(Illustration by Tracy Worrall)
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Can the Liberal Democrats break through in big cities again? Noah Vickers reports on the party’s bid to sharpen its ‘national brand’
Ed Davey was triumphant on May 8 as the results of the local elections in England rolled in.
“We’re on for historic gains. This would be another record eighth year of consecutive gains in local elections for the Liberal Democrats – that’s never been done before,” he told Sky News.
The party enjoyed a net national gain of 155 councillors, continuing an upward trend that began under Sir Vince Cable’s leadership in 2018.
But not all Lib Dems shared Davey’s upbeat assessment. A deeper analysis revealed that, while the party had made further in-roads in many of the formerly Tory blue wall areas it won at 2024’s general election, progress in other places – especially in England’s biggest cities – was more limited.
On Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester city councils, the party failed to gain any seats and saw its vote share fall. While consolidating its grip on south-west London’s prosperous suburbs, the party also failed to gain any new boroughs in the capital, including its main target of Merton.
In inner London specifically – where, back in the 2000s, the Liberal Democrats controlled boroughs like Camden, Islington, Lambeth and Southwark – their vote share fell to its lowest since 1978. Instead, the chief beneficiary of anger towards Labour from left-leaning, urban voters was the Green Party.
“Lambeth and Southwark are perfect examples of this, where it would have been entirely reasonable to expect two or three times as many Lib Dem councillors to get elected as were,” says a Lib Dem activist in London.
“A lot of our candidates worked extremely hard and, quite often, they got beaten by Greens who did nothing. That’s unbelievably frustrating, because the central party message is very often ‘if you work hard, you’ll win’.”
Chris Annous, a strategic communications associate at More in Common, says that while the party is not actively turning off urban, progressive voters, “the broad problem is that there basically is not much of a national brand for the Lib Dems”.
In areas where they had a positive local record, this barrier was overcome, he argues. But in big cities, where populations are more transient and residents are likelier to vote on national issues in local elections, it proved a hindrance.
The Lib Dems’ particular enthusiasm for door-knocking as the chief way of connecting with voters locally was also less effective in urban areas dominated by high-rise flats, where concierges often refuse entry to canvassers.
“The party’s handbook of how to win elections isn’t working in these sorts of cities right now,” says Victor Chamberlain, Lib Dem deputy leader of Southwark council, where the party has gone into coalition as a junior partner to the Greens.
“People are telling us there’s no national message; they don’t know what we stand for. We articulate it really strongly at a local level, but they don’t know what the national party is necessarily speaking to them about and I think that confuses voters.”
He adds: “Unfortunately the party has tried to nationally identify us as ‘the party of middle England’ a bit too much. I’m really proud of what Ed Davey’s done over the years to get us to the highest number of MPs ever. But it has meant that we’ve almost become a bit too associated with just one part of the UK.”
Rob Blackie, the Lib Dems’ 2024 London mayoral candidate, argues that the party must “take more risks” in its pitch to voters.
“Playing it safe is actually very dangerous,” he tells The House. “At the last election, we got 72 MPs elected, which was a fantastic achievement, but [it was] because we were perceived in those constituencies to be the best anti-Conservative party…
“The danger for us is that now that the Conservatives are no longer in power, being anti-Conservative is less motivating for people,” he says. “You have to positively encourage them that it’s worth voting for us.”
Blackie argues that a higher risk, higher reward approach should mean reclaiming “our heritage as being the honest party who are willing to say things that the other parties are too scared to do” – including on taxation.
“We’ve got to be clear that we are a centre-left party. That means that we know that to get better public services, it’s going to require higher taxes.”
He adds that the Lib Dems should also speak in more direct, less technocratic terms about rejoining the EU, and should adopt a more “enthusiastic” stance on housebuilding as a way of helping renters.
“The national party has given the impression, a lot of the time, that they think the problem with housing is that it’s too easy to build it,” he says.
“Although the formal policy, which we debated at conference a couple of years ago, is very pro-housebuilding in a very good way, the tone of a lot of what we have done has implied that we are sympathetic to people who don’t want houses built, rather than the people who are paying extremely high rents.”
The party’s official policy is to build 380,000 new homes nationally every year, but one London Lib Dem councillor asks: “Will you ever hear Ed Davey talk about that?”
There is “a bit of a disconnect”, they say, between the party’s formal policies “and what the leadership team around Ed is doing”, adding: “In our manifesto, we have enough decent policies, we’re just not really using them. We’re just talking about boring, centrism, don’t-rock-the-boat kind of stuff.”
More in Common’s Annous, a former Lib Dem parliamentary candidate himself, says there is a “tension” between the party’s target parliamentary seats – most of which are Conservative-held – and the individual voters it is likeliest to win over.
New research by More in Common reveals that 60 per cent of voters who do not presently support the Lib Dems but are open to doing so in future are currently voting either Labour or Green. Only 36 per cent are currently voting Tory or Reform.
Over the summer, the Lib Dems have been consulting on a new ‘party strategy’ document, to be debated at the party’s conference. But in a July email to members, party president Josh Babarinde made clear this was not an invitation to comment on the Lib Dems’ wider political pitch, which remains in Davey’s hands.
“The ‘party strategy’ guides how we build and resource our party to meet our big, liberal ambitions,” he wrote.
“This is different but connected to the ‘political strategy’, which is about driving a vision for the country, and setting out what and who we’re for (and against!). This rightly sits with the party leader. We’re working closely with Ed to drive both forward this summer.”
A London Lib Dem activist reports that members have been frustrated that the party’s official response to the local election results was “all very tactical”. The leadership’s approach amounts, they argue, to little more than asking: “Can we tweak our leaflets a bit?”
“Playing it safe is actually very dangerous”
As of June, some 1,500 of the party’s roughly 60,000 members had responded to the strategy consultation, according to a summary attached to Babarinde’s email. When asked what the party’s “key risks” are, the single most popular answer – cited by 40 per cent of respondents – was “unclear identity / weak distinctive message”.
Members keen to help develop that message are not sitting idly by. The House can reveal that a group of 15 to 20 urban Lib Dem councillors and activists began informally organising following the local elections. They are devising a series of recommendations aimed at tackling what they say is an “urban political identity problem” for the Lib Dems. Each of the group’s members comes from a different urban authority, including Chelmsford, Hull, Manchester, Liverpool, Portsmouth, Sheffield, Leeds and some London boroughs.
One member, Camden councillor Patrick Stillman, tells The House: “We want to work with the party to develop a clear national story about what Liberal Democrats stand for that resonates with younger, urban voters.
“Backed by strong digital campaigning, we think the party has a real opportunity to make an inspiring case for modern liberalism, with greater clarity and confidence. That would strengthen our prospects in Britain’s cities, and the party as a whole.”
Davey has meanwhile asked Harrogate and Knaresborough MP Tom Gordon to chair a review of the party’s electoral strategy in the North of England, where the party has only four MPs.
Gordon is authoring the review – due to be finished by party conference – with assistance from Lord (Shaffaq) Mohammed, Baroness (Hannah) Kitching, Sunderland council’s Lib Dem opposition leader Paul Edgeworth, and the North West Lib Dems’ vice-chair for campaigns, Chris Lovell.
Some in the party are optimistic that their national brand will be sharpened by the appointment of James Holt to the newly created post of ‘political director’ in party HQ.
Holt previously led communications for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and was executive director of their Archewell Foundation. But his new job is something of a homecoming, as he was also Nick Clegg’s comms chief during the Coalition years.
In response to suggestions the Lib Dems are struggling to reach beyond the blue wall, a senior party source pushes back, pointing to Sefton in Merseyside as one example of where gains in councillors could lead to future parliamentary success.
They add that over the coming months there will be an “evolution”, rather than a revolution, in the party’s national message, including a focus on forging closer relations with Europe through trade and defence co-operation.
There will also be more emphasis, they say, on the party’s commitment to climate action, as well as “Trump-proofing” Britain’s democracy through constitutional reform – further details of which are yet to come. Social care, which has long been at the heart of Davey’s policy offering, has meanwhile been given new relevance by Andy Burnham’s arrival as Prime Minister.
In the run-up to summer recess, Lib Dem MPs attended ‘strategy away days’ in London, where the latest data was presented to them on flipcharts and messaging was discussed. The party’s weekly parliamentary meetings have also focused more heavily on wider strategic questions in recent months, according to attendees.
“At the moment there’s a lot of goodwill towards the process that has been started inside the party, but people need to see fruit from it pretty soon,” says one Lib Dem MP.
They add that while there is a collective ambition to take more risks in their pitch to voters, it is also true that if the party could simply hold and grow its seats in and around the blue wall, that could leave the Lib Dems “in an extremely powerful position” in the event of a hung parliament, even if it “might have felt a bit boring along the way”.
But they caution that if that approach works: “The next question is ‘what for?’ and ‘do the public understand what for?’ If you’re going to make demands in a hung parliament – whatever arrangement there might be, if there is one – then the public needs to understand what your demands might be. That’s a big challenge for us.”
A party spokesperson tells The House: “The Liberal Democrats have had extremely successful local election results this parliament after many years of making net gains. Of course there have been some disappointing results along the way, and Ed has been clear that we have lessons to learn in some areas, including inner cities.
“In much of the North of England we were the only party that stood up against the tide of populism because we are rooted in our communities. We are confident that if we all work together we can do even better in the North of England in the years ahead.
“Fundamentally, our party has a moral responsibility to do everything we can to stop Nigel Farage turning our country into a version of Trump’s America. In Parliament and across the country, Liberal Democrats are working incredibly hard to do just that.”
