2020 Liberal Democrats Leadership Election

[Former President tack50]

A few questions:

1) Dawn, why does the SNP deserve to get its arse kicked? I'm an Atlantic Canadian so obviously I'm not sympathetic to seperatists tearing up the country, but why specifically?

Because they are nasty right-wing nationalists who actively and gleefully put David Cameron in office in 2015, and have been a major obstacle to anything approaching left of centre politics in this country because of their antics. Plus the adoration from some lefties in the rest of the UK towards them as if they are 'allies of Labour' or something along that just sickens me. Unfortunately the current situation (independence being desirable but not obtainable for the Scottish population) favours them heavily. They'll become unpopular eventually as all parties do but it won't be soon unfortunately.

(This is very much a personal opinion of mine and not gospel btw)

Since when are the SNP right-wingers?

Iirc the SNP was centrist (kinda like the Lib Dems) in the 70s, voting to bring down Callaghan and what not and called the Tartan Tories; but yeah they are clearly left wing now.

A hypothetical Tory-SNP no confidence vote against a Labour PM is hard to imagine unlike in 1979

[Former President tack50]

If the Lib Dems go all in on a hardline #rejoin campaign, how likely is it that they get wiped out? Do they even have anything remotely resembling a safe seat?

I guess the Lib Dems would just become the Orkney and Shetland party?

[Former President tack50]

The "official" LibDem report into their 2019 election failure has been published. In parts it is amusing, in others almost horrifying, but that they have released such a thing is still to their credit.

(the contrast with my own party is indeed a fair one to make)

Though rarely actually referred to by name, it makes clear what a poisonous delusional grandiloquent s*** the former MP for Streatham was. Well, some of us did try to warn you......

What is the basic summary of the Lib Dem "autopsy report"?

[Former President tack50]

Something interesting I just noticed is that the Lib Dems (not too unlike Labour actually) came very close but not wuite enough in a lot of seats.

The Lib Dems lost a whopping 6 seats with majorities under 1000 or 1%; which would increase the Lib Dem sests by 50% by itself. A swing of 3% to the Lib Dems would outright double the Lib Dem seats.

Granted the Lib Dems seem to be going down, not up, but if they could even just hold steady at 2019 levels they would probably flip several seats and get into yhe mid-high teens

[Former President tack50]

What about Surrey? How much of the Lib Dem surge there was Brexit-based and how much was genuine support for them?

Iirc don't Lib Dems tend to get distant seconds in most of rural southeast England? Not like those seconds matter of course since that's where the Tories regularly break 60% and what not.

Anyways as for a future Lib Dem strategy, an underrated thing is that while there are still 4 years to correct course, assuming the Lib Dems do not surge from here to election day, they seem to have gone down, not up since 2019. They are currently polling around 8% when they got 13% or so in 2019.

So the Lib Dems in 2024 will not be playing offence for the most part, they will be playing defence. So while all their close 2nds and what not are nice and they should still try to keep them, they should take a narrow strategy that:

1) Tries to win the very few districts where the Lib Dems very narrowly failed. Obviously they will not win all of them or even a majority.

By this I am just referring to the 5 districts where a swing of under 1% is needed as barring unpredictable local circumstances and what not; I don't think the Lib Dems can flip anything else. I don't even think they can flip that many here, but the rest are essencially impossible. These 6 seats are:

Dunbartonshire East, Wimbledon, Sheffield Hallam, Carshalton & Wallington, Cheltenham and Winchester

Ironically they are probably better positioned in the latter 3 than the former 3, where local circumstances mattered more into getting the Lib Dems just narrowly miss the finish line. All 6 are winnable though I'd say they have a better shot at the latter 3

2) More importantly, try and concentrate all their efforts into holding what they have. They will be playing defence in 2024 unless they start polling at around 12-13% again, so they need to behave like that.

Granted most of their seats are safe, or as safe as a Lib Dem seat can get. They need to campaign in all of them but still seats like Bath, Oxford West & Abingdon, St. Albans or the 3 London seats they can get away with a normal campaign.

The Lib Dems really would need to concentrate into their 4 Scottish seats (trying to position themselves as the best unionist party I suppose does the trick) and Westmorland and Lonsdale (no idea how to deal with this one, I guess Farron has a big personal vote?)

[Former President tack50]

Probably a bit off-topic, but on that note why did Blair support the Irak war? Throughout Europe the trend was generally opposed to the war, and Blair in particular seems like a bad fit for supporting it?

I would imagine most of Labour's base was oppsoed to the war, and in fact I would not be surprised if there were more supporters of the war among the Conservatives in 2002!

Why did Blair side with Bush over Chirac and Schröder? Especially when Blairism is not that far from what Schröder was doing in Germany

[Former President tack50]

Since the Corbynists seem to have become devoted Lib Dems now, hopefully after destroying the Lib Dems they will become Tories and destroy the Conservative Party some time in the mid 2020s

Unfortunately unlike Labour I don't think the Lib Dems can survive such a blow

[Former President tack50]

What is being counted as endorsements here? I suppose just MPs plus local government councillors? Do the Lib Dems even have 2000 local government councillors to begin with?

[Former President tack50]

Also, the LD path back to relevance has two steps:

1. Win enough seats to hold the balance of power in a hung Parliament;
2. Play their cards well enough to get credit for keeping their coalition partner in check.

If they're only seeking to win about 20 seats, the window in which 1 is even possible as a strategy is incredibly narrow, especially since in those circumstances you can always promise to built a new relief road in County Antrim instead to win over the DUP.

And to demand PR at all costs to enter coalition, which would probably be easy enough to get Labour to do.

I take it you're too young to remember how things went down in 2011?

This is partly what I’m referring to. Clegg should have demanded at the very least actual PR, not settled for AV (which would have produced a less proportional result than FPTP at the election), and really the next time the party is in coalition, they ought to make it a condition of the coalition to adopt PR without a referendum.

In fairness, "adopt PR without a referendum" will look very bad on the Lib Dems, they would easily be painted as undemocratic and "wanting to impose what got soundly defeated in 2011"

[Former President tack50]

You're assuming national list PR and no threshold which isn't what PR in the UK would look like: in reality it'd resemble what Scotland has strongly and we have an effective threshold of around 5.5-6% (it changes depending on the constituency results and a litany of other factors) and in a 2015-17 style election that would result in the Lib Dems not having the support to win list seats in parts of the UK, and certainly if they underperformed those numbers.  Especially since based on recent evidence the Lib Dems get more votes under FPTP than they would under PR: so their vote would fall close to that 5-6% range that puts them at risk of being shut out.  Look at Scotland and Wales for examples of that: the Lib Dems have no PR seats in the Welsh Assembly and in Scotland they got one list MSP in 2016 because 5.5% Scotland wide isn't enough to guarantee list seats in every region while the Greens, that got 6.6% managed to get enough list seats to finish ahead of them despite the Lib Dems also winning four constituencies.

Given the fact that the UK actually does (well more like "used to" because Brexit) have a kind of election that is both national in nature and using PR (the EU Parliament elections), wouldn't the model resemble more the EU Parliamentary elections than the Scotland/Wales elections?

A model like the EU elections probably involves dividing Britain into the 12 regions it uses for the EU elections.

Yet instead of each region electing 3-10 MEPs (for a total of 73); the UK would instead be electing 600-650 MPs at Westminster so the regions would be 10 times larger.

That would mean that the effective threshold would be slightly above 1% (the Southeastern region probably elects somewhere around 80-90 MPs) assuming no artificial thresholds are used of course.

[Former President tack50]

I think people still overestimate the willingess of the Labour Party to back PR; especially because it's seen (incorrectly) as the worse sort of naval gazing- I remember the 'he needs a helmet, not a new voting system' type ads we had in 2011.

I think the only accepted way to change a voting system is via referendum & I don't think PR would pass; the two easiest arguments are 1.) It costs too much 2.) Do you want Farage/Galloway/Momentum in Parliament?

There's a certain visceral distrust of it; while the AV vote in 2011 most likely did a lot worse for a whole host of reasons (being a half way system, clegg being hated etc) it wouldn't fill me with confidence. Even more so it's part of a horse trade for a government.

On a slightly related note there's a tendency in both the Lib Dems & Labour to talk about PR without working out how you achieve it (aka 326 votes for the bill & 50%+1 in a referendum)

I unfortunately agree that there is no way PR is winning a referendum in the near future, although I think that just in the last few years support for it in Labour has increased substantially. It would, politically, be a hard sell to implement it without holding a referendum, though not impossible.

The only way I see a large shift in public opinion towards electoral reform is if we see an election where the party with the second-largest number of votes ends up with a majority, or a similarly egregiously unproportional result.

For what is worth, 2015 was the most unrepresentative result in the UK in decades if I am not mistaken, with UKIP getting just 1 seat on 13% of the votes and the Lib Dems getting 8 on 8% of the vote; while the SNP got 56 on under 5% of the vote and the Tories got a majority on 37%.

2005 is also not going to win any representation awards either, with Labour getting a majority on 35% of the vote and only a 3 point gap with the Conservatives.

[Former President tack50]

When was the last time all three """major""" party leaders represented London constituencies? Has it ever happened before?

Keeping in mind what Realpolitik said, last time the leaders of both Labor and the Conservatives represented (modern day) London constituencies was probably in 1951; with Atlee representing Walthanmstow West and Churchill representing Woodford.

Though it is worth noting that back in the 50s the borders of London were smaller (I think?), so both constituencies were actually in Essex, even if their modern day successors are located in Greater London.

1945 is an slightly better one as Attlee's constituency then was Limehouse (located in the smaller borders of 1940s London); though Churchill's is still Woodford.

Other than those 2 (and obviously 1950) I can't find any examples since Labour's first election in the 1900s