Today’s Campaign Corner question: Your mystery shopper survey of local parties criticises local parties for not treating possible new members better. We’re a small, struggling local party and it’s hard enough to run the basic operation. How can we be better without exhausting overselves?

You’re right to identify the difference between working harder and working smarter. Working both hard and smart is often required, but it is usually possible to do things in a way that gets more out of your time rather than simply needing always to spend more time on party matters. So here are three tips for how to treat possible new members or helpers well:

1. Get them on your mailing lists: Some local parties reserve their newsletter mailing list for paid-up members and send occasional email updates to an even smaller group (such as just the local party executive). What a waste of the effort that goes into producing such communications! If someone is new and interested, get them on your newsletter and email lists straight away and do the same for helpers who aren’t members. Keeping in regular contact with such people secures more help from them in the long-run.
2. Make use of other people’s mailing lists: Don’t think you have to do all the communication yourself. Most MEPs run a good email list for members and supporters in their region, as do holders of many other elected posts, such as the London Assembly team. If you get a new person on some of these (e-)mailing lists, then other Lib Dems will do part of the work of keeping in touch and informing people for you.
3. Make use of events held by neighbouring local parties: Similarly, your own local party does not have to be the only possible place where new people can come to event. Many regions and party bodies organise good events and, in all but the most geographically sparse parts of the country, events held by neighbouring local parties are often as easy or easier for people to get to as your own. I live right on the border of my local party, so there is not only the neighbouring local party but also the local party that covers my place of work whose events I can get to as easily (in fact, often more easily) than my own local party. Get on the mailing lists for your neighbouring local parties and pass on news about their events.

Got any other tips? Please do share them in the comment thread below.

Want to know more about local campaigning? Campaigning In Your Community by myself and Shaun Roberts should be right up your street. It’s available for only £4 from ALDC and you can read an extract for free here.

Previous Campaign Corners have included:

• How do we get more leaflet deliverers?
• What to do on the doorstep
• How to make Focus leaflets looks better

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

1. We should adopt a three-election strategy and should plan on that basis that I would probably not be in a position to mount a genuine challenge for the seat until my third attempt. [It took him two rather than three attempts as it turned out.]

2. I would need to stay full-time in the constituency. So I had to get a job locally and could not afford to get distracted by anything other than the single task of winning Yeovil (i.e. I could not afford to allow myself to get interested in national Liberal Party affairs).

3. Our immediate aim at the next election was not to beat the Tories, but to beat Labour. Once we were the clear challengers for the seat, we would be able to squeeze the Labour vote in subsequent elections.

4. Our effort, therefore, should now be not in the rural areas, where we had traditionally concentrated, but in the towns – and especially in the Yeovil estates, where Labour’s traditional vote was based.

5. We needed to build up our base from the bottom, concentrating first on local government elections.

6. We could not rely on any newspapers, either locally or nationally. So we would have to find other means to communicate directly with our electorate if we were to succeed in getting our messages across.

7. We would nevertheless need a strong Press effort – we should aim to get at least one story, with genuine news appeal and about a local issue, into the local Press every week.

8. The national Party’s standing was not very high, so our key messages should be about local service not national politics. What was subsequently to be known as ‘community politics’ would be our battleground.

Taken from Paddy Ashdown, A Fortunate Life.

Some of the steps in his strategy are very specific to particular local circumstances. The general principles are however sound, especially having a political strategy and then shaping your campaigning to fit it, rather than simply campaigning where you are used to working or are comfortable with working. Still very relevant too is the need to make your own channels for getting out news, one which these days involves the internet alongside the traditional printed local Focus newsletters.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

Now that we have the full set of figures for normal applications (late applications will carry on for some time yet), it is worth returning to the same basic points.

Once you strip out the spike last year and factor in the population decline (the 18 year old population peaked in 2009), the figures show something rather remarkable:

The proportion of English school leavers applying for university places this year is higher than it ever was under Labour, and is the second highest on record (second only to last year’s pre-fees change spike).

It’s worth saying that again, as judging by the initial news reports just about all of the media have missed it:

The proportion of English school leavers applying for university places this year is higher than it ever was under Labour, and is the second highest on record (second only to last year’s pre-fees change spike).

What certainly has dropped is the number of applications from would-be mature students. That is an important (and almost wholly neglected) issue. Against that, on the up side, applications from people from the most deprived backgrounds have held up.

The ironic net effect is that with applications from the most deprived backgrounds holding up, if anything the changes overall have produced a small net improvement in social mobility, albeit via a slightly bizarre back door route. (Stephen Tall has highlighted the evidence from UCAS on this and put together this excellent graph.)

Moreover, what we don’t yet know is how much of the fall in would-be full time mature students is caused by them shifting to applying for part-time courses instead, as they are excluded from these figures. Given that the changes in fee arrangements includes providing tuition fee loans to part time students for the first time, it would be logical to expect some people to shift from full time to part time. It is likely too that the general economic situation is encouraging more people to think about part time rather than full time study to help sustain overall levels of household income. We will need more data to judge that later in the year.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

Today’s Campaign Corner question: We’re organising a mass delivery session next weekend. Any last minute tips on what we should do?

1. Stickers and badges: As Greenwich Liberal Democrats reminded me at the weekend, if you are going out delivering and people see you walking past, it is rather a missed opportunity if they don’t know that the Liberal Democrats have been out and about in person in their area. Not everyone who sees you will see a leaflet later. So make sure everyone has a sticker (or, thinking of the longer term and the environment, a badge).

2. Give people sheets and pens to record casework: if you have a group of people covering a large amount of ground in a short space of time, it is a great opportunity to pick up issues you can then campaign about. Perhaps graffiti is an issue in the area, in which case ending up with a long list of actual graffiti locations means you can take action much more effectively.

3. Give a quick briefing session at the start: how to deliver may be self-evident, but even the most experienced need to know where you are meeting up for a drink or coffee afterwards! The chances are, anyway, that at least one person in the group could pick up a tip such as looking out for the number of meter cupboards and bins to work out how many flats there are in a building and so whether there is likely to be a letterbox  round the back / down the stairs which they have missed.

Got any other tips? Please do share them in the comment thread below.

Want to know more about local campaigning? Campaigning In Your Community by myself and Shaun Roberts should be right up your street. It’s available for only £4 from ALDC and you can read an extract for free here.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

Taking the publicly advertised email addresses for 25 local parties, I tried sending them all a test email from someone asking about joining the party. Just under two-thirds responded within 48 hours, which is a good response time. However, beyond that there were only a couple of further replies and the others have, after more than two weeks, not replied at all.

It is a similarly mixed picture with the quality of the replies. Only a quarter of the replies included a direct web link to the page on which someone can join the party. Moreover, a third of the replies did not include a working web link to join the party at all – not even one that took you to a page where you have to click to go to a page…

Amongst people who spend time trying to make emails as effective as possible and to maximise their response rates, it is very well known that you get the most responses by providing people with a clear, direct link that takes them straight to the page on which they can then directly take the action you want. (Update - such as this page.) Yet that knowledge looks to be missing in large numbers of local parties, which is likely to have an effect not only on their emails to possible members but also their use of email otherwise, both to inform and involve members and with the wider public.

The same point applies to advanced steps to make emails effective, with very few of the replies containing for example any specific event or activity the person could immediately get involved with. Yet, again, the wider lesson is that if you don’t immediately offer someone the chance to get involved in a specific activity they are much less likely to get involved in the future.

In fairness to those who sent the email replies back, many of whom did so very quickly and nearly all of whom wrote friendly, warm message, the amount of training and advice which the party provides, such as sample emails to adapt for local use, is rather limited. Moreover, a good number of local volunteers replied with a prompt personal message that puts many commercial operations who use email for customer support and contact to shame.

There is a new membership development pack coming soon which places particular emphasis on thinking about what someone trying to contact a local party will encounter, such as whether contact details are up to date. That should help to tackle some of the issues this survey has highlighted.

However, overall the party is being far less welcoming to would-be new members than it should be.

Thank you to Martin Tod for helping in the preparation of the exercise and also thank you for their time to everyone who responded to the mystery shopper survey.

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

It would be a brave person who walked up to Paddy Ashdown or Shirley Williams and told them to their face that they are history, or even old, but they are two of the most charismatic, interesting and thoughtful members of the living history class – people who have been around in politics long enough to be able to talk at first hand about not only the origins of the Liberal Democrats but prior events too. So to have both on the bill at the Liberal Democrat History Group’s Autumn 2011 conference fringe meeting not surprisingly resulted in a spacious room being packed, leaving people standing at the sides, the back and in the doorways. However, the star of the show in many ways was the less well-known third speaker, then of The Guardian and now of Downing Street, Julian Glover.

All three were introduced to the meeting by the Group’s chair, and one of the lead authors of the book being launched, Peace, Reform and Liberation, Duncan Brack. He reassured the audience that the meeting was maintaining historical party traditions, for Paddy Ashdown was going to have to leave early … and Shirley Williams was late! He also quoted Paddy Ashdown’s words on the importance of political history to a party, taken from his autobiography, A Fortunate Life, in which Ashdown recounted some of the problems of the 1989 SDP–Liberal merger. He wrote that, ‘Being a relative outsider compared to the older MPs I had, in my rush to create the new party, failed to understand that a political party is about more than plans, priorities, policies and a chromium-plated organisation. It also has a heart and a history and a soul.’

The same applies to a newspaper, too, and in kicking off with the first main speech Julian Glover took a look at one part of his newspaper’s history and soul – its on/off, love/hate relationship with the Liberal Party and its successors. Glover cited The Guardian’s May 2010 editorial urging people to vote Liberal Democrat. But, as Glover added, ‘As soon as we did it, we changed our minds.’ That prevarication is nothing new and, he implied, not necessarily much of a problem for the party given that polling showed that Labour support amongst Guardian readers went up after that 2010 editorial.

The paper’s political advice has varied much over the years. Julian Glover even located a 1950s Guardian editorial which urged people to vote out Clement Atlee and vote in the Conservative Party. But much of the time the paper had been a Labour-supporting outlet which urged best wishes on the Liberals and their successors, often advising the party to be just a little different in a benevolent / condescending (delete to taste) way.

Much of the editorialising about Britain’s third party has been, as Glover highlighted, variants on a common theme: to bemoan that the third party is not fully backing whatever cause is of most concern to the paper at the time. The other theme, he added, is to write off the third party as doomed. On occasion, The Guardian has combined both themes in one leader, including in a 1987 leader that said, ‘These are dire days for the Alliance. They have some of the most thoughtful and radical politicians around.’ Glover added, ‘As a paper we certainly seem to enjoy nothing more than praising the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats while going on to explain why we can’t actually support it.’ The party’s 1992 general election manifesto received praise from the paper: ‘it far outdistances its competitors with a fizz of ideas and an absence of fudge’, but even that was not enough for the paper to call for Paddy to become prime minister. ‘So there you have it, 150 years from The Guardian and the Manchester Guardian calling on the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats to be brave, radical; praising the party’s policies and then writing it off as irrelevant’, concluded Julian Glover.

He was followed by Paddy Ashdown, who in typical fashion strode towards the audience before starting to quiz everyone in the room, testing people’s knowledge with quotes from history. After an easy duo with ‘Go back to your constituencies and prepare for government’ and ‘I intend to march my troops towards the sound of gunfire’, with the audience easily and correctly guessing (or in many cases, remembering) David Steel and Jo Grimond, Ashdown posed a tougher one with, ‘Ideas are not responsible for the people who believe in them’. The answer? Paddy himself (on being particularly exasperated by Alex Carlisle). Probably. He admitted he may have borrowed it from someone else and forgotten. (A search through Hansard finds him first using the phrase in Parliament 1986, in a different context and even then not sure if he had penned it himself).

He went on to entertain and enlighten the audience with a sequence of many other quotes from past Liberals, including from Lord Acton: ‘A state which is incompetent to satisfy different races, condemns itself. A state which labours to neutralise, to absorb, to expel them destroys its own vitality. A state which does not include them is destitute of the chief basis of self-government.’ Acton got several mentions, with Ashdown also picking out what he described as one of his favourite quotes: ‘It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than it is to find people fit to govern’. The quote should be emblazoned across the party’s political manuals, he said, making the implicit point that many of the lessons past liberal drew from their contemporary experience are still highly relevant today.

As he said, ‘our history is our present’ – just after quoting Gladstone on Afghanistan. Different centuries, different wars but the same humane, liberal creed: ‘That philosophy of liberalism that combines a solution to the questions of liberty and freedom – and sometimes, as John Stuart Mill said, they oppose each other, the freedom to and the freedom from – you have to determine where that balance lies for your time, for your nation and for your generation. It does not lie always in the same place. You have to determine that. That is why liberalism is a living creed.’ He finished saying, ‘The thing that we have in our party title – liberal – goes back thousands of years. You should be proud of that. It should give us strength, and it should make us campaign even harder … Henry Gibson once said, ‘You do not go out to battle for freedom and truth wearing your best trousers.’ Sometimes I think our party wears its best trousers too much. This is our heritage and it is also our message today – and we should be proud of it’.

It would take a speaker of rare skill to match Ashdown’s speech, but Shirley Williams is one of the select band who could – and did, even though she opened joking that she wished she had after all agreed to speak before rather than after him. She contrasted Ashdown’s drawing of lessons from the more distant past with her own talk – looking at the lessons from more recent political history, in particular the way the limited teaching of history in the US helps shapes its leaders’ worldview – if you only teach American history, you end up with people who do not think much beyond the boundaries of America. This had ‘devastating consequences’, Shirley Williams argued, when the lessons of the Vietnam War and the state the country was left in were not applied to Iraq.

She then turned to the way the Liberal Party declined so sharply in the early twentieth century, becoming reduced to near irrelevance. ‘What kept it going were the deep roots it had put down in some parts of the country – the Pennines, parts of the West Country and of course the Celtic Welsh and Scottish Liberals,’ Shirley Williams explained. Her own roots, of course, are in the social democracy rather than liberalism – a distinction she described as being based on being less distrustful of the powers of the state, but also a distinction that has faded as the merged Liberal Democrats have evolved.

Returning to America and the uses of history, Williams said that lessons from the 1930s are still very relevant. One of her conclusions from them is the need to consider a job creation program, aimed particularly at young people, funded by a dedicated temporary tax. More optimistically, she thinks politicians have learnt from the 1930s that they should not ‘simply take the dictation of the market without any question as to whether it is right or whether it isn’t.’ Then only the American President FDR amongst western leaders bucked that consensus of treating the recession as an act of inevitability, introducing instead a liberal and democratic government to fight that which other people viewed as inevitable.

The USA is also responsible for her views on coalition. Williams revealed that initially she would have preferred a minority Conservative government, with a confidence and supply arrangement rather than a formal coalition. However, she has since changed her mind, drawing on what she has seen in the USA and the dangers it shows of ‘total political polarisation’ stopping the government from taking necessary action in an economic crisis. As a result, she now thinks forming a coalition ‘was necessary and it was right … One had to make the political system work, even if it was painful and difficult to do so.’

Finally, looking back a century to Britain’s own history, Shirley Wiliams said there were three failures of the Liberal Party in 1911: on gender, inequality and Ireland. ‘It was appalling that Asquith consistently refused to consider suffrage for women,’ she said, before stressing that in her view the party had made far too little progress in improving the diversity amongst its MPs – and has a diversity problem illustrated by the near all-white audience for the fringe meeting. The success of ‘zipping’ in introducing gender balance amongst the party’s MEP’s points the way, she said, towards the need for action in other areas.

The second failure was shown by the so-called workers’ rebellion, fuelled by a dramatic drop in real wages. As with gender, this source of 1911 failure is a challenge for the modern party too, with real wages once again dropping. But on this issue Williams said the party was getting right, with its emphasis on a fairer tax system, keeping the 50 per cent tax rate and increasing the basic rate income tax allowance to £10,000. When she was first elected in 1964, the ratio between the pay of the country’s leading chief executives and the average wage of people who worked in manufacturing was about 8:1 she said; now it has risen to over 80:1. ‘That’s not just inequality: it is appalling obscenity.’

On Ireland, Williams reminded the audience that Ireland was long a passion of William Gladstone. The tragedy of his inability to secure home rule for Ireland was a heavy burden on Britain and Ireland’s subsequent histories. But, much less well known is that when in office Gladstone offered the Zulus a military alliance against the Boers. When he fell as prime minister the proposal fell apart, with huge costs to South Africa, too. On this point, Williams did not explicitly say what the lessons for modern Liberal Democrats are, the implication was left hanging in the air that it meant – at least some of the time – being willing to militarily support the oppressed. What she did say in conclusion was that history matters, for ‘we must learn the lessons, even the painful ones, and not make the same mistakes again’.

In answers to questions from the audience, Ashdown agreed that Gladstone’s love of thrift and voluntarism is still very relevant – environmentalism is a form of thrift and community politics is based on voluntarism. But community politics is greater than voluntarism, for community politics must also be about shifting power.

Williams agreed, saying the country was increasingly realising how unreal the New Labour economic boom had been, based on unsustainable debt producing a mirage which both the public and the government believed in. For her thrift has a moral and psychological purpose, making us more happy, she thinks, given the costs of the anxiety that comes from seeking ever-more riches rather than enjoying what you have.

On voluntarism, Williams again agreed with Ashdown, pointing to the amazing care that hospices provide, thanks to a system based on voluntarism. Repeating her high profile opposition to some aspects of the government’s health reforms, she nonetheless saw a key role for such voluntarism.

The question and answer session was rather taken over by contemporary political questions, including very strong comments about the importance of the party improving the diversity of its parliamentary party in the Commons from both Williams and Ashdown. The latter admitted to changing his mind on the topic and is now willing to support more radical temporary measures if necessary than he was when leader of the party.

Ashdown also retold a story of a meeting between Henry Kissinger and Mao Zedong. Seeking to kindle a shared interest in history to smooth the business, Kissinger asked Mao what he thought would have happened if it had been Khrushchev and not John F. Kennedy who had been assassinated. Mao pondered before saying that he doubted that nice, rich Greek ship owner would have married Mrs Khrushchev.

Closing the meeting, Duncan Brack reminded people of the comment made by the distinguished historian and Liberal Democrat peer, the late Conrad Russell, that the party via its predecessors was probably the oldest political party in the world. This 350 years of history is captured in the new history of the party – to remember, to celebrate and to learn.

You can buy Peace, Reform and Liberation from Amazon here or reviews from William Wallace and Iain Sharpe.

* Declaration of interest – I’m one of the chapter authors.

Watch the event in full

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

Today’s Campaign Corner question: Aarrgh! There’s just too much information online. How do I cope?

1. Make use of news aggregators. If you want to know what is happening in the world of UK politics, Politics Home is a great start, as it pulls together the latest content from traditional and online news sources into one regularly-updated front page.  For more specific Liberal Democrat news there is the essential Lib Dem Blogs and for political news and blogs more generally there is my own aggregator aggregator.markpack.org.uk.
2. Use a feed (news) reader. One of the major tricks to getting the most out of websites in a time-efficient manner is to cut back on the amount of time you spend going round checking websites and instead make the websites come to you whenever they have something new – and that is where feed readers, such as google.co.uk/reader come in. Once you have set up your feed reader, you can tell it to keep an eye on a website either by inputting the web address into the feed reader, or by visiting a website and then looking for the ‘sign-up to a feed reader’, ‘subscribe to RSS’ or similar option on screen (frequently accompanied by an orange square with curves cutting across it).
3. Get the most from Google Alerts. Visit www.google.com/alerts and enter the search term you want (such as William Gladstone) along with your email address. You can choose how often you want to receive the alerts and, unless they are alerts that require a quick response simply set them to ‘once a day’ so that the alerts are reasonably timely but don’t tempt you during the day to get distracted from what you should be doing!

Got any other tips? Please do share them in the comment thread below.

Want to know more about local campaigning? Campaigning In Your Community by myself and Shaun Roberts should be right up your street. It’s available for only £4 from ALDC and you can read an extract for free here.

Today’s Campaign Corner question: How do we get more people to our next campaign session?

1. Cater for different sorts of people: Some people prefer to get a task and then go off and do it on their own; others prefer group activity. Some prefer talking to people; others prefer leafleting. Your possible helpers vary in all sorts of ways, so plan a range of different ways that people can be involved.

2. Don’t assume people know what is involved: Explain clearly what will be involved. ‘Come to our Action Day’ is often used as shorthand, which is fine if you have been to one before, but utterly unrevealing to a novice.

3. Give a specific purpose: Some people will be active for the sake of being active – in particular, some people like going delivering as a way of stretching their legs and getting some fresh air. Most however need a specific prompt to be active in a particular way at a particular time – so give them a reason, such as ‘we need to get the leaflets out to residents ahead of the planning meeting next week’.

Got any other tips? Please do share them in the comment thread below.

Want to know more about local campaigning? Campaigning In Your Community by myself and Shaun Roberts should be right up your street. It’s available for only £4 from ALDC and you can read an extract for free here.

• The Budget
• May’s elections
• Treating supporters as active participants
• Wealth taxation
• Communicative ministers
• A coherent narrative

And don’t forget the four priorities for the party’s new Chief Executive, Tim Gordon.