It appears that the Liberal Democrats despite a strong showing in the 2024 General Election is not doing as well as they should be on the membership front. According to an investigation by a BBC reporter the Lib Dem membership has halved since 2020. Back in 2020 the Lib Dems had 118k members now it’s down to 60k.
This is not good news for any party but it is especially bad for the Lib Dems as they rely on members for both finance for the party and to provide the sort of manpower that has allowed the Lib Dems to keep the party in high profile locally at times between elections. However as the Liberal Democrats have apparently simultaneously abandoned any of the old concepts of libralism and of respect for democracy, this drop in membership is good news for those of us who are increasingly hostile to any of the old Westminster Parties.
The BBC said:
The number of Liberal Democrat party members has almost halved in the last five years, according to BBC analysis of available figures.
The figure has fallen from just under 118,000 in 2020, when Sir Ed Davey became leader, to 60,000.
That is despite the Lib Dems having their most successful general election ever last year in terms of seats won.
A party spokesperson said "in actual elections, more and more people are backing the Liberal Democrats".
Link to source:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy5069p70x2o.amp
Whilst I agree with the BBC reporter that it can be sometimes difficult to pin down actual membership figures for political parties some of the figures quoted in the BBC report make for interesting reading. The jump in membership for the Greens suggests that the Greens are pulling in members of the nutjob classes the sort of people who might in the past have joined either Labour or the Lib Dems. It’s quite possible that the Greens are winning the sort of middle class far leftists and lanyard class types that might once have aligned themselves with Labour and to a lesser extent the Lib Dems. It is also possible that some of the policies of the Lib Dems might be deterring potential members. The Lib Dems stubborn refusal to see and accept how the public has become much more hostile to gender ideology and the European Union may also have played a part in the drop in Lib Dem membership, but because membership number publication is not a legal requirement under electoral law, it’s difficult to be entirely sure why potential members are abandoning the Lib Dems.
However, the drop in Lib Dem membership numbers along with membership numbers for both the Tories and Labour and a rise in the number of people joining alternative parties such as Reform may well show that members of the public no longer see any point in joining the old Westminster Parties as there’s nothing for them within these parties. All the membership gain action does seem to be with Reform although it’s quite possible that Reform could end up in a similar position to the Social Democratic Party in the 1980’s which also had a rush of memberships from those previously uninvolved with political parties and also remarkably high polling numbers, but became a party which disappeared from view for years after their disastrious electoral turn out in 1987.
The drop in Lib Dem membership could be a blip that could be reversed but with the party so identified with support for some seriously godawful policies such as gender identity and cleaving to a dying EU, I can’t see how this membership slide can be reversed. Although this is bad news for the Lib Dems it’s good news for the challenger parties of both the Left and the Right.