Generally, one can get by without politics. It is at best an amusing sideshow on the news of an evening, or, at worst, something to blame when you haven’t had a pay rise in years. However, I think this sort of attitude, although both pervasive and understandable, is simply nonsense.
Politics is important, and the more time one gives to it, nationally and locally, the more interesting and absorbing it becomes. I started actively watching the news, daily, as an undergraduate. A couple of years later I was also reading a daily paper. As time went on, and I was given access to greater information I became more informed and therefore more interested.The issues I heard and read about started to matter and I formed opinions about them.
The Liberal Democrats do not have a national paper or a tv station behind them, publicising their every move. We have Focus, and it has some space for national messages but not much. Helping people to understand the world the way an active Liberal Democrat understands it is therefore difficult. Perhaps we have an overarching message but distilling what it is and getting it ‘out there’ is proving very difficult. We care about what matters to people, but we understand… it is Liberal to the core, to understand that what matters to people differs depending on who those people are.
And yet we need to look for unifying themes. We tend to do this by naturally ‘looking for the bigger picture’, for what unites individuals, but this means that we easily become a party of very academic principles. This suits some of us, but makes it hard to translate a core message to everybody. We come up with some very good ideas – ideas that are often well-received locally, and yet nationally we flounder and even if our policies (such as raising the income tax threshold) are positive for everyone they get lost… lost in the absence of a rhetoric to believe in or fight against. I firmly believe that, if only we could find the words to fix our canary yellow colours to the mast of public opinion, we would have a chance of taking many many more people with us… and you could be one of them.