Mark Argent speaks at General Election campaign launch

The launch of the Huntingdon Liberal Democrat General Election campaign took place on 21 January. We’ve re-selected Mark Argent, who was our candidate in 2019 and nearly doubled the Liberal Democrat vote, and we’re looking to build on this.

Mark spoke about plans for the General Election and beyond, of the campaign to send him to Westminster as MP for Huntingdon, and to increase our number of county and district councillors.

We don’t yet know the final form of the Liberal Democrat manifesto, but Mark identified four key themes:

• Support for the NHS — looking to ensure that it is financially stable in the long term and free at the point of delivery, and, in the more immediate future, looking to reduce waiting times for GP appointments and support key infrastructure projects such as the rebuilding of Hinchingbrooke Hospital;

• Action on the environment — reducing our dependence on fossil fuels to combat the climate change that is already giving us summer droughts and winter floods, and contributed to the cost of living crisis by pushing up fuel bills since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and dealing with the problem of sewage being dumped in rivers (Huntingdon’s present MP, Jonathan Djanogly, was among those who voted for this);

• Pulling economic growth into Huntingdonshire — there is considerable growth going on in the wider Cambridge region and it’s important to pull some of this business activity into Huntingdonshire, and to ensure that house building happens so that local people can afford homes;

• Repair our fractured relationship with the EU — undoing some of the damage done since the referendum and since Brexit actually happened — to ease relations with the EU, ease the economic damage done by Brexit, and to address the increased polarisation in British politics since the referendum.

Can we win? Lots of people are making a parallel with the Labour landslide of 1997. That also saw the election of many more Liberal Democrat MPs. Many of the people in Huntingdon who once voted for John Major as their Conservative MP will be looking on in horror at their party. These are people who are more likely to vote Liberal Democrat than Labour.

In 2019 we nearly doubled our vote. We now have Liberal Democrats leading cross-party alliances on the County and District Councils. That’s an excellent springboard for this General Election.

Annual Dinner

Our Prospective Parliamentary Candidate, Mark Argent, spoke at our Annual Dinner on 2 March.

He spoke about the forthcoming County Council by election in Yaxley, where we have a super candidate in Andrew Wood. Winning would send big shock waves, and is a very real possibility. It’s also very much part of a Liberal Democrat commitment to local government. Andrew will be a welcome addition to our team of hard-working and able councillors, dedicated to their communities. While the Tories have done a lot to undermine trust in government, and national politics, our team of councillors show that good things can happen when Liberal Democrats are elected, which is a message to take into the General Election.

To many people the idea of “politics as public service” or “people before politics” is now sounding hollow. That’s turning up the alienation from politics (particularly the Conservatives) we’re hearing on the doorsteps. A sign of how much things have changed is seeing some comments a couple of years ago from John Major — visibly a Conservative, visibly a statesman, and excoriating the Johnson government with a killer phrase: “A majority gives you power. It doesn’t give you license to do whatever you want”. There’s a huge gap between that and what we’ve seen with Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. In 2019 John Major also described Brexit as “The biggest foreign policy mistake of my lifetime”.

He mentioned a recent tweet from the editor of Liberal Democrat Voice about Lee Anderson’s crass and Islamophobic comments on Sadiq Khan, and his alarm at a response saying “The majority of people in the country agree with him. It’s only you lefties who don’t”. Is that the Britain we’re building? Liberal Democrat values offer an alternative to this — and might also address the groundless fear that lies behind that response.

Mark finished with an appeal — for help in Yaxley, for help going into the General Election, and for help putting Liberal Democrat values to voters this year.