Liberal Vision

Can headless chickens engage in navel-gazing? #libdemfightback

The answer is yes, if you are a Lib Dem.

There have been many daft posts on Lib Dem Voice since the total obliteration of the Lib Dem Parliamentary party – and yesterday came another one. An article went up on Lib Dem Voice last night calling for “a #libdemfightback special conference before the 3 June close of nominations for the party leader” (yes that’s about 7 working days away).

Why a “special” conference ? Well according to the author of the piece “An obvious debate would be whether or not to change the Constitution to allow any member to be nominated as a leader.”

Not sure where that particular one is going – perhaps Obhi Chatterjee has a particular person in mind, or simply doesn’t like the current options from within the parliamentary group.

Whatever his reasons for the suggestion, here are a few points for Lib Dems to note:

UKIP /Plaid Cymru/Greens would soon run into trouble if they reached the dizzy heights of 8 MPs in Westminster. They could easily have a (non parliamentary) leader saying one thing and the parliamentarians saying, doing , or voting for something else. Especially if they had 8 well established, and experienced MPs (which the Lib Dems have).  For speed of message what you need is the leader of the parliamentary party to be the head of the whole party or chaos (and/or inertia) will ensue. And if the Lib Dems did have a “non parliamentary” leader would they also want to appoint a leader in the House of Commons? Just how many “leaders” do the Lib Dems think they need?

I also query the need for another elitist conference. Conferences by their nature exclude too many people who cannot take time off work; have prior engagements in the diary; have care responsibilities; cannot afford the travel etc. I am sure councillors /public sector workers/the affluent retired etc may be able to get to an extra conference. I am equally sure that the answer from that elite group on a great many issues would be very different from the wider Lib Dem membership.

[I would add that the conferences in recent years have resulted in a set of policies that the voters have wholly rejected – so their thoughts should be turning to how to make better policy choices (NOT at conference in my view) rather than how to change Articles 10.5 or 9.1. It never ceases to amaze me how totally blind the Lib Dems are as to how undemocratic it is to set policy with just a tiny fraction of the membership eligible to vote on any proposal.]

For goodness sake, just get on and elect a damn leader, amongst the entire membership if you must (I would have got the 8 MPs in a room and kept them there until there was white smoke). Once he is elected, lobby the new leader for all you like to get through changes about the future – including “rules on leadership” if that is your particular hobby horse.  Norman and Tim (the two current candidates as far as I am aware) are both reasonable human beings and would be happy to consider changes to how the party operates in the future, if they thought they would benefit the party.

I just hope that the leader will show some spine.

Lib Dems – last chance saloon

If Ms Jones vision for the Lib Dems was a bit too fruity for you, then here is an alternative item that may be of interest.

Julian Astle’s piece, which appeared in the Independent last week, is all together less humorous, but he makes some excellent points.

First he neatly encapsulates the entire problem with the disastrous 2015 General Election campaign…

“The proximate cause of the Liberal Democrats’ identity crisis was the decision to fight the election as centrists rather than liberals – a decision that the party leadership knew, deep down, risked leaving them with a functional and lifeless message, devoid of the sense of moral purpose and historic mission that made Clegg’s resignation speech his best of the campaign….

…In so far as this gave the party a reason to exist, it was to moderate the worst excesses of whichever party it might end up working with in government – a dismal offering. Not only did this tell voters nothing about the party’s own vision for the country, it actively undermined its claims to have one. If the Tories want to travel 10 miles to the right, and Labour 10 miles to the left, the logic of the Lib Dem position was that they were prepared to travel in either direction, but only for five miles.”

He also goes on to clinically dissect the reason for this ill-fated strategy

“…the underlying cause – and the one the party leadership candidates will try hard not to discuss in the coming weeks – is the unresolved battle between the party’s Right-leaning economic liberals and the Left-leaning social liberals about the true meaning of liberalism.”

But what of the future? Well, Julian argues that the “anti-austerity Left” has now become “the most crowded part of the political landscape” and, he argues, the Lib Dems have already burned their bridges back to that land…

“A party that has spent five years attacking the deficit with the Conservatives cannot credibly spend the next five denouncing “Tory cuts”.

So where next? It’s so simple. There is a large group of younger voters crying out for a party that represents them…

“rather than identifying either with the Left or the Right as the pre- and post- war generations did, and do, today’s young combine the social liberal views of the Left (secular, internationalist, concerned about the environment, relaxed about lifestyle choices and family structures) and the classical liberal views of the Right (in favour of balanced budgets, low taxation, conditional welfare, personal responsibility, individual choice and entrepreneurship) without seeing any contradiction between the two.

This increasingly educated, empowered, technologically savvy cohort is left cold by the conservatism of the Tory party and the collectivism of the Labour party. They are instinctive liberals. They just need a liberal party to vote for. “

Though I cannot, in any sense of the word be described as a young voter, that is where I am pretty much planted. It is one where many of my friends and occasional drinking-fellows (Lib Dem, UKIP and Conservative voters) to a smaller, or larger extent, are also at – economically free market, socially liberal (whatever that means these days).

Surely this is the best, the only, route for a sane Lib Dem party to take? And if they don’t act soon UKIP, the Conservatives (or some party yet to emerge) will move into this vacuum and the Lib Dems truly will be left defending the rights of the likes of Sebastien, Flounder, Flotsam and Jetsam and co, and little else.

Nick Clegg Was A Bad Leader

I feel that someone should just say it. Despite showing a great deal of dignity in the End, here are my brief impressions of where Clegg went badly, badly wrong:

1. Clegg did not reform the party structure.

The party machine is a useless maze of committees and associations. In order to free himself from this labrinth of dysfunction, Clegg’s office appeared to separate themselves from the main party. This put distance between him and the members and he became more and more out-of-touch. A good leader would have reformed the party structure not treat it as an inconvenience to be managed.

2. Clegg did not get rid of Rennard sooner.

To his credit Rennard is gone. But how much better would it have been had Rennard been gone sooner? Lord Rennard clearly did not have the party’s best intrests at heart and any meaningful reform was impossible whilst Rennard was still sat upon his throne. Nick Clegg only got rid of Rennard when he had to. The damage was already done.

3. Clegg surrounded himself with amateurs.

Angela has already comprehensively addressed this one.

4. Clegg sold the LibDems too cheaply.

The price for the LibDems going into Coalition should have been PR by STV. Not a referendum, but a constitutional agreement that all future elections were to be contested this way. Without this Clegg wrote the LibDems suicide note. Pehaps the lure of power was too tempting. That should have been the ultimate LibDem red line.

Is classical liberalism the best hope for Lib Dems?

David Herdson on politicalbetting.com seems to think so…

“… if being the reasonable voice of the centre won’t cut it for the Lib Dems, what will? There is of course always the well-trodden path of local activism and that no doubt has its part to play but only where the party already has an established base and that has its limits, particularly with the boundary review likely to shake up the map.

To my mind, the Lib Dems have, or could have, two genuinely distinctive messages that no other party is selling. One is being unashamedly pro-EU. That will matter in the next three years and could be the ticket back into the heart of the action. It’s true that they did play that card in 2014 and it flopped badly but a referendum may be a different matter.

The second, however, is the stronger, and is to return to a more classical liberalism: for individual freedom and against state encroachment, whether economic, social or in excessive policing powers. Some would argue that no other party is selling either message because neither is popular and there’s something in that – but unpopular doesn’t mean there’s no support and the alternative is to contest other policy ground where other stronger parties are already encamped.”

The article is worth reading in full and can be found here.

Time for the Lib Dems to put the amateurs out to pasture

Following the “evisceration” of the Lib Dem parliamentary party on Thursday, will the Lib Dems finally wake up and smell the coffee?

Losing some 47 seats in the House of Commons and somewhere in the region of 350 deposits, on May 7th, was not an accident. It was not a “price paid for being in coalition” – particularly when the entire South West was lost to a party to the right of them. It was not the “brutal tactics of the Conservatives” – they simply fought an excellent campaign – and won. Did Lib Dems really expect Lynton Crosby to back off in the South West because the Lib Dems had been good eggs in 2010? Of course not. It was not a price paid for the tuition fees debacle. It was certainly not the “unfairness of the voting system” (we presumably knew that before we started) and it was definitely not a lack of media coverage or the “biased” media coverage (the much-loved “all the media hate us” hobby horse of the party).

It was the total and utter failure of the Lib Dems to offer anything interesting or compelling to the country.

It was a shambles of a campaign. And it was a total and utter failure of Nick Clegg to make the necessary changes to the party, its structure and its personnel over the last 5 years that made such a disastrous campaign inevitable.

Let me be clear; I know Nick is a good man. He is an excellent media performer (as he showed yet again during the General Election). He is also a brave and honourable man. Had he not been prepared to drag the party into the 2010 coalition, the country would not just be on its knees right now it would be on the floor. I hope that history will recognise this contribution, because it was truly noble and magnificent.

But for all the bravery he showed for the sake of the country, he was a coward when it came to taking tough decisions for the sake of the party.

He did nothing to modernise the ludicrous archaic committee structure of the Liberal Democrats (too many groups with lots of power and prestige but no accountability). You can hardly make a cup of tea in the Lib Dems without half a dozen committees getting involved. It probably has more rules than it has members.

This is no way for a political party to operate in the 21st century. Take just one example. Why on earth did Nick allow the perpetuation of the wholly undemocratic conference elite (those who have been awarded a magic “voting card” by some local party ) deciding party policy rather than, oh I don’t know, those who actually have been elected by the voters? If the idea of accountable MPs determining policy was a step too far, at the very least we should have moved to a democratic “one member one vote” system by now. Why no change?  Of course the answer is probably that Nick didn’t want to take on the 29 person Federal Policy Committee and the 20+ person Federal Conference committee (and possibly several other committees I have never heard of) who would undoubtedly have fought tooth and nail to protect their power base. But that should not have stopped him from doing it.

Likewise, he did nothing to end the spectre of hapless amateur hangers-on at the top of the Lib Dem hierarchy surrounding the leader like a ring of steel; getting their kicks from “being important”, hoarding information, and lauding it over everyone else – hopelessly out of their depth and too self-obsessed or too stupid to know the limitations of their own abilities.

You might have thought that Nick would learn from the omnishambles of the “YES to Fairer Votes” (Yes to AV) campaign – possibly the most disastrous campaign ever witnessed by mankind (up until the General Election of 2015 that is). For the 2011 AV campaign he appointed his mate John Sharkey  to head up the fight. Sharkey, you will recall, was the bungling strategist in charge of the lacklustre 2010 election campaign which was saved single-handedly by Nick’s own performance at the TV debates (not helped by the hapless Sharkey apparently leaving his secret TV debates notes in the back of a cab).

Yet come 2015 Nick does the same thing again, appointing his patron and friend Paddy Ashdown as Campaign Chair and Olly Grender (ex everything in the Lib Dems) as Deputy Chair. It was like YES to AV all over again – a total misallocation of resources, and silly gimmicks (a manifesto launch in a nightclub where the sound fails) failing to cover up the lack of any coherent proposition to the electorate.

And if you want proof positive that the amateurs in charge at the top of the 2015 campaign were living in la-la land right up to the end,  then look no further than Paddy’s assertion that it had been “a wonderful campaign” on May 6th and Grender’s preposterous tweet on May 7th in response to the “I’ll eat my hat” gaff:

“@campbellclaret will eat his kilt, @paddyashdown will eat his hat …… right now I’d settle for a sandwich #GE2015”.

Did these people have absolutely no idea what was going on, even that late in the game?

And that is the problem with the Lib Dems. It is the plaything of too many amateurs and wannabes – whether they prance around at the various committees feeling self important (with all the power and none of the accountability), wander around on stage at conference admiring their own images on the TV and grinning whenever they “take a lump” out of the leadership, or head up disastrous self-indulgent campaigns, for which they all too rarely face the consequences.

Nick has stood down as leader, but what of Olly Grender and Lord Ashdown? They have, presumably, been automatically stood down now the campaign is done. So what do they do – just move on and go back to writing books or popping up on the odd TV programme? I trust they will never be put anywhere near the Lib Dem levers of power ever again. And, that the time for appointing amateurs is well and truly over.