I’ve been mulling over two bits of data over the last week, and their implications for the Liberal Democrats, my former political home. The first is this table by Election Maps UK of the candidates standing in the English local elections this year, which shows the Lib Dems fielding 519 fewer candidates than the Greens (and 954 fewer candidates than Labour).
The second is this table in a recent report by the Institute of Trussonomic Affairs, which Rose Runswick was kind enough to share with me:
Obviously any data from arguably the most agenda driven and least transparent think tank in the UK needs to be taken with several pinches of salt. But it has a grain of truth to it, and I suspect corresponds with the Lib Dems’ own internal research.
The table shows that of the five main English parties, Lib Dem voters consider “increasing freedom and choice”, seeing “my living standards improve” and young people being able to afford their own home as the least important priorities. They are least enthusiastic about reaching Net Zero by 2050 out of Labour, Lib Dems and Greens (interestingly, Labour, not Green, voters are the most keen). Only the Conservatives are less enthusiastic about reducing the gap between rich and poor.
Overall, the picture is that the typical Lib Dem supporter fits more closely with the opinions you’d expect to see coming from a typical Conservative voter 15 years ago.
This, combined with the decline in Lib Dem activity in local elections across England go a long way to explain the pretty pronounced shift in direction the party has undertaken in recent months.
This has ranged from Daisy Cooper’s “Get Britain Growing Again” policy launch, which seemed like an odd admixture of reheated Rachel Reeves rhetoric and support for an Elon Musk DOGE-style Department of Growth. There was Ed Davey’s weird ranting about badgers on five pound notes, seemingly intent on getting out in front of a culture war at precisely the point when Morgan McSweeney had finally left Number 10, and support for Reform had seemingly peaked. His party conference speech in which he highlighted a new Lib Dem policy supporting an independent nuclear deterrant (whether you support the UK having nuclear weapons or not, how is this likely to be a defence spending priority?) and the Magna Carta (is this aimed at people who support strengthening human rights or self-proclaimed “sovereign citizens“? Because the two are very different groups). And his recent calls to cut fuel duties, which basic economics would suggest won’t cut anyone’s petrol bill but will enrich oil companies.
I’m not sure all of that adds up to very much. It seems to be aimed at a caricature of a soft Conservative voter, not actual people living in so-called Blue Wall constituencies. But it’s clear what the calculation behind it is: the Lib Dems have a lot of seats they need to defend from the Conservatives / Reform in the next general election, and this is intended to prevent those centre-right voters who supported the Lib Dems last time from drifting away.
This would be less of an issue if the Lib Dems were on the rise, as perhaps we might expect a party with a record 72 MPs opposing a directionless government that is dwindling in popularity by the day. But the potential space that the party could occupy to capture that disenchantment (as it did between 2001 and 2010) is currently being held by the Green Party.
In truth though, this opportunity was handed on a silver platter by Ed Davey to Zack Polanski. Under Adrian Ramsay and Carla Denyer, the Greens were laser focused on being as moderate, nice and, well “Lib Demmy” as it was possible to be. The Lib Dems had plenty of political space to be more outspoken on any number of issues, and had an unprecedented level of resources at their disposal to do so. But Davey chose not to, something that would have been unthinkable under Charles Kennedy 25 years ago. At least some Lib Dem MPs appear to agree with me.
And some of that is down to that low number of council candidates. Scratch under the surface and this points not to a general decline but a decline in specific areas. I cut my political teeth campaigning in Manchester and Leeds. In both cities in the early 2000s, the Lib Dems were the main opposition to Labour. Sure, a lot of the seats held by the Lib Dems in urban areas like that were middle class, but by no means not all. The Lib Dems are valiantly holding on in those cities, but have tiny council groups compared to where they were.
The Lib Dems had half the councillors in the Manchester Gorton constituency at one point, and as recently as 2017 the seat was considered enough of a prospect that the party was willing to put money into the by-election campaign there (which was quickly subsumed by Theresa May’s ill-advised general election). Fast forward to 2026, and the party wisely decided that the Gorton and Denton (which comprises of about half of the Manchester Gorton constituency, plus a few bits of the formerly Lib Dem held Manchester Withington constituency) by-election wasn’t worth treating as a priority.
In my own area in the London Borough of Barnet, it used to be a running joke that the Green Party fielded just one candidate per three-member ward. This year, the Greens are running a full slate, and the Lib Dems are only fielding two, one or even zero candidates in most of the wards. Back in the 1990s, the Lib Dems were part of a coalition running Barnet council.
Fundamentally, if you no longer have any target seats in areas where Labour are your main competition, you’re going to focus on attracting Tory voters instead.
The Lib Dems took a real beating as a result of their decision to go into coalition with the Conservatives. It’s indisputable that they have managed to bounce back, but this has not been true across the UK (I haven’t mentioned Wales here, but the fact the Lib Dems have never been more irrelevant in the nation of David Lloyd-George, is pretty self-evident). A lot of the places the Lib Dems took the least damage from were of course middle-class areas where the Conservatives were their main rivals.
After the coalition, a lot of the activist base that joined the Lib Dems seemed to come from two sources. Labour members who were disaffected by Jeremy Corbyn, and “Remainer” Conservatives. With Corbyn out of the way, the disaffected Labour members seemed to simply drift back to the loving arms of Keir Starmer (locally, most of the Lib Dem activity I saw between 2017 and 2020 was driven by one ex-Labour activist who appears to no longer be involved; and that’s not to mention Luciana Berger). But the Conservatives have offered their former supporters no such incentive to rejoin.
So we have a situation where the activist base has, overall, apparently grown more rightwing. Meanwhile, the party’s best prospects were in Conservative-inclined, middle class seats. From that position, if your sole concern is maxmimising parliamentary seats — as opposed to shifting the national debate in your favour (the strategy adopted by Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski) — then shifting to the right is simple electoral maths.
And if it sounds like I’m just sneering and lamenting about how I didn’t leave the Lib Dems, the Lib Dems left me, I’m really not. I see this as a direction of travel that has slowly developed over 20 years, something which I recognised at the time but failed to do enough about.
Unlike the Orange Book putsch, this isn’t predominantly the result of scheming neoliberals who felt threatened by a party that was refusing to sing from its hymnsheet; this is a combination of the decisions made in 2010 and the much tougher decisions made, in terms of allocation of resources, in the years since then. I have more than a little sympathy with those decisions; I just ultimately disagree with them.
Arguably, the time for the party to shift gear was back in 2020, with the leadership election between Ed Davey and Layla Moran. Moran’s platform was much more aligned with the direction I thought the party needed to go down, but she was comprehensively defeated by the more managerial and process-focused Davey.
Let’s be fair. The country arguably needs a centre right party, now that the Conservatives have vacated that space. There is a lot of ground to be won as both the Tories and Reform slowly realise that they’ve argued themselves into a political cul-de-sac. I’d choose the conservatives under Ed Davey over any version of the Conservatives in my lifetime in a heartbeat, if I ever had to make that choice.
But it does leave the Lib Dems with problems of their own, which is that it has drifted into this position rather than made a conscious shift to change its politics. We already see this with issues like trans rights where the party offers mealy mouthed support for trans people without much in the way of meaningful support. This is the same position Labour was in 5 years ago, as it has become increasingly hostile to trans people in practice. The policies are ugly, but the dissembling is arguably worse; I hate to see the Lib Dems playing the same game of triangulation out of a fear of upsetting Daily Mail readers.
At the same time, it leaves itself in a position where, even more than it has in the past, it is speaking for one socio-economic group, specifically the middle class, rather than at least trying to speak for the nation as a whole. That isn’t healthy for any political party, but at least Labour is big enough to retain some residual support from the groups it no longer represents; smaller parties like the Lib Dems don’t have that luxury.
Ultimately it leaves me — and I suspect a lot of other people — feeling unrepresented. I do think there is significant portion of the public that is crying out for the type of egalitarian liberal party that I thought I was joining back in 1995. With this current vogue for populism and simplistic answers to complex problems, I don’t currently see anyone else filling that space.
I’m increasingly wondering if, at least under the current voting system, egalitarian, socially progressive liberals even have a place in party politics right now. I’ve been rereading some of my old writings about the direction I wanted to see the Lib Dems going in a couple of decades ago. Back then, one of my main hobby horses was community politics, as distinct from the pavement politics that the Lib Dems have turned it into over the past 50 years.
A lot of what I wrote here about liberals organising at a grassroots level to develop more actively engaged and informed citizens doesn’t really need to happen within the confines of a political party at all. Indeed, organisations working in civil society can and do practice true community politics every day; that was part of my day job for ten years after all.
But there is still a case for remaining involved in party politics, because however electorally successful the Lib Dem shift to the right might be, it isn’t actually putting the party in a position where it can really stand up to the challenges facing the country and planet over the next couple of decades. We are facing a climate crisis at the same time as the rise of an ever more politically muscular plutocracy is seeking to undermine democracy in favour of a system of oligarchy.
The Lib Dems have virtually nothing to say about the latter. And while they a currently making the right noises about renewable energy, those polling figures above suggest that they have spectacularly failed to make the case to their supporter base. If the dismal logic of the last 20 years continues, there’s a very strong chance they’ll be distancing themselves from Net Zero or any meaningful attempt to tackle climate change at the next election.
If you’re a Lib Dem activist reading this, maybe you can prove me wrong? All I’m seeing is drift right now.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Davey’s approach isn’t working electorally, at least in the short term. Despite the fact that the Lib Dems have languished in the polls over the last two years, I expect them to make gains in the local elections in two weeks and I think it’s quite possible that they will make gains at the next general election. But they are achieving that by changing themselves not by changing minds.
Despite a record number of MPs they are utterly failing to change the terms of political debate in a way that both Reform and the Greens have been notably effective at doing.
In an interview with Politics Home last week, Ed Davey asserted that “I am determined to lead us into the next election and show that we have the ideas for our country.” I still think that there’s a good chance that this might be so much pre-election bluster and that he has every intention of standing down in May. The party needs an opportunity to reinvigorate itself with new leadership and a robust debate about its future direction. So if he isn’t bluffing, the best advice I have for Lib Dem members is to start sharpening their knives.
Leave a Reply