O Libdems, Where art thou?

First the good news. The Liberal Democrats narrowly beat Labour in the local elections as a percentage of the national vote (with 27%). This being a 22% increase on what they managed during last year’s General Election, you could say they have not had a bad few weeks. After all it is only the second time in recent history they have been ahead of Labour.

The bad news is that the LibDems may as well not have existed in these elections; on face value it was a straight transfer of power from Labour to Conservatives. They shuffled around the edges.

I want to make two points in this article. The first is that there needs to be a better discussion of whether Sir Ming Campbell needs to make way for a new leader who has more impact. Secondly, that LibDem blogs need to start becoming more strategic.

It is true that in local elections people are less interested in politics on a national scale. But that does not explain why the Conservatives gained so heavily at the expense of Labour. So I set about going through LibDemBlogs to find out what party activists had been saying, and was left a bit disappointed. There was very little discussion of the results on a national level.

But there was some. Peter, Susanne and Stephen cover this briefly. Jonathan Calder says a bit more.

Let’s start with my first point. On this, James has a good analysis of the elections and says:

Is it fair to pin the blame on Ming Campbell? Yes and no. On the one hand, had Kennedy remained in post I am quite sure we would have had just as bad a night, possibly worse. From the central party point of view, our problem is twofold: our inability to develop distinctive national messages, and our inability to spread best practice and develop a coherent Lib Dem nationwide approach to local government.

Though Cicero and Tony Ferguson are forgiving, Ken Owen and Paul Linford are not:

Ming is a decent man, of that there is no question, but my suspicions that he would prove ill-suited to the demands of modern politics have proved sadly correct, and it is not just Tory MPs and part-time bloggers who think he cannot take the party through the glass ceiling.

He has failed to give the Liberal Democrats the distinctive branding and youthful appeal they had under Ashdown and Kennedy and even his House of Commons performances, which were expected to be his strong suit, have been stumbling.

Apologies if I missed anyone out in my above round-up. During the leadership election Sir Campbell was not my first choice and I am still to be convinced he can make any real impact with voters outside the hardcore Lib Dem constituency. And that brings me to the second point.

A few months ago the Apollo Project merged with Liberal Review online. I view such consolidation positively because there is a real opportunity, specially for blogs aligned with political parties, to use this online space to move the agenda forward.

So here my view. While Lib Dems seem to more prevalent amongst card-carrying British bloggers, they mostly write about personal and local affairs. This is neither surprising nor necessarily a bad thing. But it pretty much means zero political impact.

What I’d love to see is the likes of Liberal Review and Liberal England leading a concerted and organised grassroots efforts to thrash out the future direction of the party. To discuss and debate why the local elections, what can be learnt, whether Sir Ming Campbell can do the job, and how those elusive voters can be converted to the cause.

We already know blogs offer a fantastic publishing platform for people to discuss and debate ideas. Why not use that to re-generate the political grassroots rather than leaving it to the higher-ups to formulate policy?

I’m not deriding the existing quality of commentary or implying there is little retrospection. I’m simply saying that rather than being disparate and disconnected, this debate needs to be more strategic and organised.