Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Read Nick Harvey's take on the Lib Dems' disaster of 2015


Nick Harvey, the former Liberal Democrat MP for North Devon, was appointed as interim chief executive of the party.

That makes it interesting to revisit an article he wrote for Liberator in November 2015 on the party's collapse at that year's general election.

I quoted a key passage when I blogged about it at the time:
Somehow, though stuck at 8% in national polls, we clung to the idea that incumbency would save MPs (even though it hadn’t saved excellent councillors and MEPs). 
Our biggest mistake in responding to that finding was to offer up a diet of backward-looking self-congratulation on what we had achieved in coalition. 
There were indeed many Lib Dem achievements in office of which we should be proud, and no one else would blow the trumpet for them. But many were in the earlier years so no longer news, and all were by definition done with Tory consent so they had shared credit in some cases. 
Above all, voters simply aren’t motivated by gratitude, as Paddy regularly acknowledged. Yet on and on we warbled like a cracked record.
You can read the whole article in Liberator 375.

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