Liberator says something nice about Nick Clegg - honest!

Credit where it’s due, Nick Clegg’s “I’m In” campaign on Europe may finally see the Liberal Democrats campaigning on Europe during the course of a European parliamentary election.

That would be a welcome break with precedent. In previous euro elections, the party has acted as though it viewed the exercise as, at best, a chance to train its organisation in target seats by campaigning on purely local issues or, at worst, something it wished would go away.

National campaigns have been hesitant and embarrassed, a situation not helped by mistaken attempts to appeal to eurosceptics by making incautious promises about referendums.

How often does it need to be said that eurosceptics will vote UKIP or Tory? With at least two choices of the real thing on offer, they will not be impressed by the Liberal Democrats suddenly trying to pretend unconvincingly that they too are eurosceptics of some sort, obsessed by pointless referendums.

That tendency was at its worst in the last euro elections, with Clegg lending his weight to calls for a referendum on the spurious grounds that there hadn’t been one since 1975.

He now appears to have grasped something that has long been staring Liberal Democrat politicians in the face. Despite the weight of press hostility, emotional hysteria and nationalist bigotry on the eurosceptic side, there is a consistent one third or so of the population that is pro-European.

That one third is a minority but it is a considerably larger one than that which has ever voted Liberal Democrat. It is the obvious pool in which the party should be fishing.

The pro-European vote has effectively been abandoned in previous elections, perhaps on the assumption that it had nowhere much else to go. Not merely can that vote be awakened but it is essential that it is awakened ahead of any referendum eventually happening.

Through a combination of coalition legislation and political reality, the Liberal Democrats have ended up, possibly by accident, with a quite sound policy on Europe – that the party favours membership of the EU, is prepared to expound its benefits, and will tolerate a referendum only when there is something to have one about, by which it means some major proposed change in the UK’s relations with the EU.

This is where the party should have ended up years ago instead of wittering on about referendums in a vain attempt to placate people who will never vote Liberal Democrat. It gives next year’s euro candidates something to fight on and the party a reason to campaign. About time too.


This is the Commentary column from Liberator 362, which will be out next week. Also includes Felix Dodds and Simon Titley on How to be a Liberal minister, Greg Mulholland MP on why the pubcos should be tackled, and Rebecca Tinsley on how to give aid to Africa without lining the pockets of the corrupt... plus RB, reviews and Lord Bonkers.

Better all-woman shortlists than the Leadership Programme

Last year, I was in the audience for a panel discussion at a professional conference. Every single member of the panel was a balding middle-aged man. It was, as several members of the audience pointed out, cringe-making.

It has reached the stage where the low number of women in the Liberal Democrat group in the Commons strikes me the same way.

You can say in our defence that we do not have safe seats into which we can parachute female candidates. You can say we had plenty of women candidates in promising seats at the last election – but the problem is that we did not win them. You can say we are selecting plenty of women in seats that look promising next time around.

Now Nick Clegg, according to today’s Independent, is considering imposing all-woman shortlists on the party.

That, of course, is not in Nick’s gift. He would have to convince the party conference to support the measure.

And my heart is not in the idea. My ideal is still Liberal Democrat members selecting the best candidate for the seat, irrespective of sex, race or anything else.

But if you feel we have reached the point where Something Must Be Done, then I would much rather see all-woman shortlists than the Leadership Programme we have at present as the solution to this problem.

This is for two reasons. The first is that it involves the party establishment picking favourite sons and daughters who will then expect to be provided with agreeable seats to fight. This gives that establishment too much power, and I would rather see candidates fighting their way up from the bottom. There is also the point that some of those chosen, for the initial intake at least, seemed to be doing very well without any special help from the top.

More fundamentally, the Leadership Programme fails to challenge the party sufficiently. It says, in effect, that women candidates are not as good, but with the proper training they can be just as good as white men. What looks radical at the outset turns out to be deeply conservative.

When you set it against all those faults, it is hard to argue that all-woman shortlists would not be an improvement.

This post first appeared on Liberal England.

The Crazy World of Jeremy Browne

Having lost his ministerial job in last week’s reshuffle, Jeremy Browne was interviewed in Friday’s Times (£) – and it’s not a pretty sight.

What’s that? You won’t pay to enter the Times’s firewall? Quite right, so a copy of the story is provided at the end of this blog post. There are also summaries of the Times’s story in the Guardian, on Liberal Democrat Voice and at Politics.co.uk.

The interview has fuelled speculation that Browne will eventually defect to the Tories, which his half-hearted denials do not entirely dispel.

Meanwhile in the Liberal Democrat blogosphere, Browne’s comments have earned a universal raspberry:

• Naomi Smith (co-chair of the Social Liberal Forum) responds at the Huffington Post, accusing Browne of posing “a false dichotomy when he says the Party must choose whether to be a party of protest or of Government”.
• In a must-read post, James Graham examines Browne’s behaviour in the context of the increasingly authoritarian drift of the Liberal Democrats’ right wing.
• The Fact Collector argues that, if Jeremy Browne were to defect to the Tories, then strangely enough everybody would gain.

What has earned all this hostility? There is much in both the content and tone of the interview that has caused offence, but the essential problem is Browne’s apparent inability to distinguish between government and party.

Controversially, Browne wants the Liberal Democrats to run on a coalition ticket rather than a Liberal Democrat ticket:

Mr Clegg told delegates in Glasgow last month that he “hadn’t said enough” about what “Britain would look like today if the Tories had been alone in Whitehall for the last three years”.

By contrast Mr Browne urges his party to take responsibility, and credit, for the Government’s “central pillars”, including reducing the deficit, curbing immigration and crime and education reforms.

Curbing immigration?!

But the Browne quotation that will doubtless attract the most criticism from within the Liberal Democrats is this:

Comparing his party to a shopping trolley that “left to its own devices defaults to the left and to being the party of protest”, he says that he became exposed after years of trying to exert “corrective pressure”.

“I saw my role, and continue to do so, as doing everything I can to accelerate the Lib Dems’ journey from a party of protest to a party of government.”

This ‘party of protest’ thing is a tired old trope, already worn out by Nick Clegg over the past year. It is simply untrue that the party had no interest in power before the 2010 general election. This falsehood is linked to the suggestion that anyone in the Liberal Democrats who is critical of the coalition government is necessarily against being in power at all. Strangely, both Browne and Clegg never seem able to cite any specific examples of these power-averse party members, which suggests such members are straw men.

Why, then, does Clegg retain support within the party but Browne has virtually none? The reason is not Browne’s views on economics, even though these are about as right wing as they come within the Liberal Democrats. It is because of Browne’s views on civil liberties.

If there is one thing that unites Liberals from left to right, it is support for civil liberties. Yet Browne seems to have a tin ear for this issue, so his move from the Foreign Office to the Home Office last year left him vulnerable.

His weakness on civil liberties was exposed at the end of July, when the Home Office sent advertising vans round several London boroughs advising illegal immigrants to turn themselves in. A few days later, it was revealed that the UK Borders Agency had been hanging out at Kensal Green tube station in London, randomly stopping non-white people supposedly in an effort to catch illegal immigrants.

Browne had not been consulted about these measures so could not be blamed for them. But once he had heard about them, he should have been quick off the mark. As Jonathan Calder and Caron Lindsay pointed out at the time, the silence was deafening. It is a poor state of affairs when Liberal Democrat ministers appear unconcerned that government officials are stopping citizens in the street at random and demanding to see their papers.

Browne’s ineffectiveness on such crucial Liberal issues is basically why he was fired and why no one in the party has come to his defence.

The Times’s interview with Browne will win him no new friends within the Liberal Democrats but simply confirm the perception of his semi-detached status. Disparaging one’s party having just been fired also makes Browne look churlish. But it is the association with authoritarian policies that has, in the end, proved fatal.


The report in The Times (Friday 18 October 2013):

Running out of old grandees

‘Two jobs’ Tom McNally has finally shed one of his roles, having resigned as leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords.

He has combined this since 2010 with being a justice minister, with the result that it is easy to find peers who believe the demands made of McNally mean that he did neither role effectively and had an obvious conflict of interest when peers objected to something the Ministry of Justice is doing.

This was illustrated by his having been probably the only person in the hall at last month’s party conference in Glasgow to vote against the emergency motion on legal aid cuts – the party was against MoJ policy and he was stuck with it.

Who will succeed him? McNally followed Shirley Williams, who followed Bill Rogers who followed Roy Jenkins, who was appointed at the merger.

Alert readers will have spotted that the qualification for being Lords leader is to have been a prominent SDP member and, apart from the appalling Ian Wrigglesworth, the House is running out of those. As a newly appointed peer, Wigglesworth probably also lacks the required seniority.

Those thought to be in the running include John Alderdice, the group’s convenor (and a suitably distinguished and trusted loyalist), and its deputy convenor, former party president Navnit Dholakia.

Update on 4 October – We now hear that Jim Wallace will be standing for Lords leader, despite breaking the unwritten rule of never having been in the SDP.

However, as a Scottish lawyer, it is unclear that Wallace could take McNally’s Ministry of Justice post, which presumably will have to wait for the reshuffle.

Not a case for Sherlock Holmes

Today’s Observer reports that Nick Clegg is to hold an investigation into whether members of his team briefed against Vince Cable before conference.

The matter in question is a briefing given that said that, in a debate on the Glasgow economy motion at an MPs’ awayday, the vote went 55-2 against Cable's unhappiness with it.

This was reported by the media, plainly as the result of an official briefing, though was later the subject of a limited retraction by the BBC’s Nick Robinson, who said:

I am now told that no vote was held after a debate about economic policy at the Lib Dem parliamentary meeting a few weeks ago. However, sources close to both Vince Cable and Nick Clegg agree that the Business Secretary did urge the party to be prepared to relax fiscal policy if the recovery wasn’t sustained. Mr Cable is said to have had the support of just one other Lib Dem MP. Mr Clegg persuaded all the others. So, it was 55 versus 2.

There are several reasons why it is clear that Robinson and his colleagues were misled in a way designed to damage Cable, an idiotic course of action by whoever was responsible since Cable is a major party asset and a public figure in his own right.

The most obvious is that, with David Ward suspended from the party whip over his comments on the Middle East, and Mike Hancock having had the whip removed over matters we need not enter into here, there could not have been 57 MPs present.

Even if there had been, anyone who spoke to a few MPs at conference would be perfectly well aware that a lot more than two prefer Cable’s position to Clegg’s.

Indeed, one MP said the meeting in question had no formal vote but he kept a scorecard of speakers’ sentiments that came out 2:1 in Clegg’s favour – a much more believable ratio and, as one MP put it, “many of those on Clegg’s side were those who still retain ambitions”.

The Observer did not say who was to conduct this inquiry, or what would happen to anyone found to have misbehaved.

Given the frequency with which one name was mentioned at conference, the inquiry may not have very much inquiring to do.

Will the last delegate to leave please turn out the lights?

Leaving aside the issue of defence, what was striking about the vote on the amendment to today’s defence motion at the Liberal Democrat conference was the numbers.

228 voted for the amendment and 322 voted against, a total of 550 voting representatives. Given the importance of this vote, it is a fair bet that most voting reps present in Glasgow took part. This suggests that it is unlikely the total number of voting reps present in Glasgow exceeds 600.

Yes, holding the conference in Glasgow when most party members live in southern England deters attendance. Yes, many members attending are observers rather than voting reps. Even allowing for these factors, the low total is a sign of serious problems with membership numbers.

Party membership fell from about 65,000 at the time of the 2010 general election to only about 42,500 by the end of 2012. How much worse are things now?

Inability to count

Word reaches Liberator of an altercation at yesterday’s parliamentary party meeting over briefing by those associated with Nick Clegg, to the effect that the unamended motion on the economy (debated by party conference yesterday morning) was supported 55-2 at a pre-conference awayday of MPs.

We hear that this greatly displeased Vince Cable, on the grounds that no such vote took place at the event concerned and that, even if it had, not all 57 MPs were present so the figures could not have been correct.

The implication was that Cable was among the two and therefore that his position on the economy enjoyed only minor support among MPs. This is believed to be a terminological inexactitude.

Liberator would be grateful for any further details of what transpired at the meeting, our usual discretion assured. Oh, and the 224-220 vote yesterday in favour of a 45p top tax rate, rather than 50p, was, it should be noted, made possible only a by frantic late whipping in of ‘payroll’ MPs, to the wry amusement of those on the 50p side.

At least 220 people understand the important political symbolism in being a party that thinks some burdens should fall on the rich, even if the leader doesn’t.

A Pyrrhic victory?

The outcome of this morning’s Liberal Democrat conference debate on the economy was a mixed bag for social liberals.

At the Huffington Post, Liberator’s Gareth Epps has just posted his assessment of the debate.

Meanwhile, there is another consequence of this debate. After prostituting himself to support the establishment line on the economy for the second year running, party president Tim Farron MP can kiss goodbye to the party left’s backing for his leadership ambitions.

Why Monday’s debate on economics is crucial

Monday morning’s debate on economics at the Liberal Democrat conference is the most significant of the conference.

It is significant because it is effectively the first time that the party has ever been consulted about Orange Book editors David Laws and Paul Marshall’s plan to convert the Liberal Democrats to neoliberalism.

The key votes will come on the Social Liberal Forum’s amendments. If these amendments succeed, members will know that the Orange Book project has finally been defeated. If they fail, it will be a Pyrrhic victory for the right, because the party will haemorrhage active members.

I’ve provided further arguments on Liberal Democrat Voice.

The sound of gunfire?

Today is the 50th anniversary of Jo Grimond’s famous ‘Gunfire’ speech to the Liberal Assembly (the Liberal Party’s annual conference) on 14 September 1963.

That speech had a remarkable effect at the time, inspiring a generation of Liberals. One effect was that the Young Liberals started a magazine called Gunfire. It was the end of that magazine in 1970 that prompted the creation of Liberator magazine, still with us 43 years later.

At my suggestion, David Boyle blogged yesterday about the anniversary of Grimond’s speech. He is generous to the present leadership but I do not share his generosity.

In 1963, Grimond sought to inspire his members. Nick Clegg has spent the past year slagging them off. It will take more than 5p on plastic bags to inspire them again.

A party bigger than its leader

One might have thought that a leader who has presided over a catastrophic slump in his party’s membership would have better things to do than insult those who remain.

Yet the media were being briefed assiduously over the summer that the Liberal Democrat conference in Glasgow is the event at which Nick Clegg would confront his party over whether it accepted ‘grown-up’ politics. Translated into English, that means, “will it do what I tell it to?”

Having evaded any real debate on the economy for the past two years – helped by the fiasco over two competing amendments last September – the party leadership has now gone to the other extreme and staged an economy debate that Clegg himself will sum up.

The motion he will commend to conference is a recitation of things the coalition has done, together with some rather uncontentious ideas for limited improvements. This, as the movers well know, faces the party with the choice of publicly repudiating its leader or endorsing the economic record of the coalition, which has seen three years of recession, followed by a tiny upturn in growth paraded as though it were a miracle.

In this situation, Clegg may well get his victory, but it won’t be worth having. Does anyone in his bunker seriously believe that the party will be enthused by, or voters impressed by, a policy that says, “You’ve just been through the longest recession on record; we were right and everyone who disagreed was wrong; now please vote for us and, if we have a coalition again, we’ll knock a few more rough edges off the Tories’ more lunatic ideas”?

When not discussing being ‘grown-up’, Clegg’s usual line is to accuse his Liberal Democrat critics of being uninterested in power and preferring opposition. Entire armies of straw men have been lined up by Clegg to be demolished like this. Who are these people, and why has no-one except Clegg ever met any of them?

The people that Clegg alleges are not ‘grown-up’ or ‘serious’ are the remnants of those who gave him a majority in favour of coalition in 2010 so large that even he described it as ‘North Korean’.

Those who disagree with Clegg do not, with rare exceptions, object to being in coalition at all. They object to the conduct of this one; to Clegg’s failure to use his influence well; to Clegg being too close to David Cameron; to Clegg permitting policy disasters like the Health Act and bedroom tax (which will return to haunt the party’s candidates); and to Clegg appearing altogether far too comfortable in working with the Conservatives.

Clegg would appear to wish to fight the next election on the platform of “didn’t we do well?” A few conversations with most of his MPs, and some pretty senior ones at that, ought to convince him that fighting the next election by offering more of the same is likely to prove inimical to his prospects of continuing as deputy prime minister, because there will be too few Liberal Democrat MPs to sustain a coalition. But then perhaps he thinks his own MPs are not serious.

There is also a hard message for those of Clegg’s critics who have given up and left the party in disgust at something or other the coalition has done. What did you expect? You joined a political party that seeks power and, unless you believed the Liberal Democrats were going to vault from third place to first, it was inevitable that a coalition would arise at some point were the party ever to exercise power.

Undoubtedly, most party members would have preferred Labour as a coalition partner, and things would have been less problematic on economic policy. But since suspicion of civil liberty is part of Labour’s DNA, such a coalition would likely have caused equal if different anguish. Probably a mirror image of those who have left because of this coalition would have left because of one with Labour.

Each social liberal who leaves the party makes life easier for Clegg and the clique of economic liberal extremists around him, and harder for those social liberals who remain. The least helpful of all are those who have left the Liberal Democrats but say they might be back “when it turns into a social liberal party”. By their own actions, they make such an outcome less likely. If the party is to be rescued for social liberalism, it needs social liberals in it. Each of those who leaves does Clegg’s work for him.

No coalition was ever going to be easy. Even a majority Liberal Democrat government would have created its share of anger and disappointments. But the only people with good reason to leave the party are those who have undergone a genuine intellectual conversion to a rival cause.

For lapsed members who remain social liberals, the choice is simple. The party is bigger than Nick Clegg and will be there when he has gone, and it is worth saving. Clegg wants you to leave, which should be reason enough to stay. Or rejoin.

This is the Commentary column from Liberator #361 (September 2013 edition), just sent to subscribers.

Abolish spring conference? No thanks!

A working group, appointed by the Liberal Democrats’ Federal Executive (FE), has produced a consultation paper ‘Spring Federal Conference: Cost-Neutral Options for the future’ [pdf], which includes the option of curtailing or even abolishing the party’s spring conference.

I should say at the outset that, even though I’m a member of the party’s Federal Conference Committee (FCC), which organises the conference, I have had no inkling of these proposals until now because the working group has not presented its views to the FCC. We will have to comment in the same way as every other party member has a right to, so here are my initial views.

This is not the first time anyone has proposed to abolish the spring conference. There was a previous attempt under Charles Kennedy’s party leadership. The idea was scotched after it became clear there were many reasons not to abolish it, and that conference would not support the proposal, let alone provide the two-thirds majority required to amend the party’s constitution.

There are a number of reasons why curtailing or abolishing the spring conference is a bad idea. Here are the first five that spring immediately to mind.

1. The move is presented as a financial necessity but is not due to be implemented until after 2015, by which time the difficulties caused by the sudden withdrawal of Short and Cranborne money in 2010 may or may not have abated.
2. The value of spring conference cannot be measured in purely financial terms. We know that many members come to conference to take part in the extensive training programme, to help develop policy by attending debates or consultation sessions, or for other reasons such as networking (see page 4 of the consultation paper). The training programme, in particular, can be put together only through the arrangement of the weekend conference package with meeting rooms and hotels. Thus abolition or curtailment would be a false economy. The spring conference is not a loss-leader but a good opportunity to provide economies of scale, which is why the other parties, even without party democracy, also have weekend events.
3. The ability of party members to hold the party to account would be diminished if abolition were to take place. To be precise, it would be halved.
4. The ability of the party to make policy would be severely affected. Without a spring conference, the party would be unable to make policy more than once a year. There would also be less opportunity for consultative sessions. Only the Federal Policy Committee (FPC) would be able to fill the gap, yet it has not been consulted at all about the FE’s proposals. The net result would therefore be more policy-making on the hoof.
5. One idea mooted in the FE’s paper is to reduce the spring conference to a one-day event, but has anyone actually thought what a one-day conference agenda might look like? For s start, it would not run from 9am to 6pm because people would not be able to arrive in time, no matter where the event is held. This would mean a loss of debating time in any case. But when you also allow time for the leader’s speech, the obligatory sessions for reports from various party bodies, and constitutional amendments (which must be debated), there would be hardly any time left for actual debate.

There is one silk purse that could be made from this particular pig’s ear. When abolition was last mooted, income from the spring conference rose significantly. It broke even in one year, as people worked harder to make the event pay. With next spring’s event in a new location likely to be popular (York), perhaps this will happen again.

This post was written by Gareth Epps, who is a member of the Liberator Collective and is also a directly-elected member of the Liberal Democrats’ Federal Conference Committee. He writes here in a personal capacity.

At last... those new peerages

Finally, after several false starts, the list of new life peerages has been announced. There are ten new Liberal Democrat peers. How does this list compare with Liberator’s predictions on 16th June?

Well, we correctly predicted that there would be ten new peers and we correctly predicted seven of them:

• Olly Grender
• Christine Humphreys
• Brian Paddick
• James Palumbo
• Alison Suttie
• Rumi Verjee
• Sir Ian Wrigglesworth

We also predicted an unnamed Scottish Liberal Democrat, who turned out to be:

• Jeremy Purvis

We failed to predict two:

• Cathy Bakewell
• Zahida Manzoor

Meanwhile, two of our predictions went away empty-handed:

• Liz Lynne
• Julie Smith

In any event, there is an equal number of men and women on the Liberal Democrat list. But the list is heavily biased to people resident in London (even if they came from somewhere else originally).

The practice of ennobling former MPs seems to have come to an end. Only one of the nominees is a former MP (Sir Ian Wrigglesworth), and he lost his seat in 1987. His nomination probably had more to do with his subsequent services to the party than his time as an MP.

How many of today’s new peers were elected to the party’s Interim Peers Panel? The answer is just two; Brian Paddick, who was elected to the panel in 2008 (and, strictly speaking, his membership of the panel expired in 2012), and Olly Grender, who was elected to the 2006 panel (which expired in 2010).

Only one person from the most recent list (elected in 2010) has so far been made a peer: Sal Brinton. Only three from the 2008 list have previously been ennobled: Jonathan Marks, Monroe Palmer and Ben Stoneham. It is probably safe to assume that Mr Clegg does not have much time for the Interim Peers Panel.

Has Clegg had enough of his party?

There has been some debate lately about whether Nick Clegg will survive as Liberal Democrat leader until the next general election. But increasingly, it seems that whether the Liberal Democrats have had enough of Clegg is the wrong question. It’s more a matter of whether Clegg has had enough of his party.

Over the past year, a repeated theme of Clegg’s speeches has been the baseless accusation that many of his party’s members do not want to win or hold power, accompanied by the bogus claim that, until he became leader, the Liberal Democrats were merely a party of protest. (These claims were dismantled in previous posts here, here and here). Clegg even made these accusations in a speech at this June’s ALDC conference, to an audience of councillors (or ex-councillors who had lost their seats mainly due to him), who received his patronising lecture about ‘power’ in stony silence.

There is no evidence whatever for Clegg’s depiction of his party as people uninterested in power, and he has failed to produce any evidence. Never once has he named any such party member to back up his accusations. Team Clegg has obviously decided not to let the truth to get in the way of a good story, but has made further attacks on its own party. This time, the conduit is Isabel Hardman, writing in both the Telegraph and the Spectator. The spin is wearily familiar; the Telegraph’s headline could not be more loaded if it tried:

Airy-fairy Lib Dems must face life outside the goldfish bowl

Beneath this tendentious headline, we learn:

The Lib Dems currently have an official goldfish policy – one banning the sale of the creatures at fairs – which lingers as one of the clanking skeletons in the closet of a party still getting used to people paying it any attention at all. As the 2015 election approaches, though, Nick Clegg and his colleagues are trying their best to persuade activists to adopt a more grown-up approach to policymaking that is less about goldfish and more about government.

Mr Clegg knows there is still some work to do with party members before they can sign off a grown-up set of manifesto pledges. The Lib Dem leader recently warned his councillors that they must choose between “consigning ourselves to be 'the third party’ forever” and becoming a “firm party of government”. This week he reminded activists that there could be no promise to scrap or lower tuition fees in the 2015 manifesto. Backstage, strategists have used a series of meetings to tell MPs and their staff to cheer up and talk up the party’s achievements.

These regular warnings are part of a process of softening up the party rank and file, to get them onside ahead of this year’s autumn conference. When activists meet in Glasgow in September, they will discuss a “manifesto themes” document, as well as policy papers on tax, post-16 education, defence, Europe, “balanced working life” and zero carbon. The long-standing goldfish policy won’t get a look in.

This whole narrative is dishonest from beginning to end. For a start, there never was a policy on goldfish. But look at the repeated spin about being “grown-up” and the implication that the membership (unlike Clegg and his chums) is immature and not interested in power. Excuse me, but isn’t this the same membership that gave Clegg a North Korean-style majority in favour of coalition at the special conference in 2010? The same membership that, in the latest Liberal Democrat Voice poll, chose power over opposition by 87% to 13%?

In the Spectator article, meanwhile, we are told:

The main conflict in the party at the moment, according to those pushing the grown-up line, is between pragmatists and idealists, rather than left and right.

So there we have it. The debate is being reduced to a matter of maturity. Clegg is “grown-up”, while anyone who disagrees is some sort of child or hopeless idealist. No real argument, no facts, just personal insults. It seems that Clegg and his aides are continuing to ratchet up the war against their own party members, exploiting the media template that was fixed in the 1980s, which continues to frame all internal party politics in terms of Labour’s battles with the Militant Tendency.

The problem of a leader who dislikes his own party is not unique to the Liberal Democrats. David Cameron’s aides have been repeatedly spinning against the Tory grassroots as the ‘Turnip Taliban’, revealing what is essentially a cultural divide between a metropolitan and cosmopolitan leadership, and a rural and suburban backwoods. In the Labour Party, meanwhile, Ed Miliband recently tried to pick a fight with the unions over the selection contest in Falkirk, in what appears to be more a public relations exercise intended to boost Miliband’s ‘strong man’ credentials than a genuine disciplinary issue.

Clegg’s war on his own members seems to be all of a piece with this trend. But the fact that his Tory and Labour counterparts are playing similar games doesn’t make it right. Indeed, when your membership has slumped to 42,500, it is extremely foolish to insult and alienate those few members who remain, especially when your accusations against them are false.

Foolish, that is, unless you imagine you can pursue a purely elite-based political strategy with no further need for grassroots involvement. That is the only logical explanation for Clegg’s campaign against his own party over the past year. Presumably he hopes this campaign will culminate in the ceremonial humiliation of the membership at September’s conference. If he succeeds, he will probably win more praise from the likes of Isabel Hardman in the Telegraph, but it will be a Pyrrhic victory because its practical effect will be to weaken the party by demotivating members.

So here’s a question for Nick Clegg. Do you really want to remain party leader? You have made it abundantly clear over the past year that you dislike your own party, so much so that you are prepared to travesty your members repeatedly, culminating in what you hope will be their final humiliation at this September’s party conference. Have you thought through the practical consequences for the party? And if punishing your members on false grounds is what you really want, ask yourself whether you are in the right job. A major part of a party leader’s duties is to enthuse and motivate the members, and build the party’s strength in the process. But if you actually couldn’t give a toss about your party, shouldn’t you resign and let someone else do the job?

It’s time to piss or get off the pot. If you like your party, show some leadership (and real leadership consists of inspiring not insulting your members). If you don’t like your party, fuck off. Either way, make up your mind, and the sooner the better.

Postscript: Read Alex Marsh’s analysis of Clegg’s antics (‘The need for “grown up” policy’) on the Social Liberal Forum website. Thoroughly recommended.

Change the leader? Something else has to change first...

“Nick Clegg’s ratings get a boost” is the headline in a report on Liberal Democrat Voice of its latest readership survey. It suggests that the fall in support for the leader amongst party members has been reversed, at least for now.

Since the previous survey of members in March, Clegg’s positive ratings are up 10% to 58%, while his negative ratings are down 8% to 40%. We also learn that 55% want Clegg to remain as leader and fight the 2015 general election, compared with 38% who think he should resign before then.

So, an increase in approval, but 40% against is still a substantial hostile minority of members, which ought to worry any leader. This is particularly so when you consider that many of those on the positive side may simply be making a calculation about the wisdom of holding a leadership election before 2015 rather than expressing any wild enthusiasm for the current leader.

The problem with such popularity ratings is that they focus attention on the personality rather than the strategy, so the more important issue is neglected. No matter how bad members may think Clegg’s leadership is, there is no point getting rid of him unless his successor has a better strategy. If there is a leadership contest without a serious strategic choice, all we are left with is a vacuous personality contest.

At this stage, you may be thinking it is wrong even to raise the issue of Clegg’s leadership. Since he is likely to remain leader until the next general election, there is nothing to gain by prolonging this discussion. Well, it doesn’t matter what you think, because Clegg has decided to raise the issue anyway.

On the Social Liberal Forum website, Gareth Epps reveals that, at this September’s Liberal Democrat conference in Glasgow, Clegg is planning to stage a series of ‘binary choice’ votes, intended not only to shift the party decisively to the right but also to stage a symbolic defeat of the grassroots. Predictions of a conference bust-up also appear in an article by Richard Morris on the New Statesman’s blog.

Gareth Epps’s article is the more revealing, since it explains what the thrust of Clegg’s argument will be. Clegg will say that the Liberal Democrats must go into the 2015 general election fighting the coalition’s corner rather than the party’s. Is this is what he actually means by moving to the ‘centre ground’?

No one can say they weren’t warned about this conflict. Over the past year, Clegg has made a series of speeches attacking party members who he alleges want to “turn back the clock”, create a “stop the world I want to get off” party, who are “looking in the rear view mirror”, who want to be “the third party forever”, who are calling for “an eternity in opposition” and “hankering for the comfort blanket of national opposition”.

I analysed these attacks in a post here last month, pointing out that Clegg’s stereotype of party members simply doesn’t exist:

These are straw men. We know this because in none of these attacks does Clegg ever name his critics or supply specific references to the speeches or writings where they have expressed such views. These imaginary enemies are conjured up because Clegg needs a ‘defining other’, a pantomime villain against whom he can contrast his virtues. He’d like his audience to shout out, “they’re behind you!” They won’t because they do not share his illusion.

In the same blog post, I also quoted various other party members who had become tired of Clegg’s repeated travestying of his own members. Others have since commented along similar lines.

The latest party blogger to grow weary of Clegg’s fantasy enemies is Mark Pack. In a blog post on 25 July, he produces conclusive poll evidence that Clegg’s straw man is 87% straw. Meanwhile, in a more detailed analysis in his latest monthly Newswire, he observes that Clegg has jettisoned community politics:

Community Politics, never a favourite subject of Nick Clegg’s (and all but totally absent from his public utterances from his first day in the party), does not feature in the party’s message, despite Tim Farron’s calls for Community Politics to be a priority for the party.

It not only does not feature, but it is repeatedly implicitly rubbished as a result of what else Nick Clegg does regularly say. He and the party officially keep on hammering on about the importance of being in government in order to implement policies, without even a passing caveat about how people outside of political office can also achieve things. The idea that political parties should be all about winning political office as being the only way to bring about change is in a completely different political world from that of Community Politics with its emphasis on enabling people to take power over their own communities, working both within and outside the political system.

Mark Pack also takes apart Clegg’s timid strategy of being only “one step ahead”:

The politics of being one step ahead of the centre ground on its own is not enough to recruit and motivate an enthusiastic group of party activists, especially if you wish (as the party should) to have a core of activists who have something more than their dislike of potholes and their love of pointing in common.

What to do about this? We know that Clegg’s strategy is to soften up opinion before conference by travestying the membership as “not serious about power”, in contrast to his hard-headed and practical leadership. His strategy relies on establishing a narrative: “I'm competent, anyone who disagrees is a dilettante”.

The focus of any counterattack should be to bust that bogus narrative. Clegg has no right to a monopoly of the language of competence and experience, so he must be deprived of it. There are plenty of parliamentarians and councillors in the party who were exercising power when Clegg was still in short trousers, and they should take no patronising lectures from him about ‘power’.

More than that, Clegg has no right to monopolise this language because of his own record of incompetence:

• The number of Liberal Democrat MPs actually fell at the last general election. The people who Clegg put in charge of the election campaign had insufficient experience of political campaigning, as demonstrated by the campaign’s complete inability to exploit ‘Cleggmania’. The opportunity for a coalition came about more as a result of the accident of the parliamentary arithmetic than any carefully crafted strategy on Clegg’s part.
• Liberal Democrat poll ratings have been stuck at about 10% since the autumn of 2010, and local election results have been abysmal. Clegg has no idea how to reverse this trend.
• The party’s membership has fallen by over a third since 2010, and many of those members who’ve stayed have scaled back their activities. Clegg’s repeated attacks on his own members suggest that he thinks this doesn’t matter. He seems to have no idea how to, in Mark Pack’s words, “recruit and motivate an enthusiastic group of party activists”.
• Clegg believes that most voters congregate in an imaginary ‘middle’, and that politics is therefore about competing with the other parties for these same voters. But talk of the ‘centre ground’ is psephological nonsense – in practice, it means competing with the Tories and Labour for the sort of voters who never vote Liberal Democrat anyway, while alienating the party’s natural constituency (explained in more detail in an earlier post). Clegg does not understand his party’s core vote or what makes it tick – indeed, he actually seems to hold this core vote in contempt, mistakenly dismissing it as a ‘protest vote’ that can be safely dispensed with.
• As Mark Pack said in his Newswire quoted above, Clegg’s strategy effectively repudiates community politics. Clegg seems to think that success resides in becoming more conventional, when all the signs are that the patience of the public with conventional politics is coming to an end. Furthermore, Clegg’s approach makes his party more indistinguishable from the Tories and Labour, which deprives voters of any good reason to vote Liberal Democrat.
• The economic orthodoxy of the 1980s continues to dominate Tory and Labour thinking, even though that ideology has been living on borrowed time since the great crash of 2008-9. Future success depends on moving beyond those redundant ideas. Clegg’s belief that his party must align more closely with the old orthodoxy is nothing short of disastrous.

Clegg’s strategy is failing and, long term, it will doom the party to irrelevance. He wants to convert the Liberal Democrats from a radical campaigning party to a right-of-centre, conventional party of government. But this strategy deprives the party of a USP and, with nothing distinctive to offer, it loses votes and members, and demotivates those members who remain.

If Clegg wants to monopolise the language of competence and experience, he must demonstrate his superiority as a strategist and manager. His practical failures and the absurdities of his arguments suggest he has no right to monopolise this language. The trick is therefore to deny him this monopoly and thus force him to stop talking in clichés.

But to return to the question originally raised at the beginning of this post, the strategy should not be to demand Clegg’s resignation. It’s not worth removing him unless there is a credible replacement with a coherent alternative strategy. Sadly, no such Liberal Democrat MP currently exists.

Meanwhile, in other news of attempted internal coups, Alex Marsh reports the latest wheeze of Mark Littlewood and his right-wing libertarian chums. A forthcoming summer school will include discussions about how they can take over the Liberal Democrats after the 2015 general election. I’m not saying these fruitcakes and their fantasies should be ignored entirely, but we should focus on winning this year’s battle before we fight the next.

Postscript: Oh dear. It seems that the final paragraph has offended some right-wing libertarians, who responded with comments that will not be published because they were anonymous (and if they’d bothered to read our comments policy, they would have realised that). However, the gist of their complaints is that their summer school is not “forthcoming” but has already happened, and that their debate about taking over the Liberal Democrats was merely “a joke”. Well, I’m glad that’s settled. As long as they’re preoccupied with obsessing about how many angels can dance on a pinhead, the rest of us can get on with the serious business of politics.

Oh no, it’s Ben Ramm again

This morning’s edition of BBC Radio 4’s Week in Westminster included an interview about Vince Cable with two Liberal Democrats, Nick Thornsby of Liberal Democrat Voice and Ben Ramm, billed as “former editor of The Liberal, regarded as being on the left of the party”.

What was not mentioned is that The Liberal magazine is defunct and has been for four years. During the six years it was published, it ran to only thirteen editions. Throughout that time, it had no influence or standing in the party but was merely a heavily-subsidised vanity project.

As Liberator’s Radical Bulletin column reported in this April’s edition:

Eccentric magazine The Liberal has not been heard of for some years. That hasn’t stopped lazier parts of the media continuing to invite the magazine’s last editor Ben Ramm to act as a respected pundit on party matters.

The Wikipedia page for The Liberal states that it “ran in print from 2004 to 2009 and online until 2012”. But its own website states that there is a “new website coming soon” and has a link to the old website, which touts for subscriptions to a magazine that no longer exists.

Even when The Liberal was in print, Ramm was never considered an authoritative spokesperson for the left of the party (or any other section of the party for that matter). If that is what the producers of the Week in Westminster wanted, they could have gone to the Social Liberal Forum or any one of many councillors or parliamentarians, or indeed to that august journal Liberator. Clearly the producers need to overhaul their outdated contacts list.

Lib Dem conference sex ban shock horror

The world was rocked to its foundations by news that Liberal Youth has banned shagging at its conference this weekend.

The story was published yesterday by the Blue Guerilla blog under a sensational headline:

EXCLUSIVE: Lib Dem Youth Leaders Impose Shagging Ban.

It was rehashed in this morning’s Daily Star under the salacious headline:

LIBERAL DEMOCRATS IMPOSE SEX BAN ON RANDY ACTIVISTS

The Star suggests that Liberal Youth has split into two factions, between “budding politicians hoping for an early night kept awake by their randy colleagues” and those who regard the LY conference as “the one and only pulling event in their annual calendar”.

It turns out that there is less to this story than meets the eye. One of the comments beneath the Blue Guerilla blog is from Liberal Youth member George Potter, who dampens down the excitement:

I hate to break it to you but this is old news. Sex has been forbidden in crash since 2009. This announcement by the LY Chairs is just a reminder of that rule.

O tempora o mores! I recall a Young Liberal Movement council weekend in Manchester in 1977, when I entered a large bedroom in David Senior’s flat that was being used as a crash pad. It was like stepping into a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.

Not everyone was shagging in those days. There were rival attractions, such as putting the world to rights or heavy drinking or roll-your-own cigarettes (which may have contained more than just tobacco) – or all three. But “hoping for an early night” rarely featured on any conference agenda.

Several participants in this hedonism went on to become respected MPs and councillors (and, no, none of them were those involved in subsequent scandals), so today’s more austere youth should not assume that getting a good night’s sleep is a guarantee of future political success.

Postscript: Apparently the main reason for Liberal Youth’s policy is concern about “child protection”. Liberal Youth has a minimum age of 14 and, while it is necessary to ensure the safety of under-16s (and no one of any age should be subject to sexual abuse), all but a few of those attending Liberal Youth events are over the age of consent. The fact that all participants, irrespective of their age, are subject to worries about “child protection” says more about the current moral panic about paedophilia than it does about any actual risks.

A coup against Clegg?

On the Telegraph blog, Bernard Brogan reports that Nick Clegg is “safe”. The “leadership crisis” is over. There will no longer be “a coup at the Liberal Democrats’ autumn conference”.

A crisis? Excuse me, but did I miss something? A post here on 16 January explained why it was unlikely there would be a leadership election anytime soon. There has been no ‘crisis’ in the intervening months. The arguments in January’s post remain valid.

But despite the lack of a coup, Clegg is increasingly deserving of one. It isn’t because the Liberal Democrats joined the coalition – the party agreed to that overwhelmingly. And no matter how much you may think Clegg has subsequently made a poor fist of being in coalition, it is hard to see any of his potential rivals being able to make a significant difference at this late stage in the game.

The problem isn’t the coalition but the survival of the Liberal Democrats after 2015 as anything more than a fringe party. Clegg seems to have little idea of what makes the party tick or how its campaigning strength was built. The nature of this problem was revealed in a series of speeches and statements he has made over the past year.

In May, I posted here about Clegg’s statement after the local elections and his speech to last September’s party conference. On both occasions, he said that his way is the only way; anyone who disagrees is simply not interested in winning power. His way is the future; anyone who disagrees wants a return to the past.

He referred to the Liberal Democrats as having been a “party of protest” before he took charge. He travestied party members as people who want to “turn back” and create a “stop the world I want to get off” party. He warned them to “stop looking in the rear view mirror”.

In his speech at the ALDC conference in Manchester last Saturday, he repeated similar arguments. He scorned party members who want to “turn back the clock” and be “the third party forever”, who are calling for “an eternity in opposition” and “hankering for the comfort blanket of national opposition”.

These are straw men. We know this because in none of these attacks does Clegg ever name his critics or supply specific references to the speeches or writings where they have expressed such views. These imaginary enemies are conjured up because Clegg needs a ‘defining other’, a pantomime villain against whom he can contrast his virtues. He’d like his audience to shout out, “they’re behind you!” They won’t because they do not share his illusion.

Indeed, following Saturday’s speech, several have censured this smear campaign:

• Jonathan Calder was depressed by the spin in advance of the speech, which promised Clegg would “take on his internal party critics”, and mocked his “very real fork in the road”. He pointed out that Clegg’s strongest critics are not the dilettantes Clegg would have you believe: “...the fellow Liberal Democrats who are most likely to be critical of Nick’s leadership are precisely those who have lost power under his leadership – councillors and group leaders in Northern cities who have seen the gains of years of hard work wiped out”.
• Caron Lindsay, usually a loyalist, complained on Liberal Democrat Voice, “we’re not a bunch of unrealistic hippies, you know”. She warned: “Nick ought to realise that if he wants us to do something for him, then inferring that we need to grow up and get real is hardly the best motivational tool, especially when it’s not even accurate. Activists, who are already working hard, are going to think ‘Is that how little he thinks of us?’”
• Gareth Epps asked on the Social Liberal Forum blog whether Clegg was resorting to “megaphone diplomacy”. He observed that it was perverse of Clegg to lecture members about power at an ALDC conference of all places:  “...an audience of councillors is a strange one to lecture about being in power, especially those who did just that successfully for many years before national political trends voted good Liberal Democrats off councils we formerly ran. They are people who have long been a party of Government, who have suddenly found themselves in some cases relegated from first place to third thanks to taking the path Clegg seems to advocate.”

Only one notable commentator excused Clegg’s attacks. On Liberal Democrat Voice, Stephen Tall suggested, “That’s the way you get journalists’ attention, y’see”. If it really were the case that this is merely a PR tactic, it is a stupid one because it is extracting a disproportionately high price in terms of the alienation and demotivation of members. Y’see.

Meanwhile, writing on his blog on Sunday, David Boyle detected signs in the latest issue of Liberator magazine of a change of mood in favour of Clegg, which seems a charitable interpretation. If anything, the mood towards Clegg is continuing to deteriorate. The articles in the latest Liberator by Tony Greaves and Chris White indicate increasing exasperation with a leader who is effectively hollowing out his party.

In Saturday’s speech, Clegg warned that, unless members follow his “very real fork in the road”, “we condemn our party to the worst possible fate: Irrelevance; impotence; slow decline”. In fact, it is Clegg’s disregard for the long-term health of the party as a thriving campaigning organisation that is condemning the party to slow decline.

Clegg likes to lecture members about the ‘realities’ but the problem is that his narrative is remarkably unreal:

1. Until Clegg became leader, the Liberal Democrats were merely a party of protest.
2. Until Clegg became leader, the party had no experience of power and no interest in winning it.
3. The power the party has won is entirely due to a transformation brought about by Clegg. The gains have been made despite the party rather than because of it.
4. There is only one viable way forward, which is Clegg’s. Anyone who disagrees is backward looking and would rather be in permanent opposition.

This narrative is not just an insult to the party; it is bogus in every respect. Anyone who seriously believes in it is deluded. Anyone who promotes it while knowing it to be false is a liar. Either way, when a leader is promoting such an obviously dishonest prospectus, how can he expect his members to respect him or work for him?

Clegg is not the first leader to try and define his leadership qualities in terms of opposition to his own party. The tactic of making yourself look tough by attacking your own members is straight out of the David Steel playbook. With Steel, it reached the point where his closest allies (led by Richard Holme) worked for merger with the SDP as much as anything to achieve ‘Year Zero’ – to erase the Liberal Party and all those pesky radical activists and start with a clean sheet of paper, so that a centralised party could be run with no interference from the members.

Clegg seems to have reached a similar stage in his leadership, where he can no longer disguise his contempt for his own party. The problem is more acute with Clegg than his predecessors because he’s never assimilated. He joined the party only in 1997, became an MEP in 1999, an MP in 2005 and leader in 2007 – little wonder he’s never really understood the party’s culture. This problem is evident not only in the repeated slurs against activists but also the crass insensitivity on issues such as secret courts and immigration.

So will there be a coup? It is less a question of whether the party wants to get rid of Clegg than whether Clegg wants to get rid of his party.

Mark Littlewood too extreme even for Mail readers

My thanks to Liberator colleague Jonathan Calder, who has spotted an article in the Mail on Sunday by Mark Littlewood, which calls for the government to publish the names of all benefits claimants and the amounts they are paid.

It is the sort of shock tactic we have come to expect from Littlewood. But as the comments beneath the article show, this time it has proved to be too much even for readers of the Mail. One of them responds:

For the love of God, what next? Are people on welfare going to be made to wear a large yellow “W” on their coats? Before we send them to the camps? I understand the concern, but this really isn’t the way. Not the way of a freedom-loving, democratic, gentle, tolerant country. And those of you who think it is, be very sure what kind of country you want to live in. Be very sure.

Littlewood, you may recall, used to belong to the Liberal Democrats. He joined the party in 2001 with other former members of the short-lived Pro-Euro Conservative Party after it disbanded. He was employed by the Liberal Democrat parliamentary party as Head of Media from 2004 until departing under a cloud in 2007, after embarrassing the leadership by saying that the introduction of proportional representation should not be a deal-breaker in any coalition negotiations.

He then proceeded to become the leading figure in the small group of right-wing libertarians in the party, as Director of Liberal Vision (which claimed to be a ‘think tank’ but was really just a blog with an accommodation address in a dingy back street near Victoria Station). It was during this time, at the September 2008 Liberal Democrat Conference, that he published a controversial booklet claiming that two-thirds of the party’s MPs would lose their seats unless the party pledged to make tax cuts. This led to a ‘scuffle’ with Torbay MP Adrian Sanders. Littlewood left the party in December 2009 to become Director General of the market-fundamentalist think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA).

It will be interesting to see what Littlewood’s few remaining libertarian chums at Liberal Vision have to say about this lunacy.

Postscript (1): Even the Adam Smith Institute thinks Littlewood has gone too far.

Postscript (2): Further interesting comment on Littlewood’s proposals from Mike Sivier and James Bloodworth.

The bizarre case of the ‘disciplining’ of David Ward MP

Attempts to ‘discipline’ Liberal Democrat MP David Ward, over remarks he made on his blog in January about Jewish people, appear to have foundered.

Liberal Democrat Friends of Palestine reports in its newsletter today:

Baroness Neuberger and Lord Carlile, who were due to hold a meeting with MP David Ward, in order to ‘re-educate’ him in ‘sensitivity and language training’ apparently no longer wish to do so. No explanation has been given.

The Jewish Chronicle (30 May) reported that this meeting was arranged after a previous meeting had been aborted:

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, deputy leader Simon Hughes and chief whip Alistair Carmichael had originally intended to force Mr Ward to meet the party’s Friends of Israel group to agree “proportionate and precise” language for his future comments on Israel.

But the plan was scuppered when the Friends group referred the case back to Mr Clegg, saying Mr Ward had not removed the original blog. Lib Dem Friends of Israel said this week that it had not changed its position over the MP.

A Lib Dem spokesman confirmed that the disciplinary process against Mr Ward has now been adjourned in anticipation of a meeting with peers Lord Carlile and Baroness Neuberger.

The Jewish Chronicle (6 June) subsequently reported that the Jewish Leadership Council was piling on the pressure because of this delay. An explanation for the delay was suggested:

Mr Ward’s case is thought to have fallen down the pecking order over the past five months as the Lib Dems contended with disciplinary actions against former Cabinet member Chris Huhne, Lord Rennard and MP Mike Hancock.

Now, with the refusal of Neuberger and Carlile to participate, it seems that the party has no idea what to do. But why should it do anything? Ward has already apologised publicly for his remarks and that should be the end of the matter. The continued hounding of him serves no rational purpose. But then the Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel has a track record of vindictiveness towards prominent critics of Israeli government policy, so a long-running vendetta is only to be expected.

Postscript (1): A thought occurs. If Nick Clegg, Simon Hughes and Alistair Carmichael can “force” a party representative to “meet the party’s Friends of Israel group to agree ‘proportionate and precise’ language for his future comments on Israel,” can we also expect them to force pro-Israeli representatives to meet Friends of Palestine the next time one of them justifies brutal Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza?

Postscript (2): David Ward has tweeted, “Disciplinary process – next stage.....I am to meet with don’t know who and if I did I must not tell anyone”.