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Category: Lib Dems

After just a year in the job Cable comes under pressure

After just a year in the job Cable comes under pressure

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Mail reporting LD plot to swap Vince Cable, 75, for Layla Moran, 35 https://t.co/BwUBULHXuN via @MailOnline — Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) July 22, 2018 Could he be the first party leader out? I have no idea whether the Mail story linked to in the tweet above is correct but there’s little doubt that Cable’s failure to participate in one of the key Commons votes of this Parliament has raised a few eyebrows something that’s been exacerbated by the narrowness of outcome….

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With just about all the LE2018 results now in the clear winners were the LDs gaining most seats and councils

With just about all the LE2018 results now in the clear winners were the LDs gaining most seats and councils

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BBC News One of the things that generally happens on local election nights is that the media narrative is determined by what happens in the first few hours of results. So the big coverage was of Lab’s failure to take its key targets in London and of course the antisemitism element of the result from Barnet. But now that we’ve got just about all the results in we seen clearly that the big winners were the Lib Dems who have…

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The LDs need a good day in next week’s locals just to show that they are still in the game

The LDs need a good day in next week’s locals just to show that they are still in the game

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Can they take councils and increase their council seats? We are now three years on from the end of the Coalition and it is 8 years since tuition fees were a big issue. For the Lib Dems next week’s local elections are an opportunity to show that they are starting to recover at least at local level. Because the elections up on May the 3rd include all the London boroughs there will be much greater mainstream media interest than is…

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Chris Rennard’s “Winning Here” – the requiem for the battered Lib Dems or the handbook for another revival?

Chris Rennard’s “Winning Here” – the requiem for the battered Lib Dems or the handbook for another revival?

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A review of Chris Rennard’s newly published “Winning Here” “ Paddy’s personal ratings were shown to be very high in our poll, even at the outset of the by- election campaign. This helped to persuade him of the validity of the other poll findings.” Thus Chris Renard then the LD director of campaigns and elections coaxed Paddy Ashdown into accepting his formula for winning the 1993 Newbury by-election. The humour and shrewdness about people’s motivation mark this first volume of…

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Lib Dems can do it on a drizzly Thursday in February – but what about on 3 May?

Lib Dems can do it on a drizzly Thursday in February – but what about on 3 May?

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By-election gains may well be yet another false dawn Up until last year, Sunderland had carved out for itself one, and only one, niche in British political life: it counted its votes at general elections faster than anywhere else. For six successive elections from 1992 to 2015, the southern Sunderland seat was the first to declare in the country. Other than that, the city was politically unremarkable: it’s returned two Labour MPs ever since the 1960s and the Red team…

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Winning where? The Lib Dem targets for 2022

Winning where? The Lib Dem targets for 2022

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Alastair Meeks looks at the challenges facing Cable’s party Three years ago, the Lib Dems were still in government. Danny Alexander and Nick Clegg comprised half of the quad, the inner circle that fixed the government’s direction. It feels like a lifetime ago now. The Lib Dems were reduced to 8 MPs in 2015 and recovered only to 12 MPs last year (with a slight decline in vote share nationally), despite being the only party to advocate remaining in the…

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At 100/1 or longer Osborne, DMiliband & TBlair for next LD leader – totally daft or might there be something there?

At 100/1 or longer Osborne, DMiliband & TBlair for next LD leader – totally daft or might there be something there?

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Above is the Ladbrokes market for next Liberal Democrat leader. Clearly this is not something that is going to come to fruition quickly though my guess is that the party will have a different person at the top by the time of the General Election if that happens in 2022. That is still a long way off and a lot of things will have happened by then. What is striking about the list are the three names that I have…

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Trying to understand why the Lib Dems aren’t doing better in the polls

Trying to understand why the Lib Dems aren’t doing better in the polls

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  The Lib Dems are still paying the price for being hollowed out in local government during the coalition years. One of the mysteries of current politics for me is how badly the Lib Dems are doing in the  polls. Since the general election every opinion poll bar one has the Lib Dems polling in the single digits when the current political terrain should be fertile for them. With Brexit being so polarising I’d have thought the only staunchly GB wide…

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