John Oxley is a consultant, writer, and broadcaster. His SubStack is Joxley Writes.
It’s easy to mock the Lib Dems; fun, too. Under Sir Ed Davey’s leadership, they have become more known for their wacky stunts than their political leadership. The rise of Reform and the Greens in the polls has also sucked attention away from them.
Their conference this week largely faded into the background, not even garnering the coverage they once got as the most established third party. In a new, more polarised and fragmented political world, the party starts to feel like a relic, or a project without a purpose.
The party itself seems caught in an identity crisis. Questions abound about who it is for, and what it is trying to achieve. Yet reading between the lines of the conference, there was a clear message. It wasn’t really a strategic or governmental message, but the political tactics were transparent. Right now, the Lib Dems are focused on holding their seats and blocking the centre-right’s return.
The headlines from conference were clearly pitched at the sort of seats the party picked up in 2024. Predominantly wealthy places in the South East, where people have high-paying jobs, big houses and liberal tendencies – but also feel put upon by the government. Davey campaigned for a cut to fuel duty, an economically dubious measure that helps richer drivers more than the poor. His centrepiece was an income tax cut.
The funding wasn’t entirely clear, predicated on the fruits of returning to the EU, but the benefits would be widely spread, increasing the tax-free allowance and raising the higher tax thresholds. It looks like a very middle-class populism. The Lib Dems might not know what they want, but they know who their voters are.
This should continue to worry the Conservative Party. The loss of more than fifty seats to the Lib Dems has often been overlooked in studies of the 2024 rout. We lost far more seats to Labour, and more votes to Reform, but the rise of the centrist party across swathes of formerly Tory territory is a real problem.
We were beaten in places we had held since the Great Reform Act, in constituencies almost synonymous with the Party, and with demographics that should be a natural fit for the centre-right. The Lib Dems obviously aim to keep these, and perhaps pick off a dozen more, mostly in the South East.
Winning back these seats will be difficult. There is a reason activists compare Lib Dems to turmeric – the orange spice that is almost impossible to remove. The party has proven adept in the past at digging in, campaigning hard and holding seats through changing political tides. In 1997 they turned new gains into strongholds, losing many of them only when the damage of going into coalition with us filtered through. They will be working hard to ensure the same longevity in those recent wins, as well as trying to flip seats where they have made inroads on councils.
Those seats are, however, essential for almost every potential comeback trajectory for the Tories. If we cannot regain places like Surrey Heath, Mid Sussex or Tunbridge Wells, then we have to reach deeper into Labour territory than ever before. Based on last time’s majorities, without those 60 or so seats that fell to the Lib Dems, we’d need to pick up places like Rochdale and Central Newcastle just to have a working majority. That would take political choices and demographic shifts that would likely strain any centre-right party.
The resilience of the Lib Dems also acts as an insurance policy for Andy Burnham. Whilst in 2010, the party tasted power for the first time as our coalition partners, there seems little likelihood that would be repeated in the short term. They were scarred, electorally and psychologically, from that partnership, and many new MPs, activists and members developed their political consciousness in its shadow. Once bitten, twice shy. They are even less likely to enter into any sort of government which includes Reform, knowing that doing so would compromise their principles and votes, even more than tuition fees ever did. As such, the bar for Labour to have a workable minority government remains lower than anyone else’s.
What to do with that position remains their biggest strategic challenge. The Lib Dems are struggling to articulate or define what their demands would be if they had to negotiate for power again. In fairness, it is a hard question to answer. If the next election made them kingmakers, they would be a party representing high-earning, wealthy areas, talking to a left-wing party. A delegation of the South East propping up a Prime Minister who has made the North both his focus and his identity.
Talk of tax cuts for the wealthy, or even rejoining the EU, is unlikely to persuade the next Labour government. A post-2029 Burnham would want to spend too much for the former, and is still likely to be too wary of Labour leavers for the latter. The Lib Dems might convince him on electoral reform, but that delivers for their activists, not their voters. Through their conference, the party looked like one that knew how to campaign but wasn’t serious about contributing to government.
The Tories cannot, however, wait for the Lib Dems to discredit themselves. Beating them is an important part of our electoral future. If their conference offering hits the campaigning mark and draws in more affluent constituencies across the Home Counties, our heartland will be gone completely.
Their staying power will make those places hard to recover and potentially pull us in stranger directions as we chase places to replace it. It could also mean we are looking at going backwards on 2024, even without the rise of Reform.
The Lib Dem conference may have been a third-order news story, but its message should still matter to the Conservatives. We continue to be squeezed from both sides of the electoral spectrum, and we don’t have the luxury of picking which opponent to fight.
We need to beat both. Davey’s message might not be coherent policy, but it is politically transparent: a play for better-off voters who have drifted away from us. If we are serious about our electoral future, we must be wise to its threat.