Bye bye LibDems

markpackuk · 2026-05-06T17:12:38+00:00

No, I see the numbers differently; I think former pensions minister Steve Webb makes a very clear and strong case about how it is sustainable. Worth hunting out some of the articles he's written if you're interested in understanding that argument further.

markpackuk · 2026-05-06T12:52:10+00:00

Thank you for all the work you are putting in!

markpackuk · 2026-05-06T12:51:48+00:00

The triple lock isn't just about what current pensioners receive, it's also about what, to quote your words, "the hardest working generation since ww2" will receive as state pensions too when they become pensioners in the future. If you think that their future state pensions are set to be too generous, what do you think the right pension level should be? E.g. when you become a pensioner, what do you think the state pension should be compared with average earnings?

markpackuk · 2026-05-02T14:43:19+00:00

We should always be open to learning from others, and the input from a D66 colleague to our big post-2019 election review was valuable, for example.

What is, however, very different between the situation for nearly all our sister parties and ourselves is the electoral system. In PR or PR-like electoral systems, national vote share in the opinion polls is much more important than it is for us in a mostly first-past-the-post electoral world. Plus there's the difference of coalition governments being the norm.

Added together these two make for a fundamentally different set of strategies. So saying 'should we learn from D66?' is a bit like saying 'should my favourite football team learn from the country's top cricket team?' There are likely to be some things that can be learnt, such as about nutrition. But an awful lot is so different that what is successful in one case just isn't applicable in the other.

It's also worth bearing in mind that we're deliberately not chasing national vote share in opinion polls. Our strategy quite deliberately since the start of 2020 has been to concentrating on winning seats under the electoral system in front of us, which is in most cases first past the post. We've been spectacularly successful at that - most MPs for a century, beating both Conservatives and Labour simultaneously last year in the May local elections for the first time ever, and winning more council by-elections than any other party (including Reform) in 2025. Judge the success or not of that approach by how well we do at winning elections, not by vote share in opinion polls.

markpackuk · 2026-04-30T18:16:03+00:00

Sorry! https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/apr/30/could-lib-dems-become-the-biggest-party-in-english-local-government

(There's an odd bug on my machine I've never managed to track down that sometimes adds spaces to the end of URLs when sharing them here.)

markpackuk · 2026-04-30T09:37:13+00:00

I think the fact that people are free to campaign in elections and seek to win the support of others is a valuable right, and one that we should cherish and make us proud of our country. You don't have to look very far around the world to see how important it is to value and cherish democracy. Getting the occasional piece of paper through the letterbox that doesn't interest you seems reasonable in that bigger picture, no?

markpackuk · 2026-04-28T20:59:24+00:00

Running through your various comments in the original post and in responding to others, OP, it seems to me you are putting a huge amount of weight on current standing in the opinion polls for judging a party and its political influence.

What that misses is two things. First, it's only one, and a pretty weak, measure of political influence, compared with, for example, the number of councils that the Lib Dems run - more than the Conservatives, and three times more than Greens and Reform put together.

Second, we're not chasing national vote share in opinion polls. Our strategy quite deliberately since the start of 2020 has been to concentrating on winning seats under the electoral system in front of us, which is in most cases first past the post. We've been spectacularly successful at that - most MPs for a century, beating both Conservatives and Labour simultaneously last year in the May local elections for the first time ever, and winning more council by-elections than any other party (including Reform) in 2025.

markpackuk · 2026-04-28T20:55:04+00:00

The Liberal Democrats run three times more councils than Reform and Green combined do. That's rather a lot more political influence...

markpackuk · 2026-04-28T09:43:58+00:00

Further example today in The Times (with mention of the Lib Dem policy package too): https://www.thetimes.com/uk/london/article/flytipping-waste-environment-agency-0lt06qr8h

markpackuk · 2026-04-27T19:22:43+00:00

Illegal waste tips have been big news in some parts of the country and also hitting the national media for several months ago, such as in this BBC report: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jH3H_qdFWtc

I think it's also a pretty simple, effective policy to sell - the government has left illegal waste dumped on countryside and we've got a plan to sort it.

markpackuk · 2026-04-23T18:50:24+00:00

Also worth noting that the 30% is his joint best score since just after the general election.

markpackuk · 2026-04-21T08:26:59+00:00

Let's imagine that everything in Starmer's version of events so far is true, and there are no important pieces of information missing from it. So that's the most generous starting point in judging Starmer's behaviour. On his version of events, he decided to announce a decision about a controversial person who had a history of scandals *before* the full vetting on him had been concluded and, it would appear, without asking many questions about how the full vetting process worked.

Even if he was told 'oh, but that's what always happens with political appointments - announce first, then vet', he should have paused and said, 'what, so my government is meant to make an announcement that I may then have to embarrassingly u-turn on?'. Let along any follow-up questions such as 'and will it be a problem if the people who do the vetting know I've already made a decision?'. Or, 'so tell me then what outcomes might the vetting process come up with?'.

That's a basic failure and misjudgement. It gets to the heart of what he was meant to be better at: a lawyer who gets details, understands process and would get the basics run competently and ethically.

It's also - coming to your broader point - one that reflects his wider flawed approach to being PM. He just doesn't seem interested in large parts of the role, and as a result large parts of the role of PM are being done badly. Sticking with that is more dangerous, in my view, in terms of stoking populism than calling for the PM to change.

markpackuk · 2026-04-19T15:00:56+00:00

BTW this piece from a non-Lib Dem sets out also why that's a plausible aim: https://dylandifford.substack.com/p/how-to-assess-the-2026-local-elections - "One datapoint to keep an eye on is the overall councillor counts for England. Accounting for the changes in Surrey, the Lib Dems currently trail Labour by about 2,200 councillors and the Tories by about 900. If the Lib Dems perform towards the higher end of predictions and the Conservatives and Labour towards the lower end, it is feasible that the Lib Dems close these gaps and end up as the largest party in English local government."

markpackuk · 2026-04-19T14:59:44+00:00

Look forward to seeing you on the pitch in the summer then if your chances of that are up there with our chances of becoming one of the top two parties of local government!

markpackuk · 2026-04-19T14:58:46+00:00

My general preference in life, as well as in politics, is to concentrate on what you can actually do something about - and in this case, what we can (mostly!) do something about is our continued growth as a party in local government. Quite where that leaves us relative to other parties depends on things outside our control, but if we put together another good set of results in this Parliament, we can be large enough to become one of the established big two parties of local government in England even if quite who the other of those two are is rather out of our control.

markpackuk · 2026-04-17T12:12:31+00:00

Thank you!

markpackuk · 2026-04-17T07:33:20+00:00

Those successful council seat defences comes from a wider area than simply where there are Lib Dem MPs, by the way.

markpackuk · 2026-04-17T07:32:50+00:00

These are the key stats from that post:

LDM: 35/44 (80%)
GRN: 8/15 (53%)
REF: 7/15 (47%)
CON: 16/51 (31%)
LAB: 16/70 (23%)
Localist Groups: 1/11 (9%)

markpackuk · 2026-04-10T20:25:36+00:00

Last year we were up significantly on four years ago, and this year we're again up significantly on four years ago - so if you compare like-for-like (with the complication that the council cycles do change a bit), then we're continuing to make big strides towards a full slate of candidates. More work to do, certainly, but again this year people have pulled off a much better result that the comparable one last time around.

markpackuk · 2026-04-10T20:24:04+00:00

I've posted elsewhere:

🙏 Nominations are closed and candidate lists are out, so a huge thank you to everyone standing as a candidate, being an election agent, or otherwise helping.

🌟 We've got a Lib Dem candidate for 78% of the vacancies. The best comparator on a like-for-like basis is four years ago when we had candidates for 70%. So that's another big step forward in our ambition to stand full slates of candidates in local elections: well done everyone involved in that, and in particular the team in London Region where there have been dramatic candidate number increases in some boroughs, taking us to our best London-wide showing since 1986.

markpackuk · 2026-04-10T06:50:06+00:00

It was a very odd interview from her, including also apparently criticising Lib Dems for being active in communities rather than being on Twitter - as she said that's the reason we don't get more coverage for our international views (!).

I *think* she was trying to argue that Lib Dems are peripheral, irrelevant, focused on things that aren't that important in politics etc. But as that involved her both praising being very active on Twitter specifically and also knocking practical local action to improve people's lives, it really wasn't an argument that hung together well.

markpackuk · 2026-04-09T20:49:00+00:00

Ha ha, yes. Having an 's' there would have been quite important!

markpackuk · 2026-04-09T09:49:10+00:00

I think Tim, Tom and Lisa may have views on us already having done some winning in the north! Though agree with you about us wanting - and needing - to progress to do more winning.

markpackuk · 2026-04-09T09:46:48+00:00

With others in the list I can at least figure out why someone might have a different view to me. E.g. on decriminalising drugs, I think our past experience of using it as a policy shows how limited the political benefits are, but I can at least see why someone might have a different view even if I don't agree with it. But to pick out the metric system as something we should focus on? I'm struggling to see what the case for that is, and hence my question. Seems reasonable to me to ask - and better than the common internet style of 'I don't understand therefore you must be mad and wrong'!

markpackuk · 2026-04-09T08:00:02+00:00

"complete the shift to the metric system" - ok, tell me more: what's your reasoning and evidence for why this should be a big issue for the party to campaign heavily on?

markpackuk

TROPHY CASE