A large part of David Cameron’s job, of course, is getting the balance right between keeping his traditional base of supporters happy, while simultaneously also appearing appealing to enough others to vote for him. In striking this balance, generally his strategy as leader has been to prioritise appealing to the new voters he needs, “detoxing” the Conservative brand, and generally trying to end the image of “the nasty party”. Part of this calculation, similarly to Tony Blair  in this respect if not in others, is surely that those on the extreme had nowhere else to go.

So declaring as he did this week that Conservative MEPs after June’s European elections will not sit as part of the European People’s Party (EPP, the main-centre grouping containing most of Europe’s governing parties) to seek an alliance with others who do not share its “federalist” ambitions, appears to go against this strategy. (Whether the EPP really is federalist or not is another question, but it’s close enough for British Conservatives of a not very internationalist bent). It does look very much as though the British Conservatives will end up in a group with some rather odd, and generally very right-wing partner parties.

But presumably Cameron and Hague have made the calculation that to the Conservatives’ core support, being “in bed with federalists” is the sort of thing that renders them spluttering into apoplexy over their Telegraph and cornflakes in the morning - whereas to the population generally, which alphabet soup of foreigners some people that they’ve never heard of sit with, is simply meaningless.

And I have to say I am starting to wonder if they might not be right. The risk they run is that opposition parties such as ourselves are able to paint the Conservatives in these European elections (and of course more importantly set the tone for next year’s General Election) as somehow in league with some very unsavoury people. And this is certainly not unjust.

But I wonder, quite simply, how much this resonance this really has with the average British voter. If I recall correctly we campaigned a few years ago to tell the public that the Conservatives were in league with Alleanza Nazionale (the Italian post-fascist party). But quite frankly I don’t think many British voters cared much.

And perhaps more psephologically importantly, on this one occasion, those to his right do have somewhere else to go: UKIP, the BNP and any other parties who will be attacking the Conservatives from the right, for being too integrationist-minded.

So maybe it is the right strategic thing for them to do. But there must surely be a risk that some normal people - those he needs to vote him into Downing St next year - do actually notice. And remember.

And it surely is odd that at the same time as he is doing his best to get the Conservatives to come over as normal people, he feels the need to leap into the arms of some thoroughly un-normal people, just to escape company which even Margaret Thatcher kept - and that was at a time when real leaps forward in integrating European policy and lawmaking were actually on the table.

I spent a happy time this weekend in Yorkshire, at the Liberal Democrat spring conference in Harrogate. Party conferences are so often dominated by rows, real or imagined, combined with other frustrations ranging from the purely logistical to policy ones, that it was good to have a conference focussed around a strong theme. We concentrated this weekend on the liberating power of education, backed up by three strong policy papers covering different aspects of this (early years, schooling, and college and university). (Mainstream journalists have written that the the conference focussed on the economy, but they are talking about the media’s conference, whereas I am talking about the actual event).

And unsurprisingly I was pleased that my own preferred outcome carried the day on the one really heated debate we did have: at its third attempt, stretching back over the last decade, the party finally managed to agree a policy on faith schools. This was one of those debates which really makes the case for democratic political decision-making: good speakers making high quality points, and as a result a hall of several hundred people making a balanced, well-informed, reasoned decision (and with a good bit of political drama and tension thrown in, in the form of a very close counted vote). There are those who doubt that this is the best way to make political decisions, but moments like Saturday afternoon’s debate remind you how well it can work, and certainly so much better than its opposite, ’sofa government’.

On the substance of faith schools, by the way, in summary, we won’t require all (state-funded) faith schools to close down, but we will require them to be inclusive in the way they work (something I myself seen achieved locally already, and which the major Christian groupings are themselves keen to promote these days).

Of all the party’s conferences that I’ve been too - and in a bored moment over the weekend I counted that this was the twenty-fifth that I have attended - this was one of the most cohesive, businesslike and, well, happy.

But it also had an element which was new for me, at least when I was using it (which, contrary to the claims of the friends I was with at the time, was not all of it!). For this weekend I participated in Twitter - reading and following very short electronic updates on what was happening at the conference, and it gave an interesting perspective on it some of it.

For those not familiar, I’ll attempt to summarise what Twitter is (ans this is also a test for whether this newby has grasped it!).

The basic point is that people on Twitter write very short (up to 140 characters long, so no more than, say, 25 words) updates on what they’re doing or thinking.  And of course you can ‘follow’ what other people are writing (”tweeting”, in the parlance). At heart it’s as simple as that.

You can update it and follow others’ updates either from your computer, or (as I do and I suspect most will do) very easily through one of several little pieces of software available you can download to your phone.

Everyone says they like the discipline of having to keep their updates very short, and you can follow either your real friends or celebs - @stephenfry is popular, apparently (it’s regarded as good practice when referring to fellow Twitterers to preface their username with @ so the the system tells them they’ve been mentioned), Peter Mandelson recently did a trial month on it, and there is a rather contrived Boris Johnson version too. I follow several Lib Dem MPs such as Jo Swinson, Lynne Featherstone (dedicated new technology pioneers both), Norman Lamb, Susan Kramer and leading PPC Bridget Fox, as well as various other friends.

Just like Facebook status updates, which with it has quite a lot in common, it can be quite interesting to see what people are doing. But, as you can probably imagine, very quickly you can feel that you’re getting more information than you really need. And it is much ridiculed for being a channel for people to update their friends just on the fact that they’re going to the loo, having lunch, or whatever - do you really need permanently to be fully up to date with the fact that all your friends are now enjoying sitting down and reading the paper?

So many people I think seem to use it to send more occasional updates, of more interesting things. I know several politicans who use it as a way of telling people of the work they’re doing in their constituency, and I guess you can imagine that some people might find it interesting to get an update that their local MP has just, I don’t know, opened a new facility in their area, or raised a local issue in Parliament, or something similar (although perhaps more importantly, MPs would be interested in telling their constituents this).

I can’t imagine that I’ll spend a huge amount of time on it, and perhaps will use it as similar to Facebook status update (with which it can be automatically linked). But it might fill the odd bored moment on a bus and, like Facebook, be a good way of keeping up with people I don’t see often. And last week, when some controversy surrounding the International Criminal Court indicting a head of State for the first time was in the news, I used it to tell my ‘followers’ on my own strong views (as written often on this blog) on this question.

But the weekend was something different. People at the conference were asked to include in their messages about conference the word #ldconf (this is known as a ‘hashtag’). There’s an easy electronic way to follow all messages with #ldconf in them - and so effectively you are then following all messages being posted by people at the conference. This meant (for me, at least) a far higher volume of messages and so, just for the weekend, a different type of use developing - something a bit closer to a conversation. At peak times this might have reached an average of perhaps 3 or 4 “tweets” a minute.

Where I thought this worked really well, and I enjoyed it, was in a couple of the big events - specifically the big debate on schools policy, the leader’s speech, and Howard Dean’s speech. People were able to post their instant responses - ranging from simply repeating phrases that a speaker in the debate had said that they thought was especially telling, or indeed thought were nonsense, to other people (one in particular) using many points made in the real debate to repeat his request via Twitter for us to vote a particular way, to attempts at satire or humour. People post directly from sitting in the hall: in many ways it’s a supercharged version of the practice of texting other people in the same meeting as you to offer a commentary on what’s being said (a temptation to which I confess I have occasionally succumbed).

In some ways this therefore become a sub-debate, happening beneath the surface of the ‘real’ debate, and it was at times quite interesting, and at others just amusing. It allowed you to get some idea of how well ideas were going down - for example, an instant judgement that some of the points in Nick Clegg’s leader’s speech were popular. As you come out of a leader’s speech there are always some TV crews around the place waiting to vox pop you about what you thought about the speech, and looking at the Twitter #ldconf feed would give them a wider range of responses so you could actually start to make a slightly more scientific judgement on how a particular point has gone down with the party (if arguably not making quite as good telly!).

Some of us used this as an opportunity to make points and respond to each other within #ldconf; others, especially MPs and PPCs, still seemed to have their eyes mostly on constituents back home they were hoping would receive the messages, so tended to be more along the lines of “Nick Clegg has just made another good point about how the LDs will save the nation by xxxx”

The times I was less keen on how it worked were when an enthusiastic user used the system to report on a fringe meeting in real time as it was happening (this is known as “livetweeting”). This was probably quite interesting to anyone at home wanting to know just how a meeting was developing, minute by minute and point by point (but are there really any such people?). But otherwise it meant you turned on your phone to suddenly 40 messages detailing an intricate blow by blow account of a meeting you had already decided not to go to… But it’s not difficult to ignore them if you want, of course.

At its best however, I did quite enjoy it - it was an opportunity to give instant feedback on what you’re hearing, and of course, like blogging and indeed speaking, whether that’s worth listening to depends on whether you want to listen to the person speaking.

It was, however, quite different (at least I hope so) from ‘normal’ Twitter use - I certainly couldn’t cope with that kind of intensity away from what is already an intense event.

Will Twitter last? Who knows. There is much discussion of the lack of business model of the company behind it. Like most things on the internet, it is free - but with such very tight constraints on content, it is very difficult to see how you could introduce advertising into it (and there seems to be an assumption that if you introduced regular adverts in amongst the tweets from your friends, it would be so intrusive that users would simply move to another system that someone else would set up without them). I’m not convinced that status updates alone will achieve sufficient critical mass of interest to drive people to something over time. And I’m also not hugely confident in all my fellow citizens’ ability to produce a steady stream of finely-crafted and stimulating epigrams (with some striking exceptions, such as the supremely articulate @alexmortimer).On the other hand, Twitter does seem to have snowballed in the last few weeks and has also survived a fairly major change in product when they were forced (in this country) to stop sending out text message updates: it adapted and is now a somewhat different product. And maybe we will, as some predict, just get much more discerning about who we decide to ‘follow’ and culling those who issue too many toilet trip updates and not enough interesting thought.

Purely personally, it feels to me more like a craze which some people will enjoy for a while (much as when I was about nine we all madly played with some odd sticky plastic spider thing for a few months), than Facebook, which I can see having a more enduring use as a manageable way of keeping in touch with people.

Whatever, I quite enjoyed it!  (Oh, and by the way, for anyone who feels they could never understand it, if you’ve read this far,  you now know everything you need to to use it - and even more you even speak the language!)

Of all the arguments that this government has put up to justify their attempted smash-and-grab raid on the natural rights of us all, the most wrong-headed, spurious and downright pernicious is perhaps the claim that “if you’ve done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to fear”.

To someone who has an absolute trusting faith in the state, this is true. Entrusting a perfect state, which both never did anything wrong and also never did anything with their data that a reasonable citizen might wish to disagree with, is one thing.

But this is of course not exactly what’s an offer, what with us living with a state apparatus that not many of us would regard as perfect, and reasonable people taking different views on things.

What is being, slowly, forced on us, is entrusting pretty much all our personal information to someone else. And although the nature of our relationship with the state is rather different to, say, deciding whether we want to give our phone number out to some random person we’ve just met, or allowing someone access to our personal details on Facebook, at root it is the same. Before you give any information about yourself to someone, you ask yourself: do you trust them?

And what I think makes my run a bit cold is that it simply does not occur to most people who utter this phrase – at least some of whom are sensible and relatively alert human beings – that it is only true if one has pure, unquestioning faith in the apparatus of the state. If you put to such people - Ministers, for example - the proposition that the state could do no wrong – well, if it is were in public they would deny that they think such a thing, and if it were in private, they would surely just giggle. It is not a claim that, put in those terms, almost anyone I know would seek to defend.
But yet this phrase is trotted out as some kind of reassurance that if you’re not a criminal – you’re just a normal person – then you have nothing to fear in giving your information to the state.

And this is the second aspect of its use that makes every alarm bell in my body ring. For in the armoury of governments that start off meaning well but end up falling into totalitarianism, in the drawer just next to collecting huge amounts of personal information about their citizens, is dividing off, bit by bit, one section of society from another. This government is already well down this route in exploiting this supremely cynical tactic, in the way it is implementing ID cards. Throwing off casually to one side one of the hardest-won rights of a free society, living under the rule of law, that the law applies to all equally, they are introducing this category by category.

And of course they start by imposing it on all the unpopular groups of people – foreigners, students, people without an effective voice – basically, every group demonised by the Daily Mail. Yes, Prime Minister called this tactic “salami slicing”. Pastor Martin Niemöller made the same point in his famous lines about the way in which German society was picked apart in the 1930s, group by group. I am not, before someone accuses me of it, saying that this government has the same intentions as that regime. But the tactic is absolutely the same: imposing an unpopular view by “dividing and ruling” may be – despite its extreme cynicism – a powerful way of a government achieving its way, and therefore in a way unsurprising. But even leaving aside what it tells us about this government that it is prepared to employ such tactics to achieve its aims – in a democratic society that does not oblige us all simply to roll over and accept it.

If you believe that you are innocent, that you have “done nothing wrong”, and you are completely confident in every respect in your government, then you might feel tempted to accept this argument.

But even if you are, you shouldn’t accept it. Because you should be worried about protecting not only your own rights but those of your fellow-citizens, some of them perhaps with more non-standard or complex lives than you.

The use of this phrase is the very opposite of reassurance that if you are just a normal person then you have nothing to fear – because it can only be said either by someone who has no idea what they’re saying, or by someone who believes that we can never have anything to fear from any one of the millions of individuals who might ever have their fingers on one of the levers of the state.

Even the supremely innocent person - let alone the rest of us - DOES have something to fear from the government taking all their information

Last night’s meeting of Islington Full Council to set the Council Tax for the next year sounds like it was quite a lively affair.

At first appearance, the Labour group seem to have been the winners. They managed to overturn the wafer-slender numerical superiority of the controlling Lib Dems (the position is currently 23 Lib Dem, 23 Labour, one independent former Lib Dem, and one Green) to get their budget proposals agreed in place of the official one proposed by the (Lib Dem) Council Executive. Such a victory has been on the cards ever since the 2006 local election results returned a tiny majority for the Lib Dems (figures as above but before the former Lib Dem became a former one). But nevertheless this is something of a cause for celebration for them. At least when I was attending Council meetings, Labour managed to get all 23 of their 23 councillors to turn up to every Full Council meeting. This is no mean Whipping achievement, what with councillors’ other commitments in life and when time after time they miss other (surely more enticing) engagements to turn up at the Town Hall, only to lose every vote, time after time. But - at least at one level - it came good for them last night and for the first time since 2006 (and indeed since 1999) won a major vote in the Council chamber.

But I can’t help feeling that some of their more thinking Councillors might have wondered - privately - this morning, where that has left them in the longer term. Fun and games in the Council chamber may keep people like them and on occasion, yes, I admit it, me, entertained and amused. But to most people it is not even tomorrow’s chip paper - it is simply not interesting at all - just something that happens on another planet.

But what non-political obsessives do most certainly care about is how much of the money they get every week or every month they have to hand over to the government or the Council. And what last night did establish for residents here is that Islington Labour have put your Council tax up. For many people this is one of the very very few things that the Council does that they notice - which makes it all the more unfortunate (if you are Labour) that this is the only action on the Council that they have got successfully implemented for almost ten years.

Was this really the strategic move that Islington Labour wanted to make? Because this is an issue with some considerable history: Labour have spent years now trying to overturn their reputation for being high taxers here in Islington.

When Labour last ran the Council, in the late 1990s, Islington had the highest Council Tax in the capital. The then opposition Lib Dems made considerable political success out of this, and Labour charging you too much Council Tax was (along providing very poor services, and a range of other things) one of the major weapons they were able to use almost to win control at the 1998 elections (the result was 26-26) and then actually to do so in a byelection the following year.

To reinforce that political gulf, the by-now-ruling Lib Dems then cut the Council Tax for three years running (in 2000, 2001 and 2002). And since 2002 they have pledged to keep it below the London average which they have done. More recently the Labour group have even copied this latter pledge and this seemed to take the level of Council Tax out of the Islington political arena as a major issue. Labour have made much of saying that they have changed and are different now to the late 90s - and specifically that they are more financially responsible.

All of which makes it all the more striking that Labour have now taken this dramatic step which stains their hands afresh with the association with high Council Tax here.

I’m sure this wasn’t what they had planned - and indeed a party doesn’t just put up Council Tax for the sake of it: it does it in order to pay for some additional services. In this case Labour put forward this position in order to introduce free school meals - and also a Council Tax discount for pensioners: you can read the details on their website. They presumably think this is in itself the right thing to do; the Lib Dem group disagree and have a set of reasons why they think it is not the best use of taxpayers’ money. This may be the right or wrong thing to do, in itself.

And also considered more narrowly as a political calculation, free school meals would presumably normally be a popular thing to do - as most promises to spend more money on something are (especially when they involve children!). And Labour are understandably very pleased to have got their proposal through and I wouldn’t expect them to say anything that detracts from that publicly.

But I can’t help wondering if - privately - some of them don’t wonder if getting through these one or two spending commitments in specific areas were worth it to sacrifice their many years trying to distance themselves from exactly this kind of political positioning, as tax and spenders. They won the vote last night but the real prize - what they are surely really after and which will really allow them to have an impact on Islington - is winning control of the Council in next year’s elections. Some of them will be aware today that associating themselves with high taxing has cost them dear in the past at the ballot box, and is surely unlikely to help them in these recession-hit times.

Is free school meals for children worth more votes than continuing your efforts of the last few years to distance yourself from high taxing? Make your own judgement.

Personally, I can see that it will be popular with those who benefit directly: those parents whose children do not already receive free school meals. But I don’t think its positive impact will be felt much beyond that group. Increasing Council Tax will be felt by much more people directly - and perhaps even more importantly it is seen by almost all as emblematic of a party’s general approach. The recession and the generally very low level of Council Tax rises this year, especially in London, will also affect the way it plays politically - as will the campaign that the local Lib Dems have been running over the last few weeks for a Council Tax freeze, deftly re-associating themselves with their traditional low Council Tax position.

“Islington Labour means high Council Tax” was a successful political weapon for their opponents ten years ago, and one that last night the Labour group took down off a shelf, dusted down and put back in their hands again.

I see that Mr Brown has this morning waded in to the debate about banks and mortgages, saying he wants to restrain banks from what seem to many people some of their more extraordinary excesses, such as 100% mortgages, mortgages six times your salary, and banks paying you to live in a house in anticipation of you paying them back when you die (OK, I made the last one up but would you really be surprised to hear that such a product was actually available!).

This exercise looks to me as if it’s about trying to reassure us that he is coming from the same place as those of who thinks all this kind of thing sounds just crazy - rather than a serious attempt to tackle the roots of the problems in consumer financial services. Indeed it doesn’t seem to have many specifics at all, other than simply asking the FSA to look into all this.

And specifically it won’t challenge what seems to me to be one of the main ways that banks have insinuated their ways into our lives, which is this.

Quite simply, thirty or forty years ago it was possible to buy a house without having to involve a bank.

Now, however, for almost everyone it is effectively not possible to buy a house without handing over quite a lot of money to a bank, for a mortgage.

I don’t claim to understand exactly how banks have managed to pull this off, but it seems to me a very effective trick by a whole sector - effectively ensuring that you can only get access to one of life’s essentials by paying a lot of money, normally on an ongoing basis over several years, to a private sector. And I really can’t see why anyone would think this is in the public interest. Just compare it to the political debates about other “essentials” of life such as health and education, and the extreme watchfulness and lengths that we as a society go to in order to ensure that no charging regime is able to get between a citizen and these. It seems to me extraordinary that we allow a situation where it is impossible to get access to buying a house without handing over a lot of the money that you ought to be spending actually on the house, or indeed on any of life’s other essentials or desirables, to a financial services institution.

Clearly the point above does not apply to social housing - but unless anyone is actually advocating that private ownership of housing should be abolished, and we should live in social housing, this does not seem to me to answer the point (and unlike health and education where the proportion of the public using the private sector is very small, most of us are in the private housing sector is far higher: I believe the figure is about 70%).

And obviously the comparison between the picture thirty years ago and now is not completely black and white: mortgages did exist then, and certainly some portion of society needed them, and equally there are some still who can afford to buy a house without one now.

But by tying the whole market inextricably into using mortgages, banks have managed to inflate house prices to an extent where the house prices to average earnings ratio is such that for most people, it is now simply not possible to buy a house without a mortgage.

I certainly see that for each individual planning to buy a house, a mortgage can be very helpful in making it more affordable. And certainly banning all mortgages seems somewhat extreme (even leaving aside the not negligible issue that such a move would entail a huge overnight cut in the value of most families’ principal asset!).

But it seems to me that a serious approach to reforming the housing finance sector in the public interest would address this point of why, in stark contrast to health and education, for most people the private sector is able to insist on getting its cut, in order to provide access to housing.

Earlier this week David Cameron launched a policy green paper entitled “Control Shift – Returning Power to Local Communities”. According to the party website this sets out “a series of policies that will see powers transferred from the central state to local people and local institutions”.

If true, this is surely very welcome: it is indeed quite right that power in Britain is far too centralised, and that many decisions would be very much more effectively and democratically made closer to the people they affect.

But does the Conservative party actually really believe this? They have started to talk of localism more in recent years, but the test is in their deeds, not their words.

The history is not promising: the last Conservative government famously centralised all sorts of elements of power, from abolishing regional government in London to, for example, introducing national control of local taxation (rate-capping).

Cameron Conservatives of course claim that the party has changed radically since those days, and it’s not fair to judge them today on actions of two decades ago.

Fair enough. So are they are now proposing to, say, remove central control of local taxation?

Hardly. In fact on the contrary, they seem to believe that the level of local taxation should not just operate within nationally-set parameters, as Mrs Thatcher thought, but in fact have its actual level set by the national tier. Here is George Osborne making a national pledge about the level of every Council in the country at their party’s autumn conference last year. Mr Cameron himself confirmed the pledge again at Christmas.

They are not crude enough to propose formally removing this power from local authorities, but make it very clear that they expect Councils to fall in line, and when local authorities receive the vast majority of their funding not through local taxation but in a grant from central government – a system Cameron does not appear to be proposing to change – and are regulated and inspected to the nth degree, then central government can have overwhelming influence on what Councils actually do.

Quite simply, you cannot be taken remotely seriously as actually believing in decentralisation of power, while simultaneously making policies to set every Town Hall’s Council Tax from the centre.

Not everything they suggest in their paper is itself a bad idea: some of their proposals might, at the relative margins, improve local Councils’ control of their local area.

But they do not address the real, big questions about greater local control. Will their proposals give local people greater control over, say, their education and health services? They will not. Above all, they make no proposal to give local communities greater control of their finances, and without control of the money, much of their talk of empowering local communities is just playing with shadows.

The truth is that, away from the margins, at heart the Conservatives fundamentally believe that real power belongs uniquely in Whitehall. In their minds, there is simply something special about the national level.

In the twenty first century, this is simply wrong. Certainly many things are best done at the national level. But others are best done locally – and others best done at a global or European level.

So while the Cameron Conservatives might talk some of the talk about local empowerment, the reality is that when it comes down to it, this idea doesn’t even run as far as their own policy proposals while in opposition. Why on earth would we think that when in government - where the temptations are much greater - they would reverse some of the centralisation that they themselves introduced last time?

Yesterday the Liberal Democrats held what seems to have become our almost annual one-day January policy conference, this year on the theme of a progressive future for Britain.

Perhaps the most constant theme across the day, or at least the sessions I was in, was a consensus about the importance for that goal of investing in education, at every phase from early years right through schooling and up to further and higher education (actually further education didn’t get much of a mention, though it should have done). There was a strong consensus that education must be at the heart of achieving the liberal idea of empowering individuals to - as the preamble to the party’s constitution puts it - not be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity. And indeed our spring party conference in six weeks’ time will have a whole raft of proposals in each of these three phases, including significant plans for additional investment in each.

But the point that got me thinking most was one made in the final session, about the importance of parenting skills.

We all agree now, it seems, that investing in the education of children, the younger the better, is the most effective way of helping them to develop, so that in due course they are in the best position to make their own choices about their lives and indeed their world.

But what about the far greater part of their lives that young people don’t spend in school, nursery or any other kind of formal setting - but at home? Surely that must also have a huge impact on how they develop (and indeed there is evidence to support this)?

I always think this is a fascinating dilemma for liberals.

Read the rest of this entry »

Liberal Democrats have had an interesting relationship with the government’s policy of turning NHS hospitals into ‘Foundation Trusts’. When the government first proposed them in 2002, we opposed the legislation in Parliament - so you might expect us to be straightforwardly against them. But in fact the picture is a little more complicated than that - because at the time what we were in fact saying was that the freedoms which the government proposed to give only to Foundation Trust hospitals, in fact ought to be available to all NHS hospitals. And the government’s policy is indeed now that pretty much all NHS trusts should become Foundation Trusts, so you might say that we have had something of a victory there.

A central part of the Foundation Trust (FT) structure is the idea that these hospitals should be more accountable to local people, and less to the national Secretary of State - all of which is of course a good idea and thoroughly in accordance with Lib Dem policy. In practice I think that they fall considerably short of the ideal here: they are supposed to be accountable to local people who have signed up as ‘members’, but typically you need only about 1% of the relevant local population to sign up as members to convince the regulator that you have enough local support to become an FT. The only real benefit of becoming a ‘member’ is that you then get to vote for the members of a hospital council (the precise term varies from hospital to hospital, but they are often called things like a Governors Council or Members Council). Even in these days of low turnout and political interest it is rare to get a turnout of local people, even for local elections, of less then twenty times this, so this is a pretty ultra-lite form of ‘local accountability’.

Nevertheless, this obviously is an attempt to engage local people in running their local hospital, which - as far as it goes - is a good thing. Some Liberal Democrats have therefore, like myself, stood for election to the Council of Governors for their local hospital, and been elected (and when you stand you are obliged, incidentally, to identify yourself as a member of your political party if you are a member of one). Others have been appointed as members of the hospital’s Council by the local authority that they sit on as councillors. And so as a result, up and down the country there are now a range of Liberal Democrats sitting on bodies with some responsibility for their local hospitals. But so far, we don’t quite know who all these people are, and there is no opportunity for them to exchange experiences, good practice and generally support each other. And so to facilitate this, we have set up an email discussion list for Lib Dem governors of NHS Foundation Trusts.

If you are a Lib Dem sitting on such a body, either directly elected by members of the trust, or appointed as a councillor by your council, and would like to be able to exchange ideas with other Liberal Democrats in the same position, please let us know so that we can add you to the list. (In fact even if you would prefer not to go on the email discussion list it would be helpful if you could get in touch so that we can know you exist). Please send an email with your name, email address and hospital you are a governor of, to hospitals@jeremyhargreaves.org (The list is intended specifically for Lib Dems involved in running Foundation Trusts, not for members of health overview and scrutiny committees)

Also, if you know any Lib Dems who are in this position, please pass this request on to them. We hope this list could be a useful way to provide mutual assistance and support to other Liberal Democrats, and to spread experience and good practice.