"It's worked well, but at some point it is going to have to stop."

The Liberal Democrats need an ‘exit strategy’ from progressive alliances, Layla Moran MP has said. Moran made the comments at a fringe meeting at this year’s Liberal Democrat conference in Brighton.

During the meeting, hosted by Compass, an audience member asked the panel – which included the former Lib Dem leader Vince Cable – whether the party needed to maintain a strategy of agreeing a single ‘progressive’ candidate in seats to prevent the Tories from winning in some places.

Historically, Moran has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of such a strategy. In the 2017 general election, the Green Party did not field a candidate against Moran, who was narrowly elected as the MP for Oxford West and Abingdon, unseating a Tory in the process. Her majority then was just 816 votes, significantly less than the number of votes the Greens received in the seat at the previous election.

At the meeting, Moran acknowledged that cooperation between the Liberal Democrats and other parties had been important in removing the Tories from office in her area.

She said: “Oxfordshire is built on this. We are often held up as a very good example of where this has worked – and it has”, later adding: “This has been a very long process – a ten year process – of getting to the point where there are now no longer any Tory MPs in Oxfordshire, all of our councils are run by either Labour or Liberal Democrat leaders, some outright, some in coalition.”

However, she also argued that the party should move beyond such an approach. She said the Lib Dems needed an ‘exit strategy’ from progressive alliances and that they needed to ‘release’ themselves from electoral collaboration with other parties.

Moran told the meeting: “We’ve got to – at some point – have an exit strategy. This was always a means to an end. It was always about how do we kick the Tories out – and we’ve broadly done that.

“So, at some point, now that we’ve done that – we are different parties for a reason – it is right to give the electorate a choice. How do all of us put our best feet forward, give the electorate maximum choice, but not let the Tories back in? And so we now need a bit of an exit strategy.”

Later in the meeting, she added: “We do need to now have that conversation about how do we release ourselves from this collaboration. It’s worked well, but at some point it is going to have to stop.”

Chris Jarvis is head of strategy and development at Left Foot Forward

Image credit: Liberal Democrats – Creative Commons

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