Perhaps the source of most frustration since becoming involved as a Lib Dem is… Al Desmier is a newer member who has got stuck right into the party’s traditional structures, becoming chair of his local party, Islington, and was the Parliamentary candidate in Islington South and Finsbury at the 2017 general election. He runs an internet technology business. What did he make of the pamphlet? Perhaps the source of most frustration I’ve had since becoming involved as a Lib Dem activist is the institutional, bureaucratic superiority complex one has to deal with to do anything differently from campaigns we ran 10 years ago, 20 years ago and before. To be most commended in this pamphlet is the admission that even before the last general election, our party was failing. Failing to win elections but also failing to understand that voters now engage with political information in a range of different places, most of which we are currently nowhere to be seen. That the authors feel that as strongly as I do, gives me great heart that we can change. To change anything you have to take part and I thoroughly endorse this pamphlet as an inspirational vision for what we might be. I’ve been Chairman of my local party for less than a year and, with a very talented and committed team, we’ve ripped up much our campaign book and started again. We’ve given power to a new crop of would-be councillors who hadn’t considered politics 18 months ago and are now desperate to win the first Lib Dem seats in Islington in many years next May. Islington’s demise is emblematic of the problem this pamphlet highlights and seeks to challenge, namely that the ‘leaflets stopped working’. From a Lib Dem controlled council in the 2000s and a Parliamentary target seat in 2010 to not a single councillor left in 2017, nowhere has felt the technological shift more than Labour dominated Islington. A London borough known for being socially liberal, it should be full of our core vote. That’s not to say we don’t use the old methods. We have two wards teams exclusively knocking on doors this month, getting some fantastic responses to our residents’ surveys. But we are trying to do so much more – such as 10 second videos generated at street level and targeted on Facebook directly to residents via their postcode, giving us live interactions with local people that we’ve never had before. The way we treat local volunteers, new members and existing activists is picked up in this pamphlet. In my view, at the most recent general election we treated enthusiastic new members like counters in the board game Risk. Political generals sat in a far distant landed ordered new members into supposedly winnable seas at the expense of genuinely trying to build a local movement where the member had signed up and are now surprised why so many members feel let down by our result. Not enough was done to build a single message, a sense of cohesion and we have failed to really capture the ability and work of so many enthusiastic supporters, mainly through ignorance and a stark lack of emotional intelligence. There is no truer sentence in the whole pamphlet than, “No saviour is going to emerge to solve all these problems”. We need to get more people involved, respectfully reject the old ways of doing things and create a clear offering to our voters and our members, and most of all, we need to change. An additional comment from me on Al’s piece: he regularly led teams to help in target seats during the campaign, setting a shining example of the way candidates in non-target seats can show leadership and involve members in ways that maximise the number of MPs we return for any given vote share. What Al highlights above is the cost which that can – and often has – come with if the overall process of targeting relies too much on barking orders and not enough on dialogue, explanation and imagination. Far too rarely, for example, in the 2017 election campaign did we support candidates in non-target seats with smart ideas about how they could both build up their local teams for long term success and at the same time help target seats elsewhere win in the short term. An easy way to do this, for example, is telephone canvassing training sessions for new members, held in non-target seats but making calls to target seats. That both respects new members and targets resources effectively – as was my own experience doing several such sessions during the campaign.