 The next story is a lighter one and it's an entertaining one. It's about the liberal Democrats. So they have released a report on the 2019 general election, which to refresh your memory started like this. I never thought that I would stand here and say that I'm a candidate to be Prime Minister. But when I look at Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, I am absolutely certain I could do a better job than I do. And that general election campaign ended like this. The SNP, as you can see there, have taken East Dunbartonshire. Joe Swinson will no longer be an MP. Well, there's so many questions being asked, even during the campaign about the nature of the Lib Dem campaign. So, yes, the Lib Dems entered the 2019 general election, pitching Joe Swinson as the next Prime Minister. And they ended up going down to 11 seats with Joe Swinson herself losing her seat. As it stands, the Lib Dems still don't have a replacement leader. I think Ed Davies is currently the interim. So as I introduced at the beginning, the Lib Dems have done a report on the failure in that general election. It's supposed to be asking hard questions so that the party can rebuild. Let's go to some findings. So some findings from this report on Joe Swinson. Your candidate for Prime Minister had gone down well at conference to members and as an ambitious reflection of polling from earlier in the year. It appealed unrealistic to the wider public, especially given that we were already falling in the polls. Now, let's go to the Lib Dems on Brexit. So this is in the election review. We alienated large chunks of the population on Brexit. The electorate was divided into free groups, 20 to 25% passionate remainers, 20 to 25% passionate leavers, and 50 to 60% who weren't really that passionate either way. As a Liberal Party, we could never have gained votes from the 20 to 25% pro-league group, but we did effectively ignore the biggest group. And then finally on the leadership team, this is again from the report, the word hubris was often used to describe the campaign attitude. While it was clearly unintentional, there was a definite sense of believing our own hype. And then they quoted a member who they'd interviewed for the report, that small group drunk the Kool-Aid and believed she could do it. They're saying they genuinely believed that Joe Swinson could be Prime Minister. And finally, before I go to you, Ashton, Aaron, potentially the most interesting part of this report is not what was contained in it, but how it was briefed. And this report was briefed in a very explicit way to the times who led with this on the weekend. Lib Dems blamed cult of Chaka Umana for pole defeat. So really hanging him out to dry there. I'll start with Ash. What do you make of this report? Do you think they've been too harsh to Chaka? I mean, they're being very harsh to everyone, in fact. I mean, it was a pretty catastrophic general election campaign. I mean, it was like the report drag race reading challenge where you just can't take your eyes away, just gets more brutal and brutal as the read goes on. I do think that Chaka Umana is being hung out to dry there. And I'm not a fan of how he's carried on in terms of his political strategy. I'm not a fan of his politics either. But I think in some ways, it's a little bit of a case of blame a newcomer into the party and saying, you've got this all wrong. And this is your fault. Whereas actually, it was much more about Joe Swinson for me. I think it was just it was her inability to take yes for an answer when it came to parliament. You had the Labour Party being dragged incrementally further and further towards that pro-remain position that she wanted. But she couldn't turn around and say, yes, I'm going to work with you in order to, you know, frustrate a Brexit deal going through parliament and forcing it to a second referendum by having some kind of minority government. She didn't take that opportunity when it was offered to her. And yes, that was in part because of absorbing all of these sort of, you know, ex-Labor defectors who held a real deep antipathy, right? Loathing of Jeremy Corbyn because he was sort of the great usurper of their Labour Party careers. It meant that she boxed herself off. But I think in addition to that, there was a genuine disdain for the politics of populism. You know, Jo Swinson in her bones is a technocrat. She was actually much more hawkish on austerity than any conservative was by, you know, the time of 2019. And she I think saw herself as a kind of centrist saviour of politics, you know, with that, you know, adopting of the spider badge and, you know, the kind of girly SWAT t-shirt and you kind of imagine her, you know, if she was around 2020 politics, she'd be like, this Karen is the manager. Like it's that kind of like, you know, completely hollow, liberal technocratic feminism, which has no basis in either the politics of people's everyday lives or the insurgent politics, which have dominated the political system of the past few years. So I think that the emphasis on Chuka Ramona, look, I love taking the piss out of him as much as anybody else. You know, he stopped being a garage DJ and moved into soulful house when the MCs came in and that tells you all you need to know about him. But I think that the more fundamental problem was Jo Swinson, how she saw herself, how she conceived politics and her inability to take yes for an answer when a second referendum was a possibility through parliamentary mechanisms. Well, I think the implication of the briefing is that Chuka Ramona was partly responsible for the hubris of Jo Swinson. So you do, I remember the period where Chuka Ramona sort of had on his Twitter the shadow foreign secretary, Ed Davy announced himself as shadow chancellor. And I suppose Jo Swinson must have called herself leader of the opposition, but they had this idea that they were a government in in waiting. And I think the suggestion is that that partly came from those labor defectors. And I think that might be true. I think that might be true. But I think really, when you when you see, you know, some of Jo Swinson's positioning even before that point, I don't think it's all Chuka is what I'm saying. Aaron, I mean, what's I mean, she lost her seat and these people are a humiliation to themselves. But the most tragic thing of all is they shaped the outcome of the 2019 general election arguably more than anybody else. Labor got 32%, which is obviously wasn't great. But when you consider there was a split at the beginning of the year, if you normally if a party party splits, normally that's quite a big deal. You can look at 1981 to three with the formation of the SDP, labor then proceed to get I think 28%. It's often very bad news for political parties. So you had that split by people like Chuka and Chris Leslie and so on. And then you had later on the year those same people with Joe Swinson saying that they wouldn't work with labor to have an interim sort of coalition government of some kind. And so the handmaid the kind of the people that gave birth this political moment of Boris Johnson being in charge a moment of supreme national crisis, you know, these people take significant responsibility, despite how useless they are. And I think Ash is right. You know, it's a shame we don't have some kind of Joe Swinson 2020 Twitter account where she's kind of still carrying, you know, we had the Miliband one if he'd won and what was going on during a Miliband Premiership, maybe we should be doing that with with Joe Swinson. I mean, it was like it was like a it was like a sort of FPP troll account became sentient. It was incredible. It was absolutely incredible. Debate her this kind of deranged stuff and people like, what are you talking about? And it became like this thing. And what was really revealing was a significant part of the lobby. We're like, yeah, this is what people are already talking about right now. It's all people who are prefects at school. It chimes with them on a deeply resonant level. They see this overgrown head girl, you know, coming onto the political arena, demanding speech, somebody who's in charge and go, yeah, this is a real grown up. But the saddest thing for me is that, you know, a lot of labor people got in bed with that. That's the saddest thing of all for me. I know people that were like Corbin supporters who voted in the European elections in the local elections to give labor a bloody nose. And I'm thinking, you've got councillors who could do amazing. So you might have a socialist person, a socialist running to be a councillor where you are. What would you vote for the Liberal Democrats? And I think too many people, and that to me speaks about an absence of long-term political education on the British Left. That's bigger than Jeremy Corbyn. That's bigger than Navarra Media. That goes back decades and just don't be seduced by this nonsense. And then we had the whole thing about the with the Europe. And look, we can talk about the low position on the ultimately by 2020, 2019, they were in a bad place regardless. But the European elections never, ever mattered. They never mattered. You have a 35% turnout. Nobody's ever taken these elections seriously. And by the way, we know that because the Tories got what? 9%. Right? Right now, in some polls, they're polling 50%. European elections do not matter. And yet again, a significant part of our sort of, of the lobby or the sort of the people that our opinion makers around political journalism in this country took it eminently seriously. And so the failure, the catastrophe, the calamity of Joe Swinson and Chuck Arumina, yes, it's, it's derisable. It's laughable. But it also reflects on a really important point, which is the 10 years ago, the centrist, the moderates, the status quo fetishists had three political parties. And by December 2019, they only had one. And that was the Liberal Democrats. And they did terribly. So what does that say to you about the sort of the desire and the taste for change in this country? And by the way, it's not all entirely positive and progressive. Quite a lot. And I still think for much of the, for much of the commentary that's not really cut through, that actually you don't really have a control over any of the major parties anymore. And you don't really have any ideas to offer the electorate more generally. And it's something which still hasn't been a reckoning with, I think. I mean, I think, I think there are two things which really need engaging with. And one is that the Lib Dems are completely ideologically bereft, right? You don't have that kind of tradition of, you know, Charles Kennedy, Orange Book Lib Dems who had something which they truly believed in, right? They had an ideological foundation. By 2019, it was David Cameron come again. Right. And nobody wanted that. Nobody wanted that style of politics. It was David Cameron without the charisma, which really wasn't much of an offer at all. But there is, I think, a huge challenge for Labour, which I think is related to the way in which the Lib Dems were able to scupper Labour's chances and a few marginal seats. And it's because Labour has changed in a big way and occupies a very ambivalent place towards its own history, something which was sort of partially resolved by Labour in 2017 and then came a cropper in 2019, which is Labour a party of civic-minded progressives? Or is it a party of workers' struggle? Now, neither of those are easy answers. And I know that there are many on the left who would go, party of workers' struggle, that's that. I can just define it into existence and job done. Whereas actually a sense of what is a collective identity for workers after 40 years of neoliberalism, after the demise of a trade union organisation and membership, after the gutting of working-class residential centres through gentrification in metropolitan areas, but then also just the impoverishment and immiseration of lots of former industrial towns. So that's not an easy answer. And were you to go, ah, civic-minded progressives, professionals, well, good luck with that under a first pass, the post-electoral system. You also won't even fashion a social majority necessarily out of that. So two very, very difficult things there. And also I think an ongoing struggle for the Lib Dems. But I think that, you know, I made a lot of errors of judgment in 2019 in terms of where I thought things were going and what I thought I had to base my judgments on. And so now rather than confidently setting out what the answers are to it, I'm trying to think about, okay, so what are the really pressing questions? And then other people can answer them. What's really interesting is that report, you know, it says actually what people were saying in Labour, like 50% of the country don't really care about this. All the noise is coming. And 25% is still a lot of people. They can make a lot of noise. They can attract a lot of funding. They can have protests with a million people, right? Then that's true. There were huge pro-EU second referendum protests. And the problem for Labour was they didn't, and if they had done that successfully, they would have won the election. They didn't get that 50% energised. And I don't think that was actually necessary just about Brexit. I think it's very hard to do that when so much of your own party constantly denigrates you for four years. It would happen to Keir Starmer. If Keir Starmer had two-thirds of his parliamentary party saying he's an asshole seven days a week, the exact same thing would happen. And so, you know, yes, it dovetails with Brexit and the EU stuff, but it's not the entire story.