The Liberal Democrats are not the Conservative Party.
This statement may seem quite obvious to you or I, but it seems to elude our current leadership; in the Autumn 2025 Conference, Ed Davey would state in his closing speech, "Come, Conservative friends. Help us save our country." Now on the surface level, this makes sense to ask for, under the 2023 Seat Redistribution, we held only 8 Seats, and of the whopping 64 Seats we gained in 2024, 60 came from former Tory Constiuencies, and only 4 were from SNP Constituencies. Clearly, the disaffected moderate Tories had come to the Liberal Democrats in droves; indeed, of these Constituencies 12 (or about 20%) were previously occupied by members of the One-Nation Parliamentary Group. So case closed, right? We should continue to target Conservative Seats until they are eventually eclipsed by the Liberal Democrats as the Official Opposition! No, not really, and I have a few reasons to believe this.
For one, of the three defectors we had from the One-Nation Group during the 2019 Parliament, not one of those seats remained Liberal by the 2024 General Election, 15 of them flipped to Labour, and a further 21 remained Conservative, so we were hardly the main party One-Nation Conservatives turned to in 2024, in fact, we only gained 0.6% in of the vote share, and actually declined in terms of real votes, so it can hardly be said voters turned to us at all. Additionally, I just don't think the average voter is that ideological, rather moreso emotional and/or tribal; in my own Constituency of West Suffolk, for example, Nick Timothy, who replaced the outgoing One-Nation Group member, Matt Hancock, seems to have almost nothing in common with him ideologically other than the fact they both are were in the Conservative Party.
As one final nail in the coffin on the idea moderate Conservatives flocking to us, I'd like to draw attention to the fact that polls have repeatedly shown that Conservative voters have very little in common with the Liberal Democrats ideologically, with one YouGov poll on this topic showing that 2024 Conservative voters saw themselves, as being 65 points to the right of Liberal Democrats, and only 25 to the left of Reform, Meanwhile, Labour voters only saw themselves as being 13 points to the left of the Liberal Democrats, which is particularly notable as they also only polled themselves 8 points to the left of Labour. Additionally, another poll on ideological preference showed that Lib Dem voters and Labour voters polled within a few points of each other on almost all concepts aside from (a perhaps obvious) preference for Liberalism or Socialism, while Conservative voters views aligned more with Reform. Clearly, targeting Tory seats alone didn't win us this election.
Your natural response to this might be to say then, that it's the stunts wot won it! Except that doesn't hold up either, the wonderful Sophia Layton did a study on the effects of Ed Davey's stunts drew the wrong kind of attention to the Liberal Democrats with most media outright deriding the use of stunts, drawing attention away from our policies when they were intended to highlight them. This problem is further exposed in a separate study done by YouGov on reasons why people aren't voting Liberal Democrat, with the number one reason found being the fact that people simply don't know enough about the party, and the third being a perceived incompetence. Clearly, the stunts are damaging our reputation more than they are helping us.
So what was the secret to our 2024 success, you might be asking? Well for one, we targeted our campaign to the West Country, where we have historically been the opposition, so that gave us an obvious leg up, furthermore, in 40 of the other constituencies we won, we were already in second place. It's no secret that the 2024 General Election was largely won through tactical anti-Tory voting, hence how disproportionate it was, and I suspect what happened was that a lot of people who usually vote for Labour or the Greens put their votes behind us as we were the most likely party to oust Tories in their constituency, especially considering how many seats we won matched the Best for Britain tactical voting guide. This would be fine enough as a starting point, but in 2024 we only came second place in 25 constituencies, and only six of those are predicted to be gains, suggesting we're hitting the upper limit of how much we can gain through tactical voting alone. This issue was also highlighted earlier in the aforementioned YouGov poll on why people aren't voting Lib Dem as the second most likely reason people weren't voting Liberal Democrat was because they didn't think we'd be able to form a Government, which would seem strange considering we won so many seats in the last election until you realise our voting base were voting mostly for "not the Tories."
That's the crutch of the issue really; how many of our 72 Seats will survive once there is no need for tactical voting? Our campaigning isn't working, few people know what we stand for, and our voter base remains at about half of what it was in 2010. I don't know the solution to this problem, but we could certainly start by looking at what our friends over the pond, such as D66 or Zohran Mamdani are doing, both proposed radical, progressive changes and won their respective elections, shattering the whole concept of the centrist voter who we must water down our message to appeal to.
I want more attention drawn to this problem, particularly from our leadership, who's rhetoric currently suggests they are unaware it even exists, calmly pandering to imaginary "One-Nation Tories" and fighting for vague cultural concepts such as "Churchill's Britain." While Davey did speak about targeting more than just Tory seats in the speech I quoted at the beginning, there was little focus given to it, and even less on how we'd even do that other than simply being the least bad option. But being the least bad option doesn't win long-term supporters, having values and fighting on the issues that matter to people do. I just hope we take that on board before we experience how razor thin our current base truly is.
No comments:
Post a Comment