needs to rebuild the 2019 coalition, across working class and middle class voters, and in the north, south, east and west of England and Wales. Reform can’t do that. The Conservatives have two strategies open to them: the first is to displace Reform from the ground they now hold, and then rope in the middle classes and professionals later. But that will be hard: they have lost trust, and now that Mr Farage is in parliament he is in a strong position to fight them off – unless they can find a way of bringing him on board. The other strategy is to regain the middle ground, and then attack and squeeze Reform nearer to the next election, rather as David Cameron successfully did in 2015 to Ukip, a Reform forerunner. But Tory grassroots seem to have little patience for such a strategy, and they need somebody to lead it who is untainted by the Johnson, Truss and Sunak regimes – their own Keir Starmer. The likelihood is that the party will tear itself apart while trying to decide. This is Labour’s best hope, as they inevitably get bogged down in the mid-term.

What of the Lib Dems? Their large slew of MPs will give them more money, and more clout in parliament. It is a very different party from the ill-disciplined and eclectic group of local activists of the early 2000s, who often opposed Labour from the left. The centre is much stronger – this year’s campaign was notable for the strength of its central campaign, and consistency of its message across the country. They will seek to consolidate their gains, and build up new prospects. Their campaigning will continue with the same voter-led messages (health, care and the environment). But there is a hunger within the party for something more idealistic, defining what the party is all about. There will also be pressure to ramp up messaging around Europe. Perhaps they are shaping up to be part of a coalition with Labour in 2028/29.

But the big message of this campaign, demonstrated by both Labour and the Lib Dems, and in reverse by Reform and the Greens, is that elections are won by constituency-led targeting. The electoral system is shaping politics as completely as ever. Will electoral reform come back onto the political agenda? There are three broad options. The first is the Alternative Vote, which is not much more than a tweak to the existing system, but one which would allow those disenfranchised Reform and Green voters (to say nothing of third-placed Conservatives and Labour ones) more of a say. This would suit the Conservatives best – the Australian experience is that such a system ultimately reinforces the power to the two main established parties. And yet they united in opposing exactly this system when it was put to a referendum in 2011. The more radical alternative is proportional representation, which would suit Reform and the Greens best. This would have Lib Dem support too, though it is unclear that the party would benefit much, and it also has the support of many Labour grassroots.

But such chatter is irrelevant. The Labour leadership is focused on its core “missions”, which do not include political reform – and turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. Until there is a public groundswell to change the system, as there was in New Zealand in the 1990s, there will be no serious move to change things. The British electorate is very conservative, as that 2011 referendum showed. And if such a groundswell was going to happen, I think it would have happened already. Reform and the Greens need to learn from the Lib Dems and embrace local politics.

Electoral efficiency in British elections. From The Economist

There will be no Ice Cold in Alex moment for the Tories

Credit MS Image Creator again. Not exactly Ice Cold in Alex, I know, but no problems with copyright

It’s my favourite scene from British cinema, in Ice Cold in Alex, the classic war film released in the year of my birth, 1958. The film tracks the fortunes a four British soldiers (including a female nurse played by Sylvia Sims) as they escape the German capture of Tobruk in 1942 in an ambulance, heading for Alexandria across the Qattarra depression. Not far from journey’s end, when they are exhausted, they are confronted by a sand slope that the vehicle can’t climb under power. They are able to get it up the hill in using the hand-crank – an incredibly laborious process. Near the top they pause for a rest. The Sylvia Sims character is left to ensure that the crank is held in place. But in a lapse of concentration she lets go, and the vehicle rolls all the way back to the bottom. The Sims character is distraught. “My fault,” says the commander, played by John Mills, “I should have set the hand-brake.” With this he rallies the team and they try again, this time successfully. Disaster is turned to triumph.

It is a classic picture of leadership: pulling a team together by shouldering the blame, even when there is an obvious alternative culprit. The Mills character is a flawed one, with a drink problem, but at the moment of crisis he knows how to lead. What a dismal contrast with modern political leadership. As the Conservatives contemplate turning triumph in 2019 into disaster in 2024, we might reflect on that. Three successive party leaders have been unable to shoulder responsibility for things that have gone wrong. Sometimes, like Boris Johnson, they mouth the words, but they are self-evidently empty, as the excuses come out in practically the same sentence (“it was my responsibility but I made no mistake,” is the line), and there no hint of accepting a personal cost. Liz Truss remains utterly brazen. Rishi Sunak glides over problems as if they were happening to somebody else. I think this is critical to understanding the Tory predicament.

Of course there are big differences between the fictional scene in Ice Cold in Alex, and the rigours of political leadership. The position of the John Mills character is not in doubt: his job is to rally his small team. In political leadership, taking responsibility often means sacrificing your own position, or at least offering to. But somebody acknowledging mistake of their own to take the blame away from others has huge power in any context. It is a dangerous thing for a politician to do, which is why so few do. And yet there is a cost to not doing it. Each time something goes wrong and the leader dodges the blame, his or her authority is diminished. This is what did for Mr Johnson. Each time he seemed to get away with it, but his authority ebbed until his position became untenable.

This is why the current betting scandal (the prime minister’s aides betting on the election date based on inside information) is so damaging. This is a different sort of leadership failure. You cannot point to a particular mistake that Mr Sunak made, though I suppose he could have warned his staff explicitly against betting – he really shouldn’t have needed to. It is, though, reflective of weak ethical standards, which to some extent reflects wider leadership. The bigger problem is what Mr Sunak did, or did not, do when the scandal broke. He immediately fell back on the line that because there is an independent investigation, he shouldn’t comment further – and he would not suspend the election candidates involved, though the staffers do appear to have been put on leave. The problem here is that a lot of the critical facts are directly known by Mr Sunak – the decision to go for a July election was his. He knows what people knew and when they knew it. This is the basis for a much stronger response – such as an immediate suspension (“they were part of my inner team and I feel very let down”), or else a public explanation along the lines of “I did not tell them about the decision, and this is best left to the Gambling Commission”. This may breach the guidelines made by the Gambling Commission about not commenting, but one of the attributes of leadership is knowing when to break the rules. As it is, the episode makes him look like a passenger rather than the driver.

This is especially damaging because it reinforces the apparent refusal of the party to take responsibility for anything that happened in the last 14 years of Conservative-led rule – as pointed out by The Economist‘s Bagehot column. This weakness is obvious to the electorate. At a hustings at the weekend, our local Tory candidate (Mims Davies, a government minister) struggled valiantly with this – on the one hand taking the official line “this is terrible and we will do something about it” when confronted by an awkward issue (sewage, immigration, housing, etc.), and on the other trying to establish a stronger narrative that the government has been in the case throughout (she actually defended the increased levels of immigration) – for which she will have had no help from the central campaign. Tory infighting over that 14 years, and especially since the end of coalition in 2015, has been so deep that the leadership can’t seem to make up its mind as to whether their government was a good thing or not.

To date I have been predicting disaster for the Conservatives, but have said that conditions on the ground will limit the damage, while putting an upper limit on the smaller parties, notably the Liberal Democrats, but also the Greens and Reform. I am seriously starting to have my doubts about this, such is the failure of Mr Sunak’s campaign. The Conservatives are now resorting what the professionals call the “Queensland strategy” (the country’s political tacticians seem to be heavily influenced by Australia), of saying there is a danger in Labour winning big, and the party is needed to form a decent opposition. That is desperate: it still leaves the question of whether voters really want to be represented by the party. Former Tory voters drawn in by Mr Johnson’s pro-Brexit appeal to former Labour voters feel betrayed by the party, especially under its current leadership. Home Counties voters, such as those I live among, many of them anti-Brexit, if only in hindsight, are utterly appalled at the party’s tilt to win these voters back. Tory candidates like Ms Davies seem to think their best hope is to appeal as sturdy local champions, be as polite as possible, and hope that the anti-Tory vote is split. This is by no means hopeless in East Grinstead and Uckfield – where there is no Reform candidate, and a strong independent. At the hustings the Lib Dem, Benedict Dempsey, performed impressively, but so did the Green, Christina Coleman, and that independent, Ian Gibson. But even without a strong ground campaign I am starting wonder whether the competent Lib Dem national campaign is cutting through in areas like this where the Labour ground campaign is weak, and there is little tradition of support for that party. The Tory Queensland Strategy might work to the favour of the Lib Dems. If the hustings reflected the local electorate, I think that would be the case. But although it was well attended, such meetings are notoriously unrepresentative.

What is clear is that that the country is about to experience an electoral earthquake that will be talked about for generations. And all because the party of government forgot how to lead. As the Conservatives survey the wreckage on 5th July, there will be no John Mills there to rally them to climb back up the hill.

When will the Tory rot stop?

More from MS Image Creator. I’m getting bored of the “realistic” style so tried a cartoon instead

So just how wrong have I been about the UK general election? My first prediction was that there would be a limit to the Conservative decline (at about 100 seats), and that there was no chance that the Liberal Democrats would overtake them. The Reform UK insurgents would be unable to replace the Tories. In my second post I suggested that the Conservatives would narrow the gap on Labour by squeezing Reform, limiting the overall size of their loss.

The second prediction is not faring well. I was wrong-footed by Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, changing his mind about standing himself, and being the formal party leader. His initial declaration got Reform off to a bad start, and offered the Tories an opportunity. But the Tories made a weak start, and Mr Farage is back, attracting media like bees to a honeypot, including the supposedly establishment-biased BBC. The Conservative attempt to squeeze Reform supporters has stalled, at least at the national level, and even gone into reverse. More than one MRP poll now suggests that Reform might even pick up a handful of seats.

But I’m holding fast to my first prediction. There is quite a lot of breathless talk about the Tories being crushed, with well under 100 seats retained. One or two MRP polls suggest that they will indeed by eclipsed by the Lib Dems. Reform cheerleader Matt Goodwin, whose Substack is one of my main sources of information on the populist right, is talking of an inflection point, with Reform overtaking and crushing the Conservatives. Even the Financial Times‘s Stephen Bush finds himself dealing with the speculation that the Lib Dems might overtake the Conservatives in terms of seats won – though he still considers this unlikely.

My logic is rather different from that of other commentators, though. It is that the actual results in many constituencies are determined by the activity of local activists on the ground – canvassing, leaflet delivery, posters and such, often referred to as “the ground war”, as opposed to the “air war” of media. The ground war helps voters decide who is really in contention in their seat, and then to decide on the least-worst option. This is more likely to change minds than anything that happens in the air war, that attracts most of the attention. I am a case in point. I have voted for the Lib Dems or their predecessors in every general election from 1983 (my first vote, in 1979, was for the Conservatives). The only thing that could possibly persuade me otherwise this time is if I thought my local Green candidate was in serious contention in my constituency of East Grinstead and Uckfield – she is my local councillor, and the only one of the candidates I know – and whom I’m quite impressed with. She claims that this is the case based on local election results; but the Lib Dem candidate makes the same claim based on 2019 election results (complicated by the fact it is a new seat); meanwhile the tactical voting recommendation from Best for Britain is for Labour, based on an MRP poll. It’s as clear as mud, though I think the Labour claim to be ridiculous. The Tory candidate (Mims Davies, the MP for the now-defunct Mid-Sussex constituency) has not given up, and has been canvassing in our village, in the extreme south of the constituency. She will surely have quite an easy ride back into parliament, even if she fails to get 40% of the vote, which is likely.

The Conservatives lack opponents with a proper ground-war capability in so many of their well-off rural strongholds. Labour have never been strong in these seats; the Lib Dem infrastructure is only there for some seats (locally to me in Lewes and Tunbridge Wells, for example), and the Greens in even fewer (the non-rural Brighton Pavilion in my area). Reform is not constructed as a grassroots organisation, and will struggle without a charismatic candidate and an experienced local organiser – which applies in a maximum of three or four seats, I suspect. The MRP poll methodology only picks up the ground war factor indirectly and underplays it. This makes its constituency predictions unreliable in each individual case, though more plausible in aggregate, which is how their success is usually judged. My guess is that the unique conditions of this campaign mean that their aggregate conclusions are out too in most cases – and that the Conservatives will do better than forecast. Though to be fair, there is quite a bit of variation in the MRP seat projections. The ground war factor mean that it is unlikely for the Lib Dems to pass the 50 seat mark, or the Greens 3.

Furthermore, I think Mr Goodwin is running well ahead of the evidence in his claims about Reform. So far I think only one poll, by YouGov, has placed them ahead of the Tories, and that was a week ago. Aggregated poll trackers tend to put them several points behind. Mr Farage’s volte-face gave the party a boost but it doesn’t look like sustained momentum. They may pick up a lot votes in areas where the ground war is weak, such as in safe Labour seats, which might lead them to widespread second places, but little impact on the overall result (a bit like the SDP-Liberal Alliance in 1983 and 1987, and the Lib Dems in 1992 – though in their case it was mainly safe Conservative seats where they did well).

Having criticised recent MRP polls, though, the overall result predicted by Ipsos-Mori (Labour 453, Conservatives 115, Lib Dem 38) is not far from where I think things will end up – though the individual constituency projections are wayward – giving Labour far too big a share in Lib Dem target seats, for example). MRPs are a poor way to guide for tactical voting decisions. The Tories may do a bit better than this, and Labour worse. I hope the Lib Dems will do a bit better too, but then my hopes have run ahead of the actuality for every election since 1983, apart from 1997.

So, to answer the question posed by my blog title, I expect the Tory rot to stop soon, with their ground war strengths serving to limit the damage. What happens next is the big question – but let’s wait until after the election to consider that.

Postscript

Just after I posted this, three new MRPs came out – and Matt Goodwin breathlessly reported a new poll showing a spectacular surge in Reform support to 24%, with the Conservatives languishing on 15%. This poll was conducted by Mr Goodwin’s own organisation, People Polling, for GB News, another Reform promoter. This is curious. Mr Goodwin is an academic and I have no reason to doubt his professionalism in conducting polls. But it is an outlier. It is clearly becoming harder to conduct opinion polls, and a lot of the result depends on how adjustments to the raw results are made. There is always a lot of soul-searching after elections amongst pollsters, which then leaves the impression that they are refighting the last war rather trying the win the current one. Mr Goodwin says that the key change is that a lot of the previous “don’t knows” are making up their minds, and that Reform are doing very well here and the Tories very badly. There is other evidence for the second of these contentions (though that suggested Labour doing well) – a disaster for Rishi Sunak, whose whole campaign was based on the idea that he could rally “don’t knows” who had previously voted Tory.

I don’t think the new MRPs add anything to my analysis, though I haven’t looked at them closely. They show the Tories coming in at roughly 50, 100 and 150 seats. My opinion is that the higher end of the range is the most realistic forecast. I think generally that the MRPs are over-reporting Labour strength in seats that the party isn’t targeting – probably to the benefit of the Tories, but maybe the Lib Dems too.

20 June 2024

Why the Conservatives should narrow the polling gap

I asked MS Copilot’s image creator to give me 10 Downing Street, London in the pouring rain. This was the most appealing of the results, none of which were anything close to the real No 10. AI is reported to be close to superseding human intelligence.

Rishi Sunak’s calling of a general election for 4 July in the UK was a surprise – mostly for his own party. Labour and the Lib Dems had taken seriously the stories that he might go for 2 May, so although they were surprised, they were also ready. From the moment of its launch by Mr Sunak in the Downing Street rain, his campaign has not gone well. But things should get better.

The election that comes to mind as a comparison is 2017. Then Theresa May had a poll lead over Labour that was as massive, at the over 20 points, as Labour’s lead is now. But this was so narrowed by election day that Mrs May lost her parliamentary majority, ushering in over two years of parliamentary chaos. This was also a surprise election, and an even greater one, as no election was required before 2020. All parties were poorly prepared. Two main things went wrong for Mrs May. The first was overconfidence by her and her advisors, notably Nick Timothy. They took risks with the manifesto (aligning with the popular opinion that Tony Blair had been too cautious with his commanding lead in 1997), notably on the funding of social care. They also decided that they did not need to risk exposing Mrs May to televised leadership debates – which went down badly with the public. The second big thing to go wrong was that Labour, under Jeremy Corbyn, did an astonishingly good job of rallying anti-government feeling to his party. Because nobody thought he could win, voters were prepared to risk voting Labour in protest.

Labour’s leader, Sir Keir Starmer, is not going to make the first mistake. His party’s commitments are cautious to a fault – this is yet another “the same, only different” pitch. Mr Sunak’s attack lines on the party look very ill-judged. He says that he has a plan for the country, and that Labour are just waffling. All the appearances are the exact opposite – and Labour are doing their best to make it look that way. The Lib Dems are being similarly cautious, targeting their message to floating voters in 40 or so parliamentary seats where the party has an established base. It doesn’t look as if the Conservatives are seriously trying to dent the commanding 40% or so that Labour is polling, or the Lib Dem 10% for that matter.

But the Tories are still narrowing the gap. They are looking to bring on board former voters who are currently saying they are undecided, and 10% or more of the electorate that say they will vote for Reform UK. It is a convenient belief for party activists that all they have to do to win is to enthuse potential supporters in their part of the political spectrum, and not to compromise their values by chasing voters undecided between the two parties. Many on the Labour left believe something similar – citing that remarkable 2017 campaign as evidence. There is some evidence for the Tory version, though. A lot of voters distrust Labour – and that is especially the case for those who say they will vote for Reform.

And Reform’s campaign has got off to a weak start. Their main media star, Nigel Farage, has said that he will not stand this time. Immediately the party lost momentum – coming on top of a weak showing in local elections, which the party disdains. I think the Conservatives will successfully squeeze these voters – and their campaigning seems calculated to be towards that end.

It will be harder to rally the don’t knows without an effective scare message against Labour. Former supporters staying at home is always a large part of the poor performance of weak parties. Mr Corbyn succeeded as he was a fresh face, able to command a body of enthusiastic younger activists, motivated by the perceived outrages of seven years of Tory-led government (notably “Austerity”, but also Brexit). The cautious Sir Keir is in opposition, not government, and is not going to offer such a tempting target. Besides the Conservatives have spent decades putting off younger voters in their bid for the grey vote, and have no body of enthusiastic activists to carry their case to the country’s doorsteps. The failure of housing policy, leading to sky-high property rents and inaccessible home ownership, is a notable aspect of this. Besides the completely justified sense of betrayal felt by newer Conservative supporters, rallied to the party for the first time in 2019, is deep. There is hardly a promise that the party has kept; even “Getting Brexit Done” has lost its lustre.

But it is not inconceivable that the Conservatives will be able to raise their support from the lower 20s to about 30%, and narrow the Labour lead to the lower 10s. That will not be enough to stop a comfortable Labour majority. But it will be a lot better than the total meltdown being forecast by some.

Britain’s politicians are in denial – are the voters?

From the Office of Budget Responsibility: Economic and fiscal outlook November 2023

This week’s Autumn Statement by Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, was a miserable affair, full of political chicanery with little to effort to tackle the country’s deepening problems. Worse yet, the opposition parties (Labour and the Lib Dems anyway), for all their huffing and puffing, are also unable to face up to these problems.

The Conservatives billed the set of measures as the biggest set of tax cuts since the 1980s. And yet the overall tax burden is rising as the freezing of tax allowances and thresholds will bring ever more people into tax or higher rates of tax, and increase the proportion of income people pay as tax. An even bigger problem is that the government has been using inflation to squeeze public spending, while services across the board – health, education, the police, the courts, and the list goes on – are clearly overstretched and in many cases breaking down – with collapsing buildings and rising waiting lists. The Chancellor offered not a penny to alleviate this crisis, while planning a further squeeze in the years ahead. Labour and the Lib Dems gleefully pointed out the first problem, but failed to address the second. They will stand by the announced tax cuts, while offering only gestures (taxing non-domiciled residents, or private schools, for example) to help fund public services. These tax-raising wheezes are nowhere near enough to match the scale of the crisis. Meanwhile all parties suggest that a bonanza of economic growth is coming to the rescue, without acknowledging the severe headwinds that will limit the country’s long-term growth prospects.

I am also highly sceptical of the one measure that seems to be getting widespread support – the full expensing of investment in machinery and systems against corporate profits. It is said that this will boost business investment, which is sorely lacking. It is in a fact the revival of a policy that failed in the 1980s, and was abolished by Nigel Lawson, the Tory tax-cutting Chancellor, who has been about the only holder of that post in memory that had a grasp of how the tax system as a whole worked and could be reformed. Back then it created a tax-avoidance industry and encouraged wasteful investment with fancy kit, rather than the thinking through of business processes which is the real key to improved productivity. That fiasco occurred at the beginning of my professional career as a Chartered Accountant, where I could see the nonsense it was creating up close. Alas the current crop of politicians and their advisers are too young to remember this. And it is of little use to new businesses, where the need is most acute, as these typically do not generate enough profit for this to be of use. What a silly waste!

Meanwhile the fiscal climate is getting a lot worse. Interest rates are rising at time that the size of the national debt is historically very high. If interest rates are higher than the overall rate of growth, and there is a budget deficit, then a debt spiral threatens, which, if it leads to an international loss of confidence in the public finances, could usher in a severe financial crisis. At the moment it is actually quite hard to understand how much of a problem this is. You should be comparing real interest rates to real growth rates – i.e. after inflation. But there are mixed signals on real interest rates. If you compare the nominal rate on government lending, it is if anything less than reported inflation – indicating a negative rate. But yields of index-lined bonds are positive and have risen sharply. Meanwhile the budget deficit is quite high – at 4% of GDP. It wasn’t so long a go when none of this seemed to matter. Interest rates were low, and the Bank of England’s Quantative Easing (QE) programme made large government debt look manageable. But conditions have changed. Inflation has made money much tighter – with interest rates rising, and QE going into reverse. I am starting to suspect a deeper change is afoot in the world’s capital markets. Earlier this century a number of countries ran large trade surpluses – notably China, Japan and Germany. This made trade and budget deficits more stable in countries like the UK and US, as the surplus countries had plenty of spare currency to provide funding. As the world’s trading environment is getting more difficult, this may changing – though it is not yet evident in public statistics. After over-reacting to fiscal risks in 2010, and moving into austerity too quickly, the opposite risk beckons. But the Autumn statement proposes tackling the budget deficit only slowly, leaving the very high level of net debt virtually unchanged. Politicians seem to assume that as inflation comes down things will simply go back to the easy financial environment that pertained before. This is complacent.

More from the OBR report – government plans make little impact on public debt

If that is complacency, the politician’s attitude to economic growth is outright denial, though some economists who should know better seem to be in the same place. It is assumed that the UK’s poor performance has an easily fixable cause. More investment perhaps, or encouraging more people into work, or perhaps lower taxes. Rachel Reeves, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, blithely talks about sorting out public services through economic growth – even applying the first-person to the process, as if growth was the gift one individual, and not the collective result of many millions of decisions. International comparisons seem to show that Britain’s productivity lags against peers. All that we need to do is fix this, the argument goes, and we will unlock growth. Well it may be that a burst of catch-up growth that is obtainable – but I suspect that these comparisons reflect an irreversible de-industrialisation, when a swathe of high-productivity industries left the country in the 1980s and 1990s and will not return. But stepping back, most or all of the developed world faces a number of headwinds that reduce growth potential, and in some case send it into reverse:

  • Demographics: more people are retiring as lower birth rates take their toll. Immigration can make up some of the difference, but is politically fraught, and stresses housing resources.
  • Trade: as globalisation runs into reverse, gains from trade are turned into losses. The UK is spared the American obsession with “near-shoring” or the reversal of the off-shoring of industries – but we have our own demons unleashed by Brexit.
  • Overdevelopment. The increasing consumption of goods, a critical driver of past growth, is simply a phase in economic evolution that has clearly ended. People move on to improve their quality of life in other ways. Meanwhile massive increases to the productivity of manufacturing industry mean that its impact on the total economy is much reduced. All this means that lower productivity parts of the economy, including many public services, loom larger. Productivity gains are harder to get, and where they happen the result is not so much increased production, but a transfer of resources to low-productivity sectors.
  • The energy transition. The country needs to make big investments to sources and distribution of energy, and its more efficient consumption. While the end result is desirable, in the meantime this will push down consumption. This, in fact, applies to pretty much all forms of investment. The country has become used to high consumption and low savings – reversing this won’t necessarily reduce growth as it usually measured, but to many people it will feel that way.
  • Housing. One way of achieving growth, or at least burst of catching up, is to allow people to move to places where the most productive jobs are. But these areas lack enough housing to accommodate this. Britain’s house builders have growth rich on the skilful management of land portfolios, rather than the actual building of houses, which many are actually very bad at. They have no incentive to increase the pace of building. And if the pace is increased, skill shortages quickly become evident. And I haven’t even mentioned slow and restrictive planning processes. Politicians at least show some awareness of this issue, but action never matches the promises.

The days of steady economic growth over the medium to long term are over, whether we like it or not. The best we can hope for is a short-term spurt. There is plenty of potential for human wellbeing to improve, but this will manifest itself in other ways.

The central problem is the funding of public services and maintenance of social safety-nets. A combination of two things are required here. The first is higher levels of taxation – and mainstream taxes which directly affect demand, and not gimmicks around capital and wealth (the latter may help make debt more manageable, but won’t suppress demand and prevent inflation). The second is a radical reform of public services so that demand for them is reduced – reducing the level of social problems, so that we require fewer police, courts, hospital beds, etc – and managing those problems so that they are solved early rather than passed from agency to agency. Alas we have very little idea how to bring such a change about – though we can see that some countries do this better than us (Japan, Switzerland, Denmark perhaps). A radical reform of government is clearly a part of this, with less centralised control – but it needs much more than this: decentralisation by itself could actually make things worse. With the possible exception of education (which has become more effective rather than cheaper) the reform efforts made by our governments in the last twenty years have taken us in the wrong direction – from Labour’s over-centralisation, to the de-skilling and outsourcing of the Conservative and coalition years. Unfortunately the choice between the two approaches of higher taxes or radical reform is not a binary one. Reform will require substantial investment, and that is likely to mean higher taxes in the short term at least.

If our politicians are in denial about all of this, how about the public? They surely understand that public services are in a dire state – and that fixing this will not come cheap. But they are too wrapped up in their own personal struggles to spend any energy on demands for change. Politicians are in denial for a reason: they don’t just a lack imagination and perception, but they also know a voter-loser when they see it. Still, Labour are clearly presenting a more realistic prospectus than the Conservatives, even if it is based on wishful thinking. Their poll lead at least seems to show some wider awareness by the public at large. And we must grasp at that straw.

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.

Anti-Tory pacts – lessons from Wealden

Analysis: Matthew Green thinkingliberal.co.uk

Such is the paradox of the information age. Massive amounts of information from across the globe is at our fingertips, and we can now use AI tools to retrieve it with startling efficiency. But news reporting, especially local news reporting, has collapsed – so many, many interesting things are liable to escape our attention because they will never get into to the accessible database. There has been a wealth of reporting on last week’s local election results in England. But many interesting, and important, local stories remain unremarked. Such is the case in my local area, with the district council elections of Wealden in East Sussex – and arbitrary bureaucratic agglomeration of villages and small towns, whose main centres are Uckfield, Hailsham and Crowborough, each of roughly equal size.

The first point to make about this is that I wasn’t involved in these elections, in spite of being a party member. I haven’t talked to any of the actors since long before the campaign started. My reporting is based simply on the results published by the council. I hope to find out more later – but I’m not minded to harass exhausted newly-elected councillors who have important decisions to make about running the council. I’m a blogger, not a journalist.

It was the first British public election since 1979 in which I did not vote for the Liberal Democrats, or one its predecessor parties. That was because they did not field a candidate in my ward. There were only three candidates: a Conservative, a Green and an independent who did not put up much of a visible campaign. I voted for the Green candidate, Christina Coleman, who won with 64% of the vote against the Conservative incumbent councillor, Roy Galley, who had won in 2019 with 59% of the vote, against just a Green candidate. Ms Coleman increased the Green vote from 523 to 1,107, while Mr Galley’s vote sunk to 545 from 749. As I searched through the results, I found that this outcome was not untypical. The Conservatives contested wards opposed by typically only one other party. And they lost badly, sinking from 34 councillors (out of 45) to just 9, behind both the Lib Dems (13) and Greens (11). This was a shocking result in a part of the Blue Wall that is so blue that most people don’t regard it as politically competitive. This bespeaks serious trouble for the Conservatives. It is hard to exaggerate the degree of disgust with the party amongst most of my neighbours, whom I would describe mostly liberal conservatives. One Conservative inclined neighbour is even more unforgiving of the Liz Truss episode than I am.

But that is unremarkable. It has been picked up by the main media commentary. What is remarkable was the degree of cooperation amongst the Conservatives’ opponents, and how well this worked. To put a bit of substance behind this story I have analysed the detailed results in the table above. This is all my own work and it’s possible the odd error has crept in. First, some basics to help understand the figures. There are 41 wards, four of which elected two councillors, and the rest just one. One was uncontested – the Conservatives were elected unopposed. The Conservatives contested all the wards except one (where an independent stood, and lost, against a Green). In the analysis I have tried to exclude candidates without serious backing or a campaign. I judged these to be independents who did not manage to gain 100 votes, and minor parties (though in one ward there was a Reform UK candidate, and in a another a pair of Ukippers, all of whom received over 100 votes); I have left in all of the Labour candidates, although one failed to reach 100.

The Lib Dems put up 23 candidates, doubtless so that they could claim that they could theoretically win a majority on their own. But they were opposed by the Greens in only three cases, and Labour in one, with “serious” independents in four. Eleven of the Lib Dem candidates faced no other serious opponent than the Conservatives; they were all elected – but only two others were. The Greens put up only 14 candidates – nine of these faced only one serious opponent (well, 10 if you exclude a weakly supported Labour candidate) – all (ten) of these were elected, along with one other. Three Labour candidates out of 11 were given a clear run against Conservative candidates; none were elected. Two Labour candidates were elected in three-cornered battles with Conservatives and independents (including a split result in a two member ward) – their first councillors in the district. The independents are by their nature not a coherent party, so the analysis means less – but their 18 serious candidates were involved in only four straight fights – three against the Conservatives (which they all won) and the lost fight with a Green. There were 13 three or four cornered contests: the Conservatives won six of their councillors here. These six, the two straight fights with Labour and the one uncontested ward were all the councillors they won. They won no contest in a straight fight with Lib Dems, Green or Independents. In two case of the more complex contests, the Conservatives prevailed with under 40% of the vote. In only three cases Greens and Lib Dems ran candidates against each other – the Conservatives won in two of them (with under half the vote), with the Greens winning the third comfortably with the worst Lib Dem performance of the day.

So far as I know there were no formal pacts – if there had been, the picture would have been a bit tidier. But cooperation is evident, and, as a device for winning against Conservatives, it proved highly effective – but less effective where Labour were putting up the candidate. How far can we extend the conclusions to a general election? Local and national elections are different – but the main problem for the Tories in Wealden was their unpopularity at national level. Their Wealden administration is not particularly unpopular, though no especially popular either. This suggests to me that an electoral pact between the Greens and the Lib Dems could turn some seats in the Blue Wall unless the government can seriously scare voters about the prospect of a Labour-led government. Wealden borough closely corresponds to a parliamentary seat, also called Wealden, which is very safely for the Conservatives (the Lib Dems edging ahead of Labour into a distant second) – but this all changes when new parliamentary boundaries come in. Such a pact would follow one made in 2019, but could be much more effective if voters are less scared of Sir Keir Starmer as Labour leader than Jeremy Corbyn.

But it would be very hard to bring Labour into such a pact. Many former Conservative voters will vote for the Lib Dems or Greens (somewhat ironically since the Greens are closer to Corbyn’s Labour than Starmer’s), but draw the line at voting Labour. So there is much less in such a deal for Labour than the other parties, and it would be a major distraction from Labour’s main campaigning focus. Also Sir Keir is setting his face against electoral reform (which would be another distraction for him), which reduces the attraction of Labour to Lib Dems and Greens.

In the right circumstances electoral pacts work. Given the severe distortions imposed by the current electoral system I would have no qualms about my party entering into such a pact.

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.