A day to be proud of our party

Whatever final deal is negotiated, it won’t contain everything Liberal Democrats will want. It will involve some major compromises – and so it should in a democracy, given that we didn’t win a majority or the most seats.

But from what we’ve seen today and over the weekend, Liberal Democrats should be proud of just how well our negotiating team is working on our behalf.

They have a tough job – the issue that many members hold most dear (electoral reform) is also the one that it is hardest to win concessions on from from the Conservatives and is the one on which Labour has a record of breaking promises. Yet there have been no soft concessions from our side. The hardball negotiating line has even forced one of the other party leaders – the current Prime Minister – to announce plans to quit. (Even more remarkably, he also got the party’s name right for once.)

That’s a major sign that our negotiating team is successfully doing everything it can to get the best possible deal.

It’s not just the negotiating team that gives cause to be proud of the party. So too do our democratic processes: the regular involvement of our MPs, the key role of the Federal Executive, the widespread phone consultation exercise with local party officers and more – including the serious weight given by senior party figures to the results of Lib Dem Voice’s poll of party members. That consultation and democracy has already drawn some envious glances from those in other parties where the attitudes towards such factors are very different.

What happens next? David Laws’s seven rules for negotiating in balanced Parliaments gives some good clues as to how the process may play out. Key parts of the substance are still far from clear. What is increasingly clear though is that the deal extracted will be the best that could have been.