Liberal democrats

After Starmer: Labour’s liberals should plan for a new party

Labour’s left appears to be licking their lips at the thought of Starmer’s ignominious end as leader, something which they now seem to hope will be coming sooner than they could have ever dreamed back in the summer. Should the party do poorly at the May local elections, the plan seems to be to agitate for a change at the top and unite around John McDonnell as Corbyn’s true successor. If the Labour party was taken over by the far left again, this would leave liberals in a difficult position. Since Keir Starmer took over, most liberals have folded into Labour, correctly seeing that they are the only vehicle for

Soft-left squatters have taken over the Lib Dems

I was never afraid of Jeremy Corbyn, never afraid of Momentum. I’ve never really feared Britain’s hard left at all. They’re wrong, of course, and they can do some serious localised damage; but their ideology is so obviously daft and has so comprehensively failed wherever in the 20th century it was tried that they occupy in my mind a position similar to that of Satanists. Grisly, yes, but a threat to civilised society? Hardly. The hard left always gets found out in the end, and always will. Their doctrines have no natural appeal to the middle-of-the-road British (which is most of us) and in the unlikely event they were ever

Steerpike

Listen: Lord Heseltine urges Tory voters to back Lib Dems

Michael Heseltine visited the Tory stronghold of Beaconsfield last night to support the recently ousted Conservative, now independent candidate, Dominic Grieve. During the event, which also saw Remain rebels David Gauke and Anne Milton take to the stage, Lord Heseltine was asked his advice to long-standing Conservative voters in the upcoming general election. Heseltine told the audience: I am telling them to vote for what they believe and what the Conservative Party has stood for all my life and certainly their’s and put country first. And what I think that means in practical terms is they either vote for the defrocked Conservative candidates, of which we have three excellent examples

The Liberal Democrats’ costly mistake

Oh dear. Failure comes in many forms but it usually stings a little more when it also involves large sums of money. That’s the situation the Liberal Democrats are in following their disappointing election result in which they failed to make overall gains – and then party leader Jo Swinson lost her seat. This morning the Electoral Commission has released new figures of donations received by the main parties during the final quarter of 2019. The Conservatives led in donations with a total of £37.7m. When it comes to the other parties, the Liberal Democrats actually overtook Labour – accepting £13.6m in donations to Labour’s £10.6m. Given that the party

The Lib Dems’s survival now rests with Labour

A truly dire night for the Lib Dems. A net loss of one seat and a net loss of one leader. That was not the hoped-for outcome when Jo Swinson took the gamble of agreeing to Boris Johnson’s pre-Christmas election. So what went wrong? First, this wasn’t so much the Brexit election as ‘The Brexit Deal election’. If Boris Johnson had gone for his Plan A – a snap election in September threatening no-deal – I think the result would have been very different. Plenty of suburban Remain-leaning Conservative seats would have seriously been in play for the Lib Dems. But the double act of Hilary Benn and Dominic Grieve

What are the parties trying to tell voters in their leaflets?

What’s the point of political leaflets, anyway? Many voters in target seats will be asking that very question on an almost daily basis, as they shovel the latest snowdrifts of election literature into their recycling bin. We have social media, party election broadcasts and phone banks to reach voters. Who needs leaflets? There is a (I believe only half-serious) ‘test’ that some Liberal Democrat campaigners apply to the amount of information they think it is possible for a voter to absorb from a leaflet they’re carrying from the letterbox to the bin. Given the parties keep sending them, particularly in those marginal seats where it’s just not clear where the

Jo Swinson has finally made the BBC do its job on trans rights

Jo Swinson won’t be our next prime minister but her election campaign has achieved one significant thing already: she’s helped the BBC to start doing the job of journalism on trans rights issues. The Lib Dems have taken a conscious decision to go into the election campaign as the party of trans rights and inclusion. They think that embracing the transgender issue plays well with the degree-educated, socially liberal voters in university towns. I can’t judge how well the Lib Dem trans strategy is playing out with those key voters. I can simply assess the public results of that decision, which has been a string of frankly horrible broadcast interviews

Andrew Neil interview: Jo Swinson sticks to her guns

Jo Swinson had a terrible session on Question Time earlier in the election campaign, but tonight in her interview with Andrew Neil, she showed that it is possible for a leader who believes what they are saying to survive a very tough grilling with their dignity intact. She faced difficult questions on her party’s Brexit position, on her voting record in the Coalition government, and on what she would do if her party lost seats at this election, but managed to stick to her guns in a way that showed up Jeremy Corbyn for not doing so in his interview – and Boris Johnson for not having the guts to

Watch: Jo Swinson berated by frustrated Remain voter

The Liberal Democrat leader had an awful time on Friday night’s Question Time special. The audience was, at best, uninterested in her pitch. A notable moment was when a Remain voter criticised the Lib Dems for their policy of revoking Article 50, calling it ‘undemocratic’. You can watch the clip below:

Might the Lib Dems back Boris if they find themselves kingmakers?

It had not occurred to me that the Lib Dems would ‘allow’ Boris Johnson to remain PM if he were to fail to win a majority but the Tories nonetheless were to emerge from the election with more MPs than any other party. I assumed Jo Swinson’s and her Lib Dem MPs’ savage criticism of Johnson and the Tories would lead the Lib Dem leader to swallow her pride at the last and eat the vitriol she has thrown at Corbyn. I have been taking it for granted she would find a way to agree some kind of arrangement with Remain parties and MPs, with Labour and the SNP, that

Matthew Parris

What on earth are the Lib Dems up to?

Jo Swinson is right. Most of the gains that it’s worth her party aiming for would be made at the expense of the Conservatives. There are three reasons. First, glance at the 29 seats where the Liberal Democrats came second in 2017. Some 22 produced a ‘close’ result. Sixteen of these are held by the Tories, and only four by Labour. As my Times colleague Oliver Wright explains: ‘Even quite a dramatic swing from any of the other parties towards the Lib Dems could still reap very little reward.’ Secondly, Conservative and Lib Dem ideologies are not diametrically opposed. Anyone who’d even consider voting Tory would be fiercely resistant to

What’s going wrong for the Lib Dems?

The Liberal Democrats may have brought confetti canons to their manifesto launch, but they have still struggled to get as much attention today as they hoped, given Boris Johnson’s loose lips on the National Insurance threshold cut. They are also – by leader Jo Swinson’s own admission – suffering a squeeze in the polls. The latest YouGov poll has the party on 15 per cent, trailing Labour which is on 30 per cent and the Tories on 42 per cent. Perhaps more worryingly, given the focus on Swinson herself, voters don’t seem to warm to her the more they find out about her. What’s going wrong? One of the main

Tom Goodenough

Jo Swinson’s Lib Dems risk falling into Theresa May’s trap

Voters dislike Jo Swinson the more they see her. That was the verdict of a poll this week revealing that even Remain voters are turning away from the Lib Dem leader, despite the party’s fervent anti-Brexit pitch. In the summer, those asked about Swinson were apathetic: they didn’t know who she was. Now that she is more familiar, people are not impressed. For those who want Britain to stay in the EU – and even for the public generally – Swinson is not as popular as her party. It’s a brave move then for the Lib Dems to put Swinson front and centre of their general election campaign. The party’s

Ross Clark

Whatever happened to the Lib Dems’ smart approach to tax?

I have already decided how I am going to vote in the general election: for whichever party produces a manifesto with the fewest uses of the phrase ‘green jobs’. Was there ever such a numb-skulled phrase? It has become the fallback for any politician who hasn’t the faintest idea of how we are going to meet these self-imposed targets to eliminate all carbon emissions by 2050, 2030, 2025, next Tuesday or whatever. Are you worried that we might end up with no heavy industry, that you won’t be able to fly or drive anywhere, that the gas grid will be turned off and your house left freezing? Never mind, we’re

Jo Swinson denies firing stones at squirrels

Jo Swinson has branded accusations she fired stones at squirrels as ‘very fake news’. Screenshots of what appeared to be a Daily Mirror story have been widely circulated online. The article alleges that a private video of the Lib Dem leader has surfaced on Facebook, showing her pelting the furry mammals with pebbles using a slingshot. The Remain campaigner told LBC‘s Iain Dale she was becoming increasingly concerned about such viral stories: ‘They’re quite sophisticated in that people can believe them. I do think its worrying because it has echoes of what we’ve seen in other elections and particularly when you think about fake news and the technological possibility for deep fakes, where

Do ‘Workington Man’ and ‘Worcester Woman’ decide elections?

National characters How useful is it to characterise an election with a single anthropological specimen such as ‘Workington Man’? ‘Worcester Woman’ was identified by Tory strategists ahead of the 1997 election as a key voter who had helped John Major win, against expectations, in 1992. Worcester was then a Conservative seat. Has the city followed the national trend since? 1992: Con 46% of Worcester vote, Lab 36% (Nationwide, Tory majority of 21) 1997: Lab 50%, Con 36% (Labour majority of 178 seats nationwide) 2001: Lab 49%, Con 36% (Labour majority of 166) 2005: Lab 42%, Con 35% (Labour majority of 65) 2010: Con 40%, Lab 33% (Hung parliament: Con/Lib Dem

James Forsyth

Boris’s fate will be decided by Lib Dem voters

The Tories’ great fear in this campaign is that they can get their vote out, squeeze the Brexit party right down and still lose. Why? Because their strategy relies on the Liberal Democrats taking a chunk out of Labour’s Remain vote. If Labour manages to rally the Remain vote in the way that it did in 2017, then we are heading into hung parliament territory and a situation where the Tories cannot govern because they have no potential partners. The complication for the Tories is that they also need to win back a chunk of their Remain voters who have gone over to the Liberal Democrats and hold off a

Matthew Parris

I’ll vote Lib Dem – but I can’t join them

I don’t believe that before last week I’ve ever quit any organisation on an issue of principle. I tend to find people tiresome who make a song and dance about doing so. I never thought that one day I’d be ‘making an exhibition of myself’ (as my father used to say) and certainly not so late in my life. But in my Times column on Saturday that’s what I did. And it’s futile to deny I was attention-seeking. Of course I was. A columnist earns his bread by drawing attention to himself and his opinions. Quitting the party you joined 50 years ago is just a rather theatrical way of

‘Remain or Leave?’ is no longer the key Brexit question

In an astonishing interview on the Today programme this morning, Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson tried to explain why she was tabling an amendment which would force a referendum on any deal the government presents to the House of Commons on the grounds that we should ‘let the people decide’. She then asserted that the country had changed its mind since the 2016 referendum and now wanted to remain. It had to be pointed out to her that her party has, in fact, just adopted a policy of reversing Article 50 without a referendum – so much for letting the people decide. The truth is that like so many Remain

Eight reasons why I know I’m a Conservative

‘Why don’t you just join the Liberal Democrats?’ If I’ve heard that once in the past couple of years I’ve heard it a hundred times. In online posts beneath my Times column, in public debates or private conversations, the question is sometimes a genuinely puzzled enquiry but more often an implied: ‘What the hell are you doing posing as a Tory?’ It’s all about Brexit, of course: the questioner’s assumption being that, strip from a Conservative the ambition that Britain should leave the European Union, and there remains nothing important to distinguish him or her from a Liberal Democrat. The assumption is part of the poisonous modern heresy that leaving