An open letter to my party : Please, Vote Layla.

Dear Liberal Democrats,

Our party is stuck.

A decade has passed since Nick Clegg stood in the Rose Garden, and we are no closer to realising our vision for ourselves as a government-forming liberal, progressive force at Westminster.

I mention this not to stir the tension over the contested legacy of those fateful days in May 2010, for enough of that has been done in the build up to voting in this leadership contest. I simply mention it because, at its root, this observation is of the type that ought to be fundamental to who we are as a party — we must simply be more honest with ourselves about where we are and how enormous the challenge before us is.

Different people join this party for different reasons, but by and large they are variants upon the common vision of seeing a reformist, liberal party smash the two-party system that beleaguers progress in our country, create around it a more pluralistic and democratic British state, and provide everyone with the dignity to live a good life and the opportunity to live their best one. For all that say we need to turn to experience and not something radically new, I say that we cannot deny that we are currently so far away from realising our vision that many seem to doubt it could ever be realised, and that as such we cannot afford the risk of rerunning the approach that has brought us to the brink, for we don’t know how many more times we can recover from it.

The quagmire of negative association and poor media coverage and, frankly, poor communication on our part, is so great that it regularly prompts people I know to lose faith in the mission altogether. For all our talk of brilliant hardcore committed activists (and I have had the pleasure of knowing many), there are many who have joined and who lapse, or who don’t join despite sympathising with our aims, and we mustn’t judge those who simply chose not to weather a brutal storm that has battered our party for ten years. We must offer them a way back.

The old adage that 24 hours is a long time in politics now looks quaint in the hour-by-hour news cycle of the world after 2016. We’ve been on occasion beneficiaries of this (think the build up to the European Elections just a year ago), but more often than not it has contributed to a culture in our party where we simply think the next by-election, or council-election or political turmoil (think Brexit or Coronavirus) is going to be the precise moment that we turn our fortunes around. We’ve missed the bigger picture — our party cannot turn itself around without a major intervention, conducted by itself, to reform what we’re saying, who we’re saying it to, and who in the party gets the chance to be elevated to say it.

We’re stuck, and we can’t go on like this. I believe more strongly now than I have at any point since joining this party in 2013 in those most fateful words in politics — something must be done.

That’s why it has got to be Layla Moran.

Layla understands that we need to rebuild our core message around those tenets of faith that the electorate we can speak to hold true — liberal, progressive reform. It’s not enough to pay lip-service to radical liberal ideas under the guise of an updated third-way “pragmatic” liberal centrism. That simply won’t do for the 2020s (it shouldn’t have done for the 2010s). Sure, many on both sides of the debate share the same policy objectives, but that misses the point that we should be radical in our approach to and voicing of those policies because our values (and our voters’ values) are themselves radical — for instance, we believe in universal dignity and liberty and so it follows that we should support making Universal Basic Income a core part of our message.

Layla understands that we need to have a clean break with the past decade, reasserting ourselves as a party with its eyes on the future, not constantly grappling with and having to reargue the debates of the past. To do this we have to create a new intellectual revolution in the party — rediscovering the membership-up policy-making promise that is enshrined in our constitution and promoting a vibrant debate about the role of the Liberal Democrats not just in Britain but in the wider currents of change that swirl in the new world we are emerging from lockdown into. Her leading role in gathering the Build Back Better collection of essays indicates exactly what we want — a leader with the energy to win the ground war of campaigning and the curiosity and intellectualism to position the party appropriately from 30,000 feet.

Layla has spoken of a “New Liberal Settlement”. In those bold words lies a vision for the country that is unequivocal about its desire for reform, and a promise that is unambiguously inspiring for a whole generation of people who feel completely uninspired with what is on offer from any of the other parties. It speaks to Layla’s sense of the moment we are in and that she recognises the need to summon something from deeper within us than ever before, a complete reassertion of our values, updated for this brave new world, in order to revolutionise this party’s fortunes.

Layla believes in finally living up to the pluralistic politics we envision for the future by prefiguring it now — working realistically with other progressives throughout Britain to enact as much liberal progressive change as we can wherever possible. It is clear that for Layla co-operation with Labour isn’t an end in itself but a means to an end — a pragmatic relationship to stop the lop-sided Conservative dominance of the electoral system in the short term and a serious, sustained dialogue to reform the electoral system and the wider political system in the long term. That is not acquiescence nor is it sacrifice — it is the embodiment of the kind of collaborative politics that we envision for this country’s future, manifest here and now in a situation that is dire for progressive forces.

Moreover, Layla inspires and embodies a sense of renewal in the party. She conveys to the wider world the sense that we have of ourselves as bigger, better, more serious about change than we currently seem. She is the Liberal Democrat that every frustrated and fed up liberal who knows we could be so much more wants to see representing them in the media — and her relentless media coverage shows that the media themselves understand that. They understand that she may be among the most gifted communicators of the liberal message we have seen since the days of Charles Kennedy — and they want her on their show, which boosts their ratings, raises our profile, and begins to give us that oxygen (and dare I say, adrenaline) we so need to fight back.

So, if like me, you too have felt for too long that something must be done, well, here it is. Your ballot in this leadership election amounts to no less than a chance to truly change the course of the history of our party.

Please, use it the way you have wanted to for so long. Use it to Vote Layla.

Regards,

Guy Russo.