Author Archives: Simon Banks

Long ago, working in primary care management, I was struck by how the partners of an excellent GP practice, replacing a retiring partner, had not even asked themselves how their area might change over 20 years or so and whether this might influence their choice. In my Liberal Democrat local party and region, it was clear to me many local parties were stumbling on, doing what they knew, grumbling about too much work and not enough people, knowing their activists were ageing, but doing little to find new ones: plenty of hard work, but no vision, no strategy.

So I became an advocate for local party Development Plans before the English Party pushed the issue and made a development plan a constitutional requirement for local parties (that’s fixed, then).  As Chair of my Region’s Development Committee, I’ve been encouraging and advising on the things ever since.

If you’re in a hole, discover how deep the hole is and how to get out of it. If you’ve made progress but reached a plateau, identify the pinch points and what can be done. A basic tool for this is a SWOT analysis (not to be confused with heavily armed police: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.).

If this is a good idea for local parties, as I’m convinced it is, what about higher levels?

Regional Parties will have strategies, but they may well not include a hard look at existing strengths and weaknesses. The English Party and the Federal Party have various plans, often quickly forgotten, but apparently nothing like a Development Plan; strategy means the next election (as in Ed Davey’s “Guardian” interview) and SWOT analysis could be embarrassing.

What would a SWOT analysis for the whole party right now look like?

Of course, strengths would include 72 MPs, with the credibility the election result brings us. Another would be an HQ election operation, unlike 2015 and 2019, that listens to local feedback, looks at Connect input and opinion polls and reacts accordingly. Then, a comparatively open and democratic party, compared to Labour’s obsessive top-down control; and many hardworking councillors.

Weaknesses? Are there any? There are. For a start, after the surge in 2019, by all accounts party membership went into deep and spectacular decline, though figures have not been published for some time. Our campaigns need activists; activists are drawn from the membership; so a deep decline in membership is serious, possibly fatal. Increases at general election time are normal; we hear this has happened, but how much? Without openness about the figures, no judgment can be made. But will new members fall away as most of the 2018-9 recruits did? Local parties should prioritise not just recruiting members, but engaging them, and not just in leafleting. Yet the pressure from the centre is for an almost Soviet programme of getting them working and harder, harder, harder! Fine, but can they also have fun?

The local elections produced brilliant results overall, considering we were defending seats won in a good year. But there is always a downside and we best progress when we consider the downside honestly and try to deal with it.

In five authorities – all in the North or North Midlands – we lost our sole or only two councillors: Bassetlaw, Bury, East Staffordshire, Sandwell (lost two) and Stockton on Tees. When one councillor is elected in such places, it’s usually a very hardworking community activist – though in one or two cases, the lone or two councillors may have been survivors of a once-sizeable group. We have broken through in Middlesbrough, but I couldn’t see any other cases where we went from none to one or more (though in Maldon, we’d gained our first in a by-election and then went up to five). So the outcome is: FEWER councils have Liberal Democrat councillors.

In the discussion – and sales talk – around the party reform proposals, people often talk of creating a movement, sometimes equated to a supporter scheme. Sometimes, as in that video, it’s presented as an alternative to a political party. There is a danger of positive language being repeated till people stop asking what it means. So what is a movement and how’s it different from a political party?

“Movement” suggests moving – towards some shared goal. Parties can do that, but you can’t have a movement for not changing things much. Movements require mass participation.

Any party can call itself a movement. In France in 1945, some traditional parties were blamed for France’s unpreparedness for the war and others for collaborating. So a new party was called the “Mouvement Republican Populaire” – People’s Republican Movement. It was organised as a traditional party with mainly unclear goals.

Parties have a defined membership, organisation at local and national levels, a leader or leaders and some process for choosing people with particular responsibilities. Movements may or may not have these things.

Many movements campaign for something narrowly defined. Consider the 19^th century movements for abolition of slavery in the UK and the US. The UK movement worked through traditional parties. The US movement founded its own parties (Free Soil, then Republican). Other genuine movements include the Feminist movement, the Green movement, CND and nationalist separatist movements. Some have formed parties, others not.