Listening to people, all year around

Hello, Mid Bedfordshire

We don’t yet know for sure about when a Mid Bedfordshire by-election will take place after Nadine Dorries redefined “immediately” with her promise to step down straight away turning into a longer-running saga. But there is an active Lib Dem campaign up and running for Emma Holland-Lindsay, with some lovely letter boxes to admire.

Please do help if you can, in person or remotely, as Sarah Dykes’s stunning victory in Somerton and Frome shows just what we can achieve when we pull together behind a by-election campaign. A huge thank you to everyone  who contributed to that victory, a great burst of national media coverage and creating an abundance of Sarahs in the Lib Dem Parliamentary party.

What we stand for

One thing we do know the date of for sure is our autumn federal conference coming up in Bournemouth in September. The agenda and policy papers have now been published, and registration is open for both in-person and online attendance. 

The agenda includes our pre-manifesto document, For A Fair Deal. This is both an up-to-date summary of our overall policies across all the main areas, and also has in its second chapter our overall story about the sort of society we want and how to get there. Well worth a read whether you’re coming to conference or not.

I look forward to meeting many of you there or in Mid Bedfordshire.

The importance of residents’ surveys

I’ve just been reading an advance copy of a fascinating new book coming out later this year about our party, and this nugget of data leapt out at me:

"In 2010, in nearly two-thirds of Liberal Democrat target seats a substantial amount of effort was put into running resident surveys during the pre-election period. This figure dropped to just a quarter of target seats in 2019."

That data provides some hard numbers for a more general impression I’ve got from my latest round of local party Zoom calls and visits. The opportunity is there is for us to make more, once again, out of the idea of an annual round of resident surveying.

The big annual ward or constituency survey used to be the traditional heart of a good annual campaign plan. It was the big moment in between elections when people would get out on the doorsteps, refresh their supply of local issues, gather in canvass, phone and email data, recruit new members and deliverers, and start to show newly moved in residents how the Lib Dems are the local team who listen all year round and then take effective action.

Such surveys still often get done, but I think it’s fair to say - and the data suggests it too - that the idea of the survey being the heart of the plan in-between elections, and the starting step for breaking into a new ward, has slipped a bit. 

That’s understandable. So much of our politics, and especially for the Liberal Democrats, in the last decade and a half has been about national issues. Passion, anger and campaigning, not to mention being attracted to join our party, has so often been rooted in the national - and international - stage.

But a big part of our recovery though this Parliament has been about extending our run of net gains in local elections to five rounds in a row and expanding our staff teams and training programmes to support grassroots campaigning. 

So it’s great to see initiatives such as London Region’s summer residents’ survey push, with an adaptable survey for all local parties to use and the regional party sorting out the online version and freepost return address. And of course surveys can be themed around a particularly important topic, campaign or even time of year.

Whether you’re in London or not (and there’s also a template survey in the Campaign Hub), if we’ve not done a recent residents’ survey in your patch, I’d strongly encourage you to add one to your plans.

Staying on message

There’s a consistent message from what voters tell our canvassers, from what our own research tells us and from what the opinion polls say. The public is most concerned about the NHS, the cost of living and the state of the economy, and even life-long Conservatives are not impressed with Rishi Sunak’s record on them. When - as with our quartet of stunning Parliamentary by-election wins - we stick to those issues at the forefront of voters’ minds, we can win, and win big.

So it’s no surprise that the Conservatives are quite open about how they want the general election to be about something else. As their Deputy Chair, Lee Anderson, recently said, they want to fight the general election on, “a mix of culture wars and the trans debate”. 

It’s a desperately cynical attempted distraction policy, a government that wants to punch down to try to save its own political skin. 

It’s also one that is on the wrong side of the sustained, long-term liberalising of our country. Take the long view, and decade after decade, we’ve become more liberal and more tolerant. Those who love to fight culture wars in the name of populism keep on having to change their ground as they lose and the public moves on. Think of those other culture war issues of recent decades, such as same sex marriage and before that same sex adoption. There’s a common pattern: the populist right fought them, they lost and now those liberal reforms are so widely embedded and accepted that not even Nigel Farage is wanting to undo them.

But in the short-term we should recognise it for the tactic that it is: an attempt to distract in order to hang on to power. Which is why in that quartet of stunning by-election wins - as in so many other winning campaigns this Parliament too - we’ve done best by sticking to talking most about the issues at the forefront of voters’ minds.

Nominate someone amazing

Nominations close on the 24th August for this autumn’s Party Awards. We’ve got awards for amazing elected Lib Dems, diversity and inclusion virtuosos, brilliant people who have never sought elected office, wonderful staff and membership superstars.

Get your nominations in and find out more details here.

Welcome to…

The Federal Board has recently filled several more party posts:

• Rebecca Cave and Valerie Stainton (Federal Audit and Scrutiny Committee, FASC)
• Tom Bartleet (Federal Finance and Resources Committee, FFRC)
• Lynn Cunningham (Federal People Development Committee, FPDC)
• Melisa Gordon (Vice Chair - Racial Diversity Campaign, RDC)
• Neil Christian (Lead Adjudicator, Complaints Process)
• Thomas Hood (Federal Appeals Panel, FAP) - this role is subject to confirmation by our autumn conference

Many thanks to them all for being willing to take up these roles, and thank you also to everyone else who applied but wasn’t successful this time. 

Other Board business

The Federal Board’s report to conference has now also been published, with more details of our work. It’s included in the Reports to Conference booklet.

The Board also has a responsibility to review our Affiliated Organisations (AOs) once a year. We have asked the Federal People Development Committee to carry out this review on our behalf as this fits well with its remit, and its role in approving new AOs.

We have also discussed the role and potential of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), such as in cases of misbehaviour. The Federal Council has called-in this item of business, so I’ll report back in more detail on the conclusions once the call-in process has been resolved. 

Do you have questions on any of this report, or other Lib Dem matters? Then please drop me a line on president@libdems.org.uk. Do also get in touch if you’d like to invite me to do a Zoom call with your local party or party body.