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Wasted Rainforests

It's time to look again at the way in which the Liberal Democrats make our party policy. The current procedures, put in place at the birth of the party fifteen years ago, have served us well in the task of creating a body of policy for a new party. But too often they now stand in the way rather than helping us to develop the clear, comprehensible, and politically distinctive Liberal Democrat policies, which an organisation aiming to become a party of government needs.

Our current policy-making process certainly has strengths. It is an open and admirably consultative process. It comes up with robust, well thought-through policies, which are respected by experts in the field.

But the problem is that these strengths come at the price of the loss of some things which a party like the Lib Dems needs from a policy-making system.

The first trap our current process too often falls into is the temptation to go into too much detail. If you are a delegate to our party’s federal conferences, then over the course of a normal year, you receive through the post something like six or eight full policy papers which you are supposed to read before you go to conference to vote on whether or not you support them. Now, it may be that you are one of the diligent delegates who actually does read this – and if you are, then I salute you! But if you don’t mind me suggesting it, it is statistically more likely that you are one of the large majority of conference delegates who over the course of this summer, despite the best of intentions, will not in the end find time to read, say, the thirty-five pages of detailed policy on sport you will be sent, or the forty-odd pages outlining our views on pensions.

I’m not trying to make you feel guilty – as I say, the great majority of your fellow-delegates will also not manage to wade through all that detail.

No, the point rather is that if even most elected delegates to our party conference, committed Liberal Democrats, don’t read our policy papers, then how can we really expect anyone else to? If even we don’t think it’s that important, who else will?

The irony is that we really don’t need all this detail. At a UK level, we are still an opposition party, and the reason for opposition parties having policy is surely not that we have a fully worked-out programme of government. The aim of opposition policies is to outline the key proposals – the most important ones, the ones that the public are most interested in, ones which embody the party’s underlying approach and enable the public to understand and (hopefully) support where they are coming from. There is actually really no point in us producing large quantities of detailed policy which nobody – not even ourselves – ever actually reads.

Of course not every motion on conference agendas is a mega-motion from the Federal Policy Committee, accompanied by an even more detailed policy paper. Agendas in recent years have also been studded with motions on some distinctly more minor issues. Some of these have had the further disadvantage that although relatively small in actual significance, they have been high-profile issues which have inevitably eclipsed debates on duller but objectively more important issues – an obvious example has been pornography. But some have had nothing wrong with them other than that in the grand scheme of things they are not priority areas. I have nothing really against, for example, the proposal for our policy on maritime piracy, but there are surely significant question marks against whether making policy on this is a high priority for us as a party.

But the reason we have ended up debating some of these issues at conference, is that is, surprisingly, easier to get a motion on the agenda about maritime piracy, or archaeology, than it is about our general approach to major policy areas, like crime, or health, say.

In the two years it typically takes to research and draft the major policy papers we get, the Federal Conference Committee will not take any motions on these areas. So for example this autumn’s conference will have a full policy paper on Health, but the shadow of this paper has meant that it has been basically impossible to have any discussion at conference about the broad thrust of what we think about health policy for the last couple of years.

A policy-making and conference system which actively militates like this against our conferences discussing issues which are the most crucial political subjects more than once every two years, and encourages instead discussion of obscure subjects, is surely not giving us the support we need to develop and communicate hard-hitting policies in the key areas.

Finally, I wonder if you have ever turned on the television to see the news, and heard a Labour Government Minister announce a new policy on something which sounds very familiar from a recent Lib Dem policy paper. Frankly, if you haven’t had this experience then you can’t watch much TV! The Lib Dems have sometimes been accused of being merely an influential think tank. Of course, we’d rather be a powerful political party, but if you look at the number of our ideas which do get taken up, then we are indeed very influential!

You don’t have to look very far to see the reason for this. We have become very good at consulting professionals, and drawing in the views of those working in a particular policy areas about how they could be better managed, and then making their views our own party policy. Unfortunately, what seem to them and us to be sensible managerial improvements usually appear quickly to the Government to be the same thing, and they take them on. This gives us an immediate difficulty – we no longer having a distinctive policy – but also reflects a deeper concern. For we are not supposed to be a think tank coming up with better managerial ideas about how a particular sector could be better organised. What makes us different is that we are supposed to be a political party which has distinctive political ideas about how the world should be organised, proceeding from a Liberal Democrat philosophy. If a government of a different political colour, with a different underlying philosophy, can so easily adopt our views, then surely we had the wrong policy in the first place.

So to sum it up, our current policy process gives us policies which try to do too much, and as a result go unread and unnoticed by the world. It moves at too slow a pace, and results in obscure areas being given a higher billing at our conferences than the key ones. And it encourages the creation of policy which is sensible managerialism, but not distinctively Liberal Democrat.

We need some changes.

Centrally, we should be much more political about the approach we take to making policy. As an opposition political party we should be focussing on making policy proposals in just the key areas. And in devising them, we should concentrate most of all on what is distinctively Liberal Democrat about them.

We should of course seek the advice of those working the fields concerned, but what we say in the end should be our own political statement, not (as too often at the moment) some Hegelian synthesis of the views on the trades unions and the management trade body concerned.

For at present the working groups which draw up our policy papers are composed almost entirely of those with many years’ experience of working in the field. Once chosen, these experts are sent off for 18 months to come up with pretty much whatever proposals they want. The policy papers they come up with are then rarely challenged (and in fact conference has never yet, in 16 years, rejected a single one!), and so they become our party policy.

This is the wrong way round. The starting point should be our distinctive political position, informed by the evidence of the professionals.

Changing some of this is a task for the Federal Policy Committee, which of course selects the members of working groups, and is responsible for setting their remit and approving their final proposals. FPC is elected by conference to be a political body, and it should be prepared to make political judgements (and not just abstract ‘policy’ judgements) about who to appoint to working groups, and the political approach it wants to see policy working groups taking.

But some of it is a matter for all of us as party members, to focus what we are saying on the key politically distinctive areas.

To focus mainly on these issues is not irresponsible or abdicating our responsibilities to other policy areas. For regrettable though it may seem to those with expertise in some of the more infrequently-visited areas of policy, it is not the Lib Dem position on health and safety in the widget-manufacturing industry which will win us the millions of votes we need. It is simple, comprehensible, and politically distinctive proposals in a few key areas, which voters can understand and which illustrate to them what is different about us, what we would be like in government and why they should vote for us.

Our Party Conference too also needs to focus more on the political, and less purely on making new policy. We are all surely attached to the principle that only conference can finally make party policy, but this does not mean that all that conference can do is make policy.

Conference needs to change, to become a wider and livelier political event. As well as continuing its role as the sovereign policy-maker on the key policy areas, it should also be prepared to have open debating sessions which don’t actually make policy. Hundreds of organisations around the country with an interest in society – from tenants’ associations via the WI to the Oxford Union – are able to debate political issues without feeling the need actually to make formal policy on the subject – so why shouldn’t we?

If all the political world is talking about, say, the Government’s proposals for shaking up the NHS, why can’t the Liberal Democrat conference talk about this? We don’t necessarily need a whole new policy paper on it: but if we could discuss it at conference nevertheless this would meet two needs: firstly it is of course a very good opportunity to communicate to the world what Liberal Democrats think about it, and secondly it is a genuine chance for Liberal Democrats to communicate and discuss it with each other.

For the question of whether we think our priority is always creating new policy, or taking a distinctive political stand, goes right to the heart of what we think our purpose as an organisation is. Of course there is an important role for detailed policy. But we are a political party, and what we bring to the table is a distinctive political approach and an idea of what the Liberal Democrats and in time a Liberal Democrat Government, will be like. Whether we achieve that of course depends on so many other things too – but rather than being at best irrelevant to achieving it, or at worst an obstacle to it, our policy-making should support that.

This article first appeared in the August 2004 edition (issue 297) of Liberator magazine. It contains some of the ideas outlined in Jeremy Hargreaves’ recent pamphlet, Wasted Rainforests: an essay on the policy-making process of the Liberal Democrats. Copies of Wasted Rainforests can be obtained for £2.50 from jeremy@jeremyhargreaves.org

Jeremy Hargreaves is a member of the Liberal Democrats’ Federal Policy Committee and Federal Conference Committee. A former PPC, he is now Chair of one the party’s leading interest groups. He has been a member of the party since 1990 and attending party conferences since 1994.