Michael Mullaney, our candidate in Bosworth at the general election, says the party's decision to adopt the Revoke policy harmed our chances in many seats.
With the election over I thought I'd pen some words on my experience of fighting in a strongly leave seat where there was a significant base of Lib Dem support.
I noticed a graph circulating on twitter which appeared to indicate that the Lib Dem vote rose by almost as much in Leave seats as it did in Remain ones. What this failed to pick up was that in the vast bulk of Leave seats the party was starting from a very low base: 2 or 3 per cent in many cases.
Running a Revoke campaign that was aimed at a very small group of the electorate, hard core Remainers, meant that in these seats where we were starting from almost nowhere we were always likely to pick up a percentage point or two. In numerous cases this saved the deposit, so in this sense the Revoke campaign at least had some, limited success.
However the Revoke policy literally killed the party in the seats which voted heavily Leave (55 per cent or more in the referendum) and where we had a significant level of Lib Dem support to start with (15 per cent or more voting Lib Dem in 2017).
There were 19 such seats. Three were held seats: North Norfolk, Carshalton and Wallington and Eastbourne. The remainder were often seats we had held in the recent past, North Cornwall, St Ives, Devon North etc. Or seats we had not held for many decades but where we had built up support through local campaigning and winning the council, such as my own seat in Bosworth.
In these 19 seats the party's vote fell on average by 3.4% compared to a national vote rise of 4.2%. The three seats we were defending North Norfolk, Carshalton and Wallington and Eastbourne were all lost. The excellent Andrew George failed to win back his ultra marginal seat in St Ives and in many recently held seats such as Devon North and Cornwall North the Tories built up huge majorities.
The party’s expected large gains in heavily Remain areas, for which support in these heavily Leave areas was sacrificed, failed to materialise so we ended up net down in seats.
Our policy of revoking article 50 and of disregarding the 2016 referendum result without holding a further vote was extremely harmful nationally, but particularly in these Leave seats where Lib Dems had retained support.
Back in 2017 I spoke against the Revoke policy at conference, precisely because the vast bulk of English and Welsh constituencies voted Leave (and over 90 per cent of Midlands seats voted that way).
In every one, not only would we be accused of disregarding the national verdict but of disregarding the local vote too. At the time the leadership opposed Revoke and it was stopped. By 2019, however, the leadership backed it and its passing was a fait accompli.
I can sort of see why the Revoke policy was pushed through. I'm sure the smart campaigners at HQ thought our problem was we didn't get enough media coverage (true) and this would help get it by being spiky and distinctive and provocative.
They probably thought our problem was that our policy proposals generally were seen as bland and wishy washy and we needed a cutting edge and controversial policy to get ourselves heard.
Now this was probably an argument that could have been defended back in September 2018 when we were still beached at 8-9 per cent in the polls and seemingly going nowhere. However by September 2019 we had broken through, we were polling around 20% or more and had a steady stream of MPs defecting to us.
Then suddenly the Revoke policy happens and we see a steady drift down in the polls and whilst some MPs still defected to the Lib Dems from other parties not as many as expected do and some cite the extreme position of Revoke as a reason for pulling back from the brink of defection to us.
The biggest damage of all of the Revoke policy though was that it totally undercut our main argument going into the election; that we were a party of moderation against two extremes. The hard left socialism of Jeremy Corbyn and the hard Brexit policy of Boris Johnson both of which would do damage to the economy and living standards.
I went into the campaign expecting the Lib Dems to be fighting as the party of moderation and sweet reason up against the extremism of Corbyn and Johnson. Instead I faced a regular occurrence of people shouting or screaming in my face that we were undemocratic and extreme. I’ve never experienced greater hostility in a campaign.
To enter a campaign when we should have been the spokespeople for moderation, to instead be pushing a policy that was more provocative, more intransigent, more dogmatic than anything Corbyn or Johnson had produced was folly of the highest order.
In a seat like Bosworth where much of our support was based on years of local campaigning we had held some of our Leave voters in 2017 on the policy of a second referendum. We could agree to disagree on Europe knowing they could vote Leave in a further referendum and I would vote and campaign for Remain and they could still vote Lib Dem at the general election.
The Revoke policy of totally ignoring their verdict and instead overturning it without even a further vote was seen as gratuitously offensive to many of our Leave voting supporters. I am sure this must have been the case also in North Norfolk, Eastbourne and Carshalton and contributed to the loss of our seats there.
Running on a platform of moderation against extreme Labour and Tory parties had yielded high votes for the Liberal/SDP alliance in the 1980s - 23-26 per cent - and could have done so again this time, along with many Lib Dem MPs being elected if the strong national vote had been applied to strong targeting.
If the Revoke policy damaged us in many seats, the targeting process certainly didn't help either. In previous elections seats were consulted on whether they wanted to be targets and given opportunities in 'Dragons' Den' events to put forward their case to be a target in front of party decision-makers.
On this occasion no such consultation events took place, a decision was taken it appears on a demographic poll. Seats where we had large general election votes previously and had gained councils in May weren't even given the courtesy of a phone call from HQ to tell them they had not been picked.
Seats where campaigners and candidates had worked for years, winning councils were ignored in favour of seats where we often had no or very few councillors. Whilst demographics are important, targeting should have taken into account local base and candidate profile and at least given these seats a chance to be consulted and to put their case forwards! If we are to encourage people to work hard for the party completely ignoring them does not seem a great strategy for incentivising hard work in future!
A further example of HQs seeming lack of regard for any seat outside chosen targets was their decision to write to all non targets just before the election was called to tell them that they could only spend a very small amount of money on campaigning before the election was called.
This seemed to be to ensure that target seats could get vast sums of national spend spent in them without breaching local spending limits. Whilst this seemed a reasonable enough move in terms of maximising the spend on target seats, the process seemed to have taken place with very little account taken for the relative strength of non-target seats.
So those areas where we held councils, or had large numbers of councillors, or had strong votes at previous general elections appeared to be given very similar or the same, very low, spending limits as seats where we had no councillors, hadn’t come near winning a council seat, and hadn’t had any councillors since about 1995.
Thankfully this policy was overtaken by the general election being called, but it does underline a lack of consideration by HQ for those non-target seats where we often had years of campaigning, a strong local government base and their own money raised locally which they might have expected to be able to spend on local campaigning.
Despite a flagship national policy that did us huge damage locally, getting very little help from HQ and actions which seemed to positively try and inhibit local campaigning we still almost held our 2017 vote in Bosworth, down just over 1%. We also again scored the highest Lib Dem vote share in the East Midlands. This was down to the great work of the local campaigning team over many years and the numerous friends and colleagues from the region who helped in the campaign.
It’s frustrating that the East Midlands now has no second place seat again. The HQ designated target seat in the region, which had masses of paid literature printed and delivered for it, paid staff, paid for social media, a seat deal which got the Greens to stand down in our favour still ended up over 11,500 votes short of second place.
Bosworth however were extremely close, 683 votes, to getting second place back despite receiving none of the help above. Had we got some support we’d almost certainly now have at least one second place in the region for next time.
I guess in the end demographics matter, but so do local campaigning and a local party base built up over years. Not least because with five years before a likely next general election, our big job as Lib Dems is to be winning and holding and gaining councils and council seats across the country and building up our local base.
Local parties that rise to this challenge in the years ahead should be encouraged and rewarded by the party nationally if we want to go forwards as a liberal party with a strong base from which to challenge Boris Johnson’s Tory party in 2024.
Michael Mullaney ia a member of the ruling Lib Dem group on Hinckley and Bosworth Borough Council and has fought Bosworth at the last four general elections. He is on Twitter as @miketmullaney.
