Author: Harry

In the latest informal leadership survey carried out by Guy Benson (@GuyBenson96 on Twitter) and me, Layla Moran has inched ahead of Ed Davey, as the race begins to narrow.

Headline figures are:

LAYLA MORAN       51% (+5%)

SIR ED DAVEY        49% (-5%)

Fieldwork was carried out between 11-19 July 2020. 825 respondents. Margin of error is 3%. Full tables are available here.

During the fieldwork for this poll, we received some criticism from some quarters. I’d like to make crystal clear that this is just an informal poll, and we have never claimed that it will be as accurate as a full, professionally produced poll. Sampling took place on Twitter and Facebook, so there is bias towards those who use social media which we can’t correct with weighting. However, this information is just collected for fun – Guy and I are just amateur psephologists who find this kind of thing interesting and enjoyable. And this poll does contain results from a reasonably representative group of people when considering age, gender, past vote and region. It is a snapshot, and shouldn’t be taken as being more than that. As ever, it would be unwise to rely on it while campaigning.

KEY CHANGES

The biggest changes are amongst 65+ voters, and amongst undecided voters. In the former category, while they were Ed Davey’s strongest group last time, they have moved towards Layla Moran this time round in a decisive fashion. It should be noted that this poll had a significantly larger sample of over-65s (more than double the previous poll), so this could simply be reverting to the true trend after a sampling problem last time.

But arguably the more significant change is what is happening amongst undecided voters. Last time, 13% were undecided, compared to around 9% this time. This means around a quarter of undecideds have now chosen a candidate. And analysing the data, the results are significant: of those who have gone from undecided to ‘decided’, 57% now voting for Layla Moran, while 43% are voting for Ed Davey.

Furthermore, there has been a significant amount of churn within each camp as well. 8% of those who said they were originally Layla voters have switched to Ed; 13% of original Ed voters have switched to Layla. This means that for every Moran to Davey switcher, Layla Moran is getting 1.7 Davey to Moran switchers. This is a significant trend.

OTHER FACTORS 

POLL WARNING: Discussion of subsamples below!

GENDER

In terms of gender, the counterintuitive pattern of 2019 has been restored: more men (55% vs 45%) are voting for Moran, while more women (57% vs 43%) are voting for Davey. It is unclear to us why precisely this is.

REGION

While these are small subsamples, and so we should be at pains not to read too much into them on their own, the results appear to fly against the conventional wisdom about the regional strengths and appeals of each campaign. Moran appears to be doing better than some had expected in parts of the North and in Scotland and Wales, while Davey is winning strong support in Yorkshire and Devon and Cornwall.

AGE

The sample was more representative this time than last time, with considerably more older voters. The same age trend as in the first poll was present, with young voters going for Moran, and older voters going for Davey. The one exception to this was a pretty pronounced swing amongst over-65s from Davey to Moran. This could be a sampling error, or it could be that the previous poll was a sampling error. Be careful about this figure.

2019 VOTE

Moran appears to be gaining in terms of Swinson voters from 2019. As this was by far the biggest group, this could help to explain why she has pulled ahead in the overall voting intention figure. There has also been a smaller swing (well within the margin of error) of 2019 Davey voters to Moran.

CONCLUSION

With 9-10% of voters still undecided, this election still has an absolutely enormous amount to play for. Everything currently hangs in the balance, and things are the closest of any leadership election either of us have seen. As the hustings continue, more members will make up their minds – and with a significant smattering of each side’s voters not entirely enthusiastic or sure about their choice (more on this later…) there is everything still to play for.

We are choosing a new leader. The frontrunners appear to be Layla Moran and Ed Davey, while Wera Hobhouse is also running. One of the major points of discussion is how we deal with the legacy of our involvement in the Coalition. Some in the party, however, have dismissed this concern as being ill-founded, or even self-serving or introspective. But it is in my view still an important factor.

The headline reason is its impact on hindering the national campaign, and the effects of that hindrance further down the chain. To support it, I will use evidence from national media during the 2019 general election, as well as the scant polling evidence we have about voter attitudes towards the Coalition. For good measure, I will then take each major criticism of Coalition concern and establish why those criticisms are poorly founded.

The National Picture

At the 2010 general election, the Liberal Democrats won 23% of the vote. Since then, we have barely broken 11% in a general election. Our popularity in Westminster elections is dismal. Despite the burst of success between the 2019 local elections and European elections, it quickly faded away back into nothing as soon as the national stage became the top priority. That we have grown only 3.7% in half a decade is alarming, and mirrors the doldrums of the postwar/pre-Thorpe era Liberal Party.

There is ample evidence that in a national election, people vote on national issues. In 2019 specifically, YouGov polling showed that of the top 14 issues cited by voters, 10 were wholly national issues, including all of the top five.

National attention is also what buoyed our success in the 2019 European elections. After significant press attention following local election victories, our support swelled to around 20% in those elections, and then up to 24% and first place in the Westminster polls in the weeks afterwards. It is true that our support swells the most in the areas where we have a local presence, but in the absence of any significant, world-record-setting local campaigning in the three weeks between the 2019 local elections and the 2019 European elections, national attention is what must account for the near-doubling of our vote share in opinion polls taken immediately before and immediately after these events. To claim otherwise is to suggest that prior to the 2019 local elections, we weren’t working as hard as after them. In my experience as a member who joined in the dying days of the Coalition and has worked on countless campaigns since, this is not true.

National success lifts us, then. But the same is also true of national failure. In 2015, despite the efforts of local parties across the country, the national picture saw us decimated. In 2017, despite huge new membership, Tim Farron’s views on homosexuality are widely believed to have hamstrung our campaign, diverting press attention away from our message and towards questioning him on the issue. Here we see two types of national failure. 2015 was because of the deep unpopularity of Nick Clegg, the reality that we had broken a promise, and other factors like fear of a Miliband government. This is what I will call “prevailing conditions” national failure. 2017 was because of continued failures of media management and a seemingly continuous stream of questions about an issue we didn’t have an answer to. I will call this “media-based” national failure.

Coalition Questions

The reason national failure can have such an impact is because the vast majority of people receive their political news and information through the national media, consuming political news in very short bursts. The public will glance at a newspaper article either in hard copy or online, and will hear the headlines on the news in the evening. Occasionally, significant media set-pieces will happen, such as TV debates, and these will be watched by a large chunk of the public. It is through these day-to-day snippets and the impression given by politicians in these set-piece events that the public will form an impression of a party and its leader.

Because of the centrality of national media to public opinion, media-based failures are particularly calamitous. The public will see a politician under fire, or dealing poorly with a question, or saying something patently untrue or unbelievable, and will be less likely to want to vote for them. This negative opinion then colours the voter’s reception of local campaigning – if you already think Leader X is a joke with zero credibility, you are likely to have a more dismissive attitude to her party’s leaflets when they come through the letterbox. And, because local campaigning is likely to reach a voter only a very few times over the course of a campaign, local efforts are almost never enough to outweigh the national errors.

This is why Coalition is so dangerous an issue, because it has the potential to be a serious media-based failure. A leader who cannot deal adequately with questions about Coalition, about trust, about voting records, about austerity, about hypocrisy in the national media will be viewed as incompetent and unserious by the public at large, and local campaigning will be treated less favourably as a result.

This is a point which Coalition concern sceptics often ignore. They say that they don’t hear the Coalition come up on the doorstep, and thus imply that the doorstep is all that matters. But that is not true. Election campaigns are not simply the aggregate of every voter spoken to individually on a local level, as I have demonstrated above. And even if voters don’t bring it up specifically, poor responses to the Coalition question will still colour their perception of the basic competence and viability of our party. In short, even if a voter doesn’t expressly say “I don’t trust you because of the Coalition”, that doesn’t mean our leader’s response to tough questions about the Coalition doesn’t influence how they perceive the Liberal Democrats.

And this is borne out by the evidence. It is obvious that a significant number of our 2010 voters abandoned us. The last polling done asking them why they haven’t returned to us was carried out in 2017. It found that for 38% of them, their top reason was the Coalition. This is more than double the next most prevalent issue, that voting Lib Dem would be a wasted vote. Things may have changed in the three years since, but it would be surprising if that 38% figure had suddenly plummeted. These are voters who have voted for us in the past, not hard-line socialists who would never even contemplate us. We can win them back – but to do that we have to acknowledge what is keeping them away. Denying that the Coalition is still an issue which impacts upon our party’s success is surely untenable.

2019: A Case Study

A perfect illustration of the continuing importance of the Coalition to the national campaign is the 2019 general election. Four years and two leaders later, I remember hoping that this might be the first election where it wouldn’t come up as much, and we would be able to move on. But I was wrong.

The 2019 general election was officially called when legislation permitting an early election received Royal Assent on 31 October 2019. Between that date and the general election, there were 41 days. Going back through national media pieces about the party and Jo Swinson for that period, on no fewer than 21 days – a majority – were there pieces devoted to the Coalition, austerity, or Jo Swinson’s voting record. What is worse is that on every single one of the eight days leading up to election day, there was at least one national media piece on this theme.

From the list of those media pieces below, you will see that the worst dates are 22 November, 4 December and 9 December 2019. It is no coincidence that these are the days after the most significant media appearances by Jo Swinson – the BBC Question Time special, the Andrew Neil interview, and the Channel 4 debate. And within the BBC Question Time special, of the 14 questions asked to Swinson, a majority (8) were about the Coalition, her voting record, and Lib Dem trustworthiness as a result.

Far from being a break with past elections, the scant coverage of the Liberal Democrats in the national media consisted of almost wall-to-wall coverage of questions about the Coalition and austerity, hitting its peak in the immediate run-up to polling day. Some will say that this wasn’t the only issue we were skewered on, and it is true that there were also pieces about our Stop Brexit pledge, and about the claim that Jo Swinson could become Prime Minister. But it must be acknowledged that the Coalition did not go away, and our failure to satisfactorily answer questions on the issue opened us up to a media onslaught which will have reached voters and will have coloured their opinions of our party. The combination of the three factors (Brexit, presidential campaign, Coalition) made us look worse than disagreeable – they made us look like a joke, and an irrelevance.

Furthermore, some will say that those members of the public who brought it up during national media events were merely “Labour plants” or “Momentum activists”. But even if they were (and there is scant evidence for this), that doesn’t mean that their questions weren’t damaging. By forcing us onto a defence of the Coalition on national television – one where we looked hypocritical, inept and untrustworthy, reminding voters of the biggest factor keeping them away in 2017 – we had no time to talk about the issues we were actually running on. And because of that, the media wrote another set of articles reminding voters of our past record on the very issues we were now campaigning on in the opposite direction. Such questioning and such coverage smothered our campaign – it gave the impression of an incompetent party, unable to answer questions satisfactorily or honestly, and under siege, in decline, and deflating. It was not an attractive proposition for voters.

Specific Objections

“Nobody I spoke to on the doorstep brought it up.” This is anecdotal evidence from the places you personally canvassed. And even if a voter doesn’t expressly bring up the Coalition, it doesn’t mean that their perceptions of our party as a whole aren’t influenced by how we deal with the question and by the way our response to it is reported in the media. Poor responses and the appearance of hypocrisy on any issue will always diminish us in the eyes of the voters.

“The only people who care are Labour hard-liners.” See the previous paragraph. Also, even if only Labour hard-liners bring it up on national television, it still means we have to answer the question, and answering unconvincingly will still make us look incompetent to all voters.

“The real problem is just that we don’t defend it enough.” Perhaps! But this doesn’t mean that the Coalition itself is not an issue which we need to have a response to. It is perfectly valid to think we just need to be more robust about defending it – I disagree with you, however. In the most recent polling by YouGov, the number one reason for 2010 Lib Dem voters not to vote for us anymore was because of the Coalition itself. And defending welfare cuts and austerity looks hypocritical for a party pledging to… overturn welfare cuts and austerity.

“Stop being so self-indulgent, this is such navel-gazing.” No, it isn’t, because as long as we keep getting questioned about the Coalition (which I believe will still happen, particularly if we don’t elect a non-Coalition leader this time), our responses to that question will have an impact upon how voters perceive our competence. It is absurd to think that voters assess our competence on every other issue, but somehow have no reaction whatsoever to a weak or unconvincing or apparently hypocritical answer about the Coalition.

“It’ll get brought up whoever is the leader.” I think this is true to an extent: but having a Coalition minister as leader makes the issue a very easy target, as we saw with Jo Swinson (and conversely, did not see as much with Tim Farron – during the entire 2017 election campaign, there were only three days where pieces about the Coalition were written, which is 67% less than in 2019). Furthermore, different candidates will be more convincing answering the questions about it. In my opinion, even if you think what we did in Coalition was good and don’t want to disavow it entirely, we can be convincing on the issue by having someone who was not part of it, and who doesn’t have a record of voting with the Conservatives, because they have no anchor dragging them back into the discourse about it.

Conclusions

The national picture matters. If our national campaign goes wrong, voters quickly pick up on it, and it leaves our local campaigners simply carrying out damage limitation. We did not go from first place to 11% between May and December because our activists suddenly put in half the effort. It was because of failings in the national campaign which made voters unwilling to trust us with their vote.

If the national picture matters, we have to examine what went wrong in 2019. Part of it was the presidential-style campaign; part of it was our Stop Brexit message. But with Coalition articles present on most days throughout the campaign, and dominating our coverage in the last week; with most of our set-piece media appearances having a significant section about austerity and voting records; and with the last available polling evidence showing that former voters of ours are most repelled by the Coalition, it is surely impossible to deny that the Coalition is and was an issue.

Dismissing the issue as simply the preserve of hard-line Labour activists “who will never vote for us anyway” is a mistake, because elections are not just about persuading individual swing voters in doorstep conversations. I have shown that any negative impact upon the national campaign will hamstring us in our target seats. And whether we like it or not, opening ourselves up to the criticism of hypocrisy and of supporting austerity is to create such a negative impact for ourselves.

We have to get to grips with this issue. Part of the reason I am backing Layla Moran is because she does not have that Coalition voting record, and so will not be questioned as severely about it, as shown by a comparison of national media between 2017 and 2019. When she does get asked about it, I believe she will have a better response when the issue is put. But – and this is the important bit – even if you disagree with me on who to support in this leadership election, please at least acknowledge that how we deal with the Coalition’s legacy is something that matters and needs genuine discussion, rather than dismissing it as a non-issue we shouldn’t even bother thinking about.

APPENDIX 1: COALITION IN THE NATIONAL MEDIA, ELECTION 2019

Coalition articles

1 November 2019 [The Express]

2 November 2019 [The i]

2 November 2019 [Express and Star]

3 November 2019 [Sunday Post]

7 November 2019 [Vice]

9 November 2019 [The Mirror]

10 November 2019 [Daily Record]

13 November 2019 [TalkRadio]

15 November 2019 [PoliticsHome]

18 November 2019 [The Guardian]

20 November 2019 [The Guardian]

21 November 2019 [Gal-Dem]

22 November 2019 [Metro]

22 November 2019 [Mirror]

22 November 2019 [Scottish Herald]

23 November 2019 [The Times]

3 December 2019 [Metro]

4 December 2019 [Guardian]

4 December 2019 [BBC]

4 December 2019 [Independent]

4 December 2019 [Daily Mail]

4 December 2019 [The Scotsman]

4 December 2019 [LBC]

5 December 2019 [London Economic]

6 December 2019 [Guardian]

7 December 2019 [Guardian]

7 December 2019 [The Economist]

8 December 2019 [ITV]

8 December 2019 [Guardian]

9 December 2019 [Independent]

9 December 2019 [local newspapers, syndicated]

9 December 2019 [The Scotsman]

9 December 2019 [London Economic]

10 December 2019 [Express]

11 December 2019 [The i]

4 December was the day after being grilled on it by Andrew Neil

22 November was the day after the BBC Question Time special

9 December was the day after the Channel 4 debate

APPENDIX 2: COALITION IN THE NATIONAL MEDIA, 2017 ELECTION

27 April 2017 [The Guardian]

1 June 2017 [The Guardian]

7 June 2017 [The i]

Hold more than a cursory conversation with a Liberal Democrat, particularly one who has been involved in the party since before the Coalition, and you’ll almost certainly hear them extol the virtues of “community politics” as the party’s salvation and bedrock. The principle of embedding deeply into our communities and becoming supremely concerned with potholes, bin collections and community petitions has won us thousands of council seats over the years, and is frequently seen as crucial to our capacity to come back from national defeats. If we retain a strong local base through community activism, the logic says, we can hold on until the next election and convert that into national success.

This logic is not necessarily wrong. Clearly, being a party with a wealth of activists, active local volunteers, and a less overbearing federal party has its advantages, and has helped our survival since wipe-out in 2015. But increasingly, I fear it is not sufficient for our success, and is in fact becoming an obstacle to it. The survival tactic has been internalised as a catechism of liberal ideology, harmful because the tactic is itself so bereft of any real liberalism at all. And lately, the logic has been reversed. In our most recently won national seats, it is not because of strong local council bases that we were victorious, but rather, we won strong local council bases after taking back those seats (think Oxford West and Abingdon, where we stormed to victory last year two years after Layla Moran’s initial victory; or Bath, where we sensationally seized control from the Conservatives two years after Wera Hobhouse’s win).

My central argument here is that while survival is good, thriving is even better – and in order to thrive, we need to regain a sense of liberal vision, which, I argue, we have lost over the past few decades. With the flatness of our efforts over the past few years, and with our potentially necromancing issue (Brexit) now settled, we need an ideological revival. Local councils seem the best place to start this for two reasons: first, we actually control several of them outright, and so we can practise what we preach; and second, there are local elections coming up, so we can implement this more quickly.

The problems

At present, there is a litany of problems with our approach to local politics. Some of them are external, and beyond our control – for instance, local authority powers are limited, and in many cases reliant on funding from central government which is particularly unforthcoming at present. And the public often has a particular set of expectations as to what the function of a local authority is, and acting outside that set of expectations may be controversial. But many of our problems are internally created: a lack of imagination about what to do with the powers we have, and a general confusion as to what liberalism means and how we can practically implement it.

This latter problem is particularly acute. I may largely disagree with the conclusions that were drawn from it and implemented under the Coalition government, but the Orange Book era was the last time a coherent philosophy was motivating the party. Since 2015, it has seemed at times that we have had nothing to say, no broader vision for what the country would look like under a Liberal Democrat government. Our over-reliance on principles of common sense and ‘evidence’ (which, while comforting, can only ever provide half of the picture: once we collect evidence, our response to it must be governed by our political philosophies, ie our ideology) along with tightly-managed and focus-grouped national campaign messages have replaced values-based campaigning and the policy we derive from those values. Buzzwords drawn from the preamble to the Constitution are not enough – we need to have a discussion as a party about what we mean when we say we are liberal.

For my money, the core of liberalism is that it must be transformative. If it is not transformative, it has lost its essential essence – that radical opposition to conglomerations of arbitrary and unchecked power which transformed the world in centuries past. Liberalism which rests on its laurels or believes that it has ‘won’ or that the status quo is largely acceptable not only fails to recognise how broken our society and our economy are, but is in danger of sliding into privileged conservatism.

In my experience, much confusion lies in an essential misconception about what liberal politics means: it is the difference between personal liberalism and political liberalism. Personal liberalism is an attitudinal thing – it is personal tolerance and acceptance and permissiveness of things that we might ourselves disagree with. Political liberalism, however – the subject matter of politics and the end goal of us as a liberal party – is a matter of statecraft, and is concerned with ensuring that the government observes neutrality – that the rule of law is strong, that no group is preferred or discriminated against by the state, and that freedom is advanced on a societal basis. It is political liberalism that we should concern ourselves with – essentially, the question of what government should do to further freedom and non-discrimination.

Within political liberalism, we can distinguish further. Political liberalism is concerned with both means and ends. That is, political liberalism requires that politics be both procedurally liberal (means) and substantively liberal (ends). To put it in the simplest terms possible, we have to be liberal in style and liberal in substance.

Bringing it back to localism

Over the past day, I’ve asked different groups of people if they can identify a unique policy or principle of local governance which every Lib Dem council, no matter where it is, implements and adopts. Almost universally, the answer I have received is “nothing specific, but we are more open and consultative”. To be absolutely clear, I think being open and transparent is a fantastic thing – it is clearly of central importance to any democracy. But you will be able to see where I’m going with this – consultation and transparency are matters of style and procedure. They don’t tell us what the decisions themselves are which we’re consulting on or being transparent about. We are thus still left without an account of what liberals substantively believe in.

Why is this a problem? Very simply because exclusively procedural accounts of liberalism render us vulnerable to objections that we in fact don’t have any substance, or that we are ambivalent about the actual substantive decisions so long as liberal process has been observed. Liberalism cannot be as hollow as merely carrying out what local residents want, no matter how illiberal. It would render our ideology empty – we wouldn’t be standing for anything ourselves. That cannot be right.

And it isn’t right. Clearly, liberals do not have merely procedural goals. We are liberals because we have shared beliefs about what government should and should not do, and those beliefs are motivated by our political ideologies. For instance, liberals almost universally object to police overreach, to the use of indiscriminate facial recognition technology, to fining the homeless by abusing public space protection orders. These examples illustrate that we can and do have shared beliefs, motivated by liberal ideology, about what local government should substantively do. We just need to be more imaginative and unique, and be louder about these beliefs when we campaign.

Bringing it all together

“Harry, you’re mouthing off about political philosophy again,” I hear you say. So let me put this all into practical terms.

We should retain the good local stuff we’re doing already. Lib Dem councillors will always be best at making sure potholes get filled, bins get collected, and that communities are empowered. We will always ensure that consultations are carried out, that the public are engaged with (even if we disagree with some of them) and that information is circulated.

But let’s also be bold in having a local, liberal agenda to transform the lives of people living in the authorities we control, and make sure society works for them.

We should be the pre-eminent party of affordable housing and liveable towns and cities. This means insisting on affordable and social housing being present at volume in all housing developments. This means putting environmental considerations at the heart of all developments. This means discouraging car use through cycle and pedestrian friendly design, and expanding and cheapening public transport.

We should be the party of eradicating homelessness. This means taking the lead of Oxford and Manchester and constantly, loudly opposing Labour’s fines on the homeless and the use of hostile architecture. This means expanding shelters, and setting up task forces and special services designed to tackle underlying mental health problems and break the cycle of homelessness. We’re already taking a housing-first approach to campaigning on this issue in London with Siobhan Benita: let’s make it a big ticket thing we put emphasis on in all our local campaigning.

We should use 2011 Act powers to set up radical anti-poverty measures. This could include direct payments to those who apply for benefits to ensure they can survive while they wait for their applications to be processed. This could include topping up their benefits. Funding from central government is low and local authorities are cash-strapped, so this is difficult. But where there is a will, there is a way. Poverty is the number one obstacle to economic freedom in this country, and local authorities can take innovative approaches to tackling it.

We should take the initiative and be the party of adult social care. Adult social care in this country is an unmitigated disaster. One of the scariest things for families and care recipients is the prospect of paying for it, often including paying for family homes. We should reduce the minimum contribution by the care recipient to make Lib Dem councils the lowest-charging authorities to be cared for in, and look at alternatives to avoid the outright sale of family properties to fund care under local authorities’ discretionary disregard powers.

We should oppose the use of facial recognition technology. This applies wherever we have councils, and should also form a central part of any police and crime commissioner campaign (which matter and we should take them more seriously).

We should champion the arts. This last one is indulgent of me, but arts programmes often help disadvantaged kids find their niche in the world, and enriched lives are better and freer lives. We should enter into partnerships with the private sector to save cultural amenities threatened with closure like theatres, leisure centres and libraries (which have a huge role to play in providing services for those in poverty), and expand provision of them by building new ones. We can then use our stake in them to ensure cultural activities are cheap and accessible for all.

This is not an exhaustive list. There are more things that can be included. And I’ve not tried to stitch the above into an electoral narrative. But the point is that we should be punchier and more ambitious about our exercise of local power, and make sure that Liberal Democrat councillors and councils stand for something distinctive. It’s not going to happen overnight, or even over the course of one or two electoral cycles, but if over the next decade we can embed in people’s minds that a Liberal Democrat council means a greener, freer, more vibrant local community, with affordable places to live and radical support for those in need, then what is there to lose? Let’s keep the liberalism of style, but be bold and add the liberalism of substance.

Above all, though, let’s reignite a discussion about what liberalism really means when we talk about it. I for one am fed up of the policy soup we have which at election time gets vaguely meshed into a milquetoast document with no punch or overarching vision. There are flashes of brilliance in our manifesto, particularly on criminal justice, the environment, and political reform. Our whole platform can be like that. We need to each ask ourselves why we are liberals, why that matters, and why that makes us different from Labour and the Conservatives (NB not equidistant, but different). We then need to ask ourselves what the roots of our country’s problems are, and how we tear up those roots. We cannot be a bland party broadly fine with the status quo, who tweak a couple of things through extremely specific and technocratic policy. We have to recapture the transformative, revolutionary nature of liberalism, and articulate why it’s not just some weak, highbrow, unambitious thing. Only through conversations such as these will we come up with a consistent and substantive vision, based on our values, that people can really believe in.

Over the past week, I have been running an informal poll for the 2019 Liberal Democrat leadership election. I did the same in 2015, and came within 2% of the correct result, so thought I’d have another go this time round.

The results are now in, and before I go into them, I’ll just put a caveat here that although I have tried to do demographic weighting as accurately and diligently as possible, because I don’t have precisely accurate membership data (and have had to rely on the QMUL Party Members Project for information), the weightings may be slightly out. As such, this poll should not be relied upon as a formal, professional-standard poll, but its results should be relatively indicative.

I surveyed 846 participants between 24th June and 1st July 2019. This gives a theoretical margin of error of 3%. The results are weighted based on gender, age and joining period, as well as implied 2015 leadership vote based on stated ideological self-identification, corroborating the data with my 2015 leadership poll. This last weighting mechanism replaces a question about past vote (simply because more than half of members today were not members in 2015). Because it is a more experimental weight than the other three, I have also run the data without it: the results of that are under the headline section.

Full tables are available here.

HEADLINE: SWINSON AHEAD OF DAVEY

The headline figures are Jo Swinson on 54%, and Ed Davey on 46%. This is a narrower race than some were expecting, but still a relatively comfortable margin for Swinson. Along with Mark Pack’s survey putting her on 60% (albeit with a large number of undecideds), my poll seems to justify her status as favourite for this race.

NB: Even without the weighting by implied 2015 leadership vote, weighting only for gender, joining period and age, Jo Swinson still leads with 53% to Ed Davey’s 47%.

DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS

Perhaps most interesting are the demographic trends.

Men appear to be voting overwhelmingly for Jo Swinson, with 62% of them joining Jo, and only 38% going wavy for Davey. Women, on the other hand, are splitting in the opposite direction, contrary to what many expected at the beginning of this campaign. 57% of them are voting for Ed, while 43% of them are voting for Jo.

The other trend to note is one of age. A whopping 68% of 18-24 year olds say they will be voting for Jo Swinson – perhaps reflective of her much-publicised time involved in LDYS and her frequent appearances at Young Liberals Conference. On the opposite end of the spectrum, a massive 78% of those over 65 say they will vote for Ed Davey – which could be crucial, as over 65s make up the largest proportion of the party’s membership. If Davey manages to turn them out en masse, while youth voters stay at home, his big margin here could be the difference. The trend is the startling thing however – in each category, the older you are, the more likely you are to be voting for Davey. The only exception to this is under 18s, who Ed is winning handily – but this should be caveatted, because the raw sample is so small that it may not be accurate to draw statistical conclusions from it.

While there isn’t any reliable data available for sexuality to be able to weight based on it, some interesting trends do emerge from the raw data. Amongst heterosexuals, Ed Davey has the edge with 52% to Jo’s 48%. With those self-identifying as LGBTQ+, Jo Swinson is ahead with 66% to Ed’s 34%.

Finally, amongst the BAME community, Jo is ahead with 53% to Ed’s 47%, though again, and unfortunately, this should be caveatted due to a small sample size. The low number of BAME respondents to this poll was of deep disappointment to me, and shows that we need to continue to work to make our party reflect the wide diversity of the country we’re seeking to represent.

MEMBERSHIP TRENDS

Unlike in 2015, where my poll showed that Norman Lamb won a clear majority of those identifying themselves with the ‘classical liberal’ tradition, and Tim Farron won a huge majority of those identifying with the ‘social liberal’ tradition, the picture is much more mixed.

Those placing themselves in the left wing of the party make up 38% of the membership, according to my poll. And 64% of them say they will be voting for Jo Swinson, which is a big lead. There has been much discussion of the Coalition legacy at this election, and with two Coalition ministers fighting it out, the belief was at the beginning of the race that there was no clearly ‘left’ candidate. But for whatever reason, Jo is seemingly on course to win this essential bloc of voters.

Those placing themselves in the centre of the party are the largest share of the membership, making up 47% of the party. Ed Davey is on course to win 54% of these voters, which is another piece of evidence to suggest that the race will be closer than anticipated. Although this margin is much narrower than Jo’s popularity with the left of the party – and thus doesn’t make up for the size of her win there – if Ed can consolidate this lead with the party’s self-identifying centrists, this could be his path to victory.

Those placing themselves on the right of the party – the aforesaid ‘classical liberals’ – make up a smaller portion of the membership compared with 2015, with only 15% belonging to this group (cf. 22% in 2015). Among these voters, Ed and Jo are effectively tied – Jo ekes ahead with 51% of the vote, while Ed is on 49%.

In terms of joining date, Jo is winning with every group except those who joined pre-Coalition, where she is tied with Ed on 50% apiece. Jo’s lead by 65% to Ed’s 35% amongst those members who joined during the Coalition is particularly notable in the context of Ed’s decision to campaign hard on his record as a Coalition minister. Of post-Coalition joiners, the gap is at its most narrow amongst the 20,000 who joined in the 2019 surge, perhaps reflecting the fact that they are by a long way the most centrist group of new joiners (with a full 50% of 2019 joiners identifying as centrist rather than left or right of the party).

Change UK have already split. We knew it was coming. But the formal breaking away of more than half of their MPs has raised the question of whether the splitters will defect to the Lib Dems.

Some would fit naturally into the party (Allen, Wollaston, Berger) if they wanted to come. To me, it is a no-brainer that they defect. This is because:

(a) I believe most of them are fundamentally liberals, but have just never described themselves as that due to prior party loyalties and whips;

(b) We shouldn’t turn down the prospect of a swathe of new MPs, increasing our voice in the media, in Parliament, and amplifying our message that we are the home for liberal, progressive internationalists in modern politics

(c) There is a serious prospect of our becoming one of the main parties, but this only happens under FPTP if you build broader coalitions within your party, which means ideological purity will lead to our failure.

Others would face some more serious ideological difficulties (Smith, Shuker). Serious conversations would need to be had about their positions, particularly Shuker’s, whose religion influences his politics away from the social liberal policies most Lib Dems get particularly fired up about.

But that leaves one problem case: Chuka Umunna. Some say he shows authoritarian tendencies; others say he is more liberal than his voting record suggests. This is a good opportunity to discuss an important point for the near future: where is the line between ideological purity and maintaining our identity as a liberal party?

To be very clear, I don’t want the Lib Dems ever to be anything but liberal first and foremost, and I don’t want just anybody to be able to defect if they fundamentally disagree with our views, even if they are pro-EU. For instance, I am staunchly opposed to the SNP and Plaid Cymru. So, to that end, we need to be able to distil down what the fundamental beliefs of the Lib Dems are, in order to be able to check whether someone is broadly aligned with us such that they could defect without diluting our identity. To my mind, there are a few areas.

1. Internationalism. We are an internationalist party who wants to stop Brexit, prevent new borders being thrown up, and improve free trade and co-operation.
2. Environmentalism. We believe in ending the climate crisis as a matter of urgency.
3. Equality. We believe in equal rights for everyone, and are particularly firm in supporting the rights of those who are under threat the most in today’s society.
4. Political reform. We think politics under FPTP is broken, and advocate for a change in the electoral system.
5. Anti-authoritarianism. We’re opposed to snooping, to interference in our private lives, and in favour of reforming authoritarian laws like drug laws.
6. Making people better off. We want to invest in public services, and think disadvantage and poverty are great ills which need to be tackled with everything we have.

Using this list as a vague guide as to our fundamental beliefs, and “what makes the Lib Dems liberal”, I personally think that Chuka Umunna (to go straight to the problem case) fits enough to be broadly compatible with us. He is pro-EU, has voted for environmental protections, supported all rights issues as a Labour MP, supports electoral reform, and wants to tackle disadvantage.

The understandable area of hesitation is on anti-authoritarianism, considering his recent proposal of a national civic service scheme, and a vote in Parliament in December against the legalisation of cannabis. There are two points of rebuttal to raise here. First, on the cannabis issue, voting records often do not belie a person’s real beliefs due to party whips (and indeed, post-Coalition, treating voting records as mirrors of a person’s true principle would be a surprising thing for us as Lib Dems to do). And on the issue of national civic service, the idea was phrased in a vague way and one which even he admitted would need refinement. He would need to be asked about this during discussions. It is certainly not something the party could support.

I want to labour one point in particular. If Umunna doesn’t defect, it is entirely his loss, and he will be beaten by the Lib Dems at the next election. As such, I will lose no sleep over it and won’t view it as a missed opportunity. This is not least because of our fantastic PPC in Streatham, Helen Thompson, who works with refugees and aid organisations, has been doing fantastic work for disenfranchised EU citizens, and through the dedication of her team in Streatham, won the equivalent constituency at the European Parliament elections.

But if Umunna does approach us to defect, and pending important and serious discussions with Helen and the Lambeth local party about how it would work, I don’t think we should dismiss him out of hand. While I don’t agree with him entirely, his policy set would not be particularly far outside the wheelhouse of the mainstream party, and provided he was properly briefed on the correct lines, and the situation made clear that defying our fundamental policies or not playing as part of the team would terminate the arrangement, the benefits of having a high-profile defection to us – with the media attention that follows it – would outweigh the issues arising.

I thought about starting this post with a milquetoast introduction to the fact that elections were coming, but it’s time to get straight to the point. Remainers need to get real about the European elections. And, as a full disclaimer, I am a paid up member of the Liberal Democrats, so you might think that “I would say this”, but this post is aimed in particular at the Green Party, and secondarily at “tactical voting” websites which are using terrible, outdated evidence.

In plain English, even though the elections use proportional representation, the counting method is such that it is still very possible to split the vote. And naturally, Remain voters are anxious not to do that. So anxious, in fact, that they tried to lobby the parties with anti-Brexit positions to form a joint list or stand down for each other. And it didn’t work – not that the Lib Dems didn’t try.

So we’re now left with a conundrum. Who to support? This is where I think we need to get real.

I have a lot of respect for the Green Party. I have advocated alliances with them in Oxford when I was involved in the Lib Dems there. I worked with them to help get Layla Moran elected in 2017. I think they share a vast amount of policy with us, and broadly represent the same worldview. It is welcome that the Greens are supplanting Labour and beating Tories in limited places across the country.

But we need to be cold and ruthless and logical in swinging our support behind one Remain party at these elections, and I think the Greens are being disingenuous by claiming that it should be them. And before I explain why, I want to say: we have no time to beat around the bush anymore. So I am going to be blunt, and put the statistics exactly as they are. I mean no disrespect to the Greens, to whom I would probably give my second preference in any preferential election in England and Wales, in so doing.

Their main claim is that they have 3 MEPs compared to only 1 Lib Dem MEP, and this means that they are the strongest pro-EU party now. But this is ludicrous. It is absolute nonsense. We have to be honest with ourselves. This state of affairs arose from the 2014 European elections. To hammer home the point, this was five years ago, during the Coalition, when the Greens had more members than the Lib Dems, and we were at our lowest point in our history, ever, full stop. Two general elections later, and with the Lib Dems now having over 100,000 members compared to the Greens’ mere 40,000, and with the Lib Dems having significantly improved their electoral fortunes – for instance gaining over 700 seats just this week, absolutely dwarfing the Greens’ efforts both in terms of gains and raw councillor numbers – the situation is just not the same anymore. We cannot rely on evidence from before Brexit happened – before the seismic shock which changed politics – as justification for how we should act now, against Brexit.

What makes this contention even more outdated is precisely where they are saying they are stronger. In the South West – a Lib Dem heartland, where the party just hit it out of the park in local elections (see chart below). In the South East, where the Lib Dems just picked up a cluster of brand new councils – Mole Valley, Winchester, the Vale of White Horse. In London, where post-Brexit opinion polls clearly show the Lib Dems are doing best and outperforming the Greens.

Again, I want to underscore with as much clarity as I possibly can that I have enormous respect for the Greens. If we used a sensible system of proportional representation like STV, they would get my second preference. If it were an election at any time other than this, I would not be making this post. But this is not the time to be messing around. We need to make a statement.

People can vote for who they like. It’s their right as electors. And I’m sure this post will get a reaction from Green members who are understandably passionate about their own candidates. But I just want to present the evidence once again. Evidence from the post-Brexit era.

• The Lib Dems beat the Greens in every region in the 2015 and 2017 general elections.
• The Lib Dems beat the Greens in terms of vote share and councillors elected in 2017, 2018 and 2019
• The Lib Dems beat the Greens in the London local elections in 2018, including gaining majority control of an extra two whole councils.
• The Lib Dems beat the Greens in the Scottish local elections in 2017, which are the only post-Brexit election conducted by proportional representation in mainland Britain so far. They got almost double the number of first preferences, and over treble the number of councillors.
• The Lib Dems are ahead of the Greens in by-election victories
• The Lib Dems have proven they are back stronger than pre-Coalition by gaining +704 council seats this week, concentrated in the South East and South West.
• The average of polls conducted for the 2019 European elections has the Lib Dems on around 9%, with the Greens on around 7%. These were before the local elections, which showed a major Lib Dem set of gains.

Every single one of these things are facts. The only countervailing evidence is that most of these elections were done by First Past the Post. But there is not a single time that the Greens have beaten the Lib Dems post-Brexit, and nor is there a single region where the Greens are outperforming the Lib Dems. Remainers: we have to wake up. We have to accept reality. I know there are Greens who will vote Green no matter what, and all power to them. But at this election – this one time, where so much is at stake and so much can change if we send the right signal – we have to get behind the party which all the evidence shows is the strongest pro-European party out there. Please let’s get real, and force the main two parties to understand that we want them to stop Brexit.