The idea that somehow there exists a happy medium between a democratic policy making process and a system which works on the basis that what the Prime Minister says, goes, is absurd. At the end of the day, if the party disagrees with what the Prime Minister says then the PM gets the final say. This is true for the Labour Party and it will be true for any party. The question is not whether we have the right systems in place but whether we have a leader who possesses the correct skills for negotiating and listening to the party and make decisions when needed whilst alienating as few people as possible.

It honestly sounds to me as though you’re arguing that a Liberal Democrat government should be neither liberal nor democratic. If I wanted to be part of a party that treated its members like dirt and paid no heed to their opinions, I’d have joined the Tories.

Hell of a way to misrepresent my comment there. You’re continuing to set up a false dichotomy – either the leader decides everything or the FPC does – when the reality is that what he have now, and what we’d have in government, would be a balance between the extremes with the leader and cabinet working with the wider party to determine policy, not with either side trying to force it on the other.

Now, let’s suppose that Prime Minister Clegg gets a visit from Chancellor Cable to tell him that the latest Treasury sums show they can’t afford to scrap tuition fees at that time. Is this something that requires a decision there and then? Or would they have the opportunity to go to the Cabinet, the Parliamentary Party, the FPC, the FEC, Conference and whoever else to actually talk it out, explain the changed circumstances and ask for support for whatever new direction they’ve chosen? What path do you think they would choose?

And the final paragraph is just ‘well, that’s the way it’s always been, so you can’t change it.’

It is up to the party to ensure those it selects to run under its label are people it can trust to take its advice seriously. The only sanction it has is to remove its support from them. As the leader is elected by the party as a whole, there should be a mechanism where the party as a whole can depose him or her from that position. I don’t have the party constitution with me now, so I don’t know if there is such a mechanism. It can remove the party label from its MPs, forcing them to stand as independents at the next election.

One hopes that such a catastrophic thing would never come about, but the lesser sanction is that party members drift off if they find its leadership never listens to them and when in government pushes through policies it opposes. This is precisely what has happened in the Labour Party. During my time of activity in LB Lewisham, we went from a time when Labour had enough activists to swamp us if ever there was a council by-election, to the point where we were left wondering “where are they?”. It was weird – suddenly we were winning by-elections because no-one much was turning up to fight for the Labour cause. Suddenly we found we held all but one of the wards in what is still nominally a safe Labour seat. Whether this will shift to a vote for us at Parliamentary level is still to be seen. Media commentators don’t cover this, because they think local party activity counts for nothing, and it’s all just about national swings. My feeling is that the falling off of serious political coverage in the media means this is less so than it has been in most of our lifetimes.

Yes, I broadly agree. It follows, though, that all those words about downgrading scrapping fees from a policy to an “aspiration” were meaningless and should not have been used. All policies are, in a sense, merely aspirations.

Hang on, I hear you say, that’s just a bit too lax. The Attlee example notwithstanding, we surely don’t want to tell people that Clegg has carte blanche to tear up all the policies we ever made, once he gets to be PM?

So we need to find a middle way. And that, I suggest, is what we must now do, in order to regain any sort of credibility over tuition fees.

We do, rightly, boast about our fuly costed programmes and the fact that we get them independently audited by the IFS. Very well then. Our FPC should be prepared to do some hard work. They will have to juggle figures and sort out exactly how scrapping fees can be fitted into a rigorously costed programme. If it can’t be done, then never mind what they told the Guardian, they will have to take the pledge out. In my own view they would do well to think of creative ways to leave it in, such as phasing, or bringing in a graduate tax.

If scrapping fees makes it into a fully costed programme, it becomes a firm proposal. And yet it is still not cast in concrete. By the time Clegg or anyone else becomes the new PM, economic and other circumstances will have changed, and a leader will have to be able to change the message. But he will not get away with changes that are capricious, that use bounce tactics, that don’t relate to real external pressures, that fly in the face of a clear majority view.

I think he may now be recognising that. It will help him to do so if, in return, the activists put effort into the financial integrity agenda.

In my view there is no reason why the current system cannot work perfectly well, but it does need good will on all sides to make it work, a willingness to compromise on all sides and it is important that once positions are agreed that everyone signs up to that agreement is stuck to, at least unless or until something drantic happens.

(And yes the financial crisis is dramatic, but that had happened before we wrote this paper and the paper takes full account of it.)

I don’t believe any Leader of our party would go down the route you suggest, but if they did it would lead to a pretty major problem. Our party leadership is much more reliant on the party organisation and the support of the voluntary party at every level than the others, and they would be at serious risk of throwing all that away.

Jo – The unhappiness of members of the FPC is not because Nick takes a different view from some of us about priorities, rather that when we agreed the Fresh Start for Britain document a few weeks ago we did discuss exactly what it meant and what it didn’t mean. The document was meant to set out the approach we were going to take to writing the manifesto in the light of the financial crisis and I think it does that very well. It was supported by the whole committee IIRC.

We could have decided to prioritise specific policies in this document but we don’t have all the figures we would need to do this in a meaningful way and, frankly, there would probably not have been a meeting of minds even if we had.

Personally I am frustrated because I think there is every chance that we will be able to come up with a costed manifesto that does include all the various key policies people have highlighted, as long as there is a willingness on all sides to make it happen.

If policy is to set the programme for government then there is a problem.

If, however, policy is less about setting a programme and more about committing to a direction of travel and to give a tangiable example to voters of something that the party believes in and aspires to, then there is no problem.

I’d suggest that the party needs to move towards the latter position, and this will undoubtedly have some rather significant implications…

Equally the FPC has to flex its muscles as we remain a democratic party, so this argument is no bad thing.

And as for the constitution, that’s the British Constitution, an unwritten marvel of convention and confusion which is as flawed as a cheap diamond but which has somehow worked for a pretty long time without tying us up in the kind of knots which result in 25% of the world’s lawyers being American.

The role of FPC members is to deliver a framework that the MPs and the leader can campaign on, not to come along to vote on the single issue of tuition fees and do bugger all about the rest.

I don’t see how this is in any way related to the recent actions of the FPC.

As to the original point: the party decides the campaign issues. The candidates campaign on those issues. The people at large select candidates based on their campaigns; if the candidates then weasel out of their promises, then they are unlikely to be re-elected. This process could be accelerated with a “sack your MP” system. It’s really very simple and there is no issue here.

Under no circumstances can a fair system permit a subset of the population (the party members) to dictate policy. The party selects the campaign, not the policy of the government after it is elected. There is merely a presumption that the government would like to be re-elected later and hence will at least try to fulfill their campaign promises. (There is also a presumption that they will fail, to some extent; no government manages to do all the stuff in their manifesto)

In terms of democratic legitimacy within the party, the Leader wins over the FPC, who after all only have to submit an A5 piece of paper telling people what they want conference reps to know (and not what they don’t want them to know) rather than a comprehensive and thorough leadership election, where each of the candidates are challenged on their ability to do the job.

I don’t argue with the FPC right to set the policy direction but it has to come up with the goods as well – like not putting together a shopping list of policies without making sure they’ve got the money in their purse to pay for them – it’s incredibly immature. I don’t think the FPC is delivering at the moment.

The role of FPC members is to deliver a framework that the MPs and the leader can campaign on, not to come along to vote on the single issue of tuition fees and do bugger all about the rest.

Very few voters give two hoots about the internal workings of this party and open letters to the Guardian like the one this week make all of us, and especially the members of the FPC look very silly indeed.

Personally I think that the version of internal party democracy that we have is overrated. The only internal party votes I’ve taken part in have been for local PPC selection and for the selection of the party leader. Conference, for all of its ‘democracy’, is still a representative democracy that requires a certain amount of effort from party members to engage with which many do not make. As a member, I have a theoretical ability to influence policy that I will almost never exercise. I’d be more likely to exercise it if, say, we decided policy based on a national one-member-one-vote system, although I imagine that this would be considered impractical. My point is that there’s a certain sense in which many of us have chosen the leader, but haven’t chosen the policies or the people making them, therefore most ordinary party members (those who don’t attend conference and don’t input into the decisions of their local representatives) would, in theory, be better represented by having the leader choose than by having the decisions made by other people who they didn’t choose. That’s not to say that we should do it that way, but it does suggest that we have a problem somewhere.

My point is that whilst either the FPC or conference is nominally the democratic voice of the party, in practice it probably isn’t. I don’t know if anyone has the stats on this, but I’d be willing to bet that the number of party members who voted in the leadership election is significantly larger than the number who participate (indirectly) in conference votes or in the proceedings and composition of the FPC. Now, I’d still say that the FPC is the legitimate decision-making body, but that’s for reasons that have almost nothing to do with whether it’s democratic or not. It’s mostly because those involved have put in a lot more effort than a Joe Bloggs armchair member such as myself and are therefore more entitled to a say and are more likely to have an informed opinion.

My preference would be for getting ordinary members more involved in voting directly, but it seems hard to do that without diluting the precision of what they’re voting on. The FPC is great for considering points of detail, and conference can generally be trusted to consider the nuances of quite specific amendments, but a general vote within the party would probably have to be on very broad questions of priorities rather than specific policy prescriptions. I’d still like to have something like this because I think that it would improve engagement amongst ordinary members (my big idea for the party is that it should start thinking about why anyone would want to be a member of the party, and work towards improving the party in those respects), but I’m not sure that this at all answers the original post’s dilemma.