This footnote of course in no way biased my view of ‘Ukip: inside the campaign’

From Matthew Goodwin and Caitlin Milazzo’s excellent Ukip: inside the campaign to redraw the map of British politics:

More seriously, one of the reasons behind the Liberal Democrat History Group and its Journal is to help document for future generations of historians some of the information that otherwise slips through the cracks of history because it is never written down and preserved.

Even as basic questions about Liberal Democrat campaigning such as ‘”who first used a bar chart?” are already lost in the midsts of distant uncertainty.

That was in my mind when writing that piece for the Journal of Liberal History. In it I tried to document other similar points which are crucial to understanding the development of Liberal Democrat campaigning and political campaigning more generally but which had not previously been documented in a way that future researchers will be able to find.

So the footnote is a nice little sign of success. Helping preserve our historical record better doesn’t mean future historians will be faultless, but it does mean they will be better informed.

Moreover, a little better knowledge about the party’s past approach to campaigning and why things were done the way they were is no bad thing when working out what to change in the future, especially when you consider the large number of myths which abound. So if you want to join the mythbusters too, take a look at the updated and expanded version of that Lib Dem campaigning history.