2020 Liberal Democrats Leadership Election

[IceAgeComing]

I think East Dunbartonshire is gone for them personally - or at least much trickier for them to win.  They were competitive entirely because they won it in 2005 at the height of Labour unpopularity on the back of strong local government presence; they lost it in 2015 because of coalition unpopularity but regained it in 2017 because Swinson stood again which, even if she didn't have a personal vote, put the impression in the eyes on anti-SNP voters that the Lib Dems were the leaders and so they got a lot of tactical votes.  They'd only need a small swing to get it back in 2024 but its a long way away: any personal vote that Swinson does have slowly evaporates even if she does stand again (which I think is unlikely); their local government presence is less than it was and in both Scottish Parliament seats that cover the East Dunbartonshire constituency the Lib Dems aren't competitive - fourth in both Strathkelvin and Bearsden (12.5%) and Clydebank and Milngavie (8.9%) and while the latter is a cross-border seat the result does demonstrate weakness there.

They are the party best placed to benefit from unionist tactical voting, and in 2019 they were the only party where you can point to evidence of that being a thing - in the rest of the country the main pattern was a strong Labour -> SNP swing - but with a four and a half year term likely the historic evidence is that the Lib Dems fall backwards in that sort of situation in a seat like this: where they don't have a massive, deep history of success.  Of course we're talking about an election four years away and a lot could have changed by then (SNP government could be very unpopular; perhaps we've had another independence referendum, anything could happen) but basing any tactics purely off of the 2019 result would be silly there with those Scottish Parliament results showing that its not exactly an area of core strength.

I think the Lib Dems knew in 2015 that any rebuilding would be long, painful and for a while at least result in a lot more pain than actual success.  Focusing on the countryside would be sensible for all the reasons given by others; the other thing they ought to do is really go back to their old strategy of grinding away in local government elections, regaining that councillor base they lost (and perhaps building new areas of strength) before, in many years time probably, turning that into seats at Westminster.  The Brexit debate and their rating improving in 2019 gave them false confidence that Brexit was the only issue they needed but the average Lib Dem voter has always been very different from the party, and focusing on voters in places where outside of perhaps the occasional by-election they've not been successful rather than places where they had a base not too long ago and which has a history of Liberal voting was a folly.  I moved up north mid-campaign but before that I lived in North London (actually in Hornsey and Wood Green which the Lib Dems put a lot of resources into to finish a distant second with 26% of the vote: and that's a seat they held five years ago) and there was sign of the Lib Dems spending a lot of time and money across North London in some places where they surely knew they didn't have a hope in hell and while their vote share went up it delivered them  all: perhaps if they'd targeted those resources better they'd have actually won some seats.

The Lib Dems were always a party of protest for voters: if you didn't like your party but hated the guts of the other side; you voted Lib Dem to send a message.  Going into the coalition killed that and those protest voters went to other places - right wing voters got UKIP and the Brexit Party for a while, left wing voters got the Greens: there's been an increase in Independent and Residents Association councillors and I'm pretty sure that most of that support would have gone Liberal in the past.  There isn't a strong base of dedicated Liberals in the UK to really run as that sort of party if you want to win a lot of seats: they need to rebuilt that protest party reputation to get any meaningful success under FPTP.  Its long and its boring to get that back but, hey, that's what politics is at the end of the day: a long boring slog that, at times, is ultimately futile.

[IceAgeComing]

In 2010 they had seven seats: Bermondsey and Old Southwark, Brent Central, Carshalton and Wallington, Horney and Wood Green, Kingston and Surbiton, Sutton and Cheam and Twickenham.  In 2019 they had three seats: Kingston and Surbiton, Richmond Park and Twickenham.

Three of those 2010 seats are very unlikely to go back: Brent Central was the remnants of a Lib Dem by-election gain right after the Iraq War started and in 2017 they lost their deposit there (although they recovered to just under 10% in 2019); Horney and Wood Green was a seat gained in 2005 when Labour wasn't very popular locally and despite the Lib Dems throwing a lot of money into it they only got 26% in 2019 while Labour cleared 50 and without Simon Hughes the Lib Dems went backwards in Bermondsey despite the London-wide pattern and are now 28% behind Labour.

The other seats are in that South West London area which is where they've always been strongest, and where they have Local Government strength which is important.  Even then they've gone backwards there recently: they actually lost Carshalton in 2019 (where their Brexit policy probably hurt them, and might have cost them the seat); Sutton and Cheam is a long way away for them now as well.  Richmond has always been a target for them but I think that 2016 by-election helped them there: by winning it in 2016 it gave Olney a bit of name recognition and helped with morale since even after losing it in 2017 they knew they could get it back.

The issue with that is that their peak there is limited to the seats they currently hold, Carshalton and Sutton and Cheam realistically.  Sure the Lib Dems were close in 2019 but Labour are the stronger party locally, they held it between 1997 and 2001 and I believe they are the strongest party on local government there which gives them the better organisation and base to start from.  There's no sign anywhere else in London of a Lib Dem breakthrough: and realistically unless there's a by-election in a Tory seat with a strange result there's not likely to be another one outside that bit of London any time soon.

[IceAgeComing]

They'd been hemmoraging support in Bromley for years before: the only Parliamentary seat they were contested was Orpington and 2001 was as good a chance they had of winning there.  I think its a place where the local parties just died during the coalition: that's what the results seem to suggest.

That's another issue the Lib Dems have: in a lot of places where they were historically competitive their parties are moribund or struggling with very low membership because of the legacy of the coalition.  The Isle of Wight is probably an extreme example but its one that's worth talking about: the Liberal Democrats had majority control of Isle of Wight County Council from 1981 to 1998 and were the largest party until 2005; they held the Parliamentary seat in the 70s and 80s, and also between 1997 and 2001.  In the 2017 locals, they won two seats, got less votes than Labour and the Greens; in the 2017 General Election they lost their deposit and in 2019 they stood down to support the Greens.  That's an extreme example but it shows the issue they have to deal with.  The Brexit issue in 2019 helped to balance this out in certain places but they didn't win in a lot of those and who knows if those activists who care a lot about Brexit would even back the Lib Dems in future local and general elections - I think you'll see a strong shift back away from them.

That's the barrier for the Lib Dems: and they have to look at these places and try to figure out which ones are gone, if not forever for a long time (like the Isle of Wight) and which they can focus on to regain their support.  The worst thing they could do is focus on the places they did well in in 2019 since those are the ones often with the smallest base of activists and by doing that they make the situation worse in the places which have that local base of support.

[IceAgeComing]

Why is Moran even a LibDem? She could easily sit with the hard left at labour.

There’s nothing really liberal about any of the candidates

Imagine if the Corbynite voters went to the LibDems, resulting in the LibDems being left of Labour.

The Lib Dems were arguably overall to the left of Labour during parts of the 2000s.
Labour isn't inherently the more left-wing party.

I know that it went left of Labour, because of Blair and Iraq

I think even during the height of Charles Kennedy & especially afterwards there was somethings that the Liberal Democrats were shockingly right wing on; a lot of the rubbish around localism (the party was historically infamous for opposing new developments) & around cutting 'red tape' 'wasteful spending'. I had a quick glance at the 2005 manifesto and saw boasts about 'cutting subsidies', 'cutting stamp duty' (the tax on house-buying) and complaining that benefits were means tested.

The Party in the 2000s was chasing every single popular cause & gap in the market it could find- this naturally lead it to occupy a space around Labours left yet is part of the reason why it ended up where it did in 2010.

I mean the Lib Dems weren't inherently anything really: they were always primarily a party of protest in the eyes of the public.  They were the party that people would go to to send a message to governments but when they didn't want to vote for the other side; the party that people would tactically vote for to keep the other side out.  The evidence of 2015-19 (and if you go back a lot earlier you could include 1970 and 1951-59) is that the number of core Liberal Democrats is incredibly small: deposit losing in most of the country.

A lot of that was because they had to satisfy such a weird group of people: voters in inner-city London seats that had been safe as houses Labour for generations and also rural West Country seats where the Tories would dominate - and in both of those groups they had to attract both protest votes from the party they were running against and tactical votes from the other parties in that seat.  When they were in local government it was often in places where they were the only viable partisan opposition so they could govern very differently in different parts of the country - often they'd sell themselves as 'more competent' versions of the majority party beforehand with some slightly more radical flagship policies.  

This is why the coalition was so destructive: for the first time since, what, the 1920s they had to make meaningful national policy decisions that actually mattered and in doing that they alienated large portions of what had become their core support.  Add in the rise of UKIP (and Brexit Party in 2019 I guess) and the Greens acting as alternative form of protest vote for people and what they always did to get support doesn't really work anymore, especially with Brexit removed as a major issue.  Not looked at this in major depth but there are links between places that the Lib Dems did well in local elections in the past and places where UKIP did well afterwards: and a lot of that is the same thing - protest votes from conservatives who don't like the current path of the Tories.  I think that the recent increase of Independents and Residents Association councillors is the same thing: people that would have been Lib Dem in the past organise outside them now.

Ironic when you think about it: the Lib Dems as a party rail against populism when they were the populist party until recently.

[IceAgeComing]

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.

That's why "DEMAND PR INSTANTLY" isn't a viable strategy: changing an electoral system is incredibly complicated and requires defining what system you want to use (STV, AMS or List PR; if its the latter two do you have open or closed lists; with AMS many list seats relative to constituency ones do you have and in List PR do you go for lots of small regions or a small number of large ones; if you go for STV how many members do you try to get per constituency and how do you handle places like the Scottish Islands and the Isle of Wight that are currently considered as special cases worthy of special representation: do they get to keep 1/2 member seats while everyone else doesn't?) and really requires a long period of consultation to work out exactly what system to use and to sort out all of the legislation to make sure that there aren't any loop holes in it; a period of time for a referendum if you have one which is sort of required to get popular legitimacy for a new voting system (and 2011 has given you precedent that one must happen) and also a period of time to educate people about how the new voting system works and what they have to do.  Its that legitimacy part that's most important: if people don't view the system as being legitimate then they'll not be likely to see the outcome of an election as legitimate and plenty of people will be campaigning to go back to FPTP - and indeed that's why you'll see lots of PR-sympathetic people in Labour (and the SNP and honestly even the Tories: there are a few there) refuse PR without a referendum because they know that legitimacy matters a lot.  As far as I'm aware the Lib Dem manifesto only says PR but not what precise form of PR to use and in that sort of situation they aren't exactly in a position themselves to claim a mandate from their own voters for any particular electoral system.

There's a reason why New Zealand took a couple of election cycles to change from FPTP to MMP: making sure the new system has legitimacy is even more important than making sure that its the perfect one.

e: also every region that the Lib Dems do well in sort of was sparked by them doing the building up local support in local elections and then turning that into constituency support in a General Election or by-elections.  You can go right back to Orpington in 1963 sparking a (temporary) Liberal revival in South East London; or the Liberal success in South West London sparking from some good by-election performances in the early 70s proving that the Liberals could compete there: and some strong performances in the 1990s and 2000s against both major parties won them seats in parts of the country they never would.  Without those by-elections its harder for them to get that sort of mid-term oxygen and also to prove to voters that they can win in certain bits of the country: and while under PR that doesn't really matter you would still be dealing with voters with a FPTP mindset.

[IceAgeComing]

You raise some good points, and you are right that there will be hurdles in implementing PR. I think that at the moment it’s quite hard to gauge the public attitude to electoral reform, as it hasn’t really been an issue for a while. The 2011 referendum on a system which in practice would not have changed much had only 42.2% turnout after a campaign which received very little attention for a national referendum and turned into a personal referendum on Clegg.

Nonetheless, there are no current PR systems in which you have two parties dominating to the extent that has happened in England in the last two elections. West Germany pre-reunification is the only semi-comparable example I can think of (and I doubt the UK would be using a threshold as high as 5%). PR would of course make coalitions inevitable after every election. It would not be wise for the Lib Dems to enter coalition again for a very long time with the Tories, but I think as a sort of semi-permanent partner to a centre-left Labour party, it could be advantageous to the Lib Dems. They have always had their greatest success as a centre-left check on an electable Labour.

And to your point that the PR system likely to be actually adopted could disadvantage the Lib Dems, the Electoral Reform System had a report (https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/latest-news-and-research/publications/the-2019-general-election-voters-left-voiceless/#sub-section-33) which found that under every conceivable system other than FPTP the will Lib Dems would have gained anywhere between 48 and 68 seats. I am also still far from convinced that PR would result in a reduced vote share for the party.

It is certainly not inconceivable that at the next election the Labour wind up just short of a majority, leaving a deal with the Lib Dems as their most desirable route into government. In such a case getting real PR would be far less difficult than with the Tories in 2010 (Starmer actually seems quite amenable to it) and the Lib Dems simply have to attempt it and expend a good deal of their negotiating leverage on it. The chances of ending up with fewer than 40 seats are vanishingly small.

Malta uses PR (STV; five members per seat so it passes the proportionality test as well) and has a true two party system: you have to go back to 1962 to find a third party MP elected in their own right (a couple of members of the Democratic Party won seats in 2017 but they stood on a combined ticket with the Nationalist Party so they don't really count) and New Zealand uses a PR system (MMP) which is very much trending towards being an effective two-bloc system: New Zealand First is gone in the next election and likely won't return which leaves you with two parties of the left who'd only work with each other (Labour and the Greens) and two parties of the right that'd only work with each other (Nationals and ACT) with ACT only getting in because the Nationals effectively concede a safe seat to them.  And in reality its trending towards a two party system: the Greens will be near the 5% threshold and ACT below it with no one else getting above 2%.  Pretty sure there are other examples but those two come to mind instantly especially since both come from the Westminster tradition and New Zealand is the closest example to what a post-PR UK would look like.

In every PR election ever held in the United Kingdom with the exception of the 2019 European Parliament Election - an example of special circumstances if ever there was one - the Liberal Democrats underperform relative to how they do in comparable FPTP elections.  In every Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and London Assembly Election (where we have FPTP and PR results and an increasingly knowledgable voter base that know what the two votes mean) the Liberal Democrats perform better in the FPTP bit than in the PR bit of the ballot; and in every prior European Election the Lib Dems consistently performed 2-3% below what they went on to do at the following General Election.  Its a consistent pattern: and one that makes sense when you think about it.  The Liberal Democrats traditionally were the protest vote party: they were the people that voters of both major parties would go to to make a point since under FPTP they were the only viable third party (and in 2019 were the pro-Europe third party).  When you add PR in to things there suddenly are other options for voters: and so rather than going for the Liberal Democrats you'll see voters vote Green, or for whatever the Brexit Party is called now - and that's why voters voted UKIP and why there was this big Lib Dem>UKIP shift.  Its a brave decision to argue against the evidence of every PR election in the UK bar one and I think the Lib Dem leadership would probably be aware of that as well.

Also the Scottish Parliament elections tend to be really rather proportional - certainly not any less proportional than many countries that have voting systems that would be considered PR systems.  The SNP got a majority on 44% in 2011 but that was as much because there was a fair amount of wasted votes (the Greens got 4% in that election and that meant that they were often just short of a regional MSP on around that share of the vote; the Lib Dems were the same with their 5.5%; you also had around 4% of votes for other parties as well) which effectively reduces the threshold you need in order to get a majority and would do in any PR system.  In 2016 that didn't happen as much (Lib Dems got less list seats on their 5%; but the Greens went up and managed to actually win a list seat almost everywhere) which was a factor in the SNP not getting a majority then.  Its not perfect but no system is: and because of that constituency link its always going to be the PR system that would be preferred in any electoral reform which is why the Jenkins Commission went for a modified (and worse) version of it the last time there was any government action on this topic.