An ambitious plan for the partyAt our worst, there’s a weird form of inertia in the Liberal Democrats. Whatever we’re talking about, people forcefully demand that something else is more important. Policy, strategy, organisation, leadership – whenever you talk about one of these, some people object that one of the others is more important and is the one you should be talking about instead. It’s a bureaucratic form of Escher’s famous staircases. Every step is always preceded by another step, until you’ve gone round in a circle and ended up back where you started. (Newswire readers being the lovely group you are, I’m banking on at least 10 replies saying, “Actually, they are Penrose stairs”.) One way to crack that is to tackle them all at once. Ambitious, yes. But ambitious is what any plans for the Liberal Democrats need to be. And ambitious is what the party’s plans for the summer and autumn are. Leadership? Our leadership election starts next month. It won’t be just another election either. We’ll be making use of the enforced change of circumstances to have our best ever and most testing campaign and hustings program. We’ll put candidates through their paces, so members can see who has what it takes. Policy? We’ll shortly be rolling out a new mass member policy engagement platform. It will help us put together the Liberal Democrat answer to what the world should look like after coronavirus. Readers will know my take on that – how we need to show that a fair society is a resilient society. But it will be up to party members to decide. Members who will get an online conference in the autumn too, involving far more people than our big showcase event normally reaches. Strategy? Yes, we’ll have one of those too. The leadership election is a key opportunity to debate for members to choose between different visions for the party. The party will be following up with creating the strategy to underpin the vision that members choose. We need to avoid the previous mistakes where our political strategy and organisational capacity pointed in different directions. That happened even under such otherwise successful leaders as Jo Grimond. Instead, we will have one joined-up plan. Organisation? That most definitely needs sorting too, as the independent election review starkly shows. It makes for difficult reading. It also makes for very necessary reading. We need to improve the way we’re organised in a way we never have before. Here’s one simple example. The review says, “The Federal Board was often a ‘rubber-stamp’ and is too large a group to be a realistic decision-making body.” That point about its size is not a new one. It’s been a regular complaint over the years and featured in previous reviews. Yet In 1989 the Federal Executive – as the Board was then called – had 27 voting members and 2 non-voting members. By 2020, after several large reviews, it has grown in size by 12, up to 35 voting members and 6 non-voting members. (You may have noticed that 35 + 6 = 41 but I’ve talked before about the Board having 43 people. That’s because there are also two other members of staff who attend but are not formally members.) So while many of the recommendations in the election review may appear obvious, we shouldn’t underestimate how much enacting them requires over-coming entrenched habits. It’s also why my strong inclination at the moment is not to repeat our previous approaches of going for another big top down governance review. They’ve still left us with the problems documented by the review. Instead, we should instead pick off the key issues separately. All the above will much easier if we improve the party’s technology. The Board has agreed a significant investment in our tech capability, focused first on improving the main party website. If that phase one goes well, phase two will involve expanding to look at other issues. All through, consulting with the users of our technology will be a big part of the approach. (Prioritising the website makes sense for this new approach as it is the easier first step. Besides, a better website will mean better finances due to improvements such as with the donations process.) The elections review puts me on the spot for delivering a major set of improvements. That’s how it should be – and one I’m expecting to be held to account for. As the review rightly sets out, people across the party need to be held to account for how they are doing their roles. So please keep this email safe. Use it check in on progress in the months to come. Hold me and my colleagues to account for these plans to transform our party. What do you think? Do let me know direct or join the conversation on Facebook. | 
I have been a Liberal – Lib Dem member for 50 years and in all those years the biggest bugbear has been commentators and the media asking the question “What do you actually stand for?”. We have never seemed to provide an answer to this question that satisfies the questioner. Both Labour and the Conservatives seem to have clear aims, welfare state – low taxes et al, that we lack and this shows in how the population votes in general elections. As a group we are in general deep thinking concerned people with a wide range of ideas and views on what is right and wrong with our society. However the electorate is always looking for a degree of certainty when it casts its votes and will be inclined to vote for the party the best appears to provide policies that will meet their needs over the next 3 to 5 years. This short span is important as it is the time scale that is important to them personally. As Lord Keynes famously said “But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.”. If we are going to be successful in gaining real political power, without political power we a just a talking shop, we must do a number of key things:-
1. Find out what it is that our potential voters want us to achieve in government, both national and local. (We must be able to give potential voters an answer to their question “What’s in it for ME?”. This may sound a bit mercenary but people vote for parties that best answer this question to the voters satisfaction.)
2. Devise core public policies that will result in our potential voters putting an X against a Lib Dem candidate in the polling Booth. (At the moment the key things that our potential voters are concerned about seem to be a) Affordable housing, b) the NHS, c) good secure jobs, d) a decent education system and e) the Environment. These will probably form the basis of our core policies and are the things that we must get the media to talk about.)
3. Ensure that we put a Lib Dem set of values into the core policies as a way of convincing those we want to vote for us that we are serious in how we want to produce a fairer more equal society.
4. Once we has a set of agreed core policies we must set up an effective Internet and social media systems that sends out a clear consistent message to our potential voters. For local elections our message needs to be modified to take into account local issues such as airport extensions, fracking et al.
5. As it is possible that we could be stuck with the “first past the post” for some time to come we must start building alliances now with other parties and not wait until just before the next election. Boris Johnson is faced with two problems that he is not dealing with well, Covid-19 and the end of the EU transition period. These and the new leader of the Labour party give us an opportunity to come to a working agreement on policies and actions in the event of the UK not being able to get a trade deal with the EU by the end of 2020.
We must have a key theme linking all the core policies that we have agreed, e.g. “Building a Fairer Britain”, that epitomises our distinct Lib Dem view of the world.