The author list of Liberator magazine is a shifting cast of people mostly associated with the party, and the diversity of its contributors is one of the things that make it most interesting and valuable.
But one person seems to have an article in almost every edition, and it’s always very interesting to see the sometimes awkward challenges that Simon Titley poses.
In the conference edition, he takes a look at the party itself, and his headline is that party members should stop complaining about our leader. One of his key points is one I have made here - that those complaining do not have any idea what their attacks would achieve other than making themselves feel better - what he describes as “attack[ing] your own leader in public with little thought for the consequences and no coherent idea of what might be done instead’.
But he goes on from the leadership issue to make the case, which I broadly (if not in every element) agree with, that the party generally needs to be much more effective in, and give a higher priority to, engaging in the battle of ideas. I have argued before that the party’s innovative and incredibly skilful use of campaigning techniques have given us a massive advantage and have played the central role in getting us to where we are today. But Simon, I and others have variously also argued before that if we want to make a leap to the next stage, then we now need to make a step change too in the way we appeal to the electorate.
So I was disappointed to see one of Simon’s final points in his article. In a claim that we have heard before from others, he says that the close conference votes on tax (in autumn 2006) and trident (in spring 2007) were ‘deliberately contrived [by the party leader] as wedge issues to provoke a fight with the membership’. He did this as a result of ‘dud advice’ from advisers seeking to orchestrate a ‘Clause 4 moment’ of taking on his party and winning, to show that the party is not “too left-wing” (he says in emulation of Neil Kinnock, though the Clause 4 victory is more normally associated with Tony Blair).
I simply think this is wrong. The tax commission which proposed the abolition of the 50p rate proposal was set up while Charles Kennedy was still Leader, and the move to change the 50p proposal already had a significant head of steam behind it well before Ming inherited the leadership. Dispensing with that policy might have been intended partly to convey an updated image of our party to the electorate, but there was no advantage in seeking to have an internal fight with the party about it.
Something very similar is true of the Trident proposal. The attempt to debate at conference policy on the replacement of Trident in fact came (repeatedly) from those on the other side of the argument from Ming (a group associated with the organisation ‘Lib Dems for Peace and Security’), not him or his advisers. And it was the Federal Conference Committee and then Federal Policy Committee who agreed that it must therefore at some point come to conference. Additionally, in Parliament Lib Dem MPs were going to have to vote on this issue one way or the other fairly soon, so a decision needed to be made. The Leader wanted to put forward his own view strongly, and did so, ultimately winning over conference to his view - and, frankly, I do not want to be in a party led by someone who does not want to go out and argue forcefully for his own point of view. But it was not him who put it on the agenda, either within the party or more broadly, and in choosing his position I believe he simply put forward his view of what he thought we as a party ought to be saying about it.
It is also quite clear that - even though in both these cases the Leader’s point of view ‘won’ the argument - debating them at conference would not achieve the ‘Clause 4′ outcome that it was claimed was desired for them. For the political message to come out of first last autumn’s conference, and then spring this year, was not that the leader had ‘taken on his party and won’ - but relentless news coverage in the run-up to the vote along the lines of ‘Leader’s authority on the line’. Even though the outcomes were the right ones from the point of view of the Leadership, the overall impression that the general public will have taken away was given was of ‘leadership on the line’, not ‘leadership defeats party’.
I have written before about how I think our system of leaders doing the ‘right’ thing and taking decisions to conference, although right, can cause us problems.
And of course it is also striking - though Simon does not mention it - that there was no similar attempt to engineer a ‘Clause 4 moment’ at this year’s conference.
I also think the Leadership recognises that it does not have the same need to demonstrate to voters a battle with the party, as our two main rivals have. Blair felt he had to win his clause 4 moment because the public historically simply did not trust the Labour party, and he had to find some way of demonstrating that it really had changed. Cameron faces a similar problem - even considering his own personal failings, his greatest problem is that people simply do not trust the Conservative party - and he has to find some clear ways of signalling that it has changed.
But the Lib Dems do not have the same problem: whatever else the public may think of us, they do actually quite like Liberal Democrats. They do not hate or fear our party in the way they have done the Labour left or the Conservative Right.
From seeing their concern about winning those votes, I simply do not believe that the Lib Dem leadership had gone out of its way to precipitate those scenarios.
It is always tempting to suspect conspiracies everywhere - and it’s something to which Liberals and Lib Dems are particularly addicted, sometimes to the benefit of the nation. But sometimes there really just isn’t one, and the appearance actually does reflect the reality.
Is it really impossible to believe that when this openly and sometimes painfully honest Leader says that those episodes were simply an honest attempt to argue for his own point of view, that that might actually be true?
October 4th, 2007 at 14:26
The constand complaints about the tax policy in Liberator are very boring.
I’ve not seen any principled liberal reason to oppose the changes (apart perhaps that they don’t go far enough
), only social democratic calls for redistribution and taxing the rich…
October 4th, 2007 at 22:09
Good analysis Jeremy and one in which I am in total agreement. I was deeply impressed with Ming’s performance early in the year having seen him in action both at a SE regional conference and then at Federal conference.
He needs to be left to get on with it.
October 5th, 2007 at 17:21
Many thanks for taking the time to respond to my article, which, for those of you have not read it, is available in full online here:
http://www.liberator.org.uk/article.asp?id=121804034
We can argue about the motivations behind the debates on tax and Trident. The fact is that both debates were marred by abuses of party resources to secure the desired outcome - see the reports in Radical Bulletin in Liberator 317 (Trident):
http://www.liberator.org.uk/article.asp?id=105704011
… and Liberator 314 (tax):
http://www.liberator.org.uk/article.asp?id=91003990
(on page 5 of the magazine).
Meanwhile, the demand for a ‘Clause 4 Moment’ continues to be peddled by a number of people on the right of the party - the current champion of this line is Olly Kendall, whose tendentious reports appear regularly in the Guardian online.
And, of course, we must not forget the assault launched by Charles Kennedy (at Dick Newby’s prompting) immediately after the 2005 general election, in which a series of false claims were made to the effect that “radical activists” had foisted “embarrassing policies” on the party. For a thorough rebuttal of this nonsense, see Radical Bulletin in Liberator 302:
http://www.liberator.org.uk/article.asp?id=52503935
This disreputable behaviour is an indisputable fact, not an imagined conspiracy theory.
You are right to point out that the Liberal Democrats do not suffer the same problems as Labour or the Tories in terms of there being elements who are an electoral liability.
Labour needed a “Clause 4 Moment” in the 1980s because social change had made its old working class shibboleths redundant. The only way Labour could hope to regain power was by rebranding itself so that it could appeal to the middle classes.
The Liberal Democrats’ problem is entirely different - it is not that they have the wrong brand image but that they have no brand image at all. This is the key point I make in my latest Liberator article.
October 5th, 2007 at 17:43
Thanks for replying, Simon. As you know I largely agree with your final point about brand and narrative.
You also obviously are right that some people are pushing the case for clause 4 moment, including but not only Olly - but I just don’t think these people have generally been very influential behind the initiatives mentioned above.
And I certainly strongly agree that the speech the weekend after the last GE was certainly very ill-advised. I am sure it was born of frustration at a campaign much of which was spent having to defend some very unhelpful policies, rather than a coherent critique, but in any case I certainly agree that it was “nonsense”, unwise and unhelpful.
But I think it has also helped us to move on from that situation. One of the things that struck me quite a bit at Brighton this year was the interest specifically of MPs in engaging themselves in conference and the party’s policy-making processes, rather than just sitting on the sidelines and complaining about it, as has occasionally been known in certain cases in the past (!). This manifested itself in everything from MPs submitting motions themselves (other than Shadow Cabinet members in their own areas of responsibility, I mean), and particularly in putting in cards to speak in debates where they were not the spokesman.
This seems to me to be quite a significant step forward - while we certainly do need to make sure the process does not get taken over by Parliamentarians, as MPs they are as entitled to put forward motions for debate and participate as much as any member, and at least up to a point, the more they do so, the more unified we are as a party.
Overall it seems to me we are much closer to having one integrated system of policy-making, encompassing both Parliamentarians and the party at large, rather than two separate systems of decision-making, than we often have been in our history as a party. This is something we have been striving for, and I think it’s very good for us as a party.
October 5th, 2007 at 22:21
I agree that things have improved over the past year. The main source of the problem in the past has been a neurosis about staging open debates for fear that the media will depict such healthy argument as a ’split’.
But there were also three other factors behind the push for a ‘Clause 4 Moment’. The first was the desire of some right-wingers, especially those around ‘Liberal Future’ and the Oaten leadership campaign, to dismantle internal democracy and purge the left as a means of refashioning the party around their own hard-line views. Well we all know where that crusade ended.
The second is snobbery, specifically a disdain for the party beyond Westminster. One side-effect of the growth of the parliamentary party is that there is now a cadre of over 200 people employed by Lib Dem MPs, substantially more than in Cowley Street. This provides an alternative political career path to the traditional hard slog through grassroots campaigning. And it is a path filled mainly with young, public school-educated people locked into a ‘Westminster Village’ worldview. You acknowledge this problem in your review of the Political Quarterly (vol.78 issue 1) in the latest issue of the Journal of Liberal History, where you take Claire Bentham to task for her elitist view of policy making.
The third factor is sheer laziness. There is a simple and familiar narrative that goes something like this: “Party members are troublemakers and an electoral liability, therefore the party leader needs to slay these dragons to stamp his authority on the party”. When you are desperate to win coverage, it is an easy line for parliamentary press officers to sell to the media, and lazy journalists will readily swallow it. For example, Greg Hurst trots out this line in his recent biography of Charles Kennedy as if it were an uncontested fact.
You are right that the high water mark for the ‘Clause 4 Moment’ crowd has passed. We need to ensure that pre-election nerves do not revive their tedious arguments.