Why the local elections next week are a huge test for the Liberal Democrats
First off, above is a video on a completely different topic to what this article covers (it’s about woke in relation to Marxism), but I thought I’d put it here just in case anyone was interested. Please, have a quick look.
I thought a lot about whether to write this piece or not, given my history with the Lib Dems. I have often got things wrong about the party, mostly through being too close to it. You see, I was once a Lib Dem member (more than ten years ago now, but still) and even was the Executive Director of a Lib Dem adjacent think tank. A lot of Lib Dems really don’t like me any longer because I said some mean things about them in the Spectator a while back. I don’t blame them, really, that’s just how political tribal loyalties go.
Anyhow, I decided to write this because in amongst all of the predictions about how the local elections are going to go next week, how the Lib Dems will fare has barely been discussed anywhere apart from blogs from Lib Dems themselves. All of the headlines have been about how Labour will be destroyed, Reform will do incredibly well, the Greens will gain a huge number of seats, and the Tories look to do either very poorly or disastrously badly outside of their remaining bastions of support, most of which are, ironically enough, in London these days.
Most of the predictions for how the Lib Dems will do see them performing, by any objective standard given the shape of British politics now, fairly poorly. A lot of the predictions have the Lib Dems only gaining less than a hundred seats nationwide, and some of the worst ones for the party have the Liberal Democrats actually losing seats overall.
I am not here to make a prediction on how well the Lib Dems will do. But I do know that if the Liberal Democrats really underperform to the levels indicated by the predictions, then they will have to take a long look in the mirror and think about their next steps. Because I think that level of underperformance, at an election where Labour will be looking to lose almost 2,000 seats and the Tories could lose up to 1,000, will be a major inditement of Ed Davey’s “let’s just do stunts and be the party for people who eat at Gail’s” strategy.
Whatever one thinks about Reform and the Greens, everyone who pays any attention to British politics knows what each of them are about. One can say that a lot of it is vibes based as opposed to policy based, but that is just politics in 2026. The Lib Dems did well at the last election by being a place for disaffected Tories and natural Labour voters in Lib-Tory swing seats. The Lib Dems were seen as a safe haven for a certain type of voter, one who just happened to live in areas that were conducive to the Lib Dems wracking up constituencies under First Past the Post.
I don’t think the Lib Dems can play this trick any longer, mostly because politics has changed around them over the last two years. I think they have to be about more than just “We don’t like Trump and Reform, but we aren’t as loopy as the Greens”. I just think the space for what they managed in July 2024 is evaporating around them, fast. How they do on May 7th will tell us a lot about whether I’m correct about this or not.
If the Lib Dems do have to become something more than they are, what should they become? I think there are two choices, one of which I would like and agree with, and the other is what I think the Lib Dems would feel a lot more comfortable becoming.
The first is that the party becomes a pro-European centre-right party. They try and loop in disaffected Tories with an economically right-leaning agenda, while campaigning openly to rejoin the EU. So, this would mean the Lib Dems go more right on the economy and more “left” on Europe.
The other is that they really try and eat into the Green vote assuming that it is not on stable ground and in fact, an implosion of the Polanski surge is impending. While I’d prefer the pro-EU centre-right strategy, and it would get me seriously interested in the party again, I think they would probably want to go more explicitly leftist to knock out the Greens. It’s where the activist base seems to be.
That wouldn’t be a party for me, but I do admit that it might possibly work for the Lib Dems. All I do know for certain is that the Lib Dems will probably have to go one way or the other after May 7th. Standing in the middle of the road isn’t going to work for them any longer.
I agree that the Lib Dems need to be bolder and clearer about who they are. But I disagree that they need to choose to lurch right or left. There is another way, which is to be more open and honest and simpler about who they are. Trouble is that the big challenge for them - and all parties now - is grabbing the most amount of airtime possible to be heard in a 5-way battle. It's easier for the Conservatives and Labour due to the many inherent advantages (friendly media, more MPs etc) they have always had, while the Greens and Reform have the advantage of newness and the media-value of extreme positions. Last night's QT was a good example - most of the programme was about those two, both dealing with their respective poor records, extreme candidates, dodgy leaders etc - but with both being given ample airtime to respond. The LibDems Daisy Cooper was OK I thought, but with very very little airtime versus others. To go back to your original suggestion, where I personally think the LDs could do better is to be bold and open about their wanting to be economically prudent and in favour of open markets and enterprise - you could argue this is "centre right" but I would also argue that their priorities around the environment, inclusiveness, progressive taxation etc are what you might call "centre left." To me they have always included both, but I agree that many activists are to the left economically, hence leaders have often tried to sound more left leaning. Ultimately I think this is about having confidence in who they are, rather than having to choose to move left or right per se.
I agree with most of this, but not so much with the conclusion.
Have you seen this on who represents (and crucially, what is meant by) the centre?
https://samf.substack.com/p/wheres-the-centre
While I have concerns about some assumptions the leadership is making and the strategy it's pursuing, I think this is probably correct:
"One senior Lib Dem said: “We don’t need to chase the 50% who are already anti-Reform. They will vote tactically regardless of almost anything else. In 2019 we tried to win just with these people and got hammered. It’s easy to boost polling numbers and lose seats.” "
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/apr/30/could-lib-dems-become-the-biggest-party-in-english-local-government
If that is right, then it means the Lib Dems losing votes in a lot of places they're not the main anti-Reform challenger (harming national poll ratings). But if it's right that tactical voting is very strong, then in the areas where the Lib Dems ARE the main anti-Reform party, it does open up space for the Lib Dems to grow the offer by appealing to the centre / centre right. Which is where Sam Freedman's article comes in.
He describes this 'centre' - that he says no one is effectively targeting - by saying: "the centre bloc appears to contain many of the sort of people who used to be the core of the Tory coalition: aspirational working age people who are doing fairly well themselves. The sort of people Tony Blair targeted very effectively in 1997."
He goes on to say: "One might think [the Lib Dems] are well positioned to appeal to this centre group, especially as the Tories keep getting pulled rightwards. Yet their current vote is even more skewed towards the left bloc than Labour’s. Ed Davey’s way of managing this has been to avoid taking contentious stances on major issues, preferring to focus on attacking Trump and Farage. His party’s appeal is currently built around being the left bloc option in much of the south. Ironically, given their long-standing support for PR, it’s a strategy that’s very dependent on a first past the post electoral system. There’s a broader point here. All three of the traditional parties have been strategically paralysed by the difficulty of retaining core bloc support."
Bringing it back to your article and your two suggestions for the Lib Dems, personally I would like to see the party consciously decide to try to create a coalition out of its current left-leaning voters and this centre bloc. I think that can be done not by veering left or right but by being bold and loud about economic growth and creating vibrant communities that depend upon it. So more talking about what might once have been called the third way, policies to boost economic growth, recognising the importance of business but not pretending that all will be fine if we just slash taxes and regulation. It's in this context that I think the Lib Dems could be brave enough to talk about moving much closer to the EU - at least by joining the Single Market as well as the Customs Union.
Should we say we'd join the EU as full members? While there is a lot of support for this now, I still think that people underestimate how much people want to avoid further massive culture war rows, so I rather than headlining with 'we should join the EU' we'd be better off saying 'we need to get the economy going, which means joining the CU and SM'. If the response is 'if the country's going that far, why don't we just join the EU?' the Lib Dem response could be 'well, quite... we'd be in favour of that, but our immediate priority is economic growth, but note that everything we're proposing would be helpful for the country should we wish to rejoin the EU as full members'.