59% of Lib Dem members back benefits cap at £26,000 or lower

LDV asked: Under the Coalition government’s proposal the cap on benefits will apply to the total sum of all benefits a household receives, including income support, jobseekers allowance, child benefit and housing benefit. The government is setting the maximum at £26,000, the average earnings of a British family after tax. What do you think the maximum amount should be set at?

0% – £10,000 per year or less
2% – £15,000 per year or less
10% – £20,000 per year or less
5% – £23,000 per year or less
42% – £26,000 per year or less
4% – £28,000 per year or less
4% – £30,000 per year or less
1% – £35,000 per year or less
1% – £40,000 per year or less
25% – Not applicable, I don’t think there should be a maximum amount
6% – Don’t know / No opinion

A plurality — 42% — of Lib Dem members back the Coalition’s £26,000 benefits cap, but interestingly a further 17% of our respondents would have gone further than the government: one-in-10 said the cap should have been £20,000 a year. Even so, this places Lib Dem members out of step with the party’s supporters. According to a YouGov poll, 31% of Lib Dem voters would set the cap at £20,000 or lower.

In total, 69% of Lib Dem members in our sample believed there should be a benefits cap. A significant minority, however — one-in-four of those surveyed — rejected the principle of a cap at all. There were a significant number of comments advocating regional variations for the cap in order to reflect the higher private rent costs for those living in London in particular.

However, 54% back Lords amendment to exclude child benefit from cap

LDV asked: The House of Lords voted against the government’s benefit cap, passing an amendment that will exclude child benefit from the £26,000 cap. This means that it would be possible for a family with children to receive more than £26,000 in benefits a year. Do you support or oppose this amendment to the Bill?

54% – Support
39% – Oppose
7% – Don’t know / No opinion

A majority of Lib Dem members agreed with Paddy Ashdown (among other Lib Dem peers) who voted a fortnight ago to amend the Coalition’s benefits cap policy in this way. However, a large minority — four-in-10 members — rejected the Lords’ amendment, with many arguing that it would undermine the principle of the cap. Here’s a flavour of some of the comments received:

I think it’s definitely right to maintain child benefit as a separate entity. Visiting the sins of the parents (if sins they even be) upon the children is plain wrong.

Child Benefit has been around a lot longer than many other benefits. I think there should be a cap for child benefit, but it shouldbe seperate from the rest of the benefits

I would see a case for suppporting this amendment IF the figure of £26,000 without child benefit was reduced appropriately. £26,000 net of tax for a childless household is too much in my view compared to likely earnings for those in work.

I can see the arguments both ways, but when it comes down to it it isn’t the kids’ fault and they shouldn’t suffer.

Those who are responsible and only have the children they can afford to support should not subsidise those who have children that they cannot themselves afford.

* Stephen Tall is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice, and also writes at his own site, The Collected Stephen Tall.

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.

Credit must go to those few who were prepared to stick to their principles last night, not least Ming Campbell – and earlier in the “other place” many of our peers, such as Meral Ece, Joan Walmsley and Paddy Ashdown.  Everyone else should hang their heads in shame. I have no doubt that many were squirming as they walked through the yes lobby, but squirming’s not enough. Hitting the most vulnerable, the seriously ill, disabled children, abandoned mothers. Mealy mouthed excuses about having won concessions won’t wash anymore. This is about honesty and integrity in politics, something we thought important enough to put on the front of our manifesto when seeking power, but clearly not important enough to demonstrate once in power.

On the benefits cap,  of course it is crazy the amount of benefits that are going to some large families, mainly living in the South East, but the problem could surely be better addressed through rent controls and building more social housing? This dreadful bill will achieve legally what Dame Shirley Porter (why was she never stripped of her honour?) tried illegally.

And on under occupancy, yes of course, invest in schemes that support and encourage people to downsize, but isn’t it ironic that the same people who argue against a mansion tax because it may mean folk have to downsize to a smaller mansion, are the same people who think it is OK to force poorer people to give up their homes?

I am well used to being accused of bringing the party into disrepute for daring to question the direction of our leadership – well to perfectly frank – I don’t think it’s me, or those like me, who are fighting to maintain everything our party says it stand for, who should be so condemned.

I am afraid I am sick to death of the facile arguments in favour of this bill. It changes the goal posts, this is no longer just about the deserving and undeserving poor, everyone is now being characterised as undeserving. The dehumanising that is going on now of all those who claim benefits is scary, verging on fascist and certainly not liberal.

Federal Policy Committee meets on Wednesday and Gareth Epps and I have asked for this to be on the agenda. It is high time our parliamentary party were taken to task for treating the wider party with such contempt, but even more important that they are taken to task for betraying the values they claim to share. And, as George Potter has eloquently pointed out, this is people’s lives we are talking about, people whose “side” we claim to be on.

In a development that you couldn’t make up, the Independent, in its own coverage of the programme,  referred to Lord Ashdown when talking about the Conservative Party’s major benefactor.

This prompted our own Paddy Ashdown to write to the paper with, The Voice suspects, his tongue firmly wedged in his cheek

“It is one thing to misrepresent my position on the benefit cap as you did last week, but quite another to confuse me with Lord Ashcroft, the Tory funder of Belize fame, as you did yesterday in your report “Lord Ashcroft accused of hiding business links to ‘corrupt” islands”.

Please reassure your readers that I am a quiet little herbivorous Lib Dem living a life which offends no one in a small cottage in Somerset.”

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.

The weekend debates have been light on foreign policy so far, so for those foreign policy buffs out there here’s one inspired by our former leader.

Over at Ted talks, Paddy Ashdown has been discussing ‘the global power shift’ from the West to the rest and in particular to the nations around the Pacific rim.

He touches on a lot of areas, including what the future of global governance might look like, how long American power might remain dominant and the growth of a multi-polar world.

He talks about how our alliances will begin to shift in favour of new common interests and beyond our traditional allies: ”We are going to have to do business with people with whom we don’t share common values but we share common interests.” And we have to understand that: “Increasingly I share a destiny with my enemy”.

So is he right? Arguably we already do business with those who don’t share our values but are we at the stage where we can no longer draw a line in the sand? And if we did what would that line look like? Would it include dodgy arms sales, poor human right or inadequate environmental protections or perhaps something else entirely?

Julian Glover gave a very funny speech about his newspaper’s love/hate relationship with the party – “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”.

Shirley Williams turned to the history of America and of the 1930s, drawing lessons for the current economic difficulties, including why American history has made her a supporter of coalition government in the UK.

Paddy Ashdown’s speech included a collection of his favourite liberal quotes and why the lessons contained in them are still highly relevant to contemporary liberal politicians, ending with this exhortation:

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.

Here is the meeting in full to watch, and chances are it is much better than quite a few of those Christmas TV repeats you’ll otherwise find yourself watching…

You can buy Peace, Reform and Liberation from Amazon here.

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

The prime minister’s actions in Europe last week are a similar turning point. By pandering to the extremes in his party – by acting as Tory leader rather than prime minister, as Paddy Ashdown put it – David Cameron has forced Nick Clegg to once again rethink the Liberal Democrat approach to the coalition.

Yet again, though, David Cameron might in some ways have unwittingly done the deputy prime minister a favour. Differentiation – in its crude form at least – has now been as successful as it was ever going to be. It has halted the downward trajectory of Lib Dem poll ratings and stabilised them somewhere in the low double digits. But the low double digits is still a full ten percentage points less than the party achieved in last year’s general election.

So, what should coalition phase three look like? The answer can be expressed in two words: public negotiation.

Coalition ministers and MPs will continue their day-to-day work of implementing the policies contained in the coalition agreement: reducing the deficit, rebuilding the economy, improving the education system, making the health service more responsive and accountable, cutting taxes for the lowest paid.

But where events have overtaken the coalition agreement – Europe and the economic situation, for instance – the response of the coalition should be to come to agreements in a much more public and transparent way. One party sets out its position, the other party responds with their view. When compromises are arrived at, the public have then seen the opening positions of both sides and can see how the negotiated agreement has been reached. We can all see not just where the government has ended up but where the parties started.

There would be a certain irony to this, of course: David Cameron’s failure in Europe will have forced what has so far been a very British coalition to move towards a much more European model of conducting pluralist government.

Such an approach would benefit both of the coalition parties as well as the country more widely. For the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives, a strategy that allows a freer, more open exchange of viewpoints before decisions are taken would act as a pressure valve, releasing some of the tensions that have built up from the suppression of differences between the parties. For the country, it means a government that works better: harmony and competence are not synonymous. In fact, if anything, where this government has gone wrong it has been because it has been too harmonious – too reluctant to critique and debate, even where perfectly valid – rather than too discordant.

For the Liberal Democrats particularly, this strategy also has another upside. The great inherent risk in the differentiation so far attempted is that it simply turns the junior partner into an internal opposition, constantly acting as a brake rather than as part of the engine, to use David Laws’ metaphor. The great benefit of publicly negotiating to reach agreement is that it forces both sides to put forward positive arguments rather than using backroom manoeuvring to block the other side. The risk that the Liberal Democrats simply become an internal opposition would not be fully removed, but it would be substantially reduced.

Of course such a strategy is itself far from risk-free. The obvious potential downside for the two parties is that not only does transparency of this sort expose where a party has been successful in arguing for a particular outcome, it by necessity also highlights where they have failed. Neither party should be too worried about this, though. Voters realise that coalition demands compromise, and the supporters and potential supporters of both parties are in a much better position to judge who was right and who was wrong if they can actually see the cases being made openly by both.

The other main risk is caused by a media and main opposition party which still largely fail to understand coalition politics, evidenced by some of the apocalyptic coverage of the coalition disagreement over Europe. Around the globe, political parties disagree, regularly and openly, and continue to govern together in arrangements of all shapes and sizes. Britain is no different, and it seems the only way for the two governing parties to prove this is to practise it.

It remains in the interests of both the country and the Liberal Democrats for this coalition to succeed through to 2015 – the Fixed-term Parliaments Act still means that is very likely. But the reckless actions of the prime minister last week make another strategic rethink necessary. For the Liberal Democrats there is a clear route to follow which will make the government work better and help us convince voters that our values have not been diluted by the coalition. There are risks involved, for sure, but even Nick Clegg’s detractors can’t say he is one to shy away from taking bold, if risky, action. Now’s the time to do so again.

Since the tuition fee rise and EMA’s abolition, I haven’t liked Nick Clegg. Although I agreed with the coalition being formed, I didn’t agree with the coalition negotiation team he chose. I haven’t agreed with a lot of what he’s done as leader. And I’ve sat grumbling about it for months. But over the past few days my respect for Nick has significantly improved.

Why? Well I’m starting to see something different from Nick and our party. I’m starting to see a glimpse of the Liberal Democrats I joined over three years ago. Nick appearing on The Andrew Marr Show was the moment it dawned on me. He said that the EU veto was ‘bitterly disappointing’ and that eurosceptics were ‘seriously misguided’, after which I frightened my girlfriend by exclaiming ‘go on Nick’ and punching the air. Putting aside the fact that politics is clearly making me a rather dull individual, it was what I and so many other Lib Dems had been hoping for.

Ever since the coalition’s formation, Liberal Democrat members up and down the land have been crying out for our individuality to be expressed loud and clear. We’ve met Nick and had long, tiring discussions on just this. We’ve quizzed Lib Dem MPs about it at every opportunity, even Christmas dinners (sorry Tim Farron!). We’ve done our best on the doorstep to explain why we couldn’t keep all our promises. Tried, and often failed with little support from the top of our party.

But Nick’s performance is the first big development in dealing with this issue. He was clear about what he felt about the EU and clear on what Liberal Democrats believed in.

Nick’s discussion with Andrew Marr wasn’t the only thing I was proud of though. Sharon Bowles MEP, Vince Cable, Paddy Ashdown, Tim Farron and so many other senior Lib Dems have been standing up for the EU recently and in turn, our individuality in government. It’s the start of what we’ve all been striving for – Liberal Democrats in government shouting loud for what we believe in, striving for a different approach to that of the eurosceptic, anti-immigration Tory right and standing up for the common sense route.  While I’ve no doubt we’ve been doing all of this thus far in government, it’s only now that people are starting to pay attention. And while we’ve got people listening, we must do more of it.

If we as a party are to recover some of our lost support, we need to go back to being considered the ‘party of sense’. We need to put across why we couldn’t fulfil all our manifesto pledges, shout big about our achievements in government and continue to press for years that the public shouldn’t trust Labour again with the economy. Sitting in government appearing to nod at everything Cameron says is not what is best for Liberal Democrats and we need to use the EU veto as the launch of our General Election campaign strategy.

Most of Lib Dems agree we need to express our individuality in the coalition and see a return to community politics… and fast. This is what will win us back support and put us in a better position for the future.

There was no great plan for a rupture. What some Tories now see as Mr Cameron’s Churchillian moment was rather the result of an inept negotiating strategy placed in the hands of an inexperienced prime minister.

So what did happen? On last night’s Newsnight former Lib Dem leader Lord Ashdown set out a summary of events… The Lib Dems and Conservatives agreed a joint negotiating position ahead of the summit, with Nick Clegg extensively involved in the preparations and reaching out to potential British allies in Europe. However, the responsibility for undertaking the negotiations themselves lay with Mr Cameron and his team of advisers, and their inability to make a deal stick led to the agreed Coalition position unravelling.

Mr Stephens’ account takes us further into the detail:

Sir Jon Cunliffe, Mr Cameron’s Treasury adviser, is being blamed. He decreed that the Foreign Office be locked out of summit preparations. This precluded any serious diplomatic groundwork in other European capitals. Sir Jon insisted that the eurozone could be “bounced” at the 11th hour into accepting a British protocol to protect the City. This was a negotiating tactic he picked up while working for Gordon Brown. The possibility that the other leaders might simply say No was discounted. The Treasury, as one of its own once memorably remarked, has never really understood “foreigners”.

As things turned out, Mr Cameron had misread Angela Merkel’s intentions following a meeting in Berlin; and Nicolas Sarkozy had a score to settle after George Osborne recently compared France’s predicament with that of Greece.

Mr Clegg was as surprised as everyone else in Downing Street with the outcome. He had been assured that the Treasury paper was an opening gambit, but in the event it was presented as an ultimatum; and presented at an hour when European leaders wanted only to retire to their hotel beds. There was no plan B. All in all, as negotiating fiascos go, this one was at the top of the A-list.

Such an account explains much, including Nick Clegg’s initially neutral public response.

If you re-read what Nick Clegg said on Friday in the wake of the Prime Minister’s veto of a European treaty what is clear is that the position he defended is the agreed Coalition negotiating position: “The demands Britain made for safeguards, on which the coalition government was united, were modest and reasonable. They were safeguards for the single market, not just the UK. There were no demands of repatriation of powers from the EU to Britain and no demands for a unilateral carve-out of UK financial services. What we sought to ensure was to maintain a level playing field in financial services and the single market as a whole. This would have retained the UK’s ability to take tougher, not looser, regulatory action to sort out our banking system.” Every word of that statement relates to the agreed Coalition position; Nick does not once touch on the conduct of the negotiations.

What Nick Clegg may not have known (probably could not have known) on Friday morning was how the Prime Minister had played the hand they had jointly agreed. When he did — and realised that Cameron’s position was the result of poor negotiating rather than deliberate strategy — he was not afraid to make clear his dismay at the outcome for the UK.

Almost always in politics when the choice comes to believing cock-up or conspiracy, I’ll opt to believe the cock-up theory. That appears to be the truth of what really happened behind the scenes of Mr Cameron’s decision to use the UK’s veto.

However, there is one (suspicious) part of me that wonders about the involvement of the Treasury, and in particular George Osborne and his tactics-first, ultra-euroscepticism: might he have been secretly pleased that the Prime Minister’s failed attempts at brinkmanship have resulted in driving a wedge between the UK and the rest of the Europe?

In the short-term at least Mr Cameron’s failure is an undoubted success, with polls showing majority backing for his hardline stance, and right-wing papers that just a week ago portrayed the Prime Minister as a vacillating John Major Mark II figure now hailing him as Churchillian. But political success can have a remarkably short shelf-life (as the last political leader to be compared to Churchill must sometimes reflect), and Mr Stephens points out the longer-term reality of the Prime Minister’s strategy:

Mr Cameron’s coalition is now in a lose-lose position. If the eurozone fails in the effort to rescue the single currency, Britain will be caught in the ensuing economic tsunami. If the euro is eventually saved by the creation of a fiscal union, Britain will find itself marginalised in European Union decision-making in areas pivotal to its own prosperity.

Here’s a sample from Paddy’s piece:

These are confusing times for supporters of Nato. On the one hand, the alliance has completed its mission in Libya without a single casualty. On the other, its future looks less certain than ever in the face of fiscal austerity, increasingly uneven burden-sharing between members, and America’s dwindling faith in its utility.

The fact that the US feels this way is understandable. In 2000, America’s share of Nato defence spending was around 50 per cent. Today, it has risen to 75 per cent. With peace at home, many European nations have redirected spending towards other priorities, free-riding off the US when it comes to threats overseas. And this problem is set to get worse, since every European Nato member is set for severe defence cuts – including France, whose own equivalent of Britain’s defence review begins next year.

This decline in capability has come about not just because we are spending less, but because we continue to spend badly. Military funding is channelled through dozens of separate national programmes and structures, creating enormous duplication and failing to achieve economies of scale. While Europe has half a million more military personnel than America, it can deploy just a fraction of them overseas.

Nato is also being weakened by changes in US foreign policy: as the then defence secretary, Robert Gates, said earlier this year, his country is starting to look west as much as east. What America sees in Nato is yesterday’s vision of the future: allies with declining capabilities, reluctant to put troops in harm’s way, and an institution ill-suited to addressing US interests – especially with defence cuts looming in Washington as well.

To see where this is leading, consider what happened in Libya. After the initial air strikes, the US played a substantial but supporting role, encouraging Britain and France to lead the operation. As a result, the mission suffered from significantly reduced firepower, with less than a quarter of the planes used in Kosovo, flying less than a fifth of the sorties, and ammunition running dangerously low. As in Bosnia in the 1990s, it exposed how poorly equipped, organised and prepared Europe is for serious and sustained missions, even in its own backyard.

From the BBC:

Lord Ashdown, a former special forces commando, tells the story of the ‘Cockleshell Heroes’, who led one of the most daring and audacious commando raids of World War II… Lord Ashdown recreates parts of the raid and explains how this experience was used in preparing for one of the greatest land invasions in history, D-day.

As well as the documentary, Lord Ashdown’s Telegraph interview covers Europe, the Liberal Democrats and the art of compromise:

When Ashdown became leader in 1988, no one would have predicted there would be a Lib Dem as Deputy Prime Minister: “Did I think the Lib Dems would get this far?” he muses. “I didn’t even think they’d survive. I used to wake up sweating, thinking the party of Gladstone is going to end with Ashdown – it was very much touch and go.”
Ashdown recognised that the party he saw as a “furry little herbivorous think tank on the edges of British politics” needed to change, but the centrist ground he chose was colonised and superseded by Tony Blair. Is it difficult, then, to see Clegg succeed? “I don’t think I’d have been as good as Nick Clegg, in all honesty,” he says. “But, of course, I’d have loved to. It spoils my whole afternoon that I haven’t been prime minister.”

Clegg himself has paid a price: from being the subject of “Cleggmania” during the 2010 election, he has been vilified since. A new book claimed last month that he had done a deal with his wife Miriam that he would only serve one term. Ashdown dismisses this: “No… I know this man very well; he is incredibly comfortable in his own skin… I can think of no one in the party who comes anywhere near Nick when it comes to being Lib Dem leader and I can’t think of a single person in the party who’s foolish enough to believe they do.”

Read the full piece in the Telegraph.

Watch The Most Courageous Raid of WWII at 9pm tomorrow, Tuesday, on BBC2 (except Scotland).

Here’s an extract:

If there is one thing more fraught, more attended by failure and more difficult to do than fighting a war, it is building the peace which follows. Our modern wars are fought in weeks or months – but building the peace is measured in decades. Wars are violent and swift. Building peace is long, painful and almost always untidy. Winning wars needs decisiveness. Building peace needs strategic patience.

What happens next in Libya is unlikely to be tidy or elegant to watch. Get used to it. The country is tribal by nature and the war has been tribal in its conduct. Finding a constitution – probably a highly devolved one – that can provide a framework to contain these pressures is not going to be easy – especially with such oil revenues to be distributed, so much religion to infect minds, and so many arms in the peoples’ hands.

But there are strengths to build on. There are some very able individuals who are more than capable of efficiently running their country, given a chance. With the world waiting at Tripoli’s door for its precious high-quality crude, Libya will not be poor. There is real international goodwill. And, it seems, a desire among Libya’s people for genuine democracy, though – note please London, Paris and Washington – one which will more likely see Turkey’s Islamic democracy as its model, than our secular ones.

We must only help where we are asked to. This was a different war – we played our part to enable the Libyan people to fight on their own terms. We have to be prepared to let them build their own peace on the same basis. Interference will be unwise and unwelcome as they have already made clear. Sending in floods of uninvited businessmen to capture contracts as reward for our help is not likely to be well received. Ditto dispatching the kind of small army of wet-behind-the-ears economic graduates to “help them rebuild their economy”, which we sent to Iraq in the early days.

You can read Paddy’s piece in full here.

Here are a couple of excerpts:

The reasons for European integration are not weaker today than they were when this all started; they are stronger. The EU’s founding fathers saw European integration as a means to avoid repeating our past and as the right response to postward turmoil. We should see it as the best means to assure our future and the right reaction to the global turmoil that we face.

And here’s Paddy’s formula for change:

I can agree that it would be better if the EU adopted the principle that in matters such as agriculture and fishing, it would set the targets and leave it more to member nations to decide how to achieve them. I agree, too, that it should accept more variation in social norms and intervene much less in those matters that touch on the services of citizens within their own countries. I do not take the view that the single market requires us to be as rigid on these matters as we currently are.

You can read Paddy’s piece in full over at The Times here (£).

However, a glance at our daily political programming would suggest that the BBC is still pandering to the cosy duopoly of Labour and the Tories.

Perhaps this cosy duopoly is most evident on Thursday nights with “This Week” (BBC 1 11.30pm ish), promising “politics with attitude and without the spin”. Andrew Neil (ex-Conservative party employee and presenter) is joined by Michael Portillo (Conservative) and a Labour guest to debate the top topics from the world of politics.

Where are the Liberal Democrats? Apart from the occasional appearance by big beasts such as Charles Kennedy and Paddy Ashdown, the Liberal Democrats are entirely unrepresented.

This under-representation is compounded by the fact that I often find myself watching this cosy duopoly batter Nick Clegg, Chris Huhne or the Lib Dems in general without a right of reply. Contrary to the show’s claim to be “without the spin”, this is an exercise in political socialisation.

“This Week” should be called “The Duopoly Show” and not mislead viewers as to its underlying intentions.

The format of the programme, as with the participants, reflects this duopoly with two opposing sofas, one of which is inhabited by the representatives of the duopoly, a Labour and Conservative figure, and the other by everyone else.

We need no reminding that the Liberal Democrats are now part of the government and therefore an integral part of British political life. Any programme therefore funded by licence fee monies deserves equal representation of cross-party views, not just those of the duopoly status quo.

Many of the comments contained herein were submitted to the BBC complaints department. Their reply was – “audience research indicates widespread confidence in the impartiality of the BBC’s reporting”.

Tune in this week and judge for yourselves…

While the Candidate Leadership Programme seems like a good idea, giving candidates from underrepresented groups the support and training they need to go on and, hopefully, become MPs, I believe it is destined to failure for the same reasons that shortlists are not the answer.

They both ignore the real problem.

Shortlists in particular are a quick-fix, tinkering round the edges, top-down attempt to create the façade that we are a party that is representative of the whole country. The truth is we aren’t. A quick look around the conference hall and most fringe meetings would have demonstrated what the real problem is, not just that our Parliamentary Party is “too male and too pale” but that the Party as a whole is “too male and too pale”.

Looking around conference is of course not the only way to judge the party’s grassroots diversity, so what do other measures say? I’ve not got figures for other diversity (and in a comment Paul has said “my post was probably more relevant in the case of BAMEs than women”), but on gender the story is more nuanced than this:

• Overall, the party’s membership is slightly more male than female, with 52%-48% the frequently quoted figure. That’s approximately the reverse of the actual UK population, but still pretty evenly balanced. In other words, the hugely lopsided gender imbalance at most levels of elections can’t be put down to the party not having recruited enough women to the party. If the party’s election winners reflected the party’s overall membership the collective picture would look very different.
• At the local level, the proportion of Liberal Democrat councillors who are female has been stalled at 30-35% for the last two decades. Hopes that social changes will gradually over time remove the gender imbalance amongst those elected to public office look likely to be dashed.
• The only elected level at which the proportion of females amongst those elected is significantly higher for Liberal Democrats than for other parties is the European Parliament, reflecting the knock-on effect of introducing zipping (see link for full figures).

The past is not a sure guide to the future, but it can help illuminate the choices – and this trio of evidence from previous experience goes a long way to explaining why people such as Paddy Ashdown have, as Paul pointed out, changed their minds over the years and moved in favour of more radical action.

I was most struck when Paddy Ashdown, during the Guardian debate, seemed to shift from his previously held position and advocate the introduction of shortlists or “zipping” if the current leadership programme failed to make any significant impact.

I am completely opposed to the introduction of shortlists but I fear that many in the Party, like Paddy, will renew the push for them if the leadership programme does not have the desired results.

While the Candidate Leadership Programme seems like a good idea, giving candidates from underrepresented groups the support and training they need to go on and, hopefully, become MPs, I believe it is destined to failure for the same reasons that shortlists are not the answer.

They both ignore the real problem.

Shortlists in particular are a quick-fix, tinkering round the edges, top-down attempt to create the façade that we are a party that is representative of the whole country. The truth is we aren’t. A quick look around the conference hall and most fringe meetings would have demonstrated what the real problem is, not just that our Parliamentary Party is “too male and too pale” but that the Party as a whole is “too male and too pale”.

Which is why I am pessimistic about the leadership programme. It’s all very well offering training and support for female and BAME candidates but if we don’t have enough in the first place, then it’s not going to change anything.

If we want more PPCs and, in turn more MPs, who are female or from ethnic minorities then we need more people from these groups as activists and members. This is a grassroots issue. The focus of the party needs to be from the bottom up not the top down. We need to dedicate our time and energy to diversifying our party at a local level, making a concerted effort to attract new people from a wider range of society instead of trying to shoe-horn in a few token MPs so we can all feel better about ourselves.

We need to knock on doors in areas we don’t usually canvass in; we need to find issues that resonate with different communities and show them we are fighting for things that concern them and we need to take the message of what we’re already doing and demonstrate that we’re a Party they can be part of.

If we truly want to make our Party diverse and representative then we have to move away from any thoughts of taking the easy, quick (not to mention illiberal) option, accept it will be hard work and get on with it. A Party that is diverse at a grassroots level will deliver us a diverse Parliamentary Party.

I also met up with some people in both Liverpool and Glasgow and managed to bend their ears about issues, as well as adding new and interesting people to Facebook. I attended some very interesting training session – including the very exciting software program used by the Obama Campaign CONNECT and an informative session on getting selected and time management with Liverpool’s own Erica Kemp. I didn’t get to spend as much time as I hoped in the main hall, but glad I took up the opportunity to use the training available. I also managed to go to a session run by ALDC with Tim Farron and Paddy Ashdown on the panel.

I found that the Conference was well run and am proud of the way Birmingham handled itself. I had heard of problems and even violence against Conference attendees when it was in Sheffield, but quickly felt at ease outside the main venues.

I did have a very interesting conversation after hijacking a lost lobbyist on the way to New Street Station on my way home to Liverpool. When I asked why he was at conference, he said he was talking to MPs and policy makers on landmines. You have to wonder if he would have been doing this at one of our conferences a few years ago. He also said he was probably more likely to vote for Nick Clegg after hearing him speak and do a Q&A.

It sounds like a cliche I know, but I am definitely fired up for Conference in Newcastle in 2012, and have already booked my accommodation. For anyone debating about whether to attend, do it. It is an amazing feeling to be part of the decision process, in a way only Liberal Democrat conference representatives are.

In one of the training sessions, we were asked to talk about any hobbies we had. I did comment that with work and politics, I don’t have any time for hobbies, and it was said that if you are doing politics properly, that is the way it should be!

I definitely have the conference bug!

Senior Liberal Democrats have accepted that the party may need to resort to all-female shortlists or other tough measures to increase the representation of women and minority groups among its MPs…

Tim Farron MP … said that he was “utterly embarrassed” that only seven of the party’s MPs were women.

He said:

“Over the years we’ve had several debates on the crushing lack of women in the House of Commons, and our zero lack of representation from black and ethnic minority communities, and the debates we’ve always had are about the practical way to create equality and the liberal argument about how people should get there on their own merits,” he said. “Frankly I think we’re beyond that time.” …

Former LibDem leader Paddy Ashdown, who also spoke on the panel, said that the lack of women LibDem MPs winning election to parliament during his tenure was the “biggest failure” of his political career.

“I don’t like women shortlists or shortlists for anybody. I find them illiberal and I find them demeaning to those who are put in that position, and I find them potentially insulting.”

Interrupting applause from party activists at that point, however Ashdown added:

“The truth is that we have failed at this for too long, and if the leadership programme doesn’t work then I think we should be doing this. If this is the only way, through a temporary mechanism, to crack this nut that we have singularly and shamefully failed to crack, then I’ll be in favour of it.”

At a meeting of the Liberal Democrat History Group later in the day, Paddy Ashdown repeated his change of view, saying that the sort of measures he used to oppose would be necessary if the leadership programme did not succeed.

That Lib Dem Punch & Judy show

(Available on YouTube here.)

Paddy Ashdown: the Movie

(Available on YouTube here.)

John Cleese’s party election broadcast (no, not the PR one, or the local election one… the later one)

(Available on YouTube here.)