The Observer sent its policy editor - Michael Savage - to Darkest Surrey and discovered that the natives are no longer friendly to the Conservatives:
The fortress of Godalming is being besieged. The nearby village greens of Bramley and Brook are in the crosshairs. The gravelled drives of Hascombe and Chiddingfold are no longer safe. Suddenly, no Tory stronghold in the area is deemed out of bounds.
"If you didn’t know any of the politics, you would probably assume this was a hardcore Tory place," concedes Paul Follows, the beaming Liberal Democrat candidate, as he takes his latest tour of Godalming high street. "But almost all of these really clichéd Conservative places have not been so Conservative for a little while."
And some Conservatives fear the worst:
The talk among some Tories in parliament has become apocalyptic. "I’m more worried about the blue wall than anything," one former cabinet minister said in the Observer recently.
"I really think there’s a chance that what happened to Labour in Scotland in 2015 could happen to us in the blue wall at the next election. What are we offering these voters now?"
One of the things that really pissed me off about the BBC in recent years was the assumption, by current affairs production teams, that parliamentary obliteration meant that Lib Dems did not matter. The Liberal movement which had delivered much of the social change in the UK during the 20th century was an irrelevance, and all of those Lib Dem councillors would just fade away.
ReplyDeleteIt isn't a very important thing, but I reckon the BBC ought to ask itself why it ignored the Lib Dems for ten years, putting up strange people as the alternative UK voice. Still doing it.
I am sure that many Lib Dems in Blue Wall country have campaigned on their own values. I'm happy that Lib Dems are finally picking up the Core Vote and the soft Conservative vote, aided by demographic change. Work out how to retain that Core Vote and turn it into a discussion about British Liberalism rather than the New York Times version.
There's been the potential for our strength in SW London to emanate outwards into the commuter lands Surrey and Berkshire. For a long time breaking the M25 'forth wall' just wasn't possible but it's happening now. There are lots of factors at play but now is a good time to pay tribute to the activists who have made us competitive in places such as SW Surrey where we were 4th as recently as 2017.
ReplyDeletePhil I share your frustration at the relative lack of coverage on the BBC, it's pretty seldom and often they treat us as a novelty. It's been said frequently that the BBC slavishly follows an agenda set by the print media. If this is the case then that's great for the two main parties but no good for anyone else, as we Lib Dems are media homeless when it comes to partisan endorsements.
Follow the railway tracks. Core Vote liberals, those with a little bit of money, move out of dense towns into lively towns. The weird thing is that Lib Dems have never done well in smart, educated London areas which look like Kingston.
ReplyDeleteI suppose, Matt, that my disillusionment with the BBC has an intellectual facet. It's that the people making BBC news programmes have no understanding of history. They don't look to the past or look to the future, and they can't spot a flamboyant populist amongst a crowd of introverts. They are not entirely stupid people but when they treat Nigel Farage as a normal politician, their acts are stupid.
It's said that support for Chelsea follows the railways out of London too.
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