Sir Ed Davey has just finished his speech at the end of a broadly successful four-day conference for the Liberal Democrats in sunny Bournemouth. The venue for Davey’s speech could not have been more apt: the International Centre, scene of Margaret Thatcher’s final conference address in 1990. The once true-blue Tory shires that voted for the Iron Lady in droves are now firmly in Davey’s sights and the speech he delivered this afternoon was laser-focused at them. Virtually all of his attacks were directed at the Tories: the word ‘Conservative’ featured 27 times in Davey’s address, compared to just three mentions for Labour and one for the SNP. Indeed, given the ongoing war of words over the Mid-Beds by-election, the lack of any real criticism of Labour was striking.
The broad theme of Davey’s speech was failings in the public services, for which he placed the blame squarely at Rishi Sunak’s door. ‘Our country today just isn’t working the way it should’, he told the conference hall, declaring that ‘I have never known our country so badly governed’ and listing the failures of ‘crimes unsolved. Backlogs in our courts. Delays to get a passport. Crumbling school buildings. High streets in decline. And potholes, everywhere.’’
A specific focus on the NHS allowed Davey to tie in his personal backstory too. He spoke poignantly of his parents’ deaths from cancer before making the headline announcement: a new legal right for cancer patients to start treatment within two months of an urgent referral. Attacking Tory broken promises, Davey told the hall: ‘Perhaps there should be a warning on the ballot paper, like there is on cigarette packets: Voting Conservative is bad for your health.’ Davey’s emphasis on public services was carefully-chosen. The Lib Dems intend to make it central to their next general election campaign, by emphasising failings in hospitals and GP services in individual constituencies. This is part of their strategy of taking their successful by-election playbook and taking it national: running targeted, hyper-local campaigns in the 80 seats where they finished second to the Tories four years ago.
It’s a deliberate contrast to the last general election campaign. Back then the Lib Dems proposed Jo Swinson as the ‘next Prime Minister’, published a 98-page manifesto with contentious policies and ran on a simple message of ‘Stop Brexit’. The result was Swinson’s defeat and a return of just 11 MPs to Westminster. Unsurprisingly perhaps the B-word did not get a single mention in Davey’s speech today, with just a few lines instead dedicated to Europe – in spite of the passions which it arouses among his membership. Davey’s comments noticeably received the biggest applause of his whole speech. Given the Leave tendencies of many Blue Wall voters, it makes sense to put the NHS and GP services front and centre of Davey’s conference speech, rather than pander to his activists. That, along with greater oversight of the manifesto and a ruthlessly targeted approach to election funds being conditional on door-knocking efforts, suggests the Lib Dems have learned the lessons of 2019.
This weekend was the first in-person conference for four years, owing to the pandemic and the Queen’s death last year. The shift in the party’s fortunes can perhaps be illustrated by the mood among its campaign team – despondent in 2019, they are now buoyant after recent results. That should worry those Tory MPs in Blue Wall seats who will face their fire come next year.
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