A summary of the report from the party reform commission chaired by Chris Bones has now finally become available, for the discussion of it at conference next month. The proposals it makes concerning the future of the party have already been the subject of much heated debate, some of it inaccurate – so now that it is finally available, it seems a good moment to take a look through the main things it says.
The first thing to say is that the commission’s case for the changes it proposes has been seriously hampered by the frankly dreadful handling of communicating its contents to party activists and members. One definition of liberalism is a commitment to dispersing power, and as a result Liberal Democrat party members’ first and most powerful reaction to any proposed changes to their party, before they have heard any actual information about them, is to suspect that they are an attempted power grab by the Leader. Not actually releasing any information about what the report contains, immediately gives it the mystique of being a “secret report”, instantly compounding this suspicion further. People immediately assume that there must be a reason why it has not been released, making this just about the worst possible way of promoting any proposals it might want to make, and this has indeed been widely and rightly criticised.
For what it’s worth, having raised this with several people concerned with managing this commission and its report, for myself I’m satisfied that there was no desire to keep any of it confidential (other than perhaps one or two small sections which relate to very specific individual staffing matters). They were concerned – understandably – to ensure that the report was presented first to those who actually commissioned it and have a legimitate right to see it first, such as the party’s Federal Executive. They felt that not doing so would mean they were also subject to criticism. I accept that for a report with such a wide-ranging remit, engaging all such stakeholders in the right way is somewhat complex. Nevertheless they could and should have done a much better job of communicating the report – for example they could at least have found some public way to explain that that was what they were doing. This is not rocket science – we have for example done a much better of communicating with the wider party in recent major policy exercises such as Meeting the Challenge/Trust in People and recent work on developing the manifesto. And apart from anything else, doing something similar with the Bones report would have made it much easier, when the time comes, to gain agreement to its proposals.
Nonetheless, we are now finally able to see the main elements of what the Bones commission are proposing and so I think we should leave behind the messy handling so far, and actually have some sensible discussion about what it proposes.
Generally, I strongly welcome the report’s general approach and most of its specific proposals. If we are to make progress as a party then we do need, as the report says, to balance building on our existing successes and doing things in new ways, and I think their proposals do suggest good new ways of doing that.
Their remit was to propose changes which the party needs to make in order to achieve Nick Clegg’s declared goal of doubling our number of MPs over the next 2 General Elections. They carried out 2 main waves of consultation, inviting submissions from anyone and everyone, and amassed a very large pile of paper indeed in response (including a lengthy submission and several specific proposals for change from me) – altogether I think they’ve had something like 400 submissions. Having considered all that, they have now proposed changes which are not radical enough to require a change to the party’s constitution – so it’s important to realise that there are no constitutional amendments proposed by them coming up at conference (the deadline for which was back in May, incidentally) – although they have flagged up a couple of areas for possible constitutional change after the next election. And I think their decision to avoid constitutional change at this stage is quite right: the last thing we need to spend the next 18 months doing is arguing over complex internal organisational changes.
As a Vice Chair of the Federal Policy Committee, the first thing that strikes me is that it proposes no significant changes to our existing policy process: that a committee predominantly elected by conference representatives co-ordinates policy development and brings all policy choices to conference for representatives of local parties to make the decision on. Policy is probably the area where party members are most suspicious of attempted power-grabs by the Leader, with the intention, they fear, of giving themselves greater power to drive the party to the right/to the left/into coalition/out of coalition. The absence of any changes here is therefore quite significant, it seems to me.
Secondly, the Commission look at the whole issue of how we treat members of the party. The line here in their report about the Lib Dems being “a leaflet delivery cult” has been quite widely picked up in discussion in the blogosphere. This phrase came from my submission to them: I absolutely did not mean to denigrate the importance of leafletting, or any of our other traditional campaigning techniques. In my experience in any campaign there will always be someone who complains that “we’re delivering too many leaflets”. But this is not at all my view: I take a pretty hardline position that there is a winning Liberal Democrat campaign formula, which includes large quantities of leafletting, and all that any campaign really needs to do is just to follow that formula.
But while we should certainly get every party member or supporter who is willing to do so to deliver leaflets for us, what I meant to say by that phrase was that we need also to value the many party members – the great majority, in fact – who are not willing to deliver leaflets, or at least not to have it as their sole activity as a party member. The commission say that we should develop a clearer idea of ‘membership benefits’ that we offer, which I think is quite right. They don’t, however, propose any specific ideas for what these might be. Personally I think most people join political parties for political or policy reasons and so I think we should offer much more to support that - for example, more opportunities for policy discussion. But I’m sure there are other things too – I have heard of research evidence, for example, that members of national voluntary organisations value simply a quarterly glossy membership magazine, and we should explore what we can offer members – and supporters too, incidentally, which the commission recognises – in this way.
The Bones proposal that has probably generated most heat is their proposed creation of a Chief Officers Group, or COG, actually to take a leadership role in running the party – the report describes it as a “management board”.
Its job would be to cut through the existing web of party committees, each with a slightly different responsibility, and actually take the lead.
I basically think that something like this proposal is exactly what we do need. I simply don’t think that anyone who has been involved in decision-making at senior levels of the party thinks that the current system works well. Probably the most significant element of the existing management structure is the party’s Federal Executive (FE), predominantly elected by conference representatives, but I don’t think I know anyone – including members of the FE – who thinks that it actually does lead or manage the party satisfactorily. Partly, this is not their fault, as so many other committees and stakeholders (some of them in principle accountable to FE, many not) also have a finger in the pie. For example, I have heard it said recently that 15 different committees have to agree the party’s annual budget. I actually think this claim is a bit misleading and not quite right, but the basic point is true: we have a system in which lots of different stakeholders are each responsible for one part of leading the party, but each with little responsibility for seeing the bigger picture, and with no-one, including the Leader, really in a position to resolve any differences between them. This is simply not a system which is going to lead us strongly forward to gain many more MPs at future General Elections.
I accept that there are political choices here: some liberals believe that quite simply as a matter of principle, there should not be clear procedures for decision-making. That is one view, but for myself I am very clear that it isn’t how we should seek to manage ourselves effectively. It certainly isn’t, for example, how Gladstone or Lloyd George went about leading the great Liberal governments, and it isn’t how liberals should be trying to run themselves in the twenty-first century.
So I do think we need a strong grouping at the centre to take the lead. Crucially, the proposed members of COG would be people who have been elected to leading positions by party members, and will therefore be directly accountable to them – and so importantly, this is not some grouping of unelected cronies simply appointed by the Leader. Rather oddly, the actual proposed membership of this group doesn’t actually seem to appear in this summary report, and the report doesn’t make the case for a particular membership, but from a presentation I have seen I recall that they are people such as the party leader, president, leaders from Scotland and Wales and England, a leader of a Council, and the chair of the conference committee.
I do have some quibbles with the proposal in the report. Specifically there is no member of COG with a direct remit to link it to the policy committee and policy process – perhaps a result of the commission not really considering the policy function much at all. But since a key role of COG is to ensure consistency between different parts of what the party is doing, and surely the policies we are announcing are a key part of that, there does need to be such a link. This point may not be entirely obvious: the party leader will chair COG, and Nick is also chair of the Federal Policy Committee (FPC). However this doesn’t quite cover it: the Leader as leader and as chair of COG also has some rather wider responsibilities to consider than specifically the policy angle – and for similar reasons, there is a limit to how involved the Leader personally can get in the detailed management of the policy committee and its work. And there is also the minor constitutional point that although ever since 1988 the FPC has in fact always been chaired by the party leader, this need not be the case – indeed as I reported in a rather tongue-in-cheek way here, prior to resigning as Leader, Ming had decided last summer to separate the two roles.
There are various ways this can be got round. But I do think it’s essential that if the COG is to do its job of co-ordinating the different activities of the party – and for me one of its principal appeals is that does achieve things like effective linkage between policy and campaigns – the policy function is strongly and effectively tied in to it.
My second quibble is the name! The only reason that I can think they decided to call such a group the “Chief Officers Group” is that this is the working name used by occasional informal co-ordination meetings of chairs of major committees (FE, FPC, FCC, FFAC etc) that have sometimes taken place over the years. There is some linkage here – the new COG would take that membership as its core and then expand it to include some more elected figures such as the leaders of the state parties – but the term “Chief Officers Group” hardly does a helpful job of explaining who it is and what it does!
The Bones report acknowledges that this will be operating on a trial basis, and that after the General Election, its first period of operation should be reviewed. I suspect that its membership and title will change quite a bit as a result at that stage – and if it does become a significant body it should also go into the party’s constitution – but for the moment I think what they are proposing will be a significant and helpful step forward.
The report makes some good points about how most modern organisations benefit from a fairly clear split between on the one hand elected committees making decisions about the goals to be pursued and the general way they should be pursued, and on the other, professional staff being responsible for the technical job of actually implementing them. Many elements of our party’s current organisational structure trample all over these distinctions, and their proposals would helpfully implement this for us – including giving elected bodies the unquestioned responsibility for taking decisions of principle.
A third theme running through the report, which I strongly welcome, is a more important role for regional parties in England, supported appropriately by additional resources. I think this is right not because of some long-standing ideological commitment to the notion of regions, but because I think there is a crucial job to be done in supporting local parties, officers, councillors and candidates, which the party nationally is simply not well placed to prioritise, but which a regional organisation could do well as an intermediate tier between the local and the national. Some with experience of some of our regional parties may find this difficult to believe, but I think that with a more serious role backed up by some appropriate resources, regions are part of the answer.
The report has a section on candidates. Generally I think they make some good points about the process of becoming a candidate, and how we can develop and support candidates much better, including hints that we should apply different approval criteria to becoming a candidate for a good seat than we do for ones where we are in third or fourth place, and many many thousands of votes behind the incumbent.
I specifically think that they are absolutely right that we need to make a greater effort to go out and actively headhunt good candidates, especially from under-represented groups. One specific proposal they make which will presumably be controversial and which I support, is that “key seats which select BME candidates should receive a £10K ‘diversity premium’”. This is tantamount to active discrimination against white candidates, but I think it is absolutely right. As I have written before, as a matter of pure hard calculated political self-interest, let alone of what is right, if we as a party are serious about seeking to represent the whole nation then we have to look like it. The various arguments that gentle encouragement to select more BME candidates, and that other less radical solutions can be left to solve the problem, might perhaps have been reasonable strategies to adopt say forty years ago. But you only have to take a look at the Liberal Democrat benches anywhere we are represented, to see how heavily that approach has failed. We need to solve this problem and this kind of solution seems to be the only way that this is actually going to happen.
They also talk about some other aspects of the party, such as for example how the party can make better use of, and also support much better, its strength in local government, which I think is quite right – though I will say that from my experience of local government within the party, some of the targets they set around helping controlling Lib Dem groups to retain power over the long term by being distinctively Liberal Democrat, will not be at all easy to do.
The report talks interestingly about the need, if we are to reach beyond winning just a few more Commons seats over the next two elections, to go beyond our traditional targetting strategy. They credit the whole targetting approach, as I also do, with winning the seats we have done to date. But what this has meant is just fighting perhaps 70-90 seats at a General Election, each as byelections. There are questions about how far this approach can be extended – can for example it really work when we are working on up to 200 seats? There is not least the problem that when our strategy has been effectively to turn every Lib Dem second place into a first place or a third place, we are now fast running out of second places, and don’t seem to have enough left realistically to reach the 150 seat target.
This doesn’t mean abandoning targeting, but it does mean, the Commission suggests, starting to provide support now of a different kind to a much wider range of seats, including some that we would not even really be hoping to win until the General Election after next. Enhanced regions again have a role here.
Finally, I’m not clear who is responsible for following up the recommendations in this report, and ensuring that the good principles enumerated in it are actually implemented. In my experience of achieving change in the Liberal Democrats, getting a committee – or even several committees – to agree a set of changes may not be easy, but it is the easy part compared to actually getting them implemented.
My two hot tips to ensuring that they do actually happen are firstly to be very specific about exactly what you need certain identified people to do differently (and how that will be monitored), and secondly regularly to remind the people that agreed the changes, that they did so, and that they should not simply revert to their previous way of doing things.
Many of these changes will only happen, or only continue, if someone or a group has responsibility for following them up, and I’m not clear who that is.
But I do hope that someone does have responsibility for following up these proposals and ensuring they are implemented. For the Commission are exactly right that if we are to achieve the goal of significantly increasing our Parliamentary representation, we do need to make changes. On the whole I think what they propose is sensible, realistic and will help us achieve that goal.
I urge people to take a look at what they’ve actually said, and I hope it will be agreed as a basis for our future progress.