Professor John Curtice^[i] provides an impeccable analysis of the 2022 local elections and indicates where the Liberal Democrats did well. He sets out the performance in the various regions and in the social make-up of councils but the one vital statistic that he omits is the party’s lamentable performance in the big cities. The significant generic difference between these councils and the smaller boroughs and districts is the size of the individual electoral wards. Essentially, the larger the electorate the more difficult it is to win by sheer intensive local campaigning and the more significant is the party’s core vote. In wards with 10,000 or more electors Liberal Democrats need an opinion poll level of far more than the 10% that was the average between the advent of Liz Truss as Prime Minister and her resignation. (The implosion of the Conservative party under Truss did not benefit the Liberal Democrats at all.) The table below shows the pitiful state of Liberal Democrat representation on large councils and its poor performance at the 2022 elections.

Councils with over 300,000 population

* Unitary Authority (the others are metropolitan boroughs.)

† Birmingham has 32 single member wards and 37 double members wards; the figure is electors per Councillor.

N/a: no elections in 2022.

We see that a quarter of the sixteen councils have no Liberal Democrat representation at all, three others have three or fewer councillors and only four have a group in double figures. Looking at these latter four councils in more detail demonstrates that the position is even worse than these overall figures indicate. One would expect that being relatively the more successful would mean that they have a powerful citywide presence, but, in practice, what prospects for expansion do they have? What one finds is depressing. In Birmingham of the 59 wards without party representation, one double member ward is split between Labour and Liberal but only one other can be regarded as marginal. In fact, apart from one further double member ward, the rest have derisory votes.

Of the seventeen unrepresented Sheffield wards only two can be regarded as marginal. In Liverpool, from the most recent (2021) figures, only one is marginal leaving 20 wards with derisory votes, plus one with a respectable by-election result. In Newcastle two are marginal, with 15 derisory. What this indicates is the abject lack of a core vote in the country’s major cities. As I know from my twenty year experience in Leeds, without a much higher basic Liberal Democrat vote, the task of establishing a party presence, or of expanding an existing one, requires a huge level of sacrificial, financial and organisational commitment over a number of years. Essentially, unless one can hold seats relatively easily it is impossible to expand without a much higher core vote. And without a powerful and noticeable municipal presence in these front line cities, the prospect of developing a sufficient vote in four or more adjoining wards to win a parliamentary seat is remote.

The difference in the task in the city with the largest wards and a rural county seat is shown in the experience of my former Leeds colleague, David Selby. In his final victory in Leeds, in 1987, he polled 3092 votes to win the Armley ward; in 2017 he gained the Newtown ward for the Powys county council with just 369 votes. He is now a key member of a Liberal Democrat led Powys administration.

If we examine the situation in London we find precisely the same situation. In the 32 London Boroughs, apart from the three stand out boroughs, Kingston, Richmond and Sutton, where the Liberal Democrats have eliminated the Labour party and have maximised the Liberal Democrat vote to gain and retain control, only two have representation in double figures: the adjacent Merton and Southwark, the latter represented in parliament for 27 years by Simon Hughes. In the whole of London, Liberal Democrats have just 152 councillors out of a total of 1817 - and no less than 118 of these are in the three councils they control. Taking the same cut off figure of 300,000 population as in the cities outside London, half those fourteen London Boroughs have zero Liberal Democrat representation and only Southwark has a group in double figures. The semi-proportional electoral system used for the Greater London Authority has enabled a party presence of two to survive and Caroline Pidgeon has done a remarkable job of maintaining a Liberal Democrat presence but a party cannot claim to be national, nor to be a serious political presence, with such minimal representation in its capital city, nor similarly in almost all of the country’s major cities. Above all it is its derisory votes in the vast majority of these electoral wards, along with its scores of lost deposits at parliamentary elections, that are an embarrassment.

Unless the Liberal Democrats understand and accept its absence in these urban areas and apply themselves to establishing a clearly identifiable philosophical position that attracts many “movers and shakers” it has no chance of being able to challenge for any semblance of national political influence. In particular it cannot pose a significant challenge to the Labour party in its strongholds. It is rigorous thinking, plus the “vision thing” and its application, that is needed, not Dr Pangloss.

^[i][i] The Liberal Democrat performance in the 2022 local elections, Journal of Liberal History 116: Autumn 2022