Liberal Democrats – Page 4 – thinking liberal

Lib Dems hope for a turning point

The Lib Dem conference at Brighton last weekend was a low key affair. There was enough space in the Metropole hotel to hold the whole thing, including the very limited fringe. All this is in contrast to the last spring conference I attended in 2011 in Sheffield, amid a huge police presence and shouting demonstrators. In 2011 the party was already over the edge of an abyss, though it took that year’s disastrous local elections for many to realise it. This year conference goers thought the outlook was better.

The immediate cause is not hard to see: the party’s victory in the Eastleigh by-election. Most of those there had helped in this election one way or another. The win may not look all that convincing to an outsider, but activists talked it up, as if it was a landslide. This was a reflection of solidarity under assault, from not just the usual suspects, but from the liberal media too, including the BBC. To have overcome those odds, people felt, was a triumph. Also it was a reflection that the campaign was impressively organised, and did not shy away from the party’s role in government, or Nick Clegg’s leadership – issues that many considered to be toxic.

Rather bizarrely the BBC, in its coverage on Friday and on Saturday morning, expected the activists to be a bit grumpy, full of questions about who knew what and when in the Rennard and Huhne affairs. But it didn’t take a genius to figure out that Eastleigh would overshadow all. In fact a nasty row over secret courts was the second story of the conference: the parliamentary party had backed the government’s plans, in spite of a passionate debate and motion against them at the Autumn conference. There were resignations. But this is not the sort of row the media feel comfortable about reporting, so it didn’t get much coverage. Huhne and Rennard hardly featured, though there were a regular compliments to Mr Huhne’s work on policy and as a minister, and not all from men (Shirley Williams started it). The party leadership chose to confront the Rennard affair frontally at a women’s day rally on Friday evening: and that was all that most people wanted to hear on that topic. There was a second row about government economic policy: an emergency motion on the topic wasn’t taken, as the result of a manoeuvre that most representatives thought was a bit dubious. But cabinet minister Vince Cable’s stirrings on the economy were some compensation: he gave a speech at one of the fringe meetings. The official business was low key. Uncontroversial motions and speeches by junior ministers. An emergency motion on secret courts was a bit of an exception.

The main point of the conference, if there was one, was to lay groundwork for the 2015 General Election. There was a stirring speech by Paddy Ashdown, who is chairing the campaign, as well as Mr Clegg’s leadership speech. There was also a rather low key consultative session on the manifesto. In each these, and on other occasions, the party aired its campaign theme: “Stronger Economy, Fairer Society” (“enabling everyone to get on in life” if you have space to pad it out a bit). The plan is to keep repeating this line ad nauseam for the next two and a bit years.

The slogan has its critics. Its direct message is not distinctive: every other political party stands for the same things, even if they define the terms a bit differently. It makes no reference to liberal values. Both criticisms miss the point. The party must win by attracting mainstream voters, who are not particularly liberal, though not anti-liberal either. The slogan is meant to draw people in to two further messages: you can’t trust the Conservatives on “fairness”, and you can’t trust Labour on the economy. The calculation is that each of the two main parties has a severe weakness which the party can exploit, as the only sensible, mainstream party left standing.

Will this work? It might. The Conservatives really do seem to have a problem. David Cameron was never able to mould his party in the way that Tony Blair moulded Labour. Many of the party’s MPs are right wing fanatics, as are their grass roots supporters. Such people are convinced that they have caught the public mood, because their views are reflected in much of the press. But most voters are put off. Mr Cameron has a good instinct for the “centre ground”, or the public mainstream – but his party looks divided. The very bendable word “fairness” is a good as any word bring attention to this Conservative weakness. In policy terms it is cover for taxing the rich and preserving social insurance, such as social security and the health service.

And Labour has a problem too. Their situation is not unlike the one that they faced in the early 1990s under Neil Kinnock, which led them to lose the 1992 election against a lacklustre Conservative government under John Major. They were riding high in the opinion polls, and the economy was in a mess. But they were inclined to make promises to spend more public funds, and their leader wasn’t trusted. Right now Labour are drawing a lot of energy from activists (many of them public sector workers) who feel that government cuts are motivated by ideology rather than economics. They grasp at a Keynesian critique of current government policy to think that sorting the economy out is as easy as boosting public spending, which will sort the public finances out through the multiplier effect. But polling shows that the public does not share this view: they feel that public expenditure should be cut back. That leaves Ed Miliband with an unenviable choice. If he pushes ahead with a publicly credible economic policy, and says he will match the government’s public expenditure plans, subject one of two populist tweaks, he will anger his activists and trade union donors. If he fudges, his campaign is likely to break apart under pressure, as Neil Kinnock’s did in 1992. It doesn’t help that his economic spokesman, Ed Balls, is closely associated with Gordon Brown’s economic policies, which are widely viewed as disastrous. Mr Miliband’s own public standing is weak, as was Mr Kinnock’s, though for different reasons.

This could give the Lib Dems an opening, especially in seats where the party has plenty of activists to deliver the message, tack in local issues, and get out the vote. With fifty or so seats the party may be able to win a place in another coalition government. Buoyed up by Eastleigh, Lib Dem activists think they can do it, and that an important turning point has been reached.

Eastleigh: a blow for the Westminster bubble

My first reaction to the overnight result of the Eastleigh parliamentary by election was, as a loyal Lib Dem, relief. For once the party isn’t having to explain away a lost deposit. A more considered reaction is that it shows just how out of touch with ordinary people the Westminster bubble is – I nearly wrote “has become”, but I think it has always been thus. Will they will be chastened by the experience? Alas, there is no chance of that.

By “the Westminster bubble” I mean that community of London-based politicians, journalists, lobbyists and their hangers-on, who control the main levers of political power, but who talk chiefly amongst themselves. There are plenty of enthusiastic Lib Dem bubble-types, but the Lib Dems are better grounded than most. They mainly responded to the Eastleigh challenge by actually going there and talking to the voters, rather than just trying to influence the media coverage in classic bubble fashion. The by election has been a sobering experience for the party, along with the joy of victory. First the Lib Dem vote share fell sharply, and the voters showed no great enthusiasm for the party. Second, the experience has shown just how much the party is disliked by most inhabitants of the bubble. This is hardly a surprise when it comes to Labour and Conservative politicians – but that it includes most supposedly objective news journalists, including at the BBC, is a little disappointing.

Exhibit A in this case is the Chris Rennard sexual harassment scandal. Almost all the news media have been giving huge prominence to some rather old accusations about sexual harassment by the former Lib Dem chief executive. I can do no better than refer readers to the Guardian’s fair-minded Michael White on this. The media coverage has everything to do with trying to influence the Eastleigh result against the Lib Dems, and little to do with the merits of the story. I will give a partial exemption to the BBC’s Martha Kearney on the World at One on this. She has given the story very heavy coverage – but does seem to have been genuinely interested in exploring the social issues the story raises about the behaviour of men to women. For all its flaws it sounded like good journalism to me. But the glee shown by BBC’s Today presenters about the possible effect of the story on the election was entirely another matter. The BBC should be ashamed of itself.

But the voters of Eastleigh just weren’t interested. Mild and old accusations of sexual harassment against somebody that has never held elected office was not the same thing as MPs overclaiming expenses. Neither did the other Lib Dem scandal, that of Chris Huhne’s confession of getting his wife to take his speeding points, seem to have played all that heavily. That issue was at least a legitimate issue for the by election, since Mr Huhne had been their MP, and his resignation is what triggered it. The Westminster bubble’s inhabitants seem incapable of understanding the voters’ lack of interest.

Meanwhile the bubble seems equally incapable of comprehending the extraordinary performance of Ukip, who stormed from nowhere into second place, and came close to winning the seat. This seems to vindicate the stand of some right-wing bubblies, exemplified by Daily Mail journalists, on Europe and other issues, but Ukip themselves are complete outsiders – more so than even the Lib Dems. They have been trying to link the party’s rise to Westminster’s own obsession with the country’s relationship to the EU, and whether or not to hold a referendum. But it seems highly implausible that this had much to do with it. It seems much more likely their rise is a reflection of an anti-politics mood: a bit like the success of Beppo Grillo in Italy. Of course the journalists in the bubble are doing much to stoke the anti-politics mood, in order to help their own standing within the bubble. But this is turning out to be a highly destructive game. No doubt the journalists calculate that what they have built up, in the rise of Ukip, they can just as easily destroy when it presents a real threat. But politics as a whole is being degraded.

Instead of reflecting on this, the bubble journalists are emphasising the humiliation to the Conservative and Labour parties and their respective leaders. But for these parties the election should be seen as a useful reality check, and no more.

My politically objective advice to David Cameron is: don’t panic. The election says nothing about his recent policy move on an EU renegotiation and referendum. I think this is a brilliant move: but it is part of the groundwork for the 2015 General Election, and will show few benefits before then. The election also shows that the Lib Dems will be no pushover, even though many bubblies think the party will vanish without trace in 2015. Ukip are a challenge, but their weaknesses are poor organisation and lack of media friends. There is plenty of time for them to burn out, and the time for pricking their bubble is after the 2014 European Parliament elections, and not before. Tories might reflect that if the by election had been held under the Alternative Vote (the system that they so vehemently rejected in 2011), they they might well have won. Though, to be fair, Ukip would have been more likely victors on this occasion.

For Labour, the result is pretty unsurprising, but it may help their more enthusiastic supporters to confront reality. The public does not share their view of the economy: that austerity policies are laying criminal waste to the British economy. And it will be hard work for them to make progress outside their diminishing working class heartlands. The leadership probably realise this already, even if Polly Toynbee followers don’t. But the time to fix this is not necessarily now.

And for the Lib Dems? It’s difficult not to see this as a small, but positive step forward. The party is earning a place as part of the political establishment: a party that is capable of progressing even when the media is against it. The party can’t pretend, as it liked to, that they are super-clean, and new kids on the block. The public see all the human frailties they see in other parties. But Labour and the Conservatives have succeeded in spite this. In the end people like to vote for respectable, establishment parties when the stakes are high. Instead of trying to promote themselves as a new kind of political force, they need to focus on promoting policies and competence. For all the noise, that is happening.

European elections: saving the Lib Dems from wipeout

Winner Lib Dem Golden Dozen Blogs – 9 December 2012

The Liberal Democrats have just selected their candidates for elections to the European Parliament in June 2014. These elections are important to the party – it takes itself seriously as a player in this forum, and it contributes a lot to the party’s strength and depth nationally. But the party faces a wipe-out. It needs some radical thinking to have a chance of avoiding such a fate.

The problems start with the party’s low opinion poll standing. The typical 9-10% is not enough to get the party representation in any of the regional constituencies, except the South East, under the PR system that is used. But it is worse than that. The party has always underperformed in these elections. Its usual campaigning methods are worse than useless. The party’s appalling showing in the London 2012 elections is a much better guide: closer to 5-6%. Complete wipe-out. How to save the party?

The first point is that the party needs to acknowledge the root causes of its campaigning weakness in this type of election. The party’s electoral successes in local and Westminster elections have been achieved using campaigns that focus on three things in particular: identifying local issues that stir the passions of floating voters, a ruthless third party squeeze (“Labour can’t win here, etc”), and identifying voters and getting to them to the polling stations. All three are useless in Euro elections – and yet they are so deeply embedded in Lib Dem campaigners’ thinking that they infect everything the party does. The party fails to put over a message that motivates voters, and since canvassing covers such a small proportion of the potential electors (and usually they are based on other sorts of elections anyway), the polling day knock up has very little impact on the result.

Unfortunately, it gets worse. The party’s Euro candidates tend not to be, shall we say, the party’s most inspiring campaigners. They are very interested in the goings of the European Union. This makes them well qualified to be Euro MPs – and indeed the party punches well above its weight there. But they are not good at finding messages that connect with voters. Even when they think they have found a killer, like using European arrest warrants to catch terrorists and paedophiles, this in practice has little resonance with the public.

So the party’s normal messages and techniques are ineffective, and the Euro candidates struggle to find an alternative. In the last election I remember delivering piles of tabloid newspapers that were clearly going to have little or no effect. Motivating the activists is a real problem, never mind the voters.

So what to do? The basic strategy is quite clear, and has been talked about for some time. Find enough voters who feel positive about the EU’s role in Britian’s future to turn up and vote to reach about 15-20% of the vote share. No other significant party is rallying that vote. The Labour Party is trying get these voters by default, but without prejudicing its chances with the more sceptical majority. The Tories don’t seem to think these voters even exist.

Next, how can effective campaign be mounted? What will be needed is poster and Internet advertising, mass direct mail based on promising demographics, and a good freepost (the single leaflet delivered for free by the post office). This is supported by an online and social media campaign. All this activity, combined with the right messaging, will draw in media attention. Almost no need for local activists to do much legwork – they can get on with their local campaigns. This will cost a lot of money – so the first priority will be to raise it.

The party is getting better at fundraising, but many party activists have little idea about how it works. Donors, rich and not so rich, need to be motivated in a very similar way to ordinary voters. They need to be inspired by the campaign’s messages, and think they might catch on with the wider public. You don’t raise the funds first, then decide on the campaign’s messages; it is the other way round. So the work on messaging needs to start now.

Here is my humble suggestion. The campaign theme should be “Save Europe!”. No doubt this can be improved on, but note the key features. First and foremost it is pitched as a response to a threat. People are more motivated by response to threats than positive ideas, and motivation is critical. The “No” campaign for the AV referendum was highly successful as it pitched AV as a threat to the status quo. So is pulling out of the EU a threat to the status quo. The party can be progressive and conservative at the same time! Further is the idea of “Europe” – vague and big. The idea is to appeal to people with an international consciousness. There is a double meaning: first to save Britain from leaving the EU, and second for the country to play its full part in solving a continental crisis that will affect us anyway.

How to build on this idea to make the threat seem real? “Save jobs” and “Save the Environment” should be the focus. Messing around with EU membership is a clear threat to jobs – and indeed one of the main appeals will be to businessmen who fear for the future of Britian’s relationship with the EU. The environment allows the party to play on its international outlook. Indeed it is an appealing idea to use an Earth from space picture with Europe visible on the surface as a campaign logo. It also sets the party up for some skirmishing that may be needed with the Greens. And it contrasts with Ukip’s outlook.

Ukip are the rising starts of Euro elections, which frightens the two main parties. But if the Lib Dems are after core voters rather than floaters then Ukip’s strength is an opportunity. It helps define the party: “We are the party which is against everything Ukip is for.” The more they know about Ukip, the more they know about us. The party should indulge in some relentless negative campaigning against Ukip – including how they have behaved in the European Parliament – though not straying into accusations of racism.

So you get the general idea. The best next step would be to appoint a national organiser to work on messaging and strategy. This needs to be somebody comfortable with challenging the Lib Dem conventional wisdom on campaigning, but with a degree of political realism (contrast some of the Yes to AV campaign types). Though much of the campaigning needs to be done in the regional constituencies, a lot of the design effort can be done nationally – and the Internet and media campaign needs to be led nationally too.

I do hope the party wakes up to the danger and tries to a bit radical!

Turning the Nice Party into a successful political force

Over the last two weeks the Lib Dem conference has awoken this blogger from a rather inactive period (so far blogging is concerned). Today I will complete this active period with a longer post, before going quiet for a couple of weeks. I want to follow through the thoughts provoked by my last few posts to set out what I think the Liberal Democrat strategy and policy stance should be. I am not part of the party’s Westminster set, and failed in my attempts to join it. Neither am I standing for any of the party committees. But I want to get this off my chest, and I hope it provokes a constructive train of thought amongst Lib Dem readers, and offer insights into British politics to others.

In Monday’s post I discussed the question of the Liberal Democrats’ core identity. I concluded that the party should base this around the values of tolerance and freedom, allied with a strong sense of civic responsibility and compassion. An identity that rejects the classic identities of class and nationalism that the two other main political parties still depend on. In other words, the Lib Dems should be the Nice Party. Within this identity should be plenty of scope for differences of opinion around community politics, economic liberalism and so on. But how to turn this rather challenging proposition into a successful political movement?

And here we run into the grim realities of how you create sustainable success in politics. It isn’t very nice. But it is a challenge that the party has successfully risen to in local politics in some parts of the country. I have met a number of people in the Kingston Liberal Democrats, where the party has both an MP and runs the council. I think they are nice people. I don’t think their Tory (or Labour) opponents will share that opinion: they manage their politics with a certain killer instinct.

I think the best place to start is with where the party should be campaigning, and whose support it needs to win. There are three groups: floating voters where the party is strong; core sympathisers everywhere, and potential donors.

The first group, floating voters, is entirely within the party’s comfort zone. Other parties may be catching up, but there is a lot experience and wisdom promulgated by organisations such as the ALDC (Lib Dem councillors) or gurus like Mark Pack. It is question of local campaigning, meeting people fact to face, good messaging (usually including a ruthless squeeze on whichever other main party is weakest), and ruthless targeting. This is all very good, but it is not enough. It needs activists and it needs money, and increasingly these have to be drawn from outside the targeted area, which is, by implication, being neglected. And even the best local campaigns are helped by a bit of national bounce that comes from broader popularity.

So the party needs to build core support everywhere: say about 10% of the electorate who become reliable supporters at any election, anywhere, and who are a source of activists, who can then be used in target areas. And here the party is completely out of its comfort zone. It requires a completely different style of low-effort/high-impact campaigning from that used in target areas, where huge efforts are made to gather the last few votes.

The London elections earlier this year show us this graphically. London is quite a liberal place, but the party’s Mayoral candidate, Brian Paddick, failed even to secure the 5% necessary to keep his deposit. The funny thing was that, by the party’s standards, the campaign was quite well funded – much more so than in previous London elections. The messaging was wrong. With an ex-policemen as its figurehead, the party tried to reassure voters worried that the party was a bit soft, by showing a “tough” face. “You break, you pay” was one slogan, emblazoned on billboards. All this did was put off the party’s potential core. They should have done the opposite – instead of trying to paint Mr Paddick as a Mr Nasty to reassure sceptical floating voters, they should have tried to reassure the core than in fact he was really rather nice and liberal (which he is). It’s the difference between going after core votes and floating voters.

Also the party needs to do more of what I have called “insurgent campaigning” – light touch, quick impact campaigns than move on quickly. The party needs to focus more of its campaign training on this type of campaigning, even though it wins no elections under first past the post, and celebrate success. Unfortunately every trained activist seems to want to fight a full-strength floating voter campaign even in areas where this is clearly not appropriate.

But while this sort insurgent campaigning may be relatively cheap on activist time, it helps a lot to have some money – and money is increasingly important in target campaigns too. If nothing else it makes the party look slick and credible – and our increasingly consumerist society puts the two together. I have noticed this especially here in London amongst ethnic minority voters, who tended to laugh at our cheap, old-fashioned literature.

And money requires donors. It also requires success at things like European elections, where the party’s weakness at core-vote campaigning threatens oblivion in 2014. But this is where coming into government should be a big help. People tend to assume that the present is a template for the future. While the party was confined to the sidelines it was often assumed that the party would never get beyond local government. Now people assume that future coalitions are a strong possibility. And the party’s serious work in places like the European Parliament (compare it to UKIP!) make this a party that companies and rich individuals might see the virtue in helping. But this requires the party to think about how it might go about persuading such people to part company with their money. Here too the party seems outside its comfort zone. All too often party activists think that fundraising is either local dinners and raffles that raise paltry sums, or else in the scope of professional fundraisers who can be left to get on with it. But it has to be integrated into the whole campaign process. Donors need persuasion in very similar ways to voters.

Now comes my next jump. The party’s policy stance, both in what it says and the messages it chooses to prioritise, are an important part of its success, especially for core voters and potential donors. They translate abstract notions into things that people might be really concerned about. And here we can afford to raise our eyes for a moment away from the grubby business of political campaigning to higher things. What is it, exactly, that the party wants to achieve in politics that is different from the other parties?

And here it is not just a question of doing a bit of work with focus groups. We need to look at the bigger trends in society, and try to make sure that we concentrate on policies going with the grain of history – and not leading to cul-de-sacs. The party needs to play long, and profit from slip-ups by the other parties.

For what it’s worth I suggest focusing on three broad policy themes: fair growth, limiting government, and global responsibility.

The idea of fair growth takes as its starting point the growing inequality of distribution in both income and wealth. Modern economic growth, it seems, benefits only a small minority. A large number of people are completely marginalised, and a lot of others fear that will be their fate. The economic orthodoxy that growth benefits all society, and that pay reflects the marginal cost of labour are both flagging: not so much untrue as not enough. A lot of the unequal distribution of wealth is not about due rewards for benefits conferred on all society – but about a skewed distribution of power. This clearly affects policy on tax, benefits, and public services, which may redistribute wealth. But there are also issues about how pay rates are set within organisations. These are issues that Labour has now taken to heart (after being a bit blind in the Blair era), but where the Tories have a complete blind spot. Here the party can distinguish itself from the Conservatives, but not Labour.

Limiting government, on the other hand, is Labour’s blind spot. Unfortunately it is uncomfortable for many Lib Dems too. I described the core problem that this addresses in this post earlier in the week. The costs of most public services are destined to grow in proportion to the rest of the economy, and costs as a ratio to output. This applies most clearly to healthcare (where it is being helped along by demographic trends), but we can see the same issue in education, policing and defence – not to mention the issue of pensions. Tax is an imperfect way of funding anything – it is difficult to make it accountable, and it is difficult to form a consensus on what a fair tax take is. So it will not be realistic to fund these increased costs entirely from taxes. The state will have to do less, and it will have to use new structures to do things more efficiently. Here the Tories have a good understanding of what is happening, even if they muddy it with irrelevant talk about “competitiveness”. If there is a unifying theme for the Coalition, this is it. Labour, meanwhile, want to row back on many ideas to reform public services, for example by using private and third sector providers. Their only cost saving idea is to freeze public sector pay – not at all sensible in the long run. This is where the party needs to challenge Labour rather than quietly going along with it.

And on global responsibility we have to break free from the idea that this country can go on its own happy way, while the rest of the world deals with trade, regulation, carbon emissions and what have you. This is most clearly visible in the Euroscepticism that fast becoming a national consensus, so say nothing with a general loss of momentum on climate change, and knee-jerk opposition to immigration. There are friends and foes in both other parties on this – but the emerging Euroscepticism of the Tories offers the biggest opportunity. I like this theme not so much because it plays well with the general public, but because it will resonate with large parts of the business community – who might start to realise that exterminating the party is not such a good idea.

Concentrating on these three broad themes, means excluding others. These include a more explicit focus on global warming and the environment, Paddy Ashdown’s idea of re-enfranchising electors through localising politics, and constitutional change more generally. Worthy as these ideas may be they are not going catch on quickly enough.

To exploit these themes the party rapidly needs to develop some heavy-duty and distinctive policies on taxation and Europe, and perhaps education; it needs to hold the line on health reform and university finance, and in needs develop insurgent campaigning on everything else.

Taxation is the critical issue: but it must be understood that that the total tax take is just as important as which parts of the economy are taxed. If there is a torpedo heading for the good ship Miliband, launched with such a fanfare this week, it is the tax burden. We can rely on the Tories to fire the torpedo, but we mustn’t let it sink us too. Besides limiting government expenditure, and so taxation, this answers the question as to why we are in coalition. But tax also plays to the fair growth agenda – we need to find ways of taxing the very rich that do not throttle enterprise. A tricky issue will be the top rate of income tax; there is a strong case for cutting out the 45% rate, and no doubt this would help the party’s appeal to donors. But it might be too difficult to sell.

Europe is critical because this would a central plank of the party’s appeal to business. But the party needs to have a convincing answer on how we stay clear of the Euro, while still at the heart of the regulatory process. The party is dripping with European experts – if it can’t come up with some good looking ideas here you really do have to ask what the party is for.

Education is important because it is a central part of the fair growth agenda. There is a space for more constructive policy that stays clear of Conservative grandstanding and micromanagement. I do wish the party hierarchy would make more effort to reach out to members invovled with education, though these can be quite tiresome: it may help to win over educational professionals, whom I am sure are being put off by the government’s current rhetoric. But this does not sound to be a make or break issue for the next election.

On health and education finance I think the party needs to stick with the current governments reforms, more or less, on the grounds that the tax burden will get out of control if we don’t. It will help with the proposition that Labour are profligate. We may be able to come up with some variations to soften the message, but I think the party has to grit its teeth.

And by insurgent campaigning, I mean grabbing a headline here and there, especially in areas where it plays to liberal principles and will motivate core voters and activists. Human rights and the security state provide some issues, and environmental policy no doubt more. and there will no doubt be local issues that can be taken up, not just in target areas.

There I need to leave it. This post is not quite as well developed as I hoped, but I hope it provides food for thought.

The curious case of Heathrow’s third runway

Why did senior Tory MP Tim Yeo make such a conspicuous bid to support Heathrow’s third runway? The idea is ruled out in the Coalition Agreement, and it is politically impossible for the government to take forward. Such a bid can only weaken the government and David Cameron, the Tory Prime Minister. Rather than indulge in conspiracy theories, I prefer to think it is because most MPs, who are elected in safe seats, and the business lobby advisers, don’t understand how elections are won and lost.

Mr Yeo made his bid in an article in the Telegragh. After going through the familar arguments put forward by lobbyists, he appealled to Mr Cameron to change the government’s stance, by asking himself “whether he is a man or a mouse”. The change could be a turning point for the government, he said, giving it a sense of mission amidst a lacklustre economy.

Heathrow’s operator, BAA, and principal user, British Airways, have been campaigning for Heathrrow’s expansion for many years, trench by trench. It seemed that they had lost this latest bid when the Coalition was formed in 2010. But they didn’t give up, and have kept their lobby efforts going. The results are quite impressive. Grudgingly, general public opinion seems to be coming their way, amid a deluge of supportive newspaper stories. It has become a totem issue for the political right, desperate for ideas that will both expand the economy and keep public expenditure down. Mr Yeo is one of a series of Tory MPs that have publically come out in favour.

But scepticism runs very deep here in west and southwest London, where we endure continuous intrusion from air traffic. Each victory won by BAA (to date mainly over new terminal buildings) has been bitterly contested. We have seen the smooth reassurances offered in one bid quietly buried in the next. There is no trust left in BAA and BA. And amid the swathe of hotly contested marginal constituencies in the airport’s shadow, the importance of the issue has only risen. This is what forced the Conservatives to oppose the new runway before the 2010 election. The area is also a stronghold for the Liberal Democrats, who have picked up on local opposition to Heathrow expansion from the start.

It is this last that is the political key for the government. Liberal Democrats are a beleaguered species since they joined the Coalition. Hopes that being in government would add to the party’s credibility are fading fast, as local election results show a grim picture. A very difficult election is coming up. Here the party’s objectives will be to hang on to what they have as best they can. Those local lection results show that the party can still benefit from an incumbency effect. South west London is one of the key battlegrounds, with four Lib Dem seats to defend, and a fifth Tory seat, Richmond Park, a marginal that the Lib Dems could win back. The party simply cannot afford to support Heathrow expansion. What’s more, the evident Tory backsliding on the issue is one of the very few shafts of light for Lib Dem campaigners locally. If the Tories drop their opposition to it in their next manifesto they will be bring out the champagne in Lib Dem HQ.

Which makes the fact that Mr Yeo and others are upping the ante very curious. This is an existential issue for the Lib Dems, so they will veto any change of government policy – never mind that the Tory Transport Secretary Justine Greening also has a seat under the Heathrow flightpath and has campaigned vigorously locally against expansion. Politics is supposed to be about the art of the possible.

What might the explanation be? One popular theory is that it is about Mr Cameron’s leadership of the Tory party. The Tory right are fed up with him, and would like him to be replaced. But to do it like this is surely suicidal – we only have to see what happened to John Major, the last Tory Prime Minister, who also had to deal with backbench discontent. The result was 13 years of uninterrupted Labour rule.

It may simply be a long term plan to ensure that Heathrow expansion goes ahead. This is surely what BAA and their advisers have in mind. If they can get the Tory party to change its mind at the top, and the Tories win the election without a few of those London seats, then bingo! They had already persuaded the last Labour government to press ahead. But this is a herding cats strategy. If they persuade the Tories to change their mind, the chances are that Labour will come out against, so that they can win back a few of those marginals in south and west London. The result of the that election could be very tight, so you don’t just wish away a few seats here and there for the sake of a project like this.

Personally I think it is naivity. Some on the Tory benches have spotted that if the Conservative backbenchers are behind a government policy, and you add in the Lib Dem payroll vote, who are bound to support any Coalition compromise, then it is enough for legislation to pass, even if all the Lib Dem backbenchers rebel. So all you have to do is ram a policy past the top Coalition policy process, and you’ve won. This strategy worked for George Osborne when he wanted to reduce the top rate of income tax – which he did in this year’s Budget in exchange for a series of policy concessions, now long since forgotten. He had similarly been told this was politically impossible. This is reinforced by the belief that the Lib Dems will not bring the show down because they are afraid of an election.

But that ended badly. Mr Osborne’s Budget, including reducing the top rate of tax, is now seen as a politcal distaster. It did nothing to boost investment and growth, as the Tory rhetoric and “Business” claimed it would. And as the next election looms Lib Dems are increasingly focusing on how to hold onto their parliamentary seats. It’s one reason why they jumped at the chance that Tory backsliding on Lords reform gave them to ditch the new constituency boundaries – which they had come to realise would make things very difficult for them. Heathrow is a similar existential issue, worth leaving the government for. No less than two Lib Dem cabinet members have seats near the airport.

But Mr Yeo, like most Tory and Labour MPs, represents a safe seat. He seems to have little comprehension on how elections in marginal seats work. The same seems to be true of BAA and their advisers, who probably like to look at national opinion polls and the big picture. Surprisingly few of the community of advisers, lobbyists and polical professionals that inhabit Westminster have a good understanding of the graft needed to win real elections; even less have any comprehension of how Lib Dem MPs win and hold their seats. So they make silly mistakes like this.

And what of the the case for expanding Heathrow? This deserves a blog in its own right. The case is stronger that my instinctive distrust of BAA, BA and anything calling itself a “business case”, or any group purporting to represent “Business”, would normally allow. But that is irrelevant in the rough and tumble of winning marginal votes.

Lords reform: the real loser is David Cameron’s project

Today Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats, announced that Britain’s Coalition government would end its attempt to make the country’s upper house, The House of Lords, mostly elected. It is a bitter blow for Lib Dems, but not unexpected. What does this say about the state of British politics?

The problem was that the plans did not command sufficient support on the Conservative benches. There were 90 or so rebels at an earlier vote, and this is enough to kill the bill if Labour oppose it. Labour had supported the reforms in principle, but said that, as a constitutional measure, it needed more time for debate in the Commons, so opposed the critical timetable motion. This argument is entirely specious. Debate on the floor of the Commons is an exercise in farce; it has to be time-limited or else it degenerates into filibuster. The cynicism of Labour’s position is made plain by the fact that they would not be drawn on the amount of time they thought the bill actually needed. But there was in any case a more substantive argument from the Labour side: in their manifesto they had said that reform should be made subject to a referendum, which the government side did not want to do. We can argue about the logic of Labour’s position on the referendum, but a manifesto is a manifesto.

So Mr Clegg was quite right to abandon his attempt at reform. There was very little credit in the wider world to be had for a fight to the death on this issue. While the public is broadly sympathetic to the idea, they don’t care very much about it. Mos readily agree to the trump card argument of British constitutional conservatives: that there are more important things to be doing.

Just about the only way of getting the reform through would have been to accept a referendum. Although the current polls are favourable, it would be a difficult referendum to win – a bit like Australia becoming a republic. Australians favour a republic in principle, but the never the particular structure of republic that is on offer. It was easy to pick holes in the specifics of the proposals – but that would be true of any proposal born of attempts to create consensus. The risk/reward ratio just didn’t stack.

Lib Dems are very bitter, since they see this as a breach of faith, as Andrew Rawnsley has explained in the Observer. They have knuckled down to vote for a number of proposals that they really hated, such as tuition fees for universities (though to be fair some high-up Lib Dems secretly liked the idea), and elected police commissioners, as well as immigration limits. Of course Tories have voted for Lib Dem policies too, but these are mostly quite popular in the country at large, such as raising tax thresholds. Although the Tories let them have a referendum on AV, their campaign to oppose this modest and sensible reform was so vitriolic and irrational as to come over as a breach of faith, especially when they attacked Mr Clegg personally on the basis that you couldn’t trust him because he entered into coalition with them!

But the public indifference left Mr Clegg with a problem. Why bring the government down over this, and not tuition fees, or many other things which are currently unpopular with the public at large? So the breach is not enough to end the Coalition. Instead Mr Clegg has decided to withdraw the party’s support to boundary changes to Westminster constituencies. This reform would equalise their size, to the benefit, so the conventional wisdom goes, of the Tories.

Here it is Mr Clegg’s turn to be politically calculating. I have heard his supporters make the argument that since there will be no elected upper chamber, we need to retain a bigger Commons – an argument that I struggle to understand. To be fair Mr Clegg does not use this argument in his email to members – where it comes over as a more straightforward tit-for-tat. The Tory sophists argue that the Coalition agreement did not actually say that they would vote for the Lords reforms – just to bring forward proposals. But the same can be said of the boundary changes.

And as things have turned out, the boundary changes are a real problem for the Lib Dems. In ordinary times they would have been much more relaxed, as they have shown an ability to move out of their strongholds in held seats to win over adjacent areas. The London MP Sarah Teather won her seat in 2010 in spite of major changes to the boundaries. But the Lib Dem activist base has suffered with the coalition, and the campaigning environment is much tougher. They have shown an ability to hold on where the party and its candidates are locally well know, but not elsewhere. There are no reserves with which to flood new areas. The boundary changes are a major headache. Neither are the changes partilcualry popular amongst the general public, whatever the intellectual case. To get equally sized seats they have run roughshod over traditional local sensibilities. In Wales the impact is particularly severe. Even may Tory MPs will be relieved if the reforms died a death.

But it will create an awkward moment in 2013 when the vote is due to take place, unless the proposal is abandoned. To defeat the changes Lib Dem government ministers would have to vote against or abstain – this would be new territory for the government and could easily bring it down.

So who gains from this sorry saga? The first winners are Labour, where their cynical manoeuvring have bought rich rewards. First they have made the Coalition look weak and incompetent. But best of all they should now be able to defeat the boundary changes, which they hate. Ed Milliband’s leadership can chalk up another success after his inauspicious start.

The second winners are the grumpy Tory backbenchers. They genuinely hated the Lords reform, and will be glad to kill it. They are also pretty relaxed about idea of the coalition failing. And as individuals the defeat of the boundary changes makes their lives easier.

For the Lib Dems the outcome is mixed. It’s a policy failure but it is very clear who is to blame: the Tory backbenchers and the scheming Labour politicians – unlike the AV referendum. This fiasco is out of the way a long time before the next election is due – and defeating the boundary changes will give their campaigners the best possible chance of hanging on to the 40-50 seats needed for the party to survive as a political force.

The big loser is the Tory leader and Prime Minister David Cameron, and his project of turning his party into a credible one of government. For all the soft soap he puts into the Party’s manifesto, it is clear that he can’t carry his party with him. He took on his backbenchers and came out second. His party can unite around a right-wing Eurosceptic platform, but winning a General Election, especially on the old boundaries, looks impossible. A centrist Tory manifesto will not be credible. His plan to use the coalition with the Lib Dems to de-toxifiy the Tory brand has come completely unstuck.

And the country remains stuck with an antiquated system of government that increasingly loses the respect of both the public and the world at large. The public is paying a big price for its indifference.

The Tories are living up to their “Stupid Party” label.

As I posted yesterday, the recent local elections were bad for the Liberal Democrats, the party for whom I am an activist. But if there’s any cheer to be had, it comes from looking at the behaviour of the other parties.

Labour have reason to be cheerful, but the results contain a trap. Their party has lurched to the left, going back on Tony Blair’s legacy. They want more spending, and more taxes to pay for them. This is a good line for motivating activists, many incandescent over the Coalition’s cuts, which they consider to be unnecessary and ideologically motivated. This is great for getting the turnout up in local elections. But it’s not enough for them to win in 2015 – and the weakness was evident in their failure to capture the mayoralty in an essentially Labour London. Liberal Democrats must hope that they keep reading their Polly Toynbee and let their anger trump their strategic sense.

But what is even more remarkable is the response of the Tories, to judge from the weekend’s press and backbenchers popping up on the radio. It echoes my advice yesterday to the Lib Dems in London yesterday – to shore up their core vote. They think the party will fail because it isn’t right wing enough, and that they should go back to being “the Nasty Party” to fit the nation’s sour mood. This is sheer panic, and befits the party’s other nickname: “the Stupid Party”.

They do have a problem, and one that I predicted over a year ago before the referendum on the Alternative Vote. There is a resurgent UK Independence Party (UKIP) chipping away at their core vote, while the Lib Dems find it easier to convince soft Tories to vote for them than soft Labour voters – and so they are going after them. That is why they should have supported a Yes vote in the referendum last year – or at least not fought too hard for a No vote. The more they go after the UKIP vote, the easier the Lib Dems wll find it to pick their centrist supporters off; the more they shore up the centre, the easier it is for UKIP to continue their progress.

But the correct answer to this problem is “don’t panic”. They should endure a few difficulties in local council elections and the Euro elections in 2014 – because the real prize they are aiming for is outright victory in the General Election in 2015. In this election they should have no difficulty in crushing UKIP, by painting the real enemy as Labour and the Lib Dems. They will then use Labour’s lurch to the left to scare Lib Dem inclined voters into supporting them too, while reassuring them that they are quite nice and liberal really. It’s the latter task that is by far the trickiest, so they shouldn’t jeopardise it by lurching to the right.

David Cameron knows this perfectly well, and his continued leadership represents the party’s best chance of outright victory in 2015. But if the right openly rebels, the party will both make itself look divided, and retoxify the Tory brand. The rebels should shut up and wait for 2015 – much as the Labour left did before 1997, and indeed 2001, before that party lurched to the left with its big spending expansion of government in the 2000s.

Labour lurching to the left. The Tories to the right. This makes life a lot easier for us beleaguered Lib Dems. Please let it continue.

London elections – the Libs Dems need to rally the base

After the Lib Dems shocked the world by going into coalition with the Conservatives in 2010, plenty of commentators threatened the party with oblivion. At first glance this week’s results in the local and London elections show this prediction to be comfortably on course. In fact the Lib Dem vote held up well in the party’s strongholds (including in their vilified leader Nick Clegg’s Sheffield constituency), so extinction is not beckoning. Some very challenging questions are being posed for the party’s leaders and campaigners, though, especially here in London.

The London results look particularly bad. Brian Paddick, the mayoral candidate, managed a deposit-losing 4%, and was behind Jenny Jones of the Green party, and only just beat the independent Siobhan Benita, advocating a new runway for Heathrow. In the Assembly the party mustered a mere 6.8%, leaving it with just two Assembly seats: the peerless Caroline Pidgeon and newcomer Stephen Knight. These results represent a big fall in the results achieved in 2008, which was already a very bad year for the party.

But it gets worse. This time the party had the best funded and best organised campaign it had ever put up across the capital. The results acheived did not match the Greens, who who were barely funded and organised at all, having a much smaller base of activists and donors to draw from. It wasn’t that the Greens did particularly well – the Lib Dems did very badly. A repeat performance would mean that the party will lose its London MEP at the Euro elections in 2014.

The London elections are an awkward challenge for the party. It’s entire campaigning wisdom is based on going after floating voters to win first past the post elections. This already makes the party vulnerable in proportional representation systems, such as that used for the Assembly. And yet the attention of the electorate is drawn to the parallel mayoral race (rightly, in view of the office’s powers), which is (near enough) first past the post. This draws the party in a floating voter campaign for Mayor, that fails either to attract floating voters (because the party is not amongst the front runners) or to rally the core vote, the “base” in political jargon. The party gave a lot of prominence to tough-sounding slogans like “you break, you fix” to reassure the floaters about the party’s stance on crime, but this left more liberal voters (like me) cold. The party’s literature consisted of a lot of tabloid newspapers which neither worked as sources of local news to draw people in, nor to rally wavering loyalists.

And the base seems to be disappearing. Surely metropolitan London is the most liberal part of the country? And yet the overall results must be amongst the worst in the country.

So the lesson for the party must be to spend more time rallying the base. It needs to be spell out what the party stands for, liberal values above all, and less defensively justifying the coalition, and not trying to appeal floating voters in areas where the party isn’t strong anyway. The requires a completely new mindset from the party’s campaigners. Even when they promise to do this (I remember last time’s Euros particularly well), they tend to get the same old rubbishy tabloids, positioned messages, and so so on. The next Euros will be an important test. I’m not holding my breath.

That applies especially to London. The party still needs to hang on to its MPs and councils, which takes relentless floating voter persuasion – but the party surely can’t afford to disappear into nothingness outside its bastions. The party needs activists, donors and the moral authority that come with a genuine nationwide base.

The Coalition – there’s a narrative, but the right doesn’t like it. Time for Lib Dems to make the case.

Since the budget in March, the British Conservative-Lib Dem Coalition government has been having a rough ride in the media. This is showing up in its poll ratings, with Labour romping ahead. Mostly this is Westminster bubble nonsense, but Liberal Democrats, in particular, need to ponder what is happening – and do more to lift the government’s PR performance.

The list of issues that the government is said to have handled badly grows. It started with taxing pensioners, takeaway food, and charitable donations, which arose from the Budget. This week the issues have been queues at Immigration at airports, poor GDP figures for the British economy, and revelations that the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, was a bit to close to Rupert Murdoch’s News International media group.

Mostly these are either non-stories stoked up by the opposition, or quite sensible policy decisions that are attracting opposition from vested interests. The Jeremy Hunt problem is the only one that looks a bit more serious, but it is part of a much more complex story that sits rather outside the government’s main purpose. The GDP figures do relate to an important issue, the economy, but were of little significance in their own right, and told us nothing that was actually new.

So why can’t the Government get on the front foot and just swat this stuff away? There is some nostalgia for “big hitter” government spokesmen that previous governments have been able to trot out to do just that: Labour’s John Reid, or the Conservatives’ Ken Clarke (in another era – he’s older and off-message now). There was a rather interesting discussion on BBC Radio 4 yesterday morning on this, featuring Mr Reid and Norman Tebbit, who has also performed such a role. These spokesmen blamed the government’s lack of narrative. Lord Tebbit scoffed at Lords Reform and gay marriage as ideas too small to make a compelling story. Both added that the fact that the government is a coalition made this very difficult. These creatures of the old politics would say that of course, but it’s worth trying to tackle the argument rather than the man on this one.

First there’s the rather complacent point that all governments suffer from mid-term blues, and can get bogged with apparently trivial news issues at round about this time. It’s not clear that the big hitters helped much this. Things get better in the natural cycle.

Secondly the lack of a clear narrative is hardly new either. Mrs Thatcher was clear enough – though that did not stop very poor mid-term poll ratings. And as for John Major, Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown – none of these governments had a clear mission, beyond being competent managers. Mr Major was lampooned for his “cones hotline” as being his biggest idea – beside which gay marriage and House of Lords are clearly a big deal. But Mr Blair’s main thrust in the 1990s boiled down to “the same, only different”. He was elected in 1997 with a huge majority and little mandate beyond introducing devolution in Scotland and Wales, ideas that were evidently forced on him from outside. Mr Brown’s lack of clear narrative is the stuff of legend. This is what modern managerial politics has become.

But actually there IS a perfectly good narrative, if only you look for it. First is the economy: Labour left a horrible mess, which went beyond trashed government finances to a highly unbalanced economy. The Labour economy was built on massively unsustainable levels of government expenditure, both for services and benefits. Painful though this is, they have to be cut back, and there’s never a good time to do that. But it wasn’t just the government being too big, there were too many of the wrong sorts of services, and not enough things we can export. All this means that you can’t just stimulate the economy back to growth – because as soon as the stimulus ends the economy sinks back to where it was before, with even more debt. This is a long haul – let’s be thankful that unemployment is at lower levels than in earlier recessions. What is really needed to get us moving is more investment by business – but that’s difficult in the current world climate. Now just what is it in the message “this is a long haul” that do you not understand when carping about 0.2% in GDP figures that are going to be revised in a month or so’s time?

But the narrative has to go further – Lord Tebbit conceded that there was a reasonably clear narrative on the economy. And this is the Big Society/Localism/Community Politics agenda. We need to make central government smaller so that people can be empowered locally to change things to the way they want them. That means reforming the whole shape of government – including the NHS. We’ve been so addicted to the old centralist ways that it is bound to take time for these things to work themselves out and there will a lot of protest on the way. And finally we need to clean up politics. This involves tightening up the electoral system (equal constituencies) and reducing the number of MPs. It means tackling that out of control and ineffective patronage factory called the House of Lords. Of course people are squealing. There are no omelettes without broken eggs.

I could go on to bring in Europe (not the time for radical changes in the UK relationship with the economy so delicate), and immigration (this is something most of the electorate agreed on at the last election and the Lib Dems promised to grit their teeth). This narrative is surely no worse that Tony Blair’s government that got re-elected twice.

The first problem is that the government is not clearly articulating this narrative. They are doing quite well on the economy, though could do better. But not the bigger picture. The problem is lack of narrative itself, it is that the Tory right, and their friends in the press, don’t like it.

Of course there are tensions in the government – between parties and within them. But that’s not new. Mrs Thatcher had her “wets” on the Tory left. Mr Blair had both the Labour left, who felt utterly betrayed, and the brooding presence of Mr Brown to deal with.

There’s no excuse for the government not to be trying harder to present a more coherent case for what it is doing. The Prime Minister David cameron should be leading from the front here, but seems strangely absent. But I think the Liberal Democrats should be doing more too.

For the Lib Dems the position is rather intriguing. The party took a huge hit in the Coalition’s first year, while the Tory standing increased, if anything. Now it is the Tories that are taking the main pounding. But there is little comfort for the Lib Dems here. They may not be heading for the opt-predicted wipe-out. But for them to advance beyond their current reduced poll ratings, the Government as a whole has to be seen to do better. And if the party fails to advance from its current standing, it will not play a major part in the next government, even if there is a hung parliament. The first lesson for the Lib Dems from the Coalition was to show differentiation. Now they must understand that it has limits.

Earthquake in Bradford. Not many dead.

“The most sensational by election victory in history”. For once it is difficult to argue with George Galloway’s comment on his stunning win over Labour in yesterday’s Bradford West by election. But as the dust settles, has anything changed?

The Coalition parties did badly in this election, but can be forgiven for having a chuckle. Labour’s loss was spectacular, and it has been a tough week for the government. For whatever reason, the media had turned on them over a series quite sensible moves (pensioners’ tax allowances, VAT on takeaway food, preparing for a potential strike by tanker drivers), which were admittedly exacerbated by some presentational gaffes. Labour had been taking some undeserved credit for this; and now they’ve been shown to be as out of touch with the real world as they allege the coalition parties to have been.

But Labour’s big problem is that they are seen as a party of government rather than one of protest. This leaves them vulnerable in by elections like this to candidates that seem to embody anger and frustration more. But it is a good thing if they actually want to win a General Election. In the narcissistic game of trivia played out by politicians and political correspondents this is a reverse. But no reason to panic.

Mr Galloway’s Respect party is a personal vehicle, not a convincing political movement. It attempts the feat of allying left-wing (“Old Labour”) ideas with cultivating the Muslim vote; this difficult reconciliation seems only to be feasible through Mr Galloway’s self-obsessed personality. He has tried and failed to broaden his appeal.

For the Lib Dems (not so implicated in the week’s gaffes, but having to share responsibility) the result is not a big deal either. They lost their deposit in a seat where they were already weak; the decline in vote was not quite as spectacular as for Labour and the Conservatives, and they comfortably saw off the Greens and UKIP. But it offers no particular hope of the party digging its way out of its poor standing in most of northern England, to say nothing of elsewhere.

By far the most interesting feature of this election has been the behaviour of the Muslim community – which seems to have been the main factor behind Mr Galloway’s success, harnessed by some very astute campaigning. According to Nasser Butt, a former Lib Dem parliamentary candidate in Tooting, who spent the last week in Bradford, the charge was led by younger members of the community, who persuaded their elders to rebel. This was reversal of the normally paternalistic way that politics is done in these communities.

This is an exciting development, even if it causes liberals some angst. Muslim communities (in this case mainly Pakistani derived) have a strong sense of grievance. This seems to be shaped by two things: the West’s ill-judged military campaigns in the War on Terror, and the generally liberal ways of the society that they inhabit, which runs roughshod over their conservative sensibilities. The latter’s flashpoints are the toleration of gays, perceived insults to their religion from a free-speaking public, and the modesty of women’s dress.

If the Bradford dynamic can be repeated elsewhere, it means that the Muslim vote is much more in play, instead of being stitched up with elders in little local deals, or not voting at all. The liberal fear is that it will put pressure on politicians in the wrong direction on issues like gay rights and freedom of speech. Maybe so, but I think it is a price worth paying. As the communities become more involved in mainstream politics, they will come to understand the need for compromise and building coalitions. And they will feel listened too. They may also come to understand that liberal views are held with passion and principle, and are not merely the signs of decadent society. In the long run this is good.

Meanwhile yesterday also saw a local by election in Southfields, in Wandsworth. There was no earthquake here. The Tories held off a strong Labour campaign, taking nearly half the votes cast. The Lib Dems, who did not put in a major effort, were pushed back to under 6%, but beat the Greens (under 3%) – something that did not usually happen in Wandsworth before 2010. Unlike last year’s Thamesfield by election, when the Lib Dems fought at full throttle to get 17%, Labour can’t blame their defeat on them this time. The Tory one-party state moves on unruffled. There was a Muslim independent candidate, but he made little impact, with 38 votes (1%), two less than UKIP.