Now I’m back
David Graham has gently chided me for not having updated this blog for a while. He is right to do so and first I must apologise for the delay in thanking everyone who supported me at the recent election. So many many thanks to everyone who voted for me and particular thanks to those who asked others to do so, canvassed, delivered leaflets, put up posters, donated money, helped with clerical work, took time to talk to me or gave their support in other ways.
It was of course a huge disappointment not to win and looking back now after a few weeks there are a couple of things which still upset me.
The first of course is that our team – the hundreds of people who worked so hard to try to hold the seat – did not succeed. As I have said many times, this was not a result of their commitment and application. The support that I received was amazing. 23,266 people voted for me – this far exceeds the total that many of those elected MPs received.
The Liberal Democrats were subject to a national squeeze, with the right wing press stoking fears both of another Labour government and of a coalition government. Our immigration policy was unpopular and our opponents locally exploited that effectively. They also employed some very questionable tactics, including highly edited use of information – cunningly spun to cast aspersions on me personally and on the Lib Dem record here in Harrogate and Knaresborough. Try as they might to remodel their national image, locally the Tories are still a very ‘nasty’ party.
Most of all however I regret the lost opportunity to champion many important causes. Over the past years and particularly during the election campaign many issues were brought to my attention and I was looking forward to being able work on those. Whilst I still intend to campaign hard, I do not now have the resources, the time or the platform that I had hoped would be available to me.
On the positive side, the establishment of the coalition government has been fascinating to follow. The Liberal Democrats not only negotiated an impressive deal but also took the arrangements through the party’s testing processes in an inclusive and democratic way. Achieving agreement at the outset for key policies such as raising the tax threshold and ending child detention was excellent. But far more difficult will be achieving it in practice. The right wing of the Conservative party will fight against the progressive aims that we espouse. Already it is clear that the right wing press is working hard to discredit Lib Dems and the policies that we stand for. Europe, the Human Rights Act, student tuition fees, will be amongst many difficult areas to reach agreement on.
And it will also be interesting to see how campaigning develops locally. Now that our county council, borough council and our local MP are all from the same party, we have an even more important job to do, holding them to account. Strong opposition voices are vital in any democracy and I and my Lib Dem colleagues will continue to challenge those who are responsible for spending our taxes.
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