Dissension is both an admirable and problematic trait. It’s admirable, as often you find yourself on the side of right, but it’s problematic as you rarely end up being protrayed that way. I consider what I’m doing now dissension, and what it is is to consider what a youth organisation should do and what it’s doing now.
For those who know me in Liberal Youth, I try hard to occupy the neutral ground and to compromise rather than confront, but sometimes a punch in the nose resonates more than a pat on the back. A lot of people believe Liberal Youth to be primarily a campaigning organisation and a recruiting organisation. It is, and it isn’t.
The upcoming Activate training weekend will be the first Liberal Youth weekend specifically organised for training for a long time. The fact is that campaiging tactics and training have been neglected. Equally, with the failure of the current website, and delays in getting a newer version, the campaigning abilities of the organisation have been blunted by the inability to find a medium on which to put it across.
In addition, it has been left without a Vice-Chair (Campaigns) for the past three months, meaning that the lead up to the freshers fairs (traditionally a Liberal Youth forte, where more members are recruited for the party than at any other time) has been led, almost solely by the Chair, Elaine Bagshaw. While I cannot comment on the potential competence (or lack of) in this campaign, running campaigns without the person normally in charge is rarely an effective tactic.
This then impacts on the other thing Liberal Youth is perceived to be – a recruiting organisation. While specific university branches can run very successful campaigns and freshers fairs locally, if the material lets them down then fewer people come to the stand and fewer people sign up. Getting people to look twice is the big battle and this can be easily done without central help – a bit of craft and creativity, combined with creating a welcoming atmosphere, is the reason people who would normally walk past, look in.
We are projecting an image to our target audience – young, generally liberally minded, people – but recognising that they can’t be taken for granted. Presenting ourselves as a university society that is politically active, as opposed to a political society that happens to be at a university, would reach outside our target audience and bring in more people.
The larger problem with Liberal Youth is embedded in problems in how the organisation is run and leads to the spectacular occasions of disunity we all saw at the previous Chair election. This problem is that of organisation and how the organisation sees itself.
Liberal Youth is peculiar in that it is a national organisation campaigning on national issues that is full of people expected to campaign and gain experience on local issues. It’s a setup which encourages people to know a little on a lot, yet the local parties they will also be involved with are the exact opposite – knowing a limited number of issues in great depth. In the end, it’s a fudge and encourages talented people to focus elsewhere. Equally, it has gone through a long period of ambivalence and now, since the freshers intake of 2008, has a lot of vastly differing personalities at its core, with differing views on how it should be run.
For many, campaigning is the focus. Campaigning leads to more members, after all. For the rest, inculding myself, organisation equals optimisation. When the organisation is built on flawed grounds – a quick perusal of the Liberal Youth constitution shows a document with vague guidelines, for example on elections, and specific eccentricities, for example conferences must take place in non-smoking venues – and run by people who have previously been given space to interpret these in a very flexible manner, accusations of incompetence and authoritarianism are natural.
All this leads to disunity. Many would say this was all down to Sara Scarlett, former Vice-Chair (C Communications). Many would say it was down to Elaine Bagshaw. The fact is it’s neither. Sara’s personality, creative and brilliant yet prone to make rash decisions and grand gestures, was naturally unsuited to any form of micro-management which was always going to be needed. It created a rift which shall take time to heal, but people like Sara still exist in the membership, and they can be tamed. All they need is the correct actions of a Chair who is an observent guiding hand, rather than a clumsy attempt at reining in someone whose ambitions and self-belief were thought to have already gotten out of hand.
There is, however, a simple cure. A concerted attempt is being made at opening up the executive for scrutiny, of ensuring that the holes in the constitution are patched: ensuring that the foundations Liberal Youth are built upon are solid, and ensuring that its finances are wholly in order. From there, more ambitious and convincing campaigns can be launched, and resources can be allocated and optimised. It’s all so easy, it makes you wonder why it hasn’t been done already.
A youth organisation has to recognise that to be taken seriously, the simple things that the oft-impulsive youth ignore have to be taken care of – organisation and financial stability. And from that solid base, the flamboyance of youth can take over and create policy, challenge minds and win hearts just like it should.
* Rich Wilson is a Liberal Democrat member in Sale.
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I should mention now before anyone else does that we now have a (very competent) Campaigns chair, and a raft of good ideas being put into production right now for the freshers’ materials. It would also do good to mention that our accounting has vastly improved from a bad period in 2005/2006 where we nearly went bankrupt. And finally, you can see (admittedly chair-election focussed) some public discussions around the last paragraphs at the “Holborn Manifesto” (Facebook).
At least the students in the headlights do not sound like frightened rabbits – unlike certain of their elders. There is a future for the LibDems yet.
“the simple things that the oft-impulsive youth ignore have to be taken care of – organisation and financial stability.”
Simple is not the same as easy to do.
I wish LY all the best for the freshers fair this autumn.
I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say thanks!
The secret to running a successful youth organisation is simply to do stuff. Vague constitutions and the like may be irritating, but rarely are an issue worth spending any time on.
The current team should get a good campaign under its belt, run a couple events and then maybe indulge in some strategic planning. Easier to say that to do, but hardly impossible.
“The secret to running a successful youth organisation is simply to do stuff. Vague constitutions and the like may be irritating, but rarely are an issue worth spending any time on.”
To an extent I agree and from the outside one of the major problems of LDYS/LY in recent years has been the focus on constitutionality and changes to that as a part (substitute?) for campaign activity.
The big but is that “doing stuff” requires organisation and working to an agreed plan. Otherwise people, and especially keen but inexperienced activists just start doing things at random with no plan, no budget and no assessment of how many person hours are required.
My memory is a bit hazy but, planning the first Activate started probably 6 months before it happened and involved a lot of input from people outside the core team organising it.
Learning how to plan such events is as important a part of what people get out of LDYS as the outward reaching stuff. I’ve always said that a substantial part of the party’s youth wing is to provide a sandbox* for young/inexperienced activists to learn from mistakes in a way that is fairly safe (eg if you make a shambolic speech at an LY conference it isn’t as bad as at a Federal one!)
*sandbox is used in the Wikipedia context rather than a pejorative sense.
The personalities and exact issues may change, but the essentials of what is being written here about Liberal Youth could just as well have been written about the organisation and its predecessors for the past 40 years (and maybe longer – I’m going back as only long as my memory and conversations with people who were member s before me allows).
The secret of running a good branch of the Youth Organisation is to ignore the National Executive and just get on with doing your stuff on your own. If you have to make contact with these people, do not be dazzled by them or want to be part of them. If you are lucky, they may just about be able to offer some useful information and contacts and chance to meet up with others in the organisation from elsewhere. But if they don’t, no matter.
I am know that we are all hopeful that the new exec will take on a lot of the lessons that should have been learned from the past few years.
The Chair essentially should be like a project manager with the membership as Chairman of the Board. Update us with what is going on, give us info on how our money is spent, tell us how we can help push certain projects over humps, and get people working together to complete more complex projects.
It isn’t rocket science, but does involve a mite of discipline.
Just a point on Robson’s comment above, the bad accounting period was 2004-2005 (and possibly even earlier), and was fixed during 2005-2006 by a head of office then VC Finance who was a qualified accountant. The near bankruptcy was discovered at the start of July 2005.