By Brian Creese, former Chair of Guildford CLP.

How are your CLP members feeling at the moment? If they are anything like ours, morale is at rock bottom, even though our Labour government hasn’t yet been in power a year.  I know the morale of local members in non-Labour seats may not be a high priority for the central Party machine, but I think it needs to become so in the near future. 

Sadly, I am not sure the Party really understands how much damage it caused to CLPs like ours during the last election. Here in Guildford we are considered a ‘non-priority’ CLP – which is an unhelpful description. Certainly the Lib Dems have been allowed to become the default non-Tory vote, but there is no real affection for or commitment to the Lib Dems here. Any chance of attacking this stance was destroyed early on in 2024 when the Labour Party circulated a list of ‘unwinnable’ constituencies which was immediately leaked to the Lib Dems. Even the Labour Party knows you need to vote Lib Dem in Guildford, was the predictable, infuriating result.

Secondly, the party seemed to think it could tell members, who are all volunteers, where and when they could campaign. We have members who are primarily interested in campaigning in their local streets or ward or CLP. The number obliging enough to drive to an adjoining CLP to campaign is very small. Don’t get me wrong, I loved campaigning in Aldershot and was delighted by that result, but I would have  done that anyway without the heavy-handed attempts by the Party to force us to; all that did was to alienate many local activists.

The final straw, of course, was the Party preventing us from accessing our own hard-earned data on Contact Creator for the last week of the campaign, deliberately stopping us from effective campaigning in our own CLP. The anger over that decision is still strongly felt here, particularly as it pushed us down into fourth place behind Reform who had a free run of our voters.

At the next election the new Lib Dem MP, a poor candidate and lacklustre MP, will now have to defend her own record rather than just be the non-Tory candidate, but it will be really hard to get the numbers out to build a campaign for us unless the Party demonstrates it actually wants to see a Labour MP in Guildford. We need an early decision on a candidate, campaign materials that attack the Lib Dems, and encouragement to work with other CLPs not diktats. 

Without these actions I personally think we may as well close up the Labour office and throw away the key.

Image: Labour Party poster campaign. Author: Rathfelder, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.