Thoughts on the elections:
If there’s one thing guaranteed to put people off politics I think it must be politicians and political bloggers after elections.
The Tories had a good result, you’d expect them to be rather crowing. I will take it as a compliment that many Tories have been attacking the LibDems far more than Labour - it shows that they are taking us seriously, even if they pretend that we’re not a threat.
Labour had a very poor result, yet to hear Labour MPs and pundits its not that bad. Its even a good platform for a general election win apparently. Come on, admit it, for the most part you did horribly and you are losing support in the country.
The Liberal Democrats also had a generally poor election. Perhaps its possible to spin bits of it - we did gain some ground against both the Tories and Labour in some areas, but we lost it, especially to the Tories, in other areas. We must admit that, and look at why and what we can do.
Personally, I think that we must evaluate the party and be staunchly liberal. I hear people saying so often that they don’t know what we stand for - true its difficult to get our policies across being the third party and true people not knowing what the Greens really stand for helps them enourmously, but we must start getting ideas across.
We must stop talking about liberal democracy and start talking of liberalism. Focus leaflets should espouse liberalism and frame our policies in the terms of liberalism. We must consider radical liberal policies and espouse individual freedom, rights and responsibilities.
We must seek to show we want to enable people to take control of their lives, to stop keeping people from having opportunity which they’d have without the government policies.
Everything we do should have the overriding theme of liberalism, of freedom and the individual. We must show why individualism isn’t selfish. We must stand on principle against interference in people’s lives, we must allow people to make their own decisions, even if the consequences to themselves are negative.
Everything we do should be based around a message of liberalism. In this age of spin and blandness we have an opportunity to put forward a liberal vision, to take the debate from the moribund left/right debate to one of liberty vs. authority, the individual vs. collectivism and of freedom vs. coercion.
We are the party with the strongest uniting principles, we should demonstrate them and promote them.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 5th, 2007 at 7:19 am
Spot on .
Liberalism is clear & defined - an ‘ism’ which is becoming more important and a solution to the huge challenges we & the Planet face. Liberalism is part of the solution Conservitism is part of the problem.
May 5th, 2007 at 8:12 am
Spot on. Focus leaflets are almost universally mechanistic, even the best ones which are really engaging with the issues in the communities to which they are addressed. I see hundreds of them every year and I cannot remember the last time I saw one which conveyed any kind of sense of what Liberalism is. To a large extent I think this is because the people who produce them are primarily motivated by a desire to serve their community rather than to promulgate a political philosophy: Liberalism is not a philosophy than can be communicated easily anyway. But it should be possible for the (few) clear thinkers in the Party to put together short well-written pieces on what the Party stands for that Focus editors could drop in along with ‘Massive Response’ and ‘It’s a Two-Horse Race’.