Layla Moran: 'The Lib Dems cannot remain London-centric if we're going to fight back'

Speaking to the Yorkshire Post Ms Moran, who on Thursday was confirmed as going head-to-head with Lib Dem acting leader Sir Ed Davey for the party's top job, said there was work to do on convincing northern voters to back the party.

And she said the challenge was to redefine what liberalism meant to the average voter.

The Oxford West and Abingdon MP said: “I believe that there is a different way of doing things in this country, and it's been too long since the Lib Dems have had that positive message to be able to give people.”

Ms Moran said while knocking on doors during and after the election, in which the Lib Dems returned just 11 MPs and then leader Jo Swinson lost her seat, “what people told me was that they didn't know what we were for, and also that they felt let down and that they'd lost trust not just in whichever of the other parties represented them, but also in politics in general”.

She said: “And that just broke my heart.”

Ms Moran’s competitor Sir Ed Davey, who has been the party’s acting leader since December, has been reported as being the favourite to bag the top job.

But she said: “I think my leadership would be emblematic of the renewal of the party from the last 10 years [which] have been really, really difficult, at a time when the country really is in desperate need of hope, and positivity, and that's what we are going to be as a party under me.”

Ms Moran said she took a view that politics was better outside of Westminster, having voted for Parliament to move outside of London and backing a Yorkshire Parliament.

She said: “Even though my seat is an Oxford I recognise that the Government has become a Government mainly of London.

“They are claiming to now wanting to be investing in the Northern Powerhouse, but I'm yet to see any actual evidence of that.

“I do think that when people level at the Lib Dems ‘you've become London centric’, I kind of agree with them, and that's what I want to change.

“We cannot remain London-centric, we can't keep making policy that only really works in a small part of the country.”

Former Lib Dem leader Vince Cable told The Yorkshire Post’s Pod’s Own Country podcast last month that the party had more chance of gaining seats in the South than in the North, but Ms Moran said that was not necessarily the case.

She said: “It depends on what level you're looking at. On the one hand, I don't agree with Vince on this. If you just look at local government, we have been making gains in the last few years, we run York council.”

But she admitted there were more seats down South where the Lib Dems came closer to winning in December.

“But we are absolutely going to be gunning particularly for places like Sheffield Hallam,” she said.

In seats such as Sheffield Hallam, where Labour’s Olivia Blake won despite the Lib Dem pick Laura Gordon being expected to take the seat, Ms Moran said the fear of letting in Jeremy Corbyn in stopped would-be Tory turned Lib Dem voters potentially getting Ms Gordon over the line.

“One of the things that I learned when I went to Sheffield door knocking was that one of the reasons we didn't get over the line there was that dynamic,” she said.

“A lot of the Conservative voters in Sheffield Hallam voted Conservative when bizarrely that let Labour in. But they were so scared of Corbyn they didn't want to take the risk [to vote for the Lib Dems], but then they ended up with the thing they didn't want.”

But she said appealing to younger generations would be the key to a Lib Dem resurgence, although she admitted they were likely still burned from the betrayal on tuition fees.

She said: “I do believe that there is a different way of running this country and it just really frustrates me that people see it as there's only one way, there's only the red team or the blue team.

“Well, actually, there is another way of doing things, a third way, which is the liberal way of doing things, and we haven't spoken about this for a very long time.

“I would argue it's been at least 10 years, maybe more, since if you asked anyone out there on the street ‘what does it mean to be a liberal?’, I reckon they couldn't tell you.

“And the reason why that is exciting to a lot of young people is because it is a different way of approaching the world and approaching the system, which I think they would really resonate with.”

She added: “We need to start winning younger voters again, because if they start voting for you young, then there's a chance that they'll continue doing that around the country.”

She said: “We need to recognise where we are, what we have been doing isn't working.

“And my assessment of why it's not working is because people don't know what we are for, they don't know what we stand for.

“It's been a long time since us as a party, but also the country, has had a conversation about what liberalism actually means for this modern age.”

She added: “People are sick of the way that things are done right now and we can offer a positive vision for that future.”

- To hear the full interview, listen to the Yorkshire Post's political podcast Pod's Own Country.