Assessing Party policy – the word from our local representatives

By Bev Haigh-Jones

At our November monthly meeting we were really pleased to be joined by Colin Martin, Liberal Democrat Cornwall Councillor for Lostwithiel and prospective parliamentary candidate (PPC) for South East Cornwall.

Although in previous meetings of this type we have had a statement from the representative, followed by a Q&A session, in this case the meeting was more akin to a statement followed by an open discussion. For this reason the transcript is considerably longer than usual (but worth taking the time to read) and I have given the initials of the speaker against each comment, with responses from Colin Martin.

It was really interesting to hear Colin’s views on Brexit, on campaigning, on other parties, as well as on party policy for the Liberal Democrats. The latter was especially relevant to CfE and our members, since the Lib Dems are one of the few parties who actually include any kind of plan for renewing the relationship with the EU in their manifesto. For more information on this visit: https://www.libdems.org.uk/.

We found this a very informative and enjoyable meeting and please remember, there is a facility to comment on our articles if you wish and any such comments will be passed on to Colin.

Colin Martin:

“I am Colin Martin and, as Howard said, I’m the Lib Dem candidate for South East Cornwall, I am also a councillor representing the Lostwithiel and Lanreath Division and I was elected there in 2017. I have also become the leader of the Liberal Democrat Group, which is sadly much smaller now than it was when I first joined. At the last election we lost quite a lot of seats, so I am one of thirteen Lib Dems out of the eighty-seven members of Cornwall Council.

“So, in terms of my journey with the European movement, I think that prior to the referendum I would say that I was probably guilty of not taking the threat of leaving Europe seriously enough and in hindsight, I regret that I didn’t get more actively involved in campaigning for Remain. It’s been heartbreaking to see, over the years since then, how much damage and disunity it has caused within the country and so as an active Lib Dem, since then I have been doing my bit. Through the Brexit years I was certainly with many of you on several of those marches in London, waving the flags, blowing the whistles and making as much noise as we could. However, we all know how that turned out in the end and so the question is: Where do we go next?

“After the Brexit referendum, the membership of the Lib Dems massively increased, which had an interesting effect in that the majority of the party were people who had joined as anti-Brexit campaigners, rather than people who had been life-long supporters of other Lib Dem policies. That has created some of its own tensions in the years since then, and we had a bit of a messy situation at the 2019 general election, which we can go into further if you’re interested, but, as we know, the Conservatives got a big majority and Brexit got finalised legally, though as we have seen it was anything but oven-ready and we have been picking up the pieces ever since.

“In terms of where next, the Lib Dems are absolutely clear that we still believe that the right place for the UK is as a member of the EU. We are the only major party that is still committed to that direction, but where many of our members who joined for the anti-Brexit campaign would love to see that as the number one priority in our manifesto, at the moment, if we said we were above all else, the “rejoin immediately” party, it would not lead us into power and lead Britain back into Europe, it would just make it harder for us to get elected and tackle all the other things that need sorting out such as climate change, the NHS, the education system and just about every other public service. That shouldn’t be confused with us not caring about Europe: We do want to get there and we think this is the right strategy.

“So, I don’t want to just do a monologue, does anyone have any questions that they want to ask?”

HH: “Hi Colin, I get all that completely, but I’m a Lib Dem, as you know, and I just think, cards on the table, I think to actually go wholeheartedly for rejoining Europe would be the one thing that would differentiate us from the rest of the parties at the moment. There is nothing else that does, frankly.’

HF: “The thing is from my point of view, I listened to Ed Davey in a very rousing speech, managing not to mention Brexit, in fact he didn’t mention Brexit once. I am probably one of those Lib Dems that you were talking about, I joined the party at the end of the referendum because it was the one party to be in and now I am not terribly happy, not least about the fact that it was not mentioned at all by Ed Davey.”

AH: “I’m at the other end of the spectrum because I have been a lifelong Lib Dem and I joined for all sorts of reasons, one of them being because of the then Liberals’ commitment to Europe and how that seemed to gel with what I wanted. I have also been very disappointed, now that we see that Starmer is for whatever reason, rightly or wrongly, rejecting all thoughts of any sort of movement towards rejoining, and I agree with the two previous speakers that this is an absolute opportunity for the Lib Dems to show that they are different and there is a massive potential vote out there. I think that there was a recent poll which showed that Labour’s vote would go up if it decided to be more committed towards Europe and I don’t see why the same wouldn’t apply for the Lib Dems. I don’t think that the grassroots really understand why the Lib Dem leadership is pussy-footing around with it. I know this puts you in a difficult position because, of course, you are here to present the Lib Dem line, but I think that you must be aware that grassroots are really much more keen on moving towards rejoining than the leadership appear to be and we wonder why the leadership is seemingly ignoring us.”

Colin Martin: “I absolutely recognise that feeling and I think every member of a party, every time a leader stands up, is waiting for them to say the thing that we want to hear, and particularly my passion, above all else, is the climate emergency and I get really irate when I hear leadership standing up and saying how much they care about the environment, for example protecting the green belt, or focusing on river pollution, both of which are important issues, but that is an order of magnitude less important than tackling climate change. So the question really is, are they saying those things because they don’t share our values, or are they saying those things because they feel they need to emphasise certain issues more than others to win in the seats where we have got a chance of winning? This is again the difficulty of our electoral system.

“If we had proportional representation and everybody could go out and vote for the party that they wanted, then one party could come out and say ‘right, these are our core values and anybody out there who shares those values, vote for us and whatever proportion of the voters we get, we’ll get that proportion of the MPs and we can go and wholeheartedly argue for those things in Parliament.’

“The challenge with the first-past-the-post system is that we need to selectively look around the country and ask ‘Where are the seats where we currently have Members of Parliament that we want to hang onto? Where are the places where we could get MPs? And where are the floating voters that could make the difference between taking that seat from another party?’ At the moment that’s largely the blue wall, those wealthier, middle-class seats in the south-east of England generally. Potentially also some down in the south-west.

“So they’re going out and knocking on doors, asking questions and focus grouping for the people who are thinking of going from the Conservatives, to the Liberal Democrats ‘What are the issues that matter to you?’ Of course, that’s a really uncomfortable, tricky situation to be in, because you want to just say ‘here are our values, come and join us’, but instead you are having to target all of your public-facing messages on a narrow part of the electorate who you are trying to persuade to come across for one reason or another, whatever it is that will bring them across.

“The big question on your minds is, even if you could understand why it is that the leadership is saying those things to get elected, would that mean that after the election we would still focus on those things in those proportions, or when we got back in, would we turn around and emphasise more the things that we care about rather those things that the floating voters in the marginal seats cared about? So there is an element of trust there that we have to ask ‘do we believe that our leaders will fight for those things and can we give them a bit of leeway?’ (i.e. we understand that it’s our electoral system that’s forcing them to not necessarily highlight the things that we care about the most).

“You know, I share your frustration, it’s a very unsatisfactory system, but that’s the reality of the system that we’re working within. The other part of it, though, is that although I want to rejoin, the Lib Dems want to rejoin and our leaders want to rejoin, but even if the whole country wanted to rejoin, there is another player involved in this equation and that’s the European Union. I sometimes liken it to someone who’s talking about how great it would be to divorce this wife who he’s been with for all these years, because he’ll have such a great life as a single bachelor, and some of his friends say it would be a great idea, and some friends warn him that it would be a disaster. Then, having gone through the divorce, he realises that it was far more expensive and messy and damaging than he had thought, and realises that all these new relationships that he thought he was going to have with all these new partners, turned out to be not as easy and rewarding as he had thought. He suddenly comes to his senses and thinks, ‘do you know what – it was a mistake, I should never have left that partner of all those years, she wasn’t perfect, but by God things are worse now that I am on my own.’ If that person just turned up on the doorstep with his suitcase in his hand and said, ‘Hello, darling! I have decided that we are getting married again,’ that probably wouldn’t go down too well!

“It’s partly recognising that us deciding we want to go back is only part of the equation, so we need to work out what other steps are needed to rebuild that relationship and that’s the way our policy is laid out at the moment. First of all, let’s stop going and doing things that make matters worse, like signing trade deals with other countries that have standards that bring us into conflict with European standards, which then means more red tape on the borders with the EU, then start having some confidence building measures like rejoining Erasmus+ and other optional schemes like that, then the next stage would be some veterinary agreements that would reduce that red tape, but to have those veterinary agreements we would need to make sure that we weren’t allowing sub-standard products into the UK.

“The more we get those steps into place, the closer we would be to rejoining the single market, which is something that is explicitly our intention, whereas Labour have been ruling that out. They have been saying that the people don’t want to be a part of the EU, but it is in our policy that rejoining the single market is our intention when it’s possible, though that wouldn’t be possible straight away. That would then be a precursor to our ultimate goal of rejoining the EU when they will have us. It’s not just about wanting to say the things that appeal to our voters, it’s also the reality that we can’t just turn up on the doorstep with our suitcase and announce that we are ready to move back in again.”

EB: “As everybody has announced their political flavour, I’m not one of these voters who is decided, I am ready to vote for whoever, apart from the Conservatives, but I’m floating because I’m going to do strategic voting. I am in Newquay, so against Mr Double, but just one point on two or three points beforehand, about the reason that you’re not talking explicitly about Brexit is that you don’t want to push away that little marginal portion of voters, naively – and I say this to every single candidate – I feel forgotten and rejected when I hear those things. To deliberately not talk passionately about core values, to me it puts me off, and I’m really sorry but at the moment, apart from the Greens, nobody is making themselves attractive to me and I think that is perhaps a mistake.

“I was wondering if you had polls of your own party membership on the European stance, my guess is they’re quite worried about it and aren’t you worried about losing them to other parties, perhaps, or to despair? I know there are lots and lots of issues in this country, we all know, but they all come together in that if we got rid of Brexit we would be so much further. On the last point you made about going back into the EU, I don’t think we would be that same person coming back with our suitcase. I think it’s been pretty clear what’s happened here, a lobby, a big lie, a big massive black force that made Brexit happen. It’s not the country and I think once you get rid of that layer of leaders who led us into this, and you make changes so that this could never happen in the same way again, then I don’t think the EU would believe that the entire country was behind it as it was so close anyway. The polls show that over 60% now are pro-EU.”

Colin Martin: “Yes, it’s absolutely heartbreaking to hear someone say that they feel abandoned and forgotten by a party that just a few short years ago was campaigning so vigorously, and it must have been incredibly hurtful as a European citizen living in the UK, to wake up on the day after the referendum and realise that millions of people had gone out there and voted the way they did. Then for that to be followed by the enormous embrace of the millions of people who had previously stayed quiet about Europe because it was a background issue, who rose up and said ‘we love you’ and we want to be part of the European family. To go on the marches and feel that sense of community and solidarity, that must have been a wonderful positive feeling in the other direction and to feel now that has just been switched off because it is politically inconvenient must again be a lurch downwards on that roller coaster and I totally accept that. I think the thing we need to be careful of, though, is when we look at the polls that say 63% of voters now think that Brexit was a bad idea, that’s not the same as saying that 63% now think we should start negotiations to rejoin.

[NB: After the meeting I checked this statistic and it’s actually 63% of voters who say “Brexit has been more of a failure than a success”, but this includes die-hard Brexiters who want us to negotiate an even harder Brexit. We certainly cannot assume these people all want to reverse it.]

“There are still millions of people who feel negatively about the EU, often because of misinformation, but there are also many others who just don’t have particularly strong feelings about the EU, but hated the whole psychodrama of the years surrounding the Brexit debate. I know there are people who voted for remain, but then voted for Boris Johnson just to get Brexit done because they wanted the whole thing to be over with. For a group of people like those here tonight, who feel passionately about restoring that relationship with the EU, to hear someone saying ‘can we just not talk about it for a while’, feels incredibly hurtful but we need to be realistic. If there was a referendum today, there would be many who would vote to rejoin, but many more who would just not have the head space for it.”

HH: “But that’s where we are now! That’s exactly where the Lib Dems are and need to be. We have the middle ground and we have a chance to differentiate. Okay, it’s a bit of a live or die thing, but I think that it is really something that would differentiate and we really need to do that.”

EB: “We need to maybe see that opportunity to be different. You said it at the beginning of your comments, promote the EU, say what they are doing right, say what was lacking before. I remember during the campaign, I couldn’t vote at the time, but people were coming to me to ask me questions and then dismissing, saying ‘oh well, you can’t vote anyway’, if I didn’t say the things they wanted to hear. So that is the opportunity, the positive talking, highlighting what we are now missing and that we would be better off, but unfortunately, no party is doing it and I agree, people were fed up with Brexit, but maybe don’t talk about Brexit but talk about our place in Europe, what we had before, what the European Union is able to do now that we can’t. This is a missed opportunity in my view.”

Colin Martin: “Going back to if our electoral system was a proportional, fair system, we could pick on a niche and focus on issues that appeal to that particular section of the electorate and get a good result that would give us the MPs and the mandate to go and do those things.”

EB: “How many Brexiters are going to vote for the Lib Dems at the next election?”

Colin Martin: “That’s a really good question. In lots of the seats where we are close to winning, there are those people who said, I voted for Brexit before but realised it was a bit of a let-down and didn’t deliver all the things it promised. They are sick of thirteen years of chaos of the Conservative government, they are now ready to try something else and they are looking at the Lib Dems and saying we can put up with a lot of your values. They’re not coming to us because they are life-long core voters, we already had those. Those core voters are with us, but those soft Conservative voters, a lot of them did vote for Brexit and if we remind them and say remember us, we were the ones jumping up and down and shouting at you, saying that you were stupid for being in favour of Brexit, then they might decide not to change their vote. If we can say to them, ‘we’re interested in these other things you care about like the NHS, the environment, the housing crisis, or the cost of living crisis’, then we can get their votes to win those seats in Parliament, so we have pro-European voices in Parliament and we can lobby case by case, for us to rejoin all those elements of the EU and work towards rejoining the single market. I feel like I am offering a really unsatisfactory response, but that is the system that we are in.”

HF: “I think maybe you have drawn the short straw, really.”

EB: “I will push this till the end of time – I disagree – I don’t think you should be after the Brexiters’ votes. You have got all of us [pro-Europeans] ready to vote for you and this is going to be enough.”

Colin Martin: “The challenge of not having a proportional voting system is that we don’t need to win 20, 30, 40% of votes across the country, we need to win a majority of votes in each constituency, so it depends how they break down in individual areas. The key message is, even if the message you hear for us to appeal to voters that we need to attract in the areas where we have a chance of winning, even if that isn’t touching on your core values and beliefs, that doesn’t mean that we don’t share your values and beliefs, it’s just the difficulty of the electoral system and us having to appeal to marginal voters. At the end of the day, democracy is about getting out and persuading voters to give us the chance to do what we want once we get into power.”

HF: “Well, I think Colin is learning where we are. We all may desire rather more from any of our parties at the moment as this is a story we have heard from other guests that we’ve had.”

CB: “I find myself very frustrated politically at the moment, because I think to some extent the Lib Dem leadership, but certainly the Labour leadership, appears to be on a line to basically capture the national mood to get the Tories out, and don’t want to upset any apple carts, don’t want to risk anything at all in terms of Brexit, and Labour just want to get themselves elected keeping their real views quiet and then maybe do something different after they are elected. Now I know various people, some of them closely associated with Cornwall for Europe, who actually think that that’s a proper strategy. They think that’s it’s okay to perhaps even to lie in a manifesto, and certainly amid some of the rebel seats up north, to lie to people and say we are really very pro-Brexit now and we are going to get Brexit working properly, but then maybe they are really thinking that the day after getting elected they are going to be making moves to get closer to Europe and one day rejoin and the Lib Dems must not go up that road. The top members of Labour leadership are actually on a very sticky wicket in terms of what they are going to put in their manifesto, which will be propaganda and I don’t like it.”

Colin Martin: “You’ve hit on a really important point there, which is there is a huge difference between a party saying in black and white, in its manifesto (and we have just voted on our pre-manifesto document at conference) and again the Lib Dem membership votes on its manifesto, whereas as we have seen with the Labour Party the membership can vote for something to go through, and then the leadership can choose to just ignore it like on proportional representation.

“The thing that we just voted for said;

‘We continue to believe that Britain is at its best when we are working closely with our allies. That’s why we are determined to repair the damage that the Conservative deal with Europe has done to the economy, especially farmers, fishers and small businesses. We have set out a four-stage road map to rebuild the relationship, with initial, unilateral steps to mitigate the damage of the deal, followed by confidence-building measures such as joining Erasmus+, then we will deepen the trading relationship with measures like a veterinary agreement, finally once the ties of trust have been restored we would aim to place the UK/EU relationship on a more formal footing by seeking to join the single market (and, of course, we all know that rejoining the single market means restoring free movement). All these measures will help to restore the British economy and the prosperity and opportunities of its citizens and are also essential steps on the road map to EU membership, which remains our longer term objective.’

“Now that is there in black and white. It’s on the internet, it’s not a secret document that is hidden away in HQ. When we then go out campaigning and choose that where there are voters who we think that part of the message won’t appeal to, we don’t point that out to them if that’s going to antagonise them and push them in the other direction, we focus on the other bits of our manifesto that we hope they do agree with, but it’s all there in black and white and when we get in, however many of our MPs get in, those are the things they will continue to deliver in Parliament. That difference of emphasis, how much you highlight some of the things in your manifesto, is completely different from the Labour approach of explicitly ruling things out in their manifesto, but then behind closed doors saying ‘if you’re really pro-European, don’t worry, we are really going to do all those things again, keep voting for us, we promise we will do it, but we have just got to say the opposite so that we can get elected’. That is the same thing that they are talking about on proportional representation, and on things like our rights to free protest: Labour are explicitly saying that they wouldn’t reverse the Public Order Bill because the Daily Mail demographic that they are trying to appeal to tend to think that tough, authoritarian streak is good, and then they are turning to their more liberal inclined voters and saying ‘we don’t really mean it, trust us, when we get in we will do the opposite.’

“Even if that is successful, even if they actually do get elected and then go and do some of the things that the more liberal, pro-European among us would like to see them do, that would still be really bad for democracy, because people would feel tricked and betrayed and once again they would say ‘the elite are taking us for fools and saying one thing, then doing another.’ I think there’s a difference between emphasising things differently and saying one thing and doing another. I think that’s the real difference between us and the Labour Party.”

TS: “I completely hear what Colin is saying and I think very much that it’s a hangover from that 2019 election which was completely a Brexit election. People were absolutely fed up with everything about Brexit and a lot of them voted for Johnson just because of that promise to get Brexit done. I think all of those conditions that impacted that vote and that election have vanished now, along with the Conservative Party. The Conservative Party is in a state of complete disgrace and one of the reasons for that is because all of the lies that it told about Brexit have been proven false. That’s the reason the polls are now showing that people think that Brexit was a very bad idea and that the majority of people now want to rejoin the EU. I can appreciate that people are worried about highlighting Brexit as an issue in the next general election, because nobody wants it to be a rerun of the Brexit election of 2019. I think there is zero chance that that will happen. Everything has changed since then and nobody believes the Tories about Brexit, or anything else. I think there is very little chance that they will be able to turn it into a Brexit election again.

“Having said that, the Green Party is a bit more explicitly pro-European than the Lib Dems, but we are not going to be making a call to rejoin Europe the heart of our election campaign, partly for the same reasons because there are people in the Greens who are nervous about another Brexit election, although I don’t think there is any good reason to be. I think that there is every reason to be straightforward about that intention to rejoin Europe and actually, I think that people will value the frankness and straightforwardness of not trying to hide that. If that’s what you believe, I think you should be saying that, but I’m not a Lib Dem, so it’s easy for me to say.”

Colin Martin: “I have tremendous respect for people who stand for the Green Party and vote for the Green Party, because let’s face it, people don’t do that because they think it is the route to power, they do it out of principle. We say that about the Lib Dems often, but it’s even more true about the Green Party. People voting Green are doing it, not because they think it’s the best way to get out the person that they hate the most, they do it because it’s something that they feel really deeply about as a representation of the values they want to see delivered. The challenge we have got at the Lib Dems is do we want to be a party of protest, or do we want to be a party that gets more MPs elected and where we have currently got about fourteen or fifteen, we have a real chance at the next election that we could get that up to thirty, or forty. Last time around we got carried away and thought we might get around a hundred and we ended up with barely any change at all, which shows how tricky it is to thread that needle of the unfair voting system that we have got. I’m sure that we would all support the idea of proportional representation and that would lead to more honest politics and people could say boldly and unashamedly, ‘this is what I stand for’ and not be punished for it. They could actually get elected in fair proportion to the support that they get from the voters.”

TS: “The Greens are interested in electoral politics and I think we have a good chance of getting several more Green MPs elected at the next election. Not as many as the Lib Dems for sure, but we’re a political party and we are serious about fighting elections. We have 780 local councillors now, so we are a growing party.”

Colin Martin: “I don’t doubt that, but when it comes to Parliamentary elections I wonder how many seats the Greens are targeting where they’re trying to take votes from appealing to soft Conservatives. I suspect that in the main they are appealing to take votes from Labour, because as Labour moves further to the right to try to take those socially Conservative ‘red wall’ voters, that creates a space over on the left for a bold, radical idealistic party to come and take votes on that side. In that context, that is potentially a winning strategy where the numbers line up like that, but we don’t have that luxury in the Lib Dems because in the places where we have the potential to win, the voters that are up for grabs are not people that think the Labour Party are not left wing enough, it’s people that think the Conservative Party are making a mess and failing to deliver on their promises.”

TS: “I wouldn’t disagree with you. There are lots that are obviously much more winnable for the Lib Dems than for the Greens. We are taking votes from Tories and I think we have a good chance in East Suffolk of winning a seat there actually, where we took control of the local council recently.”

HH: “As Colin knows, I am a lifelong Lib Dem voter, but I think the problem is that all the stuff that Colin has been talking about is very similar to what Labour is saying and we do need something to differentiate ourselves and I’m talking now as someone who is passionate about rejoining Europe. I think we need to be a bit bolder about it because there is a big groundswell of public opinion which thinks that rejoin, in the medium term not the long term, is the way to go. Everybody seems to be pussyfooting around it and it’s an opportunity for the Lib Dems to differentiate and if we don’t, I think we are missing a trick. But okay, that’s a decision for the Head Office.”

AG: “Coming at it from my own country, and listening to the discussion between TS and Colin, I would just like to point out that in Holland, the Greens are now bigger than the Lib Dems. So, there is always that chance that with proportional representation that any party can become a bigger group.”

Colin Martin: “On the last point, if we had a fair voting system, yes, it would be drastically different in all kinds of interesting ways, but I really have to object to this idea that the Lib Dems and Labour are saying the same things on Europe. The Lib Dems are very clear that our policy is to go back, closer and closer to Europe, with a very clear ultimate destination of rejoining the EU. That is our aim, we are just realistic that a) we are not going to get there in five years, and b) talking about it as the centrepiece of our campaign would result in us having fewer MPs because of the demographics of where we have a chance of winning.”

HH: “Sure, but a lot of people aren’t going to see that.”

Colin Martin: “If you google Keir Starmer rejoin, you will get articles like this one from the BBC on 22 September saying: ‘Keir Starmer has insisted that there is no case for rejoining the European Union, after the government accused him of wanting to reverse Brexit.’ He is very clear against rejoining the single market, rejoining the customs union. They couldn’t be more different, we say we want to rejoin, they are falling over themselves to say that they won’t. If the pro-Europeans among you are talking to Labour and hearing Labour politicians say quietly behind closed doors ‘trust us, we really do support the EU’, then their leadership are saying the opposite, there’s a big difference between saying the opposite versus being very clear what the Liberal Democrats stand for, but choosing not to highlight it all.”

HH: “No, I get that, but it’s too subtle.”

Colin Martin: “It’s always the challenge of electoral politics, how much people are prepared to dig and do the homework and find out. It’s fantastic that you’re all here, asking me these questions, unfortunately, of the forty odd million people who go out and cast their vote, a lot don’t take it as seriously and thoroughly. When you are talking on national media, our leaders don’t get to micro-target those messages and emphasise the messages that perhaps they want to. I agree that if we had a voting system that treated us fairly, then we could go and boldly say what we really stand for and get a fair number of votes, but the problem is, if we did that under the current system, then in the places where we have a chance of winning more seats, we would potentially lose them.”

RK: “I am a useless Lib Dem, I am a long-term UK in the EU so I can’t vote anyway, but I joined the Lib Dems because they were going to rejoin the EU, or were pro-European, and my huge worry at the moment is that there is so much strategic wheeling and dealing going on, that the entire electorate will say, I don’t trust any of them, they are all in the same basket and they’ll all just stay at home. That’s my worry. It was a real breath of fresh air to hear Tom say we believe this, this is what we stand for, this is what we’re campaigning on and that’s it, no strategic worries, this is just what we believe and it really was like a breath of fresh air.”

Colin Martin: “There really is a possibility that if we get the right balance of MPs in the next parliament, then if Keir Starmer wins more seats than the Tories, but doesn’t have an overall majority and has to turn to thirty or forty Lib Dems, and perhaps four or five Greens for support to get things through, then you can guarantee that the Greens and the Lib Dems will be demanding first of all, a fair voting system so that never again do we have to do this kind of talking out of two sides of our mouths to try to appeal to different people at the same time. But at the moment, this is the system that we’ve got and if we go out and just emphasise the bits that we are most passionate about, that don’t align with the things that the voters are most concerned about, then unfortunately we will be punished for that. Nobody is more frustrated about that than I am because I am the candidate, but that’s the system that we have got.”

BH: “Are you actually out actively canvassing right now on behalf of the Lib Dems around South East Cornwall, as a PPC, as opposed to a councillor?”

Colin Martin: “Yes, but it’s difficult at the moment as we haven’t got a very big team at the moment, but we are doing what we can.”

BH: “I’m just wondering, if you are, what you are hearing on the doorstep as the people’s main priority.”

Colin Martin: “It’s very clear that the tone is very different to what it was four years ago when I was out and being told that I was part of the ‘Liberal undemocrats’, because we were trying to stop the ‘will of the people’. Nobody is talking about that any more, it’s all about what a terrible state the country is in and how the current government have made a real hash of it, and people are just desperate for basic things to work. There was a child knocked down outside my school this morning. It took two hours for an ambulance to arrive to pick him up. So every way we turn, every part of the country is falling apart, and our businesses and economy are struggling to function as well, because they can’t get the staff they need. That’s the sort of thing the people are concerned about and yet they know that just promising to spend more money isn’t the solution either, because there isn’t enough money to go around. So people really want to know how we are going to spend money differently, and spend more money on prevention rather than as at the moment, where the Conservatives create crises by underfunding in prevention and proper management and then pour money into sticking plaster solutions, which is wasteful of everybody’s resources. That’s basically what most people are talking about on the doorstep.”

AG: “Get some EU workers in!”

Colin Martin: “Absolutely! And you can point out to people that with so many of these things, like why is food more expensive, well because everyone who wants to import it into the country has to do all this extra paperwork, and the shipping companies are having to charge more because of the hassle of going through customs. People are recognising that Brexit is part of the problem and that is an important part of how we pave the way for people to come around to agreeing with us that rejoining will be the way to go. It won’t happen overnight, but very few people say that Brexit has solved anything at all, so at every opportunity I will always point out where Brexit has made these problems worse. I will end on a positive note – I do believe that we will rejoin the EU one day.”

HF: “If there are no more questions, it just remains for me to thank you, Colin, for coming. I imagine you had an idea what you were going to come into, it wasn’t going to be completely benign.”

Colin Martin: “Well I was very grateful for you giving me the chance to talk to you this evening and I am sorry that I haven’t been able to say everything that you wanted to hear.”

HF: “You have said rather more of what we wanted to hear than Ed Davey, I’m afraid.”

Colin Martin: “That’s the way I roll, I’ll say what I think is true even if people don’t necessarily want to hear it. I hope that encourages you and that if you do get the chance to vote in South East Cornwall, or you know anyone else who could, that I’ll always be an honest and straight-talking representative. While we’ve got the system that we have, please choose how to use your vote carefully to get someone who might deliver proportional representation next time around.”

We are hoping that next time we may have another of these articles for you, hopefully from a representative of a different political party.