On July 4th, people up and down the country will be heading to the polls to elect the next parliament of the United Kingdom
Many are expecting this to be the election where the Conservative Party is wiped out, indeed polling points towards that, with Britain Elects’ poll tracker showing the Conservatives on just 20.5% of the vote 12 days before polls close – less than half the vote share they enjoyed the last time an election was held.
However, despite many people voting for the candidate most likely to beat the Conservatives in their seat, I won’t be voting tactically. Instead I will be voting for the party which excites me the most currently – the Liberal Democrats. Whenever I’ve spoken to friends about this, the response has always been “what do they believe?”. Unlike Labour and the Conservatives, where people can generally guess what they stand for, and unlike the Greens and Reform, where the party is dominated by a single, and popular, issue, most people simply do not know what the Lib Dems believe in.
I’d been in that same space myself a few years ago. If you’d asked me two years ago to describe the Lib Dems I’d say that they’re a group of nutters and weirdos obsessed with Brexit, but beyond their beliefs about Europe I knew nothing. To many people, and to me back then, the Lib Dems were irrelevant, simply a party which existed. By virtue of being a teenager in a deprived school and in a diverse city, I’d naturally always supported Labour. That all changed as I entered sixth form, however.
In Autumn 2022 I began doing A level politics for the first time, which meant paying closer attention to what was going on. Part of this meant learning about the main parties and what they believed in, but these were short summaries designed to fit into a powerpoint slide, so information was minimal. It’s hard to explain liberalism in just a few bullet points, and indeed I didn’t really pay attention to the slide, however I’d soon be tasked with comparing the policies of the 2019 Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem manifestos as part of the lesson.
We got given a full walkthrough of the manifesto via the TDLR video, which managed to sum up in roughly 10 minutes the key points of it. In making notes of the video, I found, after writing down about 30 or 40 policies from the manifesto, that I actually agreed with a lot of what the Lib Dems stood for. My previous assumptions about the Lib Dems still stood in my mind though, and I’d decided that whilst I agree with the Lib Dems, I wouldn’t vote for them essentially out of spite, and instead would vote labour whenever I had gotten the chance.
This was still how I felt going into April 2023, when I started learning the ideology portion of the course. We covered socialism, liberalism and conservatism in that order, and spent weeks at a time reading and making notes over what they believed, where it came from and who developed the ideas. In doing so, I learned the philosophy of each ideology, and again I was drawn to the liberals. I loved the idea of individual liberty, and had long supported equality of opportunity and capitalism. To younger me, these were just opinions which any rational person would have drawn, but to older me, actually learning about political philosophy, it became apparent I’d been associating myself with the wrong party, and that maybe my support for Labour was naive.
I continued learning the basics of liberal theory and was drawn more and more to modern liberalism, embracing the ideas of personal liberty and a mixed economy. Around this same time the 2023 local elections were held, and despite not having a clue what was going on, I was seeing the results pop up on my twitter constantly and became excited by the incredibly strong performance from the Lib Dems in the election – picking up over 400 councillors and 12 councils. I was on holiday at the time, so I had a while to really ponder and let the results sit in.
When I got home I saw a Redfield and Wilton poll showing the Lib Dems climbing to 16% of the vote. Whilst this was an outlier, it pushed me over and I made up my mind. 10 minutes later I’d joined the party.
The 12 months following have been filled with campaigning, becoming more involved in the party and learning more about liberal theory, even writing my own essays on liberalism and publishing them here. When Sunak announced he would be calling an election at the end of may for July 4th, I was incredibly excited. I’d been obsessed with the projections constantly for the 8 months prior, and seeing the Lib Dems consistently being projected 40ish seats had me believing the party was on the right path to becoming a big part of British Politics again.
The manifesto released a couple weeks after, and in that I went from believing the party was on the right path to believing that something special was brewing, and that the party was offering the best manifesto of the election. The key points astonished me; eliminating the deficit, raising the online sales tax by 4p, cracking down on tax evasion, offering free care, fixing the waiting lists, committing to clean energy, increasing defence spending, building 380,000 new homes yearly including 150,000 social homes to solve the housing crisis, a focus on mental health, and freezing rail fares and simplifying tickets in general – something so vital to me as someone who uses public transport to go almost everywhere.
In the manifesto I saw belief. Belief that a better Britain is possible, belief that fixing our problems requires actively improving public services instead of lumping more money at it, belief that I’d be listened to, belief that I’d be better off in 5 years time than I am now, belief that poverty will be reduced, belief that our high streets would be revitalised, and belief that I’d be freer and happier than today.
The campaign has only showed people and showed me how politics can be. The stunts Sir Ed Davey has pulled on the campaign trail have been hilarious, the positivity and optimism from the party and from candidates has been energising, and the responses on the door in areas that the idea of the Lib Dems winning 2 years ago seemed ridiculous have been incredible.
There’s not long left in the campaign now, and lots of people have already voted by post, but for me there is only one way to vote, and that’s to vote for the Liberal Democrats, and I’d encourage anyone who’s still undecided to consider voting Lib Dem too. The future is ours to mould, so let’s mould it in a way where all of our lives are better.