​​Beyond the ballot box: The Liberal Democrats searching for their identity amid electoral success.

​Requiring a venue upgrade since last year’s conference, this year’s affair will see 72 MPs huddle into the VENUE, as they put it to the BBC to ‘finish the job’. 72 MPs is the party’s high-water mark and the highest number of seats won by any liberal party in over a century. The conference will be the opportunity for the Lib Dems to demonstrate serious policy beyond Nimby-ism, europhilia and their own vendetta against the FPTP electoral system. The Liberal Democrats, despite this year’s success, still don’t truly know who they are or what they represent, and neither, I would bet, do the rest of the country. 

​Predictably, the first item on the day 1 agenda was electoral reform. Despite losing a referendum ten years ago and this year receiving 12.2% of the popular vote and 11% of the seats, that hasn’t deterred the perennial debate to kickstart the conference. If implemented in the 2024 election, the Lib Dems would have received essentially the same representation in Parliament and have fewer MPs than Reform UK. Nobody seems to have mentioned that, though. 

​Leader Ed Davey was then pressed on his party’s reputation for Nimby-ism. Davey said, “I’ve always felt that our approach, which has been tried in a number of places and worked really well, when you engage the community about the housing and about the challenges that means to any community, is the right approach.” Neither the developer nor the community would agree to that statement, which is clearly very naive to anybody who has engaged in the planning system. 

​ In the friendly but predictable Lib Dem style, Leader Ed Davey has suggested that he will work with the Government ‘where they do the right things’. That makes sense. Further, the Lib Dems’ success is not in taking seats from Labour but from the Conservatives, as demonstrated in the 2024 election. There’s more coal in this seam, too. Of the 27 seats where the Liberal Democrats came second in 2024, 20 were won by the Conservatives.   

The Liberal Democrats face a difficult challenge in this Parliament. Do they oppose Labour from the left (which they appear to be doing) in opposing the 2 child benefit cap, social care, more NHS capital expenditure (which Labour are no longer arguing for), and the removal of the winter fuel allowance for the poorest pensioners? When the budget comes in October, wealthy Lib Dem voters in Witney, Maidenhead, Henley etc., will be the first to feel the tax rise pinch. By which time, the opposition will inevitably be from the right and they will vote against the budget and oppose such tax rises. 

The truth is that to win, the Liberal Democrats don’t need to know who they are or present any serious vision for the country. The current formula is working, and it is, at its heart, populist. The beauty of being a party that is unlikely to govern is you very rarely deliver and present outcomes. That is, unless you end up in a coalition, and we all know how that ends.​​