Where’s your Ed at?
In a parliamentary system where size of voting bloc matters, why is the third biggest party in Britain so absent from the national conversation? I think it’s because they don’t have an evident purpose, which makes it impossible to build a story. And I have a radical proposal.
The Lib Dems never really reached higher than the halcyon days of ‘I agree with Nick,’ though 2024 gave it a run for its money, benefiting from the post-Brexit collapse in the South Eastern Conservative vote. But what are they going to do with this inheritance?
The answer may lie in Piddington, flashpoint for Burnham and Mahmood’s proposal to distribute migrants across the country. Local Lib Dem MP Calum Miller has broken ranks to condemn it – a reminder that the party inherited constituencies which elected Boris in 2019.
A search for the party’s refugee and small boats policy takes you to their proposed ‘Growth and Defence Partnership’, which includes joining the Single Market and a new Customs Union. Small boat crossings never happened before Brexit, they claim, before going on to talk about solving a consequence of them through rejoining rather than preventing them in the first place, which it’s implied the EU somehow once did.
There’s a hole in the middle of the doughnut
That is the problem: how can Sir Ed rebuild an ideology with a generation of politicians who joined the Lib Dems tribally in the post-Brexit throes now coming to an end?
There is often a sense that the Lib Dems want to return to 2010 without the coalition, or to rerun the grievance of 2016. If they have filled their narrative with simply not being the Conservatives, and all their policy must be filtered through a lens which is out of focus for the current world, what is left when you strip it away? Layla Moran illustrated it on The Daily T this week, rejecting the ‘left/right spectrum’ for liberalism v authoritarianism but unable to identify where the Lib Dems sit on her own graph.
Sir Ed Davey understands storytelling. Caring for his son gives him authority on what could become Burnham’s defining fight: adult social care.
But a story needs a core truth. Sewage and water pollution was effective campaigning but rode the wave rather than making the weather. There is similar tactical scope in the South West, mining grievance at Number 10’s focus on ‘the North’ at the expense of rural and coastal communities.
More recently, Sir Ed suggested he was open to a deal with the Conservatives. More in Common polling found that 64% of Blue Wall voters believed changed economic circumstances justified spending cuts: a reminder that the electorate which abandoned the Conservatives in 2024 did not abandon its fiscal instincts.
But I can’t help feel it comes across more as a symptom of lack of direction. Direction comes from purpose, which comes from an organising philosophy. And regretting Brexit is not that. So, my proposal:
Beating the ‘banging on about Europe’ accusation
Give up the Brexit schtick. It’s aesthetic signalling masquerading as policy framework and it takes up too much space in the Lib Dem identity for a proper philosophy to form. They will not campaign to rejoin for fear of looking out of date, but cannot abandon it because of the noisy Hiroo Onodas of 2016. They cling to polls showing changed minds while UK in a Changing Europe finds Brexit barely reaches double digits for salience. Hell, even the head-bangiest of them all, Steve Bray, tells the New Statesman he’s on the verge of packing it all in — out of the jungle, indeed.
That does not itself answer what modern Liberal Democracy should be, nor is it for me to do so. But it would at least create the space in which the party could find out. And there are clear areas where its new electoral inheritance gives it something distinctive to work with.
There can be a true big-picture vision on the size and role of the state or personal liberty in a connected world. But it cannot grow in Brexit’s shadow while questions are answered by what the party is not rather than what it wants to be. So drop it. The howls will be loud but few, and can set the party up to hunt rather than gather.
The final question is whether Sir Ed is the man for the job. Since the 2024 high watermark, questions have grown about whether he has the vision and stamina to escape the maze he has built. The interesting question is who among the next generation of orange-diamond-waving MPs is saying something different.
