Welcome to Lib Dem Newswire #211, which takes a look at lessons from the 1930s Liberal Party and from the May 2026 elections for the Liberal Democrats. Please do hit reply and let me know your views on those lessons.
Congratulations to the new Lib Dem councillors since last time - Chris McSweeny, Paddy Mooney, Beth Rowe, Phil Williams and Hugo Hardy - and to their agents. The net changes in seats so far in this cycle are Lib Dem +2, Reform +1, Green +1, Labour 0, Plaid 0, SNP 0, Conservatives -2 and Independent/Others -2.
One other piece of news before we get to this time’s edition. Many are rightly concerned about how uneven the police’s response is to intimidation and harassment of councillors. Having twice raised the issue in Parliament, I was glad to get a clear commitment from the government that they will look into how the police’s Operation Ford is operating. I’ll report back on any follow-ups to this.
Best wishes,
Mark
P.S. If you haven’t yet had time to read it, last time’s edition is available online: First thoughts on the Lib Dem results (LDN#210).
The first big Parliamentary report I’ve been involved with is now out, a review of how the government did at secondary legislation in the last Parliamentary session. Normally secondary legislation gets talked about in the context of the huge powers it can give the government to do things with little democratic check or scrutiny. But that applies to perhaps 5% of cases. The other 95% see a very different set of problems, problems which usually get overlooked. Read on to find out more.
For more on this, see also my podcast discussion with James O’Malley.
My podcast with Cory Hazlehurst, Political Fictions: political drama on screen and on the page, recently took a look at a film about a referendum, but it wasn’t Brexit:
Cory and Mark talk about the political film that’s probably most likely to be accidentally bought on Amazon: Pablo Larraín’s No. It’s about a referendum, and one with several parallels with the Brexit vote. Mark fact checks Cory on a number of occasions, they discuss how successful campaigns always seem to have three word slogans, and chew over the significance of a scene involving baguettes.
You can view the IMDb page for No here.
As well as listening here, you can also listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or in your favourite podcast app.
You can also watch the film’s official trailer here:
If you follow politics and love political drama - on screen, on the page, or on stage - Political Fictions is the podcast for you. Each episode, I join Cory Hazlehurst to explore the portrayals of politics in fiction. Subscribe to our email list and we’ll let you know when each new episode drops:
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The following is a letter from me published in the Journal of Liberal History. The Liberal Party’s 1936 constitution followed the poor result in the 1935 election and the creation of the Meston Commission to reorganise the party.
The mentions of the 1936 Liberal Party constitution in Andrew Loader’s piece “The rebuilding and reorganisation of the party” (Journal of Liberal History, #127) understandably focus on how it differed from what went before.
However, having recently picked up a second-hand copy of the document, I find there are also historical insights to draw from what went on to change in subsequent Liberal, and then Liberal Democrat, constitutions.
Perhaps most striking from a modern perspective is the trio of areas that would become big issues for the party and its procedures but are mostly missing from the 1936 constitution: the party leader, local government and policy.
The way the constitution pretty much ignores the existence of the party leader - and there’s certainly none of the sort of detail that resulted in my briefly becoming the party’s co-leader in 2020 - reflects the historic concern that Parliament should be free of outside interference. Hence it was for Parliamentarians to decide who their leader was, and so by default who the leader of their party was.
That sense of independence, while welcome when seeing off interfering monarchs, became increasingly problematic during the twentieth century as the growth of party organisations outside Parliament meant there was a democratic, rather than monarchical, impetus to give those outside Parliament a say too. Hence the different formulas that parties have devised to mix influence for their MPs with a voice for their members in choosing their leader, with a key milestone being the 1976 Liberal Party leadership election, which used an electoral college of sorts to give party members the decision-making power.
The general neglect of local government in the 1936 document also reflects broader political trends in Britain. It has consistently been treated as the poor cousin to Parliamentary government, and it was not until Paddy Ashdown that a leader of the Liberals or Liberal Democrats really saw progress in local government elections as a key part of reviving the party on a national stage.
The wider party had been ahead of its leaders. The Community Politics movement of the 1970s in particular saw local government both as important in its own right, and also as a means to build up the party nationally. But before then, as the 1936 constitution shows, debates, commissions and decisions about how to revive the party nationally mostly left out local government.
On policy, there is a policy-making role given in the constitution, but it is limited and without the sort of policy-making apparatus - and committee - that would now be unthinkable to be without.
However, on the flip side, there are two things present in the constitution which are missing from more recent ones where history may perhaps be telling us that we should think again.
First, the 1936 version gives particular attention, respect and even some powers to the party’s trained, formally qualified election agents. Second, it gives explicit priority to having selected (prospective) Parliamentary candidates in place in as many seats as possible for as long as possible. Indeed, part of the chief objective for every constituency association in the constitution is “to have always in the field a parliamentary candidate who will be the focus of their activities” (Article 27k).
The 1936 constitution followed a Liberal Party election disaster. Since our own grim 2019 result, we have made progress on both those scores - such as the additional awards at party conference for party campaigners and the reforms to our Parliamentary candidate process agreed following the 2024 general election.
However there is, I am sure, more to do. Indeed, the debates over the candidate changes showed how there is a strand of belief in the party that for most seats Parliamentary candidates are a necessity only needed to be in place late in the day, rather than being a valuable year-round presence to help the party build up even in weaker areas. The 1936 vision of local party organisation, centred on a Parliamentary candidate and an agent, was a very different approach.
Therefore, as well as welcoming many of the differences between the 2026 and 1936 constitutions, especially the greater democratic voice for members in the former, those currently active in the Liberal Democrats should perhaps also reflect on some of the lessons which could be adapted for the 21st century that the 1936 version still provides.
As well as publishing the journal, the Liberal Democrat History Group also put on excellent meetings and run an informative website. Find out more here.
This is my latest report back to party members in my role as chair of the Federal Communications and Elections Committee (FCEC). The reports first appear on the party website.
One of the most important results for us in the May elections was the constituency wins in the Scottish Parliament elections, as they blocked the SNP’s road to a majority and another independence referendum. Those wins, quite literally, played a major part in keeping our country together.
Alongside other successes to celebrate and the lessons from them, there are also lessons we must learn from the places where the results did not match our hopes and efforts.
CEO Mike Dixon’s explainer email to members (sent on 6 July) expands on this in more detail and what questions the results pose for our strategy.
There are some additional aspects of the results worth highlighting. We did very well at incumbency, that is holding what we already had and at strengthening further our local government base in the backyards of our MPs.
In fact, our successful defence rate in the English local elections was the best for any party, with nearly 9-in-10 of the Lib Dem seats up for election being successfully defended:
Proportion of seats successfully defended
Lib Dem: 87%
Reform: 81%
Green: 70%
Conservative: 51%
Labour: 41%
This is, I believe, a record high retention rate for us.
Of the seats that were not successfully defended, nearly three-quarters were lost to Reform. Of course, that doesn’t mean that voters necessarily simply switched between Lib Dem and Reform in those wards, but it does show how beating Reform to the winning post is an increasingly important part of the party’s challenge and opportunity.
It is not just that liberalism is philosophically opposed to populism, it is Liberal Democrat campaigning that is so often the effective ballot box rival to Reform.
That success at incumbency along with net gains means in fact that in Liberal Democrat councils, we won 88% of the seats up for election this time around.
Another way of looking at this is how the party did in the council contests in wards which fall within Parliamentary constituencies held by Liberal Democrat MPs.
In those wards, the Lib Dems won 82% of the seats, making a net gain of over 100 seats. That means we also made net gains outside our held Parliamentary constituencies too, though at a much lower rate and with a much more varied picture.
There will be many lessons to learn in particular from the latter part of that, particularly the way that in some places a long-running target ward campaign hoping to gain seats fell short of a Green Party campaign with very little apparent on-the-ground activity.
Mike Dixon’s email goes into that in more, and important, detail. (If you are a member and didn’t receive it, just pop a message to help@libdems.org.uk so the team can sort out what is happening with your party emails.)
There is a mini-cottage industry of reviews now underway in the party, such as dedicated reviews for the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd elections, and including more operational reviews, such as the work the party is currently doing on reviewing key data systems.
Lessons are also starting to emerge from analysing our own data, such as the impact of sustained canvassing on our results, which prompts the question about how we can better support the growth of canvassing teams across more of the country.
Some of the questions the results pose for us are about party strategy, and so it’s helpfully timed that the once-per-Parliament party strategy review will be running this year, intended to come to a motion proposed for Autumn Federal Party Conference. (Conference details, including how to participate remotely, are here.)
We also have the lessons from previous reviews to continue to implement, particularly getting the new structures for our Parliamentary candidate approval and selection processes running. An important impetus behind this was the evidence of the key role that PPCs can play in building up our organisation outside our target seats - and so the value of providing more training and support while also not leaving so many of those selections to right at the very end of a Parliament.
The new staff team to support our candidates process is now in place, headed by Claire Halliwell, who is returning to working for the party. The work is overseen by the Joint Candidates Sub-Committee (JCSC) which is chaired by Alison Suttie. Later this year a regular cycle of reporting will start up, with key statistics that can be shared across the many different parts of the party that are involved in the candidate processes.
The FCEC will also regularly review these reports as the JCSC falls within our remit.
That progress on our candidate system is only possible due to the combined work of our staff and volunteers. The election results too, although easy to talk about in terms of decimal points and spreadsheets, are the collective result of thousands of individual human stories. Whether the story you were in ended happily or not this time, thank you for your efforts.
Ed Davey: “Ultimately, the Liberal Democrats want Britain back in the EU.” Details of the Liberal Democrats’ plan for a new Growth and Defence Partnership with the EU are here.
The Guardian likes the Lib Dem line on Europe.
Tim Farron: “Liberal Democrats are leading the way to protect Britain’s nature and green spaces. When was the last time you heard the Green Party actually talk about green issues? They have completely given up campaigning on nature.”
Daisy Cooper: “Defence bonds would kick-start the urgent regeneration of our Armed Forces – after being hollowed out by years of Conservative cuts – and could also generate much needed economic growth.”
The new EHRC Code of Practice is not fit for purpose: Ed Davey and Marie Goldman write to the government.
Alex Cole-Hamilton: “As many journalists have already emphasised, it was our brilliant wins that kiboshed John Swinney’s yearning for an SNP majority. Because in every constituency that we gained, we defeated the SNP.”
Youth unemployment in Wales soars as Welsh Lib Dems warn of “lost generation.”
Lib Dems in the King’s Birthday Honours list 2026.
Liberal Democrat council moves forward with programme to support residents without private parking to switch to EVs.
Do you know a brilliant colleague? Nominations are open for the Party Awards Autumn 2026.
Alex Cole-Hamilton unveils new Lib Dem spokesperson team in Scotland.
Herts county councillor embarks on seventh mercy mission to Ukraine in his own truck.
Tributes paid to former Leeds West MP Michael Meadowcroft.
Camden councillor Flick Rea died at the end of May. A stalwart of the party for many decades, she kept the Lib Dems going during the toughest years in the borough and was able to see her legacy as the council group grew again just a few weeks before her death. Her speech on becoming an honorary alderman is a lovely tribute and full of Flick’s humour, commitment and political perceptiveness.
MP suspended amid police investigation.
📲 You can get more updates like the above in real time through my WhatsApp updates three to five times a week. Sign up details here.
In case you missed them first time around, here are some of my blog posts and assorted pieces since the last LDN:
Good news on political donations?
Lib Dems force government to end Russian sanctions exemption.
Evaluating different electoral systems for the House of Commons.
Supplementary Vote to be used for Greater Manchester Mayor by-election.
Five arrested in Tameside over allegations of fake independent candidates.
You don’t have to be standing to point.
Raising a flap about letterboxes, which includes this:
And one from the archives:
Forgotten Liberal heroes: Herbert Fisher, education pioneer.
Being regularly updated all the time of course is my list How many councillors has Reform UK lost since the May 2026 elections?
For more details on both voting intention and party leader ratings, and for updates in-between editions of LDN, take a look on my website.
The opinion polls published before the result came in all showed Andy Burnham ahead, with Reform in a clear second place, between three and 12 points behind him.
Andy Burnham did indeed win, with Reform in a clear second place, but his winning margin was 20 points. So what should we make of the performance of the polls?
Find out in the latest edition of The Week in Polls.
Selections since last time have included Tara Matthews for Sevenoaks, Matt Sanders for South West Hertfordshire and Khalil Yousuf for Farnham & Bordon.
The Westminster constituencies currently advertising to select a Prospective Parliamentary Candidate include Burnley, Daventry, East Grinstead & Uckfield and South Northamptonshire.
See all the Liberal Democrat Westminster PPCs selected and publicly announced so far here. The list has had quite a few updates since last time.
The new cycle of council by-elections got off to a winning start for the Liberal Democrats, followed by a gain in Wales and a successful tricky defence, but also by continued Reform progress.
The total net seat changes since the last May local elections are therefore now Lib Dem +2, Reform +1, Green +1, Labour 0, Plaid 0, SNP 0, Conservatives -2 and Independent/Others -2.
For more details, see my table of net seat changes since the last May local elections.
A former Labour deputy leader joined the Lib Dems in Stockport and a Labour councillor also joined the Lib Dems in Bristol.
Lib Dem councillors have switched to independent in Harborough (two), Maldon, Mid Devon, Oxfordshire, Shropshire (two), Test Valley, Vale of White Horse and West Lindsey (two), and one has joined the Greens in Maidstone. A councillor has also been suspended pending an investigation in Worcestershire.
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My co-author on a pamphlet about the Liberal Democrats, Jim Williams, has a wordplay game out with Gibsons, Categories. The final version appears to ignore my playtesting feedback, which I can only assume is why it has turned out so well.
If you enjoyed this newsletter, please forward it to a friend or share it online:
Thank you and best wishes,
Mark
Note: Links to books in the newsletter are usually affiliate links that generate a commission on sales made.
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