Some time ago I was asked to write a short guide to the Liberal Democrat policy process for those wanting to know how it works. After a bit of prodding I did eventually get around to doing it, but the people who’d asked for it then told me it was too detailed!

However I do quite often still get questions about various aspects of the process, so I thought it might be of interest, and have posted it up here. It’s only six pages, and I hope it’s quite clear, as well as comprehensive.

I do get many readers here who are not in the least bit interested in the Liberal Democrats, and clearly this is not very thrilling for you!

But for those who are, I am strongly committed to explaining our party’s internal processes, and highlighting just how open they are, so I hope for such people it may be of interest. I’m happy also to answer any follow-up questions.

I thought anyone going to conference who wondered how the debates at it work, might be interested in this post I wrote just after conference last year, outlining how debates get structured and how speakers are selected for them. Many people do seem to believe that whether or not you get called depends mostly on whether in the bar last night you were rude to the person chairing the session - so it may still be a surprise to some to see that it is in fact somewhat more scientific than that!

This autumn, conference representatives will elect members of the major committees responsible for running the party. If you have strong views that we should do things differently, then why don’t you stand? We are a democratic organisation, but our decisions will only reflect what members actually want if people do put themselves forward.

Information about the elections has now been published, and the deadline for nominations is 24 September. You only have to get two voting conference representatives to support you, and you don’t even have to be a conference rep yourself to stand.

Of course actually standing for election is not for everyone - I’m very aware that it does require a time commitment which is not everyone is able to give, particularly if you live a long way from London. But in that case please make sure you ask your local party voting representatives how they plan to vote, and of course if you are a voting conference rep yourself, do use this once-in-every-two-years opportunity to question candidates about what they will do. And of course if they’re already members of the committee, challenge them about what they do on it - and give them your own views. As a candidate in recent years I have received perhaps one or two requests for my views in each election - I’d like to see voters using the opportunity much more to question candidates. Several candidates put their contact details at the bottom of their manifesto - do use them!

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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.

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I have been asked to set down for a group of people what I think their members need to do in order to get selected in future internal party selection contests to winnable positions on Lib Dem party lists, and I thought it might be of wider interest – perhaps for candidates from ethnic minorities, or women, other under-represented groups, or just any prospective candidate – so I am sharing it here.

I should emphasise that although it’s me that is writing this up here, the wisdom (such as it is) is generally not my own – it represents a well-trodden path of candidates who have gone on to be successful.

I should also say that it is a demanding path, and, personally, not one I am myself choosing to follow at the moment (I currently do some elements of what follows, but not others). But having been asked to outline it for people who are interested in going down this road, from observing plenty of others I’m pretty clear that something very like what follows is what you need to do if you want to get selected.

The essential point is that successful campaigns to get selected don’t start when the official campaigning period starts, or even when the whole selection process begins, but years beforehand. With the 2008 London-wide elections now out of the way last week, now is an excellent time for anyone aiming to try and get elected to it in 2012 to start work (in fact I suspect it’s likely that most of those who will be successful in 2012 have already started work, but now is certainly not too late to join them with a hope of success).

So, things the aspirant candidate needs to do are:

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It’s become commonplace for people writing about the loss of our leader last autumn to refer casually to “the Lib Dems ditching Ming Campbell as Leader because he was too old”.

This is fast becoming accepted as the official history of what happened at the start of October 2007.

But in fact this is not what happened.

Yes, Ming was forced into a position where he felt he had to resign because there was a perception that he was too old.

But who was it who made this into an issue?

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I was extremely pleased to see the fuss that Lib Dem MPs, led by Ed, deliberately made yesterday about their call for a referendum on Britain’s future membership of the EU. It was an excellent way of drawing attention to this Lib Dem call (which I have strongly supported here).

The Lisbon Treaty is obviously the particular document under discussion at the moment - but the referendum that people really want, is on the key question of whether Britain should remain part of the EU or not - not about details such as exactly how many Members of the European Parliament there should be, or the exact number of weeks that national Parliaments should have to object to any proposed European legislation, which is the kind of stuff the Lisbon Treaty is made up of.

When people express their concern about the EU they are not talking about this kind of detail but fundamentally whether we should part of it or not. (Indeed many normal voters I have spoken to over the years have expressed this as “I don’t think we should go into Europe” which says a lot about the false chimera of a “federal Europe” that people are scared of, rather than the reality of a pretty federal Europe that we already now live in - but that’s a topic for another post!).

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Yesterday was the deadline for making submissions to the Party Reform Commission set up by Nick, in conjunction with the party’s President and Chief Executive (Simon Hughes and Chris Rennard).

The team actually carrying out the review are Chris Bones (whom I don’t really know but has a very impressive management background, as well as a long party history), Duncan Greenland - a councillor and as Chair of the party’s Federal Finance and Administration Committee probably has a strong claim to be the most powerful person in the party that you’ve never heard of; Kate Parminter, who I had the pleasure to work with in the Meeting the Challenge group a couple of years ago, and has a long track record of successfully transforming party operations in the past, and Paul Burstow MP, the Chief Whip in the House of Commons.

I think having the review itself is a very good idea and hope it does what it has set out to, to reform the way the party does things, to help us achieve the aim that the new Leader set out, to achieve 150+ MPs over the next two General Elections.

There is some doubt over exactly what its remit covers and how broad it is - and I may say that a few conversations that I have had with people I would expect to know about this, have not necessarily helped to clarify this for me (rather the opposite, in some cases”¦). The review group itself has put various pieces of information, including their formal terms of reference, here - but these are perhaps necessarily not entirely specific.

For what it’s worth my own best take on what it is really intended to do is Read the rest of this entry »