Until relatively recently, Labour found it fairly easy to campaign to beat Tory opponents, but in fights against the Liberal Democrats we were paralysed like rabbits in the headlights, unable to come up with strategies or tactics for winning back council wards or parliamentary constituencies they had taken from us, or to resist being inexorably squeezed in LD vs. Con fights. However, there is now a substantial bank of best practice that Labour activists can draw on, derived from local government campaigns to regain council seats from the Lib Dems in London boroughs such as Hackney, Islington, Lambeth and Tower Hamlets, and further afield in places like Oxford.
The problem facing Labour activists trying to beat Lib Dems is that they are chameleons who will present themselves as leftwing in our better areas and more rightwing in Tory-leaning areas. So they present a moving target. They also campaign very hard with minimal human and financial resources. The Lib Dem ‘paper storm’ of reams of focus leaflets and direct mail produced cheaply by Reisograph printers, and delivered by a small number of fanatical volunteers, tends to send complacent Labour (or Tory) constituency parties into catatonic shock, and to deeply impress voters if the two main parties have been neglecting an area. It is particularly effective in areas the main parties consider to be ‘safe’.
Thus the fundamental key to beating them is to put yourself in the shoes of the voters they are managing to attract and understand what those voters want. By voting Lib Dem they are usually saying they have put ideology to one side (the number of ideologically committed ‘liberal’ voters is tiny) and are making a judgement based on local delivery of services by their council, and perceived accessibility, levels of activity and commitment to the local community and visibility of the MP/PPC and councillors/ward candidates.
So to beat them, our offer has to not win just on national policies and values; we have to prove we are locally more competent to deliver services. Fortunately, Lib Dem councils tend to self-liquidate: they sweep in on a tide of protest and then invariably turn out to be less good at running things than Labour administrations are. We also have to beat them by having candidates who can prove through the way we behave as incumbents, or by the way we campaign in opposition, that we are more energetic, accessible and focused on solving local issues than they are. If we can’t prove that, we don’t deserve to win. The Labour party’s representatives have to be better representatives than our opponents, not just to have better ideas and policies. Good candidate recruitment and selection is therefore critical.
Once we have good candidates, they need to beat the Lib Dems at their own game. They have to be matched leaflet for leaflet, direct mail for direct mail, and our ones need to be better researched, more relevant and more responsive than theirs. And then we have to use our superior latent human resources – hundreds of members in each CLP when many Lib Dem associations have only tens – to contact more of the electorate through canvassing than they do. That means mobilising members who don’t come to meetings to leaflet, so that the key activists can canvass. After all, voters can’t default to Lib Dem because they feel ignored if someone from Labour has actually been on their doorstep and taken up casework for them.
We also have to do the kind of community outreach Liam Byrne has perfected in his Birmingham Hodge Hill constituency. Too often, Labour is like a closed club, failing to interact and build coalitions on issues with civic society: tenants’ and residents’ associations, faith groups, social activists, amenity societies. By doing so, we leave the Lib Dems free to identify and champion these groups’ issues, and recruit their leading members as activists or councillors when many of them could just as easily be brought into the Labour family.
Above all, our campaigning has to go local. National leaflet templates and national swing can often beat the Tories, but by voting Lib Dem in the first place, electors are saying they care more about local issues than the national big picture. Every piece of literature in a battle with the Lib Dems needs to reinforce a compelling local narrative that tells voters why it is in their interests to come back to Labour in their specific area.
You can’t ignore the Lib Dems in your campaigning messaging if they are your main opposition. They won’t just go away. But conversely, because their supporters are ‘retail’ consumers of politics, ‘buying’ a party because of its short-term offer rather than being long-term partisans, they can quite easily be switched off from the Lib Dems once presented with any reasons not to vote for them. So you need to attack them. Not negative campaigning for its own sake, or yah-boo stuff, but well-researched, reasoned exposes of their record. What are their national policies? (for instance, many council estate residents who start voting Lib Dem because of their activism on housing issues will be horrified by their soft stance on crime and anti-social behaviour, such as hostility to CCTV). What way has their MP voted on key issues? What have their councillors said, proposed and voted for at the town hall?
And our campaigns against the Lib Dems need to be sufficiently flexible and nimble to respond swiftly and with overwhelming force to each move they make. Effectively they are a political guerrilla army so we need counter-insurgency tactics, not the frontal-attack trench warfare that works against the Tories. This means being able to produce fast, cheap leaflets with local content to rebut their attacks and pick up and deal with local issues as they arise, not to be locked into a pre-planned print strategy. So any CLP trying to fight the Lib Dems without a Reisograph and in-house desktop publishing skills needs to get both fast. And it means being able to move activists round within a borough or constituency at short notice to counter Lib Dem probes into different wards (including sneaky attacks deep into theoretically safe Labour territory). Any CLP where activists refuse to work as a team where they are needed, and are chained to their own ward, will find itself defeated piecemeal, ward by ward.
All this requires a degree of command and control which is understandably somewhat alien to a pluralistic and democratic political party. To effectively combat the Lib Dems, you need to trust and empower someone who knows how to fight that kind of election to take them on. That could be the MP or PPC, or it could be the agent or campaign manager. But either way, you need as a CLP to vote to let someone get on with the job, and culturally to decide to trust that person to produce leaflets and allocate resources in the way that stops the Lib Dems. You can’t fight a Lib Dem Focus Team by holding committee meetings and arguing over the content of leaflets.
The Lib Dems are not invincible. In fact they are very ‘vincible’ because their politics are opportunist and vacuous. But beating them requires CLPs to undergo a culture shift, to being outcome not process focussed, year-round campaigners, outward looking and disciplined. Otherwise you just end up another bit of the map that gets coloured in yellow.