Anders Hanson

It might be four days late, but I should perhaps still comment on last week’s local election results. I make no apologies for the time it has taken to write this, as I was determined to have a weekend that was, almost, completely free of politics.

As Sheffield held its count on Friday this year, I went there knowing that most of the results in the country were not so great for the Liberal Democrats and the partly looked set to do worse in Scotland. So it was as much a relief as anything else to see the Lib Dems do well in Sheffield, picking up three seats from Labour and one from the Conservatives.

All of these results gave me a huge amount of satisfaction. Not only has the Liberal Democrat Group gained four excellent new councillors who will contribute a lot to their wards and the group, but they are also people I like on a personal level. We have picked up our first seats in Gleadless Valley and Hillsborough after close results last year, and we now have a full set of three Lib Dems in Walkley for the first time since 2002.

In my own patch in Sheffield Hallam, the Tories ended up losing another seat and now have only one left in the city. The Lib Dem vote in Sheffield Hallam had increased again from last year, and bodes well for the next General Election. Despite the Tories running bigger campaigns and delivering leaflets in more places than last year, their vote went down. The Lib Dems also managed to top the poll in Sheffield Central, which is a marginal seat that the Lib Dems can take from Labour at the next General Election.

But despite the excellent results in Sheffield, the national result has once again been a disappointment. Naturally the national party website puts a positive spin on these results, but I hope the official analysis will reflect on what really seemed to happen.

The accepted wisdom of the elections is that the Lib Dems did badly against the Tories in the South and well against Labour in the North. That is largely the case, but it does not explain why the Lib Dems did well against the Tories in places like Winchester, Taunton Deane and Caradon, but lost seats to Labour in York and in a surprisingly high number of other councils across the North albeit in smaller numbers. It also cannot simply be put down to people giving the Lib Dems a kicking where they are in charge, as we gained seats in a number of authorities that we have now run for a significant amount of time such as Eastleigh, Three Rivers and Oadby & Wigston, all of which have the Conservatives in second place and are in the South or Midlands. In any analysis it is also probably not fair to look at those authorities that have won or lost big on the back of just one major local issue, or those like Torbay and Bournemouth that have now developed a tendency to swing dramatically at each election, without any obvious direct effect at the subsequent general election.

Some Lib Dems have immediately jumped to criticise Ming Campbell for the result. I have always argued that the leadership of the Lib Dems is usually irrelevant to local election results, and it is as unfair to blame Ming for a bad result as it has been to praise Charles for the good results when he was leader. The inconsistency of the election results show that cannot be the case, as it would be like saying that the voters of Eastleigh think Ming is great whereas the voters of Southampton can’t stand him. But I also believe that by blaming Ming we are making him a scapegoat rather than looking for real lessons from last Thursday.

The think that has struck me most about these elections is that the party is beginning to return to the way seats were always won or lost in the past. In the bad old days when there were only a handful of Liberal Democrats, the party only did well where there was a critical mass of campaigners who knew what they were doing and where they had the drive and work ethic to make us win. Although the party has achieved this in certain seats since 1997 it has also picked up many more by simply being seen as the opposition or because of a national swing. This is fine to start with, but when you reach times like those we have now, (where the Lib Dems are starting to get squeezed out by the battle between the bigger two), much more is needed to keep winning.

The areas we have done well in this year tend, (although there are always exceptions), to be those where there is either a group of campaigners who are organised and know what they are doing, or where we have a key individual who is leading a team of less experienced people. I can look at a few councils around the country and tell you exactly who in that local party is the key individual that has given us such a good result. Where that isn’t the case, it is usually because there is a good team of activists who know what they are doing.

So the solution? We need to stop living beyond our means. I don’t mean financially, but in terms the number of activists needed to sustain a successful election campaign. We have more parliamentary seats than we’ve had since the 1920s and, despite the events of last week, more councils and councillors than we had in the old days. Yet, our membership is either static or in decline. We have the professional campaigns staff that we never used to have, we now need the grafters who can make it happen in each constituency and council. In many places we don’t and it simply isn’t sustainable when we are now clearly in the toughest political times that we have had for 15 years or more. The Tories are now motivated and have improved their campaigning know how, but I still believe that the Lib Dems know more about what wins elections than they do. What the Lib Dems now need is to boost the membership, train up more of the membership to run good campaigns and use the extra income that more members brings to give us extra financial resources that will also help us to win.