Political

Money and party selections: three changes the Lib Dems should make to our rules

Amongst the many contenders for ‘most foolish thing I’ve said’ undoubtedly the most directly costly was a few years back in a London Lib Dems training session. Armed with my experience of visiting and helping dozens of local parties during the previous round of elections, I talked about the lessons – good tips from some local parties, common patterns and a few frequently made mistakes. One in that list was an unwillingness to ask people for money. Almost none of my campaign visits had resulted in a subsequent request for a donation to help keep the campaigning going. You might argue whether such a request best comes hours, days, weeks or months later, but in fact the reaction to someone turning up to help in one way (time) usually was never to ask them to help in another too (money).

The outbreak of scribbled notes at this point should have forewarned me and my bank balance what was to come… but at least the number of subsequent donation requests showed people had been awake during my training session. An expensive KPI.

So it is against the strict instructions of my bank manager that I mention how few candidates for internal party selections have asked me (or anyone else) for donations towards their campaign, such as during the recent London selections.

I mention this because it is central to the point which Zack Polanski eloquently argued on Lib Dem Voice, about whether current financial rules for party selections are right or whether they favour the better off too much. It’s an issue he, I and others have debated over the preceding weeks and in fairness Zack’s piece reflects many of the points made in favour of allowing fundraising and expenditure by candidates in selections.

Partly that is because a selection contest should test out the skills we want from candidates – and fundraising is one of those skills we very much need more of in the party, as both the party’s bank balances and my own experiences demonstrate.

Partly also because incumbents start with a huge advantage. In all the different list selections carried out by the party for London, Scotland, Wales and the European Parliament I can only think of two occasions where an incumbent was ‘deselected’ by being pushed down to a place on the list where they were unlikely to be elected. Incumbency is enormously powerful, in part because incumbents get to spend lots of money communicating directly and indirectly with members in-between selections. That activity is good – both for the party and for the conduct of public office – and is a net benefit for the party. But given incumbents start with such a large baked-in financial advantage then challengers to incumbents need to have some opportunity to redress the balance. It isn’t a coincidence that those two occasions have been occurred more recently, as the party has moved from generally most restrictive to more permissive campaigning rules for selections.

Partly also because the best selection contests are ones where party members have a good range of information about the candidates, especially when they are about to choose possibly new incumbents who will then have years of incumbency benefit ahead of them. The guidelines of allowing £1 per member to be spent in selections (reduced to 70p for the GLA selections) actually only allow a modest amount of paid contact per member. Given the importance of the decisions to be made, that’s a pretty modest sum.

The difficulty, of course, is that – especially since the party’s membership boom – 70p per member quickly adds up to significant sums, especially when you add in the extra costs of travel to events and so on.

So what’s the answer? It isn’t to return to the previous very restrictive rules which used to be so common in the party – and which produced regular and justified complaints about being too loaded in favour of those who are already well known (who also tended to be white, middleclass men given the history of politics in the UK). The party has generally moved away from such restrictive rules for good reason.

Instead, I suggest three simple reforms.

First, a cap on the size of donations. We want candidates to be good fundraisers, not just able to self-fund. Stick in a cap and a rich candidate no longer has a big advantage – and all candidates have to show they are good at fundraising.

(A side note: in my experience, backed up by looking through lists of donor names, those most willing to make generous donations to help candidates are also overall very motivated to help improve the party’s diversity. Female candidates are often far better at tapping into this network at the moment than those who are of other diversity strands, but the route to more BAME diversity, for example, is to tap into this support more rather than cut it out of the system.)

Second, allow candidates during selections to attend party events for free. Good selection campaigns start well in advance of the formal selection period – and it is no coincidence that those who have beaten incumbents or run them very close in votes have consistently started a long way out, just as in public elections. Even so, the costs of attending events during the formal selection campaign is not trivial yet it would be easy for nearly all local parties to stand the cost of a few free attendees now and again. If candidates want privately to pay anyway, that’s fine – but the norm should be that candidate gets to attend for free.

Third, try to reinvigorate hustings. One of Zack’s suggestions is for more hustings, so that face to face campaigning matters more than money. I’m instinctively cautious about this because attendance at hustings is – outside of Westminster selections – almost always pretty low compared to the number of voters needed to win or the reach of other communications channels. Even in the party leadership contest, more people read my Liberal Democrat Newswire than attended hustings, for example. List hustings have a particular problem of involving large numbers of people, which is hard to make into an exciting and high pace event.

Yet as I urged during the leadership contest, our hustings formats tend to be unimaginative, repetitive and unchanged from the year dot. So we should also relax the restrictions on their format, let innovation and local variation bloom and who knows – we may find ending enslavement by conformity works.

Even if it doesn’t, a donations cap and free attendance at events for candidates would be steps in the right direction – whilst still ensuring members have a chance to be on the receiving end of a meaningful level of information and testing out those fundraising skills the party so badly needs.

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