29 Comments

• Matt (Bristol) 10th Jul '19 - 2:35pm

  Can I ask how we would go about obtaining access to the text of motions not picked up for debate?

• Geoffrey Payne 10th Jul '19 - 3:12pm

  I have not seen the motion “Upholding the rules-based system of international relations, especially in the Middle East” but I think there is a serious lack of debate in the party on issues like this. Surely there should be a working group to look at foreign policy and how we use soft and hard power in the world?

• Zoe O'connell 10th Jul '19 - 4:51pm

  Matt – quickest route is to contact the authors of the motions you’re interested in.

  Geoffrey – We had a working group that reported back to Autumn 2018. Item F20, “Britain at the Heart of a Changing World (Britain in the World Policy Paper)”

• Tony Greaves 10th Jul '19 - 5:02pm

  Whether or not anyone knew where motions came from (and I cannot believe that lots of members did not know about some of them rendering the anonymity rule ridiculous – which it is anyway – the kind of stupid politically correct stuff which infects this country nowadays) the resulting list of motions for debate is very heavily biased to establishment sources. As for the strict rules as to “how motions are structured” this is now so ludicrous that all we get are motions full of waffle and blather and about five times as long as necessary. It is not surprising that nowadays there are so few motions submitted by local parties and members – the whole process is no longer fit for purpose. This is a criticism of the nonsensical process we have, not of the FCC who try to make it work. But should the FCC not be taking a long hard look at it all?

• Jennie 10th Jul '19 - 5:15pm

  Tony: I agree with you that many motions are too technocratic and waffley. Sadly they seem to be the vogue. And also, sadly, tend to be better written and contain fewer factual errors. Perhaps technocratic types are more fastidious about such things?

• David Becket 10th Jul '19 - 5:18pm

  @ Tony Greaves
  Agreed. Reading the motions as laid out in conference papers is like watching paint dry, and I was watching the same paint 20 years ago. Let us have an improved process for the Spring Conference.

• Jennie 10th Jul '19 - 5:20pm

  With regard to FCC doing some innovative stuff: I, personally, would love to. And I’d love to have a proper session on it at conference so members could tell us what they want.
  Sadly, between FPC, spokespeople assisted by FPC, and FB we get pelted with so many federal committee related things that adding more feels a bit cheeky…

• Nonconformistradical 10th Jul '19 - 5:27pm

  @Jennie
  “Tony: I agree with you that many motions are too technocratic and waffley. Sadly they seem to be the vogue. ”

  But that might be because of the rules about structuring motions – why can they not be simplified?

• TonyH 10th Jul '19 - 5:32pm

  Tony Greaves as usual speaking absolute sense.
  I’ve always thought there is a real arrogance in the party telling members ‘how to write a motion’. I’m sure the intentions are good, but if you think about it, it is incredibly patronising. Yes I know some motions are very poorly written, but the thing to do is to engage with the proposers and help them make it competent, while NOT squeezing the life of it. Policy motions don’t all have to read like civil service reports. Let’s have some variety, some brevity – and let the passion shine through them.
  I also think the anonymity rule is incredibly stupid and pointless. Our conference today is full of vibrant energetic young/new members. We need to shed the (small c) conservatism that we picked up during the Clegg years and start acting like a radical party again. I’m not just talking policy but the way we do things.
  Sorry Zoe this is not a criticism of you or the committee per se. You do a lot of work for no remuneration, but as you can see here there is a lot of frustration about how stuffy our conference agenda has become in recent years, in terms of its language and tone.

• Jennie 10th Jul '19 - 5:44pm

  There’s a how to write a motions page on the party website which a lot of us link people to when the drafting advice is “look this really is not submissible” – is this what people are referring to when they say “strict rules”?

  Because that’s not rules so much as “this is what we expect it to look like, you can deviate from this if you want, but use it as guidelines or a template if you’re unsure”.

  Saying there are strict rules for structure on conference motions is like saying there are strict rules for structure on poetry. There ARE, sort of, if you want to call the party’s advice “rules”, but once you’re good enough you don’t need to obey the advice you’re given to be successful.

• Jennie 10th Jul '19 - 6:15pm

  The anonymity rule was brought in at the behest of people who thought that MPs were getting favourable treatment. They weren’t, and still aren’t, at least not with me.

  As for engaging with people and helping them to rewrite, we do this, both with the drafting advice service prior to submission and with feedback and assistance offered for resubmission after rejection, if rejection happens.

  We can, however, only offer advice. We can’t make people take it.

• David Raw 10th Jul '19 - 7:03pm

  Tony is correct. They’re not motions, they are long winded undergraduate essays.

• Mark Valladares 10th Jul '19 - 7:07pm

  I find myself agreeing with one radical and disagreeing with another. There is nothing to prevent the honing of a potential motion well before the deadline, perhaps giving it a test run at a Regional Conference, for example, which would make those a bit more interesting, perhaps.

  A well-drafted motion allows people to debate the core material, rather than engage in entertaining but ultimately futile arguments about grammar, definition and meaning. And, this will be radical coming from one of LDV’s house bureaucrats, I trust FCC to have our wider interests at heart. They want a lively conference which persuades more members to attend, creates better, more applicable policy, because that’s a GOOD THING.

  I approve of the anonymity rule too. It makes it more likely that ordinary members can get policy ideas before Conference – the ideas are judged on their own merits, rather than on the importance (or otherwise) of the drafters. Besides, we think that anonymity is a good thing for exam marking and recruitment, so why is it a bad thing for our Conference?

• Alisdair McGregor 10th Jul '19 - 7:25pm

  It’s worth saying that FCC is by no means a monolithic entity, and by-and-large the people who you end up arguing with in the comments to articles like this are the ones who are mostly on the same side of the internal arguments as you are.

  Just bear in mind that the people who are bringing you these reports are the ones who are most dedicated to putting as much transparency as possible into the process.

• Richard Gadsden 10th Jul '19 - 9:34pm

  Because FCC don’t publish rejected motions – to save the authors and the party from public embarrassment – most people don’t appreciate just how badly written some of the motions are.

  There have been motions rejected because they don’t actually create any policy (they’re just a list of facts, without any proposals to do anything), motions rejected because they’re ridiculously illiberal, or motions that call for things that are utterly vague (I understand that “we should fix this” was proposed once, literally in those words).

  As long as the motion states explanatory facts clearly, explains the principles it adopts, explains what it wants to do, and the facts are actually true, the principles are actually liberal and the actions are actually possible, then it will do much better than the average motion.

• Ian 10th Jul '19 - 11:04pm

  As was demonstrated with painful regularity during the coalition, LibDems are very good on the detail of policy but poor at seeing, let alone selling,the political big picture.

  Conference debates should be about painting a big political offer for people outside the conference hall, not deciding the minutiae of policy detail that we’ll likely never get the chance to implement. As a younger delegate I used to keep all the lengthy turgid policy papers I picked up at conference, but for years now I have been binning the lot as essentially worthless.

• Alisdair McGregor 11th Jul '19 - 8:01am

  Ian: If you are just going to bin all the conference paperwork, please consider switching to the Green Pack, which has minimal actual paper, and using a tablet or smartphone to access the rest of the material in digital formats.

• Michael Kilpatrick 11th Jul '19 - 12:51pm

  Tony Greaves, I think it’s also the mechanism of our debates that needs fixing, not just the quality of the motions.

  Our Conference debates are not debates but often a series of monologues with little scope for rigorous intellectual challenging of proposals because in the whole, the proposers of an idea (or an amendment to an idea) are constrainted in the position they speak in the “debate”. There is absolutely no give or take in this and they have no control over the other general contributions from the floor that might be in their favour. I’m not not proposing that they should have that control, but those two factors together mean that there is limited opportunity to rebut arguments (whether fallacious or wholly accurate) made by opponents of their idea.

  This is just rubbish. A proper “debate” would still allow the usual timed speeches/interventions from the floor (selected by FCC as now) but would give a far greater flexibility to the main protagonists who should, I content, remain on the stage throughout. They would be able to reserve sufficient time to answer specific points made by others and in a timely fashion in the debate rather than having to wait for the Summator to deal with it right at the very end of the debate. Their overall speaking time can still be strictly controlled. It’s not rocket science to control the accumulated time of each individual.

  This is what we need, I think, if we’re to have “debates” and better policies.

• Leekliberal 12th Jul '19 - 8:54am

  Was the motion on a nuclear weapons free Britain not selected for debate because of poor phrasing or more likely because the ‘powers that be’ do not wish it to be discussed?

• Alisdair McGregor 12th Jul '19 - 12:02pm

  Leekliberal: 100% Poor phrasing. FCC will select motions on controversial topics *gladly*, but we won’t accept badly drafted motions.

  We want Conference to have some meat to it; an Agenda full of Motherhood and Apple Pie neither makes for an interesting debate, an interesting conference, nor on a commercial level does it drive attendance.

  But we’re not going to put awfully written, badly thought out motions on the Agenda. That makes Conference (& by extension the party) look bad.

• Roger Lake 12th Jul '19 - 3:41pm

  Ian, I do agree with your first paragraph: ” LibDems are very good on the detail of policy but poor at seeing, let alone selling,the political big picture.” And with the second, while endorsing the suggestion from Alisdair that digital is good: as with the LDV articles, I copy and paste and edit, then print, and then annotate with pencil, so I don’t use much paper. (Commercial white envelopes for A4 once folded, are good.)

  So “good on detail but poor at seeing, let alone selling, the political big picture” is an important and valid criticism, IMO, of much of what appears for the benefit of supporters like me — lifelong supporters who have perhaps only in the last few years realised how badly wrong things have been going (largely thanks to FPTP), and now how urgent the need for radical change on several fronts.

  Our having good policies will only be valuable if we get elected, and to do that the first requirement is the attention and then the approval of literally millions whose votes do not depend on minutiae but on your “political big picture”. Our party (except for the last few months) gets little exposure in the Media, and that means that for our prosperity our conferences are especially important occasions — almost the only time we get looked at by the voters we haven’t yet got.

• Gordon 12th Jul '19 - 4:23pm

  I agree with Tony Greaves and others. The process simply isn’t fit for purpose.

  Just to restate the obvious about the context: Labour has fallen into full civil war, the Tories are splitting into two, have put their faith in unicorns and become hostage to the far right. They will not long survive contact with reality.

  In all the long years that Liberals have dreamed of returning as a party of government there has never been such an opening – not even close.

  And yet … Lib Dem support still owes more to ‘none-of-the-above’ than any vision of a better future for the party hasn’t articulated any – just a mass of well-intentioned but disjointed detail. And that tracks back to the flawed design of the party’s policy process.

  We live in a representative democracy so the people who MUST lead are the MPs, the party leader and various spokespeople. As politicians, the key skill they require is the ability to simultaneously listen and lead, to articulate a vision and be practical, to be straight but cunning.

  Committees can do none of these things for they embody a top-down, process-heavy and slow approach; over 30 years’ experience tells us this simply doesn’t work. So why do we still do it this way? Conformity to tradition is no excuse (not to mention conflicting with the preamble to the constitution).

  Moreover, in opposition our elected politicians are little more than spokespeople for others’ policies and so don’t get the experience they need to survive in a rough world. In government, the ponderous policy making process breaks down completely and so we get naïve and inexperienced ministers falling into every trap set for them.

  It would be better by far to treat them like football managers – give freedom to develop their talents but hold them to account and summarily depose them the moment they lose the plot and/or go off piste. Very few politicians know when they have outlived their usefulness, so they have to be pushed; the party is NOT a vehicle for anyone’s personal ambition.

• Jennie 12th Jul '19 - 9:23pm

  “We must take power away from the members and give it to the MPs” is certainly an unusual argument to be put forth by a liberal…

• Andrew Hickey 12th Jul '19 - 9:25pm

  “We live in a representative democracy so the people who MUST lead are the MPs, the party leader and various spokespeople.”

  No. Those people, quite rightly, are held only to their consciences and the party whip in Parliament, because there they are the people’s representatives.

  But within the party they should have no more power than any other party member. Once elected, they are the people’s representatives, but when they’re standing for election, they’re representatives of the party, and the manifesto they stand on needs to be chosen by the party, not by them. And if they don’t like that, they’re welcome to find another party that is more suited to them.

  After all, there are currently twenty-six times as many Conservative MPs as there are Lib Dem ones. Saying that because we’re in a representative democracy (of sorts — it’s neither very representative nor very democratic) MPs rather than party members should choose party policy leads to the inexorable conclusion that the Conservative MPs should have twenty-six times as much say as the Lib Dem MPs.

  The party’s policy-making process *is* badly broken. But it’s badly broken in that the handful of MPs we have — most of whom are intensely small-c-conservative and afraid of saying anything controversial in case it loses some parish council seat in Little Piddleton — have far too much influence over it, rather than not enough.

• Andy Hinton 12th Jul '19 - 9:33pm

  There have, for years, been voices in the Lib Dems decrying our “slow, bureacratic, process-heavy” committee-driven structure, and saying that if only the party could throw off the dead hand of these democratic encumberances, we could seize the public imagination with a bit of bold, big picture, visionary leadership.

  And then in the last few years, there was a steady stream of people outside of our party, who had decided that whilst the Lib Dems were obviously an embarrassing mess who couldn’t possibly be the answer, nonetheless what Britain needed was a New Centrist Party, with An Exciting New Centrist Vision! And lo, they were founded. Admittedly, many of them (the Renews, the Advances, the Volts) face an uphill struggle in terms of cut-through and being seen as relevant, so you can argue that they are an unfair comparison.

  But I don’t think you can argue that with Change UK. They had media cut-through, they had fairly well known public figures, they were free from the kind of cumbersome federal structure that the Lib Dems had. In the end, they fizzled and died, because it turns out that MPs don’t necessarily have all the answers, and that even when there are only 11 of you, there will be differences and policy positions will still have to be thrashed out, and before you know it, you’re proposing such exciting New Visions For The Country as a 1p charge for automated tills.

  Meanwhile, thanks to their freedom from all that boring back-room process stuff, they did next to no vetting of candidates (several of whom defected during the Euros) and suffered a death of a thousand blows to their credibility from blunder after blunder.

  Is it perhaps time for the anti-committee voices to admit that maybe there is something that the Lib Dems are doing right, and the test-cases that look more like what they have been advocating since time began are… not overwhelmingly encouraging?

• Gordon 12th Jul '19 - 11:35pm

  Jennie,
  I did NOT say we should take power away from the people despite your putting it in quotes as if I had.
  You seem to imagine that leadership necessarily follows a Stalinist model. It can, but not for liberals. For us it should be about enabling and that is very different.
  Andrew Hickey is quite right to say MPs have too much power because it’s the wrong sort, exercised opaquely in committees and in practice therefore unaccountable. Bringing this out into the open would show up who is small c conservative. Combine that with accountability and we would have a far more transparent system, one that would respond far more to members’ concerns – and that would empower.

• David Watts 13th Jul '19 - 10:56pm

  As soon as I started reading the comments I knew that there would be at least one moaning that there wasn’t a policy on nuclear disarmament selected. I support unilateral nuclear disarmament but it is an issue that we have debated many times in the past. Sadly there are a small group of our members who seem to want to hijack the party on this subject and do not respect the fact that others have differing views. Although, after a long journey, I’ve arrived at a position of unilateralism the behaviour of that group almost makes me wish I hadn’t.

• Neil Sandison 14th Jul '19 - 3:03pm

  Looks like a very interesting conference with some interesting topics for debate .How can we make it more interactive like Jo Swinson has suggested with a good on -line presence
  and e debate from members who cannot for either financial or personal commitments attend .

• Michael Kilpatrick 15th Jul '19 - 10:59pm

  I’m baffled by Ian’s comments: “As was demonstrated with painful regularity during the coalition, LibDems are very good on the detail of policy but poor at seeing, let alone selling,the political big picture.”

  I can think of several policy motions and debates in which the detail was pretty poor and badly constructed. I can think of one policy paper recently which was so devoid of any detail beyond a shallow mantra that it’s laughable.

  “Conference debates should be about painting a big political offer for people outside the conference hall, not deciding the minutiae of policy detail that we’ll likely never get the chance to implement.”

  But when we suddenly find ourselves in government or in coalition but with empty policies with insufficient detail actually to translate into meaningful legislation, then what do we do?