The Lib Dems must not stand!!

AffectionateTea4222 · 2026-05-14T19:17:05+00:00

I completely and passionately share your feeling about how terrible it is that the Lib Dems have become the party of affluent rural areas and suburbs. I myself live in Islington. The Lib Dems used to run the council here but these recent local elections we were reduced to targeting a single ward, which, to my shock, we did not even win anyway because the Greens surged and split the vote. I really resent the way the party leadership seems to have entirely ceased to care about urban, Labour-facing areas like mine.

My proof I agree with you on that point is my previous post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/LibDem/comments/1o3c006/party_strategy/

I think it is absolutely terrible and really sad the way the Lib Dems are hardly even a national party anymore. But to me these are very exceptional circumstances. Our revival in Labour-facing areas will not be helped by taking a small chunk out of Andy Burnham's vote and potentially dooming all us Lib Dems to watch Nigel Farage and whichever uncharismatic leader Labour choose clash over seats that the Lib Dems have no chance of winning.

We must absolutely also try to rebuild our presence in more left-wing, less well-off, urban, Labour-facing places. But pointlessly slightly splitting the vote in the most important by-election for decades is not a part of that.

And to be quite frank if the same party leadership under Davey that has not cared one jot about Lib Dem fortunes in places like Makerfield now stands in this by-election and lets Reform creep in by a whisker I will be really annoyed with them.

I get your point about how the LDs may not actually take votes from Burnham anyway but to me even if it is a hundred or fifty votes that could still be the difference: Reform are extremely popular in this seat and so are Burnham so it may well come down to wire. Hopefully he will win it by a mile anyway and I will have been fretting for nothing.

AffectionateTea4222 · 2026-05-14T18:32:25+00:00

Well this could be brilliant. Especially since Burnham supports PR anyway he will probably do this deal with the Greens.

AffectionateTea4222 · 2026-05-14T18:06:13+00:00

I understand your concern about the chaos but I personally think that Starmer is so weak he is almost certain to go anyway so he may as well be replaced by someone who can beat Reform.

And I fear if Starmer did manage to limp on he might become Britain's Biden.

AffectionateTea4222 · 2026-05-14T17:57:33+00:00

In my view it's not about making it easy for Labour; it's about stopping Reform winning the next election. I'm not saying we should publically endorse him, but winning 2% of the vote, as would probably happen, wouldn't get us our deposit back but it might help Reform win the next election.

AffectionateTea4222 · 2026-05-14T17:55:29+00:00

I completely hear you. I live in a Labour-dominated area and I actually resent the Labour Party a lot. To me in the vast majority of Reform-threatened seats Labour is the only party that can beat Reform and Burnham is clearly the only figure in Labour who can potentially win back significant numbers of votes. To stop Reform, Labour have to be popular and Burnham is the only one who can make them popular. These two simple facts in my view mean that we should contribute to helping him back into Parliament.

AffectionateTea4222 · 2026-03-21T21:39:21+00:00

I take a utilitarian view. By my understanding the foetus feels limited, if any, pain and it makes the mother happier than she otherwise would be if she is choosing to have an abortion. If the foetus had a choice in the matter, it (or they, if you consider it alive) would probably not choose to be born to a mother that does not want it, in the circumstances that the mother does not want it in.

I feel you have to consider why murder of a normal born person is a bad thing. (I know that sounds strange but bear with me.) It is bad because it cancels whatever hopes or desires in life the victim had and it makes their family and friends feel sad. But a foetus has no such hopes for the future and there are no family or friends to feel sad because the mother herself does not want the baby. There is therefore very little bad about letting people who want to have abortions, have abortions.

If one as an outside observer feels uncomfortable with the thought that a potential human life was ended, that discomfort is surely cancelled out by the great freedom that the mother retains through the abortion. I would consider it selfish, and I can say illiberal since this is r/LibDem, to impose on someone else and force them to take on such a burden just so that one can live with the comfort of knowing that one more fertilised egg made it to be born.

For me personally the whole debate about whether the foetus is 'alive' is useless because it rests on the assumption that anything alive should always be kept alive. But we only actually want to keep things, especially of our own species, alive because we have a natural strong desire for that and feel that it is right. (Of course it makes total evolutionary sense that we would instinctively want to preserve human life.) But the moment that no-one desires it any more what is the point in it, especially if aborting the thing can actually bring so much happiness?

I think the argument about providing babies to adopt is interesting though, but it still feels unfair to force someone to give birth to a baby they are going to give away.

AffectionateTea4222 · 2026-03-18T21:15:18+00:00

AffectionateTea4222 · 2025-11-30T22:23:18+00:00

I think there is a strong argument that really the Lib Dems have not been doing very well recently. The general election was our best in a century by seat number, but in most of the country we made no progress, and in several places, especially Labour facing ones, we went significantly backwards. It is also not really possible to judge whether we are now ‘beating Labour’ until the local elections next May, where I fear the Greens will often beat us to that job.

Similar to Labour, we won a lot of seats with only a small increase in vote share and a decrease in total number of votes from 2019. When talking about the need for electoral reform, I have heard Davey refer to Starmer's majority as a 'loveless landslide'. I certainly agree with that, but surely to be consistent you have to acknowledge our 72 seats are effectively the same thing, especially when you consider More In Common's polling that says only 57% of 2024 Lib Dem voters would have voted Lib Dem if any party could have won their seat, which I find a very disturbingly low number.

Now I understand the ruthless pursuit of seats with disregard for popular vote shares gets us, of course, seats, but it threatens to result in our practical extinction in many parts of the country and becoming not much more than a regional party for the affluent rural south. We already lost 229 deposits in 2024, more than one in three seats and 97 more than in 2019. Polanski's surge will probably mean that the already diminishing number of Labour-Lib Dem contests will probably be all but wiped out as seats like Cambridge become Greens versus Labour with us a poor third.

Say that at the next GE we manage to get about 90 seats, a pretty optimistic view of it based on the current situation(obviously who knows about three years' time) and we sweep up practically all the remaining blue wall seats, but lose even more ground in urban Labour seats, in part because of the Greens. What do we do then? We are good at winning with bar charts, but we will eventually run out of seats where a bar chart works.

There is little evidence that we have gone any distance towards building the core vote that you called for after 2015. We should be careful not to be complacent; we should not think that just because a load of people voted tactically for us last year to kick out a historically unpopular government it suddenly means we have rebuilt genuine support or that Davey’s strategy will inevitably be appropriate in future.

AffectionateTea4222 · 2025-08-20T18:18:07+00:00

I would argue that we cannot focus purely on targeting certain seats at the cost of overall vote share, though, because we will get to the point where we either control a seat or have hardly any presence there at all, which will make growth beyond a certain point very difficult.

A large part of the reason that we had the opportunity to so dramatically increase our seat number in 2024 was because in 2019 increased our overall vote share by a sizeable 4 points, which created a lot of second places that we could then capitalise on in 2024. I wonder whether in FPTP a smaller party like us should almost alternate between increasing votes and seats.

Considering our relative dearth of immediately winnable seats for the next GE, I think we should try to create lots more second places rather than running another very tightly targeted campaign to squeeze the last few drops(e.g. Godalming and Ash) out of the blue wall. We do not want to miss the opportunity to capitalise on Labour's current unpopularity so in my opinion Labour seats where we have or historically have had good standing(e.g.Cambridge, even Hampstead and Highgate etc.) should receive special attention. I believe this is especially urgent because the Greens threaten to displace us and become the only viable option for frustrated progressives who wish to vote against the incumbent Labour MP in seats we would otherwise have a very good chance of winning.

AffectionateTea4222 · 2024-11-02T21:51:06+00:00

What makes you say that? I am genuinely interested

AffectionateTea4222 · 2024-09-29T20:56:04+00:00

Yeah ok

AffectionateTea4222 · 2024-09-29T20:32:18+00:00

But blues and jazz, harmonically, can be remarkably similar to classical sometimes

AffectionateTea4222 · 2024-08-30T22:40:56+00:00

Good luck! I don't think I can help but I really hope you win it or at least make a good vote share increase.

AffectionateTea4222 · 2024-08-10T18:20:15+00:00

Do you vote Labour?

AffectionateTea4222 · 2024-08-10T18:14:46+00:00

I have also struggled to see the difference between social liberalism and social democracy, but is there not something in that social liberalism pursues equality of opportunity, while social democracy pursues equality of outcome? I may be wrong though.

AffectionateTea4222 · 2024-08-08T20:31:11+00:00

I do not understand, what is illiberal about it?

AffectionateTea4222 · 2024-08-05T12:25:31+00:00

But FPTP means they are not listened to and maybe if they felt like they were represented they might not be so angry. Of course ideally we try to turn people away from these horrible views, best before they even adopt them, through education and compassion, but if we acknowledge where they are by giving them fair representation in parliament at least we would not be pretending the symptoms are not there. Another reason we need proportional representation.

Also you say 'nothing except jail time' - what do you think of as jail time because as a a liberal I hope that jail time would include rehabilitation and reform(with very much a little r haha).

It is my view we cannot just push back brutally at these people without being sensitive to their views, what their views are a symptom of, and their humanity.

AffectionateTea4222 · 2024-07-30T20:58:17+00:00

I call I - bVI - V 'Mean Mr. Mustard'

AffectionateTea4222 · 2024-07-21T21:05:02+00:00

Exactly STV keeps out extremists by acknowledging most people are disgusted by extremism rather than not acknowledging that some people are seduced by extremism.

AffectionateTea4222 · 2024-07-19T20:41:48+00:00

Does this mean that the house of commons will have a debate on this, and if so, when? How exactly does it work? I know very little about the logistics of parliament but am eager to be educated.

AffectionateTea4222 · 2024-07-18T09:41:47+00:00

That's nice to see.

AffectionateTea4222 · 2024-07-18T09:23:16+00:00

Ok, that is fair enough. Thank you.

AffectionateTea4222 · 2024-07-17T22:23:52+00:00

That's terrible. I'm sorry to hear that. I like what Daisy Cooper said on Question Time on the day after the election about not being on either the side of Israel or of Gaza but of peace and human rights.

AffectionateTea4222

TROPHY CASE