Mathew Hulbert

Mathew on Monday: Swirling unease among urban Lib Dems

By Mathew Hulbert | Mon 18th May 2026 - 5:14 pm

The celebratory yellow smoke from the 2024 general election may have cleared, but inside the local party branches of some of our major cities a very different kind of atmosphere is settling in. It is a thick, unmistakable sense of urban unease.

Whilst the national narrative remains focused on the “Blue Wall” breakthroughs, a growing contingent of activists and councillors in our urban heartlands are beginning to ask a difficult but very necessary question: at what cost?

As others have intimated on this website over the past week, in the wake of recent local election results the mood among urban Lib Dems has shifted from quiet concern to open frustration and potential dissent.

I got a sense of this when, on Thursday evening, whilst on the train travelling down to London to appear on Talk, I got a message from a very prominent city-based Lib Dem asking if I had a few minutes for a chat. In our subsequent phone call this person, usually very affable, was noticeably reaching the end of their tether at what they perceive as the party leadership all but abandoning us being competitive in urban areas. I gave this a brief mention on Talk later that evening and clipped it up for social media the next day. The reaction from others in the party was interesting and, in some cases, very telling. Whilst most folks agreed that something is going very badly wrong others tried to suggest that everything is hunky dory in the party and there are no problems.

As I suggested on my Political Frenemies podcast on Friday evening, sticking your head in the sand and ignoring the reality of a situation is not a very sensible or useful way to behave for a political party.

For years the party’s strategy has pivoted heavily toward suburban and rural gains – a strategy that undeniably delivered seats in Parliament. However, on the ground in our cities, many feel the federal party is leaving them to rot.

Several well-known figures within the party have now broken ranks. Tom Gordon MP, Cllr Victor Chamberlain and former London Mayoral candidate Rob Blackie have all waded in. In private forums and increasingly public social media posts, activists are criticising recent local election results as a sign of an ever-narrowing political identity for the party. It is clear that tailoring our message so specifically to disenchanted Conservatives in the shires, we are becoming background noise in the diverse, high-density wards of the English North and Midlands.

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Imaduddin Ahmed

Our messaging on Palestine did not cut through

By Imaduddin Ahmed | Mon 18th May 2026 - 2:22 pm

The fallout from this year’s local elections has sparked an important conversation about where our Party goes next. I was recently one of just eight Lib Dem candidates elected to the Council in Haringey, where we worked the soles off our shoes to win twenty-one seats from a base of seven. Without any door-knocking, the Green Party won one of our safest seats and set us back in others. Our experience has been mirrored in other metropolitan areas full of disaffected Labour voters, including other boroughs of London, Manchester (see Jonathan Moore’s “What did the Greens have that we didn’t” and Shaun Ennis’ “Standing Still”), Sheffield, Bradford and Birmingham.

In contrast to the Greens, we lacked coherent national messaging. Apart from Ed boycotting the King’s banquet for Trump over Gaza, which was mentioned positively at the door, we ceded ground to the Greens on agreed upon Lib Dem policy. Erstwhile Lib Dems told me that they didn’t see the Party on the screen, nor know what we stood for any longer. Even an affluent progressive voter told me she felt unrepresented.

By contrast, the Greens have been far more successful at projecting a coherent, values-based identity. Voters saw Zack Polanski as bold, willing to challenge injustice and take clear positions, even where doing so carries political risk.

Palestine is clearly part of that picture.

Voters are looking to be inspired by parties willing to stand up consistently for international law and a values-based foreign policy. The Greens’ vocal and highly visible stance on Palestine has enabled them to fill that space, and there is growing evidence that this has translated into electoral gains in Labour-facing urban areas where we might otherwise have advanced.

In Birmingham, for example, the Greens climbed from 2 seats to 19 while the Liberal Democrats remained static at 12, despite expectations that we would emerge as the main opposition to Reform. This must surely bear some relation to the Greens’ greater clarity on Palestine in a city with four universities, a highly educated Labour vote, and many Muslims, who feel besieged by anti-Muslim Labour and Tory messaging, never mind Reform.

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The Voice

Is this the first public call for Ed to go?

By The Voice | Mon 18th May 2026 - 9:55 am

It is being reported that the our Council Leader in Colchester, David King, has called for a change of leadership. Talking to the BBC’s Simon Dedman, he said;

We need to let the party take the time to look to the future, and that’s my appeal to Sir Ed. It’s politely saying, time’s up.

Whether or not this is simply a reaction to disappointing results in Colchester – the Party lost Shrub End and Stanway wards to Reform – or indicative of a wider movement remains to be seen.

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Mark Valladares

Welcome to my day: 18 May 2026 – five/six party politics requires a new approach

By Mark Valladares | Mon 18th May 2026 - 7:30 am

155 net gains in terms of seats, 3 net gains in terms of councils, more MSPs in Scotland were the headlines after the elections eleven days ago. On the face of it, it looked reasonably good. Not great, but another advance nonetheless.

But, behind the headlines, it has become increasingly apparent that all is not well in terms of the Party’s progress. So many contributions reached us from across the nations, highlighting tales of good campaigns and hard work overtaken by Greens or Reform candidates whose clear messages and perceived alternative to a failed status quo appealed to voters in a way that we didn’t or, perhaps more worryingly, couldn’t.

As an editorial team, even as a medium independent of the Party, we retain a broad loyalty. We don’t want to rock the boat just because we can. But we do believe that we have an obligation to offer a space for members and supporters to debate the issues of the day and it is clear that there is significant dissatisfaction with the strategy of the Party at the centre.

Many potential solutions have been offered over the past week, much of which has come down to expressing more clearly what we, as liberals, believe in. And whilst I would never suggest that I am any sort of political strategist, I have always believed that the policies of a political party should be able to be easily surmised from the basic ideology it expresses. That becomes rather harder if you don’t really expound a political philosophy.

I’m not a radical for the sake of radicalism but it seems to me at least that we have to be clearer about the sort of world we want to create – the “vision thing”, if you like. The Greens and Reform currently have that clear vibe where, even if you have no real idea of what they would do in power, you can superimpose your dreams onto them. They have an identity that we currently don’t.

To make matters worse, the complications of five or six party politics don’t appear to have been entirely factored in. We’re still locked into a strategy of “only we can beat X here” and, whilst that’s effective against deeply unpopular Labour and the Conservatives, and has value against Reform if we have demonstrated that we’re the obvious choice to keep them out, we don’t seem to be able to deal with opposition from both political flanks at the same time in places where we haven’t got a firm presence. And there are too many of those.

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Caron Lindsay

Jim Wallace’s memorial service – 5th June 2026

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 17th May 2026 - 3:30 pm

Portrait of Jim WallaceWe are all still mourning the loss of Jim Wallace earlier this year.

Alex Cole-Hamilton dedicated his acceptance speech when he won his Edinburgh North Western constituency with a vastly increased majority to Jim, recalling his last conversation with Jim a few days before he died.

We all wish he could have been around to celebrate our election success when we more than doubled our 4 MSPs elected in 2021.

We will have the chance to remember Jim at his memorial service which will take place on Friday 5th June 2026 at Dunblane Cathedral at 11.30 am.

The event will be livestreamed on the Dunblane Cathedral YouTube channel and will be available to watch on catch up.

Travel to Dunblane is quite straighforward:

Rail: Regular trains from Glasgow Queen St ( sometimes involving a change at
Stirling) and from Edinburgh Waverley to Dunblane.

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Alan Eurig Williams

Time to embrace our Welsh identity

By Alan Eurig Williams | Sun 17th May 2026 - 1:14 pm

As Shaun Ennis wrote about his frustration about the lack of progress in the North of England by our party, he should be lucky that he isn’t living in Wales.

As a party and a movement that was once the dominant voice of Cymru, seeing our leader Jane Dodds eke through the sixth seat in Brycheiniog Tawe Need at last week’s Senedd election showed what a parlous state the party is in Cymru at the moment. Overall, the situation has not improved since 2016 where our votes remain low and the number of seats won to match. We were lucky indeed to have Jane Dodds, who was a very effective debater and is well regarded by the community she serves and her party in general. But there was no escaping the facts she expressed frustration and dismayed that the party (once a bastion of Welsh politics) has been relegated to the peripheral.

I applaud the efforts by my fellow party activists and campaigners who spend years or decades within their communities pounding the streets, knocking on doors, campaigning in the local community. But when the time came for these communities to vote in the Senedd election, many of them went the other way and voted for Reform, who had candidates expressing horror for having the honour of being elected a member into the Senedd because they were assured by the party that they were paper candidates.

They are now led by a man who left his homeland over thirty years ago and was until very recently the Conservative Group leader in Barnet Council. Given the history of Nigel Farage’s numerous parties, we will look forward not to five years of holding power to account but a term of infighting, rifts, splits and no-doubt shaking down the Senedd for every penny they can get.

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Tanya Park

Stand aside in Makerfield, but make Burnham earn it

By Tanya Park | Sun 17th May 2026 - 10:55 am

Josh Simons resigned his Makerfield seat this week. Andy Burnham confirmed within hours he would seek the NEC’s permission to stand, and the NEC has now cleared him to do so. A constituency most people couldn’t have placed on a map last week has become the most consequential by-election in a generation.

The question now is whether the Liberal Democrats should stand a candidate.

My answer is no, but not as an act of charity toward Labour. As a conditional offer, grounded in a straightforward calculation about what is most likely to advance the things we actually care about.

What the numbers say

Recent local elections in the Makerfield wards returned Reform on 50%, Labour on 23%, and the Greens on 11%. Britain Predicts models a general election baseline of Reform 41%, Labour 28%. Without Burnham as the Labour candidate, Reform takes this seat. With him, accounting for a substantial personal-vote bonus, the same model produces Labour 39%, Reform 36%. A narrow Labour hold. Remove that bonus, split the non-Reform vote further, and Farage’s people win.

Liberal Democrats have almost no presence in Makerfield. Standing a candidate here costs us very little in votes or resources. What it costs, if Reform wins, is something much more significant.

Why Burnham is different

Previous calls for Liberal Democrats to stand aside for Labour have rightly been treated with scepticism. The usual pitch (don’t split the progressive vote) asks us to subordinate our values to Labour’s convenience, with nothing concrete in return. That is not a case worth making.

This one is different, because the policy overlap is not vague and it is not new.

Burnham has been the most consistent internal Labour advocate for proportional representation, saying at the IPPR in January that it is “an idea whose time has come”. He built the Bee Network, the first integrated, publicly controlled bus and tram system outside London, using exactly the franchising model Liberal Democrats have advocated for years. He co-authored the Hillsborough Law, which Liberal Democrat MPs and peers backed comprehensively. He has championed a National Care Service, free at the point of need and integrated with the NHS, since 2010, a position that mirrors what Liberal Democrats delivered in Scotland over two decades ago and have campaigned for nationally ever since. He has called for Land Compensation Act reform, a fairer property levy, and an elected senate of the nations and regions to replace the Lords.

These are not rhetorical positions adopted for a by-election campaign. They are commitments Burnham has held across different offices and different political climates, often against the grain of his own party. They sit at the heart of what the Liberal Democrats stand for.

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Michael Taylor

Why are we so timid?

By Michael Taylor | Sun 17th May 2026 - 8:55 am

The Liberal Party I joined in 1964 was not a timid party. Under Grimond’s leadership, it wanted major changes to the UK. It wanted devolution, voting and parliamentary reform, sexual and racial equality, supported joining the EEC, wanted nuclear disarmament and wanted more cooperatives amongst many other things. And it wasn’t afraid to say so.

Fast forward to today and we seem afraid of our own shadow. We say little or nothing on controversial issues for fear of offending anybody. Dig a little deeper and you find we probably support the same things that we did before but you’d never know. We are criticising Starner for being too cautious, whilst doing exactly the same ourselves.

Often our leadership wrings its hands about a perceived problem but makes no proposals to change them. Take the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of sex. We all know that the right thing to do is to change the law to make the equality act mean what we thought it did, but our leadership’s silence has helped the growth of anti-trans sentiment and made the lives of trans people more difficult. We have gained nothing but contempt for our stance and lost the support of many in the trans community.

We continue with the pretence that the answer to Brexit is to join a custom’s union, when the real problem is not being in the single marker. Obviously, some focus group has been telling the party that support for the SM or joining the EU will upset voters in some undefined demographic.

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Jack Meredith

Welsh Liberal Democrats need more than “stop” politics

By Jack Meredith | Sat 16th May 2026 - 12:55 pm

In many ways, the 2026 Senedd election was historic. Wales is the first country in Great Britain to adopt proportional representation, utilising the D’Hondt voting system over a Mixed Member voting system. Its parliament has expanded from 60 to 96 members. For the first time in over a century, Labour is no longer the dominant party in Wales. Plaid is now the largest party, with its leader, Rhun ap Iorweth, becoming the new First Minister of Wales. Reform UK is the official opposition, and the Greens have made their Senedd debut.

But for all that has changed, one thing has remained the same: the Welsh Liberal Democrats still only hold one seat.

There is no point in pretending this was the result we wanted. While Jane Dodds’ re-election guarantees there is a voice for Welsh liberalism in the Senedd, this campaign has been one of survival, when it should have been one of growth.

The story of this election is far from complex. Welsh Labour’s support collapsed,  while Plaid Cymru and Reform UK grew to represent the governing alternative and protest alternative, respectively. Their messages were simple and concentrated. Plaid argued that Labour had governed for too long, that Reform UK was dangerous, and only the literal Party of Wales could govern Wales as it should be. Reform, meanwhile, argued that the system was broken because of the same old establishment politicians, and it was time for a radical shift.

And what was the Welsh Liberal Democrat message? We argued that “only we can stop independence” and that “only we can stop Reform”. An understandable goal for a party that opposes nationalism and populism, but also one that painted us as reactive and always on the back foot. While Plaid and Reform wanted to bring change to the Welsh government, for better or worse, we told voters to be afraid of change, playing into both parties’ hands by framing ourselves as “just another establishment pro-union party”. 

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Ciaran Morrissey

Should we even be considering contesting Makerfield? 

By Ciaran Morrissey | Sat 16th May 2026 - 10:55 am

With Josh Simons’ resignation on Thursday, the starting gun on the 2026 Labour leadership election was (sort of) finally fired. 

There is now a theoretical, if muddy, path for Andy Burnham to re-enter parliament and become the next Prime Minister. The Greater Manchester Mayor, a vocal critic of Keir Starmer, has announced he plans to apply to stand in the by-election. Reform UK, buoyed by a second set of astonishing local election results, including across most of Greater Manchester, have responded in kind to say they plan to throw everything they can at the seat. The question being raised internally, and that will be no doubt raised externally too, is whether we should allow them a straight head-to-head or whether we should put up a candidate.

I think the answer for this contest, as it is in all contests, is that we should give people a chance to vote Liberal Democrat, and I will try and explain why. 

The first and most pressing point is that we do not own the voters and cannot tell them what to do on either a moral or a practical level. Just because someone voted Lib Dem in a previous general or local council election does not mean they are sitting waiting for instruction from us on how to vote in future. Voters are free to make up their own minds and vote how they wish. Us standing down will not guarantee that any votes go the way that we intend them to. Indeed, any Lib Dem votes in Greater Manchester would be tacit anti-Burnham votes anyway, and so there is an argument that in the absence of a Lib Dem candidate they would transfer to the next anti-Burnham candidate, in this case Reform.

But let’s say we could. Let’s say we could direct those voters to vote Labour and us standing down would lower the ceiling for them. Should we do it then? The answer is still no. Andy Burnham still has to win over a plurality of the rest of the voters in Makerfield. He is standing to be the Labour candidate, on a platform that is explicitly opposed to the current Labour prime minister. What is that campaign going to look like? Are Labour organisers and canvassers going to trawl around asking people to vote Labour to give Labour a bloody nose? Will he be allowed to criticise the government? The logistics of it seem totally incoherent. Labour HQ is not going to allow Andy Burnham to run on an anti-Starmer platform, so Burnham will be relying on voters reading between the lines, not taking the Labour campaign at its word, and hoping that he will topple the Prime Minister. This is a campaign relying on a wink and a prayer and Andy Burnham’s supposed personal popularity. It is not a serious, credible proposal that we should step aside for. 

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Jonathan Moore

What did the Greens have that we didn’t?

By Jonathan Moore | Sat 16th May 2026 - 8:56 am

In the elections on May 7th, Salford Lib Dems suffered an unexpected setback. We lost one of our two councillors (I’m the one who remains), and we came third and fourth out of five in our two target wards. In all three cases, we lost to the Greens. The story was similar elsewhere in Greater Manchester.

In only one of the three wards did we face an active Green Party campaign – the other two wards (including mine, where we lost my co-councillor) were won by pretty much paper candidates. 

The councillor we lost was a fantastically hard working and capable councillor, who was outstanding at proactively dealing with casework and had a great reputation in the ward. There is no sense of him having ‘lost’ the ward – others won it.

I spent most of the campaign in one of our target wards with a truly outstanding candidate. Over a few months we knocked on 3500 doors and had many conversations. We ran a fantastic textbook campaign, supporting a great community activist with a big personality.

We lost to a Green Party that has no real local presence, did little to no door knocking, and put out a small number of generic leaflets, all inferior to our own.

So, what did they have that we didn’t? 

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Tom Walker

Popularity without clarity: communicating our values through policy

By Tom Walker | Fri 15th May 2026 - 6:39 pm

52% of Britons don’t know what the Liberal Democrats consider the most important issue facing the country. Compared against Labour, Conservative, Green and Reform, the electorate have the poorest recall on what the Liberal Democrats are focused on. I argue that this is a result of political parties moving away from values and visions and emphasising radical policy that draws attention to their cause. Where the Liberal Democrats communicate values and not policy, we risk getting lost in the noise of our evolving media landscape.

Radical policy from both Reform and the Greens hint at their underlying values, drawing attention …

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Thomas Worth

Stagnating here – West Sussex at the 2026 local elections

By Thomas Worth | Fri 15th May 2026 - 4:28 pm

Since the results of the 2026 Local Elections, there has rightly been some deep analysis of where we are as a party. Colleagues have argued that we are abandoning the North of England, only focusing on leafy rural areas and are ignoring our cities. While I wholly agree with this criticism, I think it misses an even more crucial point. Even in areas which are becoming our ‘new heartlands’, we are stagnating or even slipping back.

This brings us to West Sussex. As a local member, I do have more to celebrate than some around the country. For the first time since 1997, the Conservatives have lost control of the council, with us being the leading party, albeit tied with Reform. It also looks like we will be able to come to an agreement with other parties and lead the council. However, this top-down analysis misses a tale of two halves.

While in our held constituencies, Chichester, Horsham and Mid Sussex, the party made excellent gains, outside of these constituencies, a different story unfolded. Take Arun District as an example. Of the ten divisions we held before the elections, two of them came from this part of Sussex, namely Bognor Regis East and Littlehampton East. After the 2026 Election, of our 23 seats, none are in Arun District.

Both of the aforementioned seats were lost to Reform, with longstanding councillors losing their opportunity to represent their communities in the new administration. This reflects a national pattern. In areas deemed ‘unfavourable’ or as not having the ‘right demographics’, the party is surrendering ground to new radical alternatives.

Arun District should not be a place where we are losing ground. But even in the 2023 Local Elections, where we excelled across the country, we slipped back here. Too often when speaking to voters on the doorsteps during this year’s campaign, we heard the same message, ‘we like you locally, but we want to punish the government, so we will vote for Reform’. Without us having a clear national message, one with liberal ideas and values at its heart, we will continue to lose in areas like this that we need for future success. Currently,  as we are not seen as important enough on the national scene to even be worth a protest vote for many

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Steve Melia

Farage in Downing Street or work with the Greens?

By Steve Melia | Fri 15th May 2026 - 2:19 pm

The recent elections confirmed what opinion polls have been saying for some time.  Unless something radically changes, we are heading towards a Reform UK government, possibly with Conservative support.

To illustrate what this would mean, consider just one of Reform’s flagship policies: the retrospective removal of indefinite leave to remain.  People who were told by the British state that they could settle here, people who have lived here for decades, people who have worked, brought up children, bought their homes, integrated into local communities – our friends, neighbours or family – would be deported, by force if they resist.  Only those with high earnings would be spared.

Most British people, I believe, would be horrified at that prospect, but under first-past-the-post, you don’t need a majority.  27% may be enough.  This website shows a projection of parliamentary seats based on current opinion polls.  The margins of error are wide.  Most voters dislike Reform, and might be willing to vote tactically, but with a five or six-way split, in a changing situation, predicting the strongest alternative in each seat would be almost impossible.

Everyone can see the problem, but no-one seems to be proposing a realistic solution.  The tribulations of the Labour Party would be laughable if the stakes were not so high.  There has been much talk about progressive alliances, but these have always foundered on stonewalling from the Labour leadership.

There is, however, one possible alternative, which should now be taken more seriously.  Since the election of Zack Polanski (love him or loathe him), the combined support for the Lib Dems and Greens has consistently been greater than for Reform or any other party.  Separately, the gains made by both parties were modest; neither could expect to win a first-past-past-the-post national election.  In the rest of this article, I want to make the case for a temporary alliance between the two parties to fight the next general election.

The first point to make is that we don’t have to agree on policies, philosophy, personalities or campaigning approach.  I am not suggesting an existential alliance like the one between the Liberals and SDP in the 1980s.  The two parties would remain separate but agree to stand down candidates in half of the constituencies in England, and possibly in Wales.  The Greens in Scotland are a separate party committed to independence, which would make such an alliance more difficult there.

Each party would be free to campaign on its own manifesto, subject to a joint agreement on a few key principles.  These could include: changing the voting system, rejoining the European Union, stronger action on climate change and the environment and opposition to racism and Reform UK.  On areas of disagreement, we would negotiate, if the strategy leads to a potential government, which might also include the Labour Party.  As things stand, all parties will have to face the prospect of negotiations, whether they have made an pre-election alliance or not.

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Kamran Hussain

We are not going anywhere

By Kamran Hussain | Fri 15th May 2026 - 12:43 pm

I was seven years old when I first delivered leaflets for this party on the streets of Yorkshire. Seven years old. Running door to door in communities I loved, for a party that told me, told us, that we belonged here – that this was our country too.

Last Thursday’s local election results were a gut punch to anyone who believes in a fair, open, and tolerant Britain. Reform UK gained more than 1,400 seats while Labour lost over 1,100 it previously held. But for me, the results that hit hardest weren’t the national headlines. They were the towns I know personally. The towns I grew up nearby. Towns whose names are stitched into the fabric of my identity.

In Dewsbury East, Reform UK swept all three seats. Across Kirklees as a whole, Reform took 29 seats, and Labour, which had held 23 going into the election returned zero councillors. Not one.

In Oldham, Reform gained 13 seats, leaving the council in no overall control.

In Rochdale, Reform seized 12 of the 14 seats up for election. In Burnley, Reform became the largest party on the council after winning 11 seats. In Bolton, the Labour leader lost his own seat.

In the days since, my phone hasn’t stopped. Messages from British Muslim friends. From British Asian neighbours. From people whose families have lived in these very towns for three generations, quietly, desperately asking: “Is it time to go? Should we just leave?”

My answer is absolute. No, we are not going anywhere.

And I’ll tell you exactly why, not as a soundbite, but as a statement of defiance rooted in something much deeper than politics.

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Les Tarr

What just happened?

By Les Tarr | Fri 15th May 2026 - 10:57 am

I’ve been reflecting on the events of 7th May, the election cycle that dominated the entire country, especially Scotland.

UK-wide, the political landscape is widely acknowledged to have changed forever, transforming from a traditional two-party system to one of perhaps four or five parties. Over time, this may become even more divergent. Westminster, as a political ecosystem, struggles to accommodate this increase in influential parties. In fact, this struggle may have been the root cause of the sea change itself.

In all the constituent nations of the Union, the rise of Reform UK is, in my opinion, the result of a protest vote, brought about by growing frustration with the lack of delivery by successive administrations. The last few parliaments in Westminster have been dogged by sleaze, controversy, and self-interest. This has led to a complete lack of focus on voters – those people who cast their vote in expectation of change and their needs being met.

In England, Reform UK is a voice of division, directed against people who are ‘different’. This includes immigrants, individuals of diverse sexual identities, and those suffering from long-term physical or mental illnesses. Essentially, it targets anyone not conforming to its core demographic: people of wealth or those who aspire to or revere wealthy individuals. It’s somewhat akin to America and the Trump faithful, who believe that wealthy people inherently possess superior knowledge.

In Wales, it appears to be a huge protest against a century of Labour dominance that has failed to deliver anything beyond policies that interfere with people’s lives: an increasingly impactful nanny state. Labour will never again achieve the dominance they once held. With Plaid Cymru now being the largest single party in the Senedd, voters have clearly said, ‘Hey, what about us?’

Here in Scotland, the situation is different, yet still familiar. Nineteen years of SNP governance have failed to truly deliver a better Scotland. The rhetoric has been that of the left and pseudo centre-left, set against a backdrop of independence. Reform UK arrives talking about waste in national and local government – something we all knew about. In terms of immigration, their poisonous message doesn’t quite resonate. After all, we proudly say we’re all ‘Jock Tamson’s bairns’, but we all know people who talk about those who are ‘not like us’. Issues of transphobia will undoubtedly be prominent on Reform UK’s Holyrood agenda; their spokesperson on the BBC Scotland Sunday morning political show could barely conceal this.

What Reform UK offered voters in Scotland was an option to protest the status quo of established political parties.

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Roderick Lynch

Alderdice, Thornhill and Turner spoke. Were you listening?

By Roderick Lynch | Fri 15th May 2026 - 9:01 am

I read Rob Blackie’s post on Tuesday. Well written, but none of this is new. The difference now is that the warning lights are flashing everywhere, especially in London.

Let’s tell it straight. The party has a serious problem in urban Britain, and pretending otherwise will only make it worse.

We keep branding the Greens as “extreme” because they are attracting attention and energy we can currently only dream about in many inner-city areas. The Greens spoke to communities in plain English. One word summed up their offer: change.

Meanwhile, too often we sound cautious, managerial, and disconnected, speaking largely to the same narrow demographic. That is not enough in modern London.

What struck me most during the recent elections was the diversity of Green candidates across London, particularly in Lambeth, Southwark, and Lewisham. They looked like the communities they wanted to represent. That matters. Representation matters. Visibility matters. Engagement matters.

The 2020 General Election Review led by Baroness Thornhill could not have been clearer. It warned that failure to genuinely engage minority communities would eventually cost the party dearly at the ballot box. Yet years later, in too many boroughs, we still concentrate activity almost exclusively in affluent white areas. Tower Hamlets and Kensington & Chelsea are obvious examples where we have only campaigned in the more prosperous wards.

At the same time, we have the usual keyboard strategists insisting we can win here or there while effectively bypassing large sections of the non-white vote. It is an omni-shambles when viewed across the major cities.

Lord Woolley of Operation Black Vote said over a decade ago that if Black and brown communities were better organised and recognised the collective value of their vote, they could reshape the outcome of numerous elections. The Greens understood that. They listened. Then they acted on it across London and other urban centres.

Now some people call the Greens “extreme” for doing what every serious political party should do organise, engage, and include.

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Tanya Park

What last Thursday tells us about beating Reform (and where we still need to do the work)

By Tanya Park | Thu 14th May 2026 - 5:04 pm

The headlines from last Thursday have largely been written around Reform’s gains. Understandably so. 1,453 seats, 14 councils, a projected 284 Westminster seats if those numbers were applied to a general election. The narrative writes itself.

But buried inside those same results is a different story, one that matters rather a lot for Liberal Democrats. It is not a story of comfortable reassurance. It is, if anything, a more useful thing: a reasonably clear picture of what works against Reform, where it works, and where we are still exposed.

The short version is that incumbency beats protest. Almost every time. The places where we held or advanced against the Reform tide were places where we had built something durable: years of casework, local campaigns, a face people recognised on the doorstep. The places where Reform made inroads into what should be our territory were, almost without exception, places where that groundwork was thinner.

It is also worth noting that Reform’s position is softer than the seat count suggests. Their vote share actually slid between 2025 and 2026, and when voters were asked to choose someone to actually govern in Thursday’s mayoral contests, Reform’s support fell to single digits in several races. Their 1,453 gains tell you as much about Labour’s implosion as about Reform’s own growth. That means there is something to work with.

Where the model worked

Portsmouth is the cleanest example. The Liberal Democrats won outright control of the city council, 22 of 42 seats, with Reform coming second on 12. The local party’s response was telling: they said Reform had “thrown everything they had” at Portsmouth and lost. That is what a well-organised, deeply rooted local party looks like under sustained pressure. It holds.

Stockport is arguably more significant, because it punctures the lazy assumption that the Lib Dem model only works in southern, Remain-voting, leafy England. Stockport is Greater Manchester. It voted for Brexit. It is the kind of place people tend to write off when they talk about “the north.” The Liberal Democrats won a majority there on Thursday, 33 of 63 seats, the first majority any party has held on that council since 2011. Reform picked up two seats in wards with paper-thin margins and went no further. The difference was fifteen years of patient rebuilding since the coalition years knocked us back, and a local team that had genuinely reconnected with the community.

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Chris Northwood

What really happened in Gorton and Denton

By Chris Northwood | Thu 14th May 2026 - 3:07 pm

I’ve heard the calls a few times now, “if only we’d fought Gorton and Denton”, or “the local party got screwed over by HQ”, but as someone who was there coordinating the local party’s activity in the by-election, some things are a bit overstated.

Not fighting Gorton & Denton was a symptom of the problem that culminated with disappointing results in urban areas (including in my own ward in Manchester) last week, but it wasn’t the cause. The Greens aren’t doing well nationally because of the momentum of the Gorton & Denton win, they won Gorton & Denton because of the momentum they already had, which the win just accelerated.

So let’s set the record straight. The local party was in agreement with HQ – we didn’t want to burn ourselves out fighting a by-election there was no realistic chance of winning. And despite what you may have read in Liberator, there was no fully funded offer to do an election communication to the whole constituency (which would have cost at least an order of magnitude more than the suggested £300!), but instead only a more targeted one which we did do (and despite Liberator claiming HQ ran the election communication, it was actually me who did the work whilst recovering from surgery). There were a few points of friction with HQ (it was true that there was some initial pushback against even the targeted mailing, and I did find some of HQ’s comments on my artworking a bit pedantic), but we successfully made the case for approval from the agent and got on with it. Jackie was a fantastic candidate and I’m proud to have her as a colleague in the local party, and she did the job brilliantly, but she went into it knowing it was not an election we would be fighting to win.

Then when Labour’s NEC blocked Burnham, I was not at all surprised when the leader of Manchester’s Greens mentioned to me in conversation after full council that they were going to throw everything at it now. That was the turning point that convinced them that they could do it, and in the same position I would have felt the same – but we weren’t starting from the same position.

But the dominos that meant Gorton & Denton was a no hoper for us started falling a long time before the Greens chose to fight it, and us choosing not to. Membership is stagnant and even among core activists, enthusiasm is low. But despite a strong council base in Gorton a couple of decades ago, following the coalition era collapse we have now no infrastructure in place to have launched a campaign from. And when it comes to campaigning, nationally we seem to rely heavily on squeeze and tactical voting meaning we can only fight a campaign if we can position ourselves as a contender in a two horse race, which Gorton & Denton was never going to be.

All of these decisions added up that meant by the time Gwynne resigned, we’d essentially ruled ourselves out (which at best may be just an unintentional consequence of our strategy), and that’s not even to speak of the national media framing around the election which wouldn’t have considered us.

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Colin Ferguson

Local elections 2026 – A view from North East England

By Colin Ferguson | Thu 14th May 2026 - 1:15 pm

Enough has been written by more experienced observers than me to make it worthwhile to rehash the arguments already made about this year’s local election results.

It is clear that the overall headline is positive, and we should be proud to have made our eighth successive year of local election gains. It is equally clear that in many parts of the country, the hard work of our candidates and campaigners did not pay off. We are right to have a frank internal debate about that.

We are up against powerful populist machines, in Reform UK and the Green Party. The tectonic plates of politics are shifting beneath our feet. Liberalism is under threat now more than ever, and it is incumbent on us to fight for our beliefs. Nowhere is this truer than in the North of England.

In Newcastle, where I am the Group Leader, the result was declared so late on Friday that most people missed it. Despite surges from Reform and the Greens, we made gains to become the largest group, on 25 (out of 78). We topped the poll in the Newcastle upon Tyne North constituency, setting us up as real challengers for the next general election.

This was the hardest campaign I can recall fighting. We lost some good people who did not deserve to lose. In Newcastle, I believe we had the best ground game of anyone: we put out more literature- citywide, local and targeted- than anyone else; we knocked more doors than others; we were ruthlessly pragmatic in targeting. But that is what was required to deliver what we did, in the face of the seemingly organic popularity of other parties.

Being proud, local, community champions is the bedrock of our campaigning success, and a necessary part of winning as a Lib Dem. But in this era of multi-party politics, we must also offer a vision for change: that is what the electorate are crying out for, after years of stagnation. So many people’s concerns were national. We have to capture people’s imaginations for what a proudly liberal future could be.

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Victor Chamberlain

Liberal Democrats cannot afford to be absent from Britain’s cities

By Victor Chamberlain | Thu 14th May 2026 - 11:30 am

The Liberal Democrats have a growing urban problem and pretending otherwise will only make it worse.

Last week’s local election results exposed something many campaigners in cities have felt for some time: our local organisation is often far stronger than our national political message. In too many urban areas, particularly diverse cities, voters simply do not hear a compelling Liberal Democrat case for why we matter to modern Britain.

Politics today is increasingly shaped nationally, even in local elections. Voters consume politics through social media, online debate, podcasts and national narratives. Parties that succeed understand this and communicate with clarity and confidence. Too often, we do not.

In cities especially, the Liberal Democrats can appear politically invisible not because our values are unpopular, but because our national message lacks definition and urgency. We are too often seen as a party speaking comfortably to affluent southern seats while struggling to project a clear vision for younger renters, working-class families and diverse urban communities.

That should concern us because those voters ought to be natural Liberal Democrats.

I recently wrote privately and constructively to Ed Davey to raise these concerns and invited him to Southwark to discuss them further. Not to complain, but because there are genuine signs of opportunity if the party is prepared to adapt.

In Southwark, despite difficult national headwinds, we gained a councillor and returned 12 Liberal Democrat councillors in one of the most diverse boroughs in the country. That success did not come from national momentum. It came from relentless local campaigning, strong community relationships and candidates with personal credibility built over years of work. But we deserved to get far more people elected and do better.

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Mark Blackburn

Let’s stop tiptoeing around it: we belong in Europe

By Mark Blackburn | Thu 14th May 2026 - 9:45 am

There is a speech I keep coming back to. In the run-up to the 2014 European Parliament elections, Charles Kennedy told the party conference something that cut right to the heart of our political identity. Europe, he said, was in the Liberal Democrats’ DNA. But for too long, he added with characteristic wit, that had stood for “do not acknowledge.” It was time, he argued, to be front-footed, unapologetic and proud in our pro-Europeanism.

Charles was right then. He would be even more right now.

Our current framing on Europe, centred on a customs union, is not just insufficient, it is actively working against us. The evidence to support that view is not anecdotal. It is there in black and white in the new Best for Britain report.

Drawing on YouGov polling of more than 4,000 adults, it contains findings that every Liberal Democrat parliamentarian and activist should read. EU membership is the most popular option with the British public, with 53% in favour and just 32% opposed. But it is among our own voters that the numbers are most striking. A full 84% of Liberal Democrat supporters back the UK rejoining the EU, the highest figure of any party grouping polled.

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Lord William Wallace

The UK’s political leadership deficit

By Lord William Wallace | Wed 13th May 2026 - 6:02 pm

Political leadership is about changing the public agenda. Keir Starmer has failed to sway public opinion on major issues. Nigel Farage has been a much more effective political leader, albeit for a fraudulent project. He successfully made the argument for leaving the EU against the conventional wisdom of the majority of the British political elite and political commentators.

Margaret Thatcher was in this sense also a highly effective leader. She defied the civil service, many within her own party and Cabinet, and wide sections of the public, and drove through a deliberate shrinking of the size and functions of the state, through tax cuts, privatization, curbs on local government, selling off social housing and more. Politicians today still hesitate to challenge assumptions about outsourcing of public services or pledging to lower taxes, in spite of the very different economic and demographic circumstances we face. The nationalization of British Steel and the return of the railways to unified public management are moves away from neo-liberal orthodoxy – but the water industry still seems a step too far.

Keir Starmer has proved incapable of engaging with the public. The Strategic Defence Review, published ten months ago, called for a ‘National Conversation’ on the multiple threats our country now faces and the response needed to meet them. But we have been told almost nothing since then, and the promised Defence Industrial Plan is still blocked by the Treasury’s refusal to fund it. He’s just delivered another speech on how to ‘reset’ our relations with the EU, which began with some splendid rhetoric and ended with a promise of ensuring better youth mobility, without attempting to explain the complexities of closer cooperation with our neighbours or the trade-offs between sovereignty and shared prosperity and security that we have to make. Worst of all, neither the prime minister or his chancellor have tried to engage the public on the hard choices to be made on public spending and investment in pursuit of sustainable economic growth.

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Tom Reeve

Building Lib Dem groups that work for all members

By Tom Reeve | Wed 13th May 2026 - 3:54 pm

The last few years have been extraordinary for Liberal Democrats in local government. We have taken control of councils we hadn’t held in a generation, broken Conservative dominance in places that looked permanent, and built a base of councillors larger than at any point in recent memory. The May 2024 general election was the visible peak, but the local story has been running longer and deeper.

Now comes the harder part. Winning is one thing. Running things well, year after year, in a way that makes residents glad they voted for us and councillors proud of what they’ve built, takes more.

I’ve been thinking about this from a particular angle: how we work together when we deliver. The culture inside a Liberal Democrat council group shapes everything that comes out of it, and we don’t talk about it enough.

The group is the engine

Most of what residents see is the leader, the cabinet or portfolio holders, and the policies. Most of what makes those things possible is invisible. The group meetings, the WhatsApp threads, the corridor conversations, the informal conventions about who gets heard and who doesn’t. A council group is a working community of dozens of people, often with very different backgrounds, who have to make collective decisions under pressure for four years at a stretch.

Every group has good weeks and bad weeks, and the difference shows in how the administration operates. When the group is working well, messaging holds together, scrutiny is sharper, and people bring problems to the room rather than nursing them quietly. When it isn’t, the administration carries the cost.

What a liberal group culture looks like

We are Liberal Democrats. Our values should describe how we treat each other, not just sit in a manifesto.

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Rebecca Jones

The 2026 Locals were a bad result for the party, let’s not pretend otherwise

By Rebecca Jones | Wed 13th May 2026 - 2:12 pm

Like many Lib Dems who stood in the 2026 locals, I’ve spent most of the last year walking around my ward knocking on doors, delivering leaflets and following the strategy that we were told gave us a really good shot. Our data looked great, we were making lots of contacts and many voters told us they were voting for us tactically against Labour. The race seemed like a clear two horse race, the Greens previously had less than half our vote and didn’t campaign in the ward. It sounded like we had the perfect chance, right?

Well, I thought so too and felt optimistic on polling day and on my way to the count the day after. Then, we came third. Against an insurgent Green party that didn’t even campaign in many wards. Looking back, I don’t believe there is anything different we could have done locally. We ran a great campaign.

It’s the same story in many wards across London, and in other areas where we do not hold the parliamentary seat, where good hardworking teams lost out in wards to parties who did little to no campaigning.

I am genuinely exhausted with seeing people claim this election was a great result for the party. Entrenching ourselves so hard into the blue wall that we can never expand as a party is not a success, and it tells activists like me who live in Labour/Green facing areas that we don’t matter and aren’t cared about by the party.

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Vince Cable

Vince Cable writes: Escaping the Brexit dilemma

By Vince Cable | Wed 13th May 2026 - 11:55 am

There is a Brexit dilemma: a growing consensus that Brexit was a bad mistake together with the fatalistic acceptance that nothing much can be done about it.

For committed Remainers, there is the smug satisfaction of having been right all along. The predicted economic costs have duly materialised. The less predicted global upheaval has left Britain dangerously stranded in a geo-economic no-mans-land.  Public opinion polls are increasingly negative about Brexit. 

If the mistake is so obvious, surely then Britain can and will re-join, with some urgency?  But there is a big difference between the virtual reality …

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Richard Wood

Scotland’s electoral system has reached breaking point

By Richard Wood | Wed 13th May 2026 - 10:16 am

Our biggest success of the May 2026 elections was undoubtedly in Scotland, where the Scottish Liberal Democrats played a blinder to reverse years of challenging Scottish Parliament elections. The Scottish Party won 10 MSPs, up from four in 2021, an outcome that is, surprisingly, our first net gain at any Holyrood election.

However, there’s a broader electoral issue that needs to be addressed. And that’s the disproportionality of the Scottish Parliament’s supposedly proportional system.

The Additional Member System (AMS) used to elect MSPs at Holyrood gives voters two ballots. One elects their local First Past the Post (FPTP) MSP, with 73 single-member …

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Kevin Chun

Londoners need hope – our Party offers none

By Kevin Chun | Wed 13th May 2026 - 8:47 am

These local elections were successful for many, and yes, we should be celebrating. But as someone who fought in Central London — a Zone 1 ward, as central as it gets — I can’t honestly say I feel happy.

Everyone keeps talking about the Lib Dem tortoise, the slow and steady march forward, but all I can think of is the Blackadder episode where they measured gains on the Western Front with a tape measure. Being a Lib Dem in Central London feels exactly like trench warfare.

It feels like we have out-of-touch generals sitting miles behind the lines, poring over maps, insisting victory is just around the corner, while sending activists over the top with bayonets against machine guns. Every election we’re ordered forward again into impossible territory, and every time the dispatches come back from HQ saying: good progress elsewhere, keep sacrificing for the cause. Meanwhile, the people actually in the trenches are exhausted, abandoned, and ignored.

I’m sorry, but we cannot carry on like this.

In two years, 72 MPs have done virtually nothing for communities like mine. People on estates in London are struggling now. Families need lower bills now, safer streets now, housing now, hope now. Instead, what do we get? Vague promises about half-price energy bills in 2035, and a leader who seems obsessed with church roofs while the country falls apart around us.

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Hugh Andrew

A View from the Island of Mull

By Hugh Andrew | Tue 12th May 2026 - 7:35 pm

I am clearly not alone in sharing a sense of deflation at the election results UK wide. While in Scotland there was some degree of recovery it was from an appalling position. It is sobering to note we are now the sixth party in Scotland. We should bear in mind too that our gains in the Highlands and islands were aided by the ferry fiasco which the SNP has overseen. Ferries are the lifeline of not simply the islands they serve but integral to the economies of the communities from which they leave. The scale of utterly avoidable devastation to peoples lives and to the economies of rural areas cannot be overstated. That Labour’s sole gain in Scotland came in the Western Isles backs this up.

Bruising as it may be to our ego we – and this holds for all bar the SNP – are not a national party but a series of local redoubts – Fife, the Highlands, Orkney and Shetland, Edinburgh, while remnants of electoral strength remain in the Borders and Grampian. In the UK as a whole not far shy of 50% of the electorate voted for insurrectionary parties. It was disappointing to hear Ed’s branding them, and by extension those who voted for them, as ‘extremists’. It is not a description likely to convert those so described.

The reality of the situation is that people are, to use that good Scottish word, scunnered. Scunnered of politicians, scunnered about a failing system which no longer delivers for them, and most of all perhaps scunnered at being ignored by politicians whose only real listening seems to be to other politicians. We are as guilty of this as others. Instead of talking the same talk and walking the same walk as other parties (however much we might protest that we don’t) let us do something radical and different in how we present ourselves. We are, or should be, after all the party of true democracy and localism.

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Rob Parsons

The most unfortunate result possible

By Rob Parsons | Tue 12th May 2026 - 5:02 pm

In my view the results of this week’s local elections are the most unfortunate possible. They illustrate perfectly the limitations of our strength and of the nature of our offering to the public.

We made enough gains for the party leadership to pretend to be victorious – and, yes, eight gains in a row is something to be very proud of. But our gains were incremental on a night when Reform and the Green party hoovered up millions of votes. (The limits of Reform’s success are not lost on me by the way – they reflect Reform’s current standing in the polls which is about 5% off the peak of a short while ago; long may it continue to wain.) As others point out, we face diminishing returns on a policy that is designed for limited appeal. Its purpose is to make well off people in the south east feel good about themselves*, and it has very limited appeal to the people we need to be talking to, and, to be honest, very little relevance to the problems the country faces. So we are still deliberately digging ourselves into a hole which is of no use to the country, and the result was just good enough to encourage our leadership to keep digging.

In my view we need to reshape the way we make our policy to fit what is actually happening to millions of people in this country who vote for change, whether it be Reform or the Green Party, because the status quo is failing them and has been for some time, and they have no hope that it will change. We have decided to cast ourselves in the popular mind as a more of the same party, just a bit nicer than the others. And more of the same won’t cut it any more.

Our minds are both concentrated and limited by what we are going to put in our next manifesto, and here is where I propose we should make a very significant change in our planning, and in our offer to the public.

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