Ed Davey Ready To Confront Nigel Farage "Head On" In Parliament

Zoe Crowther

@zoenora6

With the General Election less than a week away, Davey is hoping to lead the Liberal Democrats back into being the third largest party in Parliament. Opinion polls suggest he could succeed: various models predict the party could win anywhere between 40 and 70 seats, significantly up from only 11 seats they won at the 2019 election.

The party has heavily targeted a smaller number of constituencies in this election, particularly along the ‘A30 corridor’ stretching from London to the South West, in order to improve the efficiency of their vote under the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system. 

“We're not quite there to balance it out yet, but we're on the right track,” said Davey. PoliticsHome interviewed the Lib Dem leader on his battle bus on the way to North Norfolk — a target seat for his party.

“The party's strategy has been to recognise we're in the first-past-the-post system. We'd like to be in a PR [proportional representation] system, but we're not.”

While the Liberal Democrats and particularly Labour are expected to benefit from FPTP on Thursday, there are other parties that will likely feel aggrieved by how it works out for them.

Farage, leader of right-wing party Reform UK, has criticised the system as being “absolutely bankrupt” as it will make it much harder for Reform candidates to get elected. Most opinion polls put Reform in the mid teens for national vote share, and some have even put them close to or level with Rishi Sunak's Tories at around 20 per cent. 

Under FPTP, however, Reform will still struggle to win more than a handful of seats on 4 July, as the system only rewards candidates who finish in first place. Reform, like the Lib Dems, is campaigning for a more proportional electoral system.

Davey said the Lib Dems would continue to advocate for electoral reform even if it would make it easier for Farage to have a platform in Parliament – or indeed if the current voting system ended up benefiting the Lib Dems themselves on 4 July.

“People say: ‘Well Nigel Farage, it would be more easy for people like him to get elected…’ Fine,” Davey said.

“That would be the best way to confront people whose values I don't believe in. You have to take them head on.

“I don’t want him to get in because I don’t share his values. However, being a democrat, I want more democratic systems and the logic of that is that different people get in who I don’t agree with. There are a lot of Tories that I fundamentally disagree with on every single level.”

Davey added that he had “never believed in no platforming”, even while a university student in the 1980s.

“When I was at university a long, long time ago, there was a debate about no platforming racists,” he said.

“I was prepared to argue against racists, because it's very easy… Their arguments don't hold up to any analysis whatsoever. You can disprove them and you can help people understand that people who preach division, that's what they're doing, and they don’t have anything to offer.”

Davey said he hoped that if the Tories suffer a heavy defeat due to Labour and the Lib Dems achieving an efficient spread of votes, the Conservatives might then “wake up and smell the coffee” when it came to electoral reform.

Under FPTP, tactical voting is likely to be a particularly important element of the Lib Dems’ electoral battle. In North Norfolk, PoliticsHome discovered that many of those canvassing for the Lib Dems were not supporters themselves, but were choosing to tactically campaign for the party as the perceived best chance to unseat the incumbent Conservative MP Duncan Baker.  

It seems highly likely this is happening across the country, and online tools by campaign groups such as Best for Britain are trying to advise the public how they can tactically vote most effectively to deliver the heaviest defeat to the Tories. 

Davey told PoliticsHome that he would not "tell people what to do": "I don't like that style of politics, I don't think it works." But he added that it was sometimes necessary for voters to "work out for themselves, whether it's through their own research or tactical voting websites, what the relative strength of different parties are".

A group of voters in Wokingham, another Lib Dem target seat, told Thinks Insight & Strategy that they generally felt positively about tactical voting. These voters all voted Conservative in 2019 but intend to abandon the Tories on polling day.

“I now pretty much think I am going to go for the tactical vote of the Lib Dems purely because I want Conservatives out and the only way Labour will win is if I go for these guys,” said Ellen, adding that she had not considered voting tactically at the last election. 

Fred, another voter in Wokingham, said: “When Clive Jones [the Lib Dem candidate] said on the pamphlet that it’s a wasted vote if you vote Labour, that probably was a bit of a nudge in their direction.

“I don’t think it’ll sway me too much but it’s kind of a smart tactic if you want some change I feel. Their strategy has been quite aggressive around here and they’re really going for it.

“I am probably going to vote for them. I called myself a floating voter before, but the way they’ve done it I think they will be the most likely party to change something.”

If the Lib Dems can increase their presence in Parliament as expected, Davey said they would "try to win the argument" on a number of issues.

“Our policies will flow from our manifesto. When we launched the manifesto I made it as clear as I could be that health and care was right at the centre of it, it’s easily the largest spending program we have,” he said.

“I see our program as genuinely rescuing the NHS, because it does things that others really haven't thought through: One is to really make sure that primary care is much, much better supported and expanded.”

The other health priority for the Lib Dems is social care, an issue Davey feels passionately about given his own experience as a carer for his disabled son, which has featured in multiple campaign videos published by the party during this election.

The Lib Dems campaigned to reverse Brexit at the last general election. In 2024, they remain, in Davey’s words, a “proudly pro-European” and “internationalist” party. However, issues around Europe have not featured nearly as prominently in their campaign this year, with it instead focusing on trying to persuade voters that individual Lib Dem MPs would act as a “strong local champion who will fight for a fair deal for you and your community”.

This is perhaps in part due to the fact that many of the seats they are targeting in the south of England voted strongly in favour of Leave in the 2016 referendum. Davey denied this, arguing they were simply listening to what voters were primarily worried about.

“Look at the polls and market research and it’s clear that health and care are number one, closely linked to cost of living,” he said.

“That's why we haven't spent a lot of time talking about Brexit, because that's not what people are worried about. They tend to know our position on it, but we want to talk to the other people for whom it's not their issue at all.”

Davey added that he believed the British public’s views on the EU had “changed more to our direction” in recent years.

“The single market is a little way off, but there's a trade deal to be done that is so much better than the dreadful deal done by Boris Johnson, which has so damaged our country,” he continued.

“Going into the next Parliament, we've got our agenda, we've got ideas… Whoever is in government, we will be making that case.”

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