It has been a different election night for the Liberal Democrats, compared to the preceding few years. Wales was a disaster, London was limp, Scotland was steady but blessed with two outbursts of electoral joy, and England has quietly bubbled upwards a little. When all is said and done, we’re likely to end up a council and a few dozen councillors, but down a London Assembly Member and 4 Welsh Assembly members. Like the results for other parties, this year’s cycle of elections has produced results that make it hard for commentators to generate a clear narrative that points the way forward. Confusion reigns in the opinion columns.

I want to focus in on the Liberal Democrat experience, and especially the strongest suite of results — those in the English councils. There is reason to be cautiously, quietly, optimistic about the future of the party in the largest nation of the United Kingdom. Results such as that in Stockport and Newcastle were not great, but there were no whole-sale destructions of major council groups, as there have been so many times over the last few years. We held, or narrowly expanded, our ground in many places, and reinforced many majorities in held seats. But after the avalanches of despair over the last few years, a net gain of 40 councillors amounts to a treading of water — it is a sign that voters are no longer angry with us, but they may well soon forget us.

My contention is that in order to move past this phase of bouncing along the bottom, in order to recover fully, we need to become, as individuals and local parties, market liberals. Two caveats here. First of all, to the disappointment of many of my friends, I do not mean we need to embrace huge tax cuts and the privatisation of the lower atmosphere. I want to try and skirt the ugly combat between two bald men over a comb that is the battle over our future ideological direction. Secondly, I do not wish this to be a call for a change of leadership or management persay. I have my reservations about Tim Farron, and I have often been vocal with them. But ultimately, he has been leader for less than a year, and inherited a hugely damaged party. These elections have bought him a breathing space and I hope this piece is taken as honest and well-meant advice to make the most of the future years of his leadership.

I will proceed in two parts — how we must be market liberals with, and without. I will use some analogies from the retail sector, for the sake of familiarity — and because really, we are selling a product (that of Liberalism) and seeing how many people will pay (vote) for it at the end of the day; and the more payment we get, the bigger we can become, and the more we can do. It is an imperfect analogy, but appropriate here for the ends I wish to point to.

My opening gambit is this — British politics is a hugely contested market place right now. More, larger political parties are competing for votes with more intensity and a greater variety of methods than ever before. Whilst the nature of politics has not and does not change, the character is changing and we need to respond to it. In this highly competitive market place, individual Liberal Democrats at a local level may well prosper by connecting with their communities — but on list elections (as we saw in Wales and London), our brand is too weak to connect to voters. In order to overcome this, we need to embrace the competitive nature of British politics and be ruthless in dealing with ourselves to overcome it. This is what I mean by becoming market liberals — we need to view this as a competition, and losing that competition means going out of business forever. What we have to sell — Liberalism — is in our eyes too important to vanish from the market place, but customers don’t share that belief. We need to show them why they need to ‘buy into’ Liberalism, and we need to do so boldly and loudly.