Before my remarks on the Liberal Democrat internal report regarding the December 2019 electoral defeat, let’s remember that, in September 2019, Boris Johnson had no longer a majority in the House of Commons. If the opposition parties had united their forces, they could have ousted him. They could have agreed on an interim prime minister. It was difficult because the then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, a left-wing ideologue, was and is as unfit as the current prime minister and was unwilling to let someone else but him lead the opposition. Furthermore, he is not a Remainer. He wanted to negotiate a better Brexit deal. But the choice between a possible Jeremy Corbyn deal (then still to negociate with the EU) and the Boris Johnson deal wouldn’t have offered anything to Remainers.
As for the then Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson (*1980), she was too young and lacked executive experience. Therefore, too many voters did not perceive her as a credible choice as future prime minister. Nevertheless, she offered the only reasonable solution: revoke Article 50 aka Remain.
One could argue that it would have been wiser to offer voters a choice between Remain and the Boris Johnson Brexit deal, with the risk of losing. But that’s democracy. At least, in a new referendum, Remain would have had a chance (roughly 50:50).
The December 2019 election showed that voters went for another Boris Brexit fantasy. The great populist offered a rosy, unrealistic picture of his deal. He could sell his lies once again to Brexiters, mainly Conservatives, but also some Labour voters as well as people who were just fed up with Brexit and just wanted to get it done. Johnson’s electoral slogan was clever but another lie. Voting for Conservatives meant an implicit Yes to his Brexit proposal with the promise, the whole Brexit drama would be over. That was of course another lie. The fine print of the UK-EU divorce still needs to be negociated. The real hard thing was just to start because of a Yes to Brexit. Only Jo Swinson’s Remain option by revoking Article 50 would have ended the mess immediately. It would have been a unilateral decision by the UK!
The British electoral system is unfair to smaller parties. The first-past-the-post majority vote makes it impossible for smaller parties and minority opinions to be fairly represented in parliament. Therefore, with only 43.6% of the vote, Boris Johnson and his Conservatives won a landslide victory: 365 out of 650 seats in the House of Commons.
According to an article in The Guardian, the 61-page, internal LibDem party report regarding the December 2019 electoral defeat describes the electoral campaign as “a high-speed car crash”. The report is partly based on roughly 21,000 survey responses from Liberal Democrat members and officials.
It concludes that hubris led to the assumption the party could win 80 seats in the House of Commos. Instead of focusing on the realistic target of initally 32, than 40 seats, the LibDem’s wasted their limited ressources on 80 fights with poor on-the-ground campaigning, the report states. Before the election, thanks to defections, the party had controlled 21 seats. They lost 10 and ended up with only 11 seats. Even party leader Jo Swinson could not defend her seat in East Dunbartonshire (Scotland).
Jo Swinson had just taken over the party five months before the election. She appointed a new party chief executive and created an inner circle of advisers. It severed some people from the roles and responsibilities they were employed to do, and led to the overpromotion of others, the report states.
The report is critical of Jo Swinson’s promise to revoke Article 50 if the LibDem’s won a parliamentary majority. Therefore, the party effectively ignored the biggest group of voters: those who were neither fervently remain or leave.
The report mentions the terrible choices the Liberal Democrats were facing: ally with Labour to stop Brexit, but risk a collapse in tactical voting from Tory voters alarmed by the possible perspective of the hard-left leader Jeremy Corbyn ending up in Number 10; or delay an election for as long as possible, even if Brexit took place.
The report states: “Instead we chose to claim to believe we could win outright ourselves, thus obviating the need to choose.” The report underlines: “It is this lack of clarity which led to an election campaign that can only be described as a high-stakes gamble for a once-in-a-lifetime election, to stop Brexit by winning outright. It was a gamble which did not pay off.”
Could the outcome have been much better for the Liberal Democrats? Not according to the report: “The overarching conclusion of the review is that had we made much better decisions in 2019, we might have gained a few more seats, but not many more.”
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This photograph is the official portrait of Jo Swinson from 2017 by Chris McAndrew. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Official_portrait_of_Jo_Swinson_crop_2.jpg
Article added at 21:41 Swiss time.
