Bournemouth was a hit, no shambolic disaster

“What’s the name of your leader?” a constituent asked me the day after the Lib Dem conference closed. Luckily, it was a question I could answer with some confidence.  “Nick Clegg”.  “Oh yes, that’s right.  Saw him on the news last night.  Good speech.”

That seemed  a perfectly reasonable, and probably typical, comment from someone with no particular interest in politics who’ll still most likely be casting their vote in the General Election; not to mention the sort of person every political party is looking to engage with.

So how does that fit with William Le Breton’s claim that Bournemouth was a “disaster”?  Or with Mark Littlewood’s claims that the conference “ended in confusion” and was “shambolic“?

The post-conference poll bounce has the Lib Dems up between 2 and 8% in ComRes, YouGov, Ipsos Mori and ICM.  True, post-conference bounces rarely last, but that boost is pretty good and suggests the voters don’t share the more downbeat verdicts on Bournemouth. (Ipsos Mori, which has the Lib Dems up 8% on 25, a point ahead of Labour, looks like an outlier but still gives a pleasant warming glow).

It helped that the media coverage bore some relation to what the party was actually talking about.  Too often in the past the message the party wanted to portray has been completely ignored by journalists far more interested in gossip about whether the leader is too old/too inexperienced/too often on chat shows or, failing that, which of Labour and the Tories the party is most likely to cuddle up to.

We had a fair dollop of that this year, but the leadership surely has reason to be satisfied that the central message – the Lib Dems as a serious party ready and able to make the changes needed to tackle the black hole in the Government’s finances – came across reasonably successfully, and seems to have gone down well with voters.

Two issues concerned many activists.  Both are important, but neither comes even close to making the conference a shambolic disaster.

There’s an issue with our leaders appearing to make policy on the hoof, as with Vince’s “Mansion tax”.  Whether or not it’s right, good or popular, some of Vince’s senior colleagues were a little taken aback to find it being presented as policy in all but name before anyone else had even been consulted.

It could have been better handled, and points to a wider challenge the party faces.  In an era when neither Labour nor the Tories make policy democratically, how does our party balance the benefits of a slow, democratic and reflective policy process with the need for the leadership to catch the mood of the moment and get ahead of the media agenda.

There’s also the question of whether the message at conference was the right one.  William Le Breton argues Clegg should have offered “hope, vision and leadership” and failed to do so.  Might he have a point?  There will always be disagreements about messages and time will tell how well Clegg and Cable’s story of wise austerity plays.

Before anyone passes final judgement on Bournemouth, don’t forget there’s rather more to any conference than getting the message across to the electorate.  The many training courses that will see hundreds of activists and councillors better able to spread Liberal Democracy.  The policy debates that took the party forwards (the culmination of many hours of effort and no little expense on the part of the unsung heroes of the policy working groups).  The (mostly) moral-boosting speeches.  The opportunity for friends old and new to network (a modern euphemism for getting drunk together).  The  professionalism of the whole event which, thanks not least to the small army of unpaid stewards, ran remarkably smoothly.

Bournemouth raised some questions the party leadership would do well to address, but it was no disaster.  It was a successful, well run and enjoyable conference in which the leadership probably overstepped the mark a bit on policy and the message may or may not have been the ideal one.  As Lib Dem conferences go, something of a hit all round.

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28 Comments

  • Tom Papworth 29th Sep '09 - 12:54pm

    “Before anyone passes final judgement on Bournemouth, don’t forget there’s rather more to any conference than getting the message across to the electorate…”

    That paragraph is all true as far as it goes, but let’s face facts. The success or otherwise of a Conference is measured entirely by its outward-facing aspects. If it has a positive effect on the electorate it is a good conference; a negative effect makes it a bad conference; and a neutral effect makes it marginally worthwhile as a party fund-raiser and jolly.

    What is interesting is that the effect of the press coverage seems to reflect the factual aspects of reporting rather than the opinion pieces. The op eds and comment pieces were fairly critical, but it seems be have been the bits that conveyed our message that voters listened too. This is interesting and perhaps useful. I believe that we need to recognise that conference is entirely about conveying our message and that we therefore need to have a much closer eye to how it will look, but it does appear that we can worry too much about what the Sniping Heads say.

    Having said that, the Mansion Tax announcement was handled badly and Clegg should have either prepared the ground for backing off the tuition fees promise or avoided picking the fight. We still have a habit of making publicity blunders around Conference time.

  • Tom Papworth 29th Sep '09 - 12:55pm

    Hmm… Another formatting error :o(

  • According to Ipsos MORI, the fieldwork for their poll was done *before* Conference on the 17th to 19th Sept

  • Simon Titley 29th Sep '09 - 5:32pm

    Bournemouth – disaster or success? While I wouldn’t go so far as to use the word ‘disaster’, Iain Roberts’s conclusion that the conference was “something of a hit all round” just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

    The conference was a wasted opportunity. We are at one of those historic turning points – 1906, 1945, 1979 – when the prevailing orthodoxy has failed and the country needs to choose a different direction. And the 2010 general election should be a ‘big choice’ election.

    The Liberal Democrats need to exploit this opportunity. The party’s central message should be its distinct vision of the ‘good society’ rather than the pain it seeks to impose, even if some pain is part of the package. Instead, the party offered a combination of muddle and empty slogans.

    Let’s deal with the muddle first. On the Saturday of conference, advance copies of the press release of Nick Clegg’s rally speech spoke of ‘savage’ cuts. On delivery, ‘savage’ was changed to ‘serious’. At a press conference the next day, Danny Alexander denied there was any significant difference between ‘savage’ and ‘serious’, prompting BBC reporter Iain Watson to observe that no-one had ever been ‘serioused’ by a dog. This shambles was just the first in a series of hour-by-hour policy shifts and ‘clarifications’ that succeeded only in delivering mixed messages to the outside world.

    Then there was Vince Cable’s announcement of the ‘mansion tax’ – a potentially good policy but it turned out that no-one knew whether valuations would be based on house sales, Land Registry figures, or a complete revaluation of properties across the country. Nor did it take account of the high value of relatively modest homes in London. And of course, none of the other parliamentary spokespeople had even been told in advance – let alone consulted – about this new policy, so some of them responded by attacking it in public.

    Then there was the biggest row of all, on tuition fees, which was totally unnecessary but which was provoked deliberately as part of a half-baked ‘Clause Four Moment’ strategy intended to make Nick Clegg look ‘strong’. As James Graham pointed out, “conference felt like having a drunk pick a fight with you in a pub”. But all that this posturing achieved was to create confusion about what one of the party’s flagship policies now is.

    And the worst of it is that the party’s media spinners had the sheer brass neck to claim that the conference’s problems were due to ‘unruly delegates’/‘beards and sandals’/‘left-wing trouble-makers’ (take your pick) when the true culprits were in the leader’s bunker.

    A ‘successful’ conference would not have provoked 18 members of the Federal Policy Committee to write a letter to the Guardian. It would not have provoked a row at last Tuesday’s parliamentary party meeting. And it would not have been used as a platform for ‘policy-making by PR stunt’, such as the mansion tax debacle.

    Then there is the problem of empty slogans. ‘A Fresh Start for Britain’ is littered with them, as was the leader’s speech. What do such over-used words as ‘fairer’, ‘greener’ and ‘stronger’ actually mean? As Bill le Breton put it, in his article in the September edition of Liberator, “The trouble with using advertising executives in politics is that you end up with your values described in the same words they use in their day jobs to sell toilet disinfectant.”

    Quite apart from his infatuation with advertising executives, Nick Clegg’s basic problem is his refusal to repudiate neoliberalism, the dominant ideology of the past thirty years and the bad idea at the heart of this country’s woes. This prevents him articulating a trenchant critique of the economic crisis and it prevents him sounding sufficiently distinct from New Labour or the Tories. The party’s lack of impact stems from this reluctance to let go of TINA (‘There Is No Alternative’).

    For me, the failure of the conference was summed up by an experience on the Tuesday evening. I returned to my hotel room before dinner and turned on the TV news. The conference rated below a story about the break-up of Chas & Dave. And in view of all the confusion and bickering on display, perhaps it is just as well.

  • Simon Titley 29th Sep '09 - 5:36pm
  • sanbikinoraion 30th Sep '09 - 11:06am

    Nor did it take account of the high value of relatively modest homes in London.

    I wish people would stop repeating this stupid talking point. Yes, houses in London are more expensive than everywhere else but a cursory search on Rightmove for properties between £700k-£1m shows that you can get pretty much any size of house any normal person/family requires (there’s a six-bed semi in Acton for £700k) without dropping seven figures on it – in fact, there are plenty of 4+ bed houses for sale in London for less than half a million pounds. If your house is worth £1m then you’re loaded, or you’re very lucky to have benefitted enormously from house price inflation and now have a very valuable asset to sell or borrow against.

  • Or not very well off at all and have a large mortgage!

    Property values are a terrible proxy for wealth which is one of the many reasons why the Mansion Tax is a silly idea and – despite Vince’s pamphlet – not actually our policy

  • sanbikinoraion 1st Oct '09 - 9:56am

    Or not very well off at all and have a large mortgage!

    … and what are they using to pay that very large mortgage, exactly? Is it money? Even at 2% over 40 years, a £500,000 house would entail repayments of £1500 per month. At 5%, it’s £2400 per month! A £1m house at 5% is going on £5000 per month – that’s a salary of £90k just to pay the mortgage, all other costs aside.

    My and my partner’s salary combined is about £50k, we have a large deposit and our bank won’t lend us £300k, never mind £1m. What planet are you on?

  • Herbert Brown 1st Oct '09 - 10:35am

    sanbikinoraion

    This is what puzzles me a bit about some of those who are keen on shifting taxation from income to property.

    Your justification of the proposed “mansion tax” is apparently that people who live in valuable houses generally have large incomes. In that, there seems to be an implicit recognition that, after all, the natural criterion for the fairness of taxation is income. So why not just tax income?

  • “So why not just tax income?”

    I’d be happy with a system whereby income was actually taxed. The problem with the system (as well documented) is that too many people are able to avoid paying income tax. It’s one of the superficial attractions of a Unitax system.

    Taxing fixed assets is considerably easier in practical terms as no-one has yet managed to move a Knightsbridge property to a tax haven.

  • sanbikinoraion 1st Oct '09 - 1:35pm

    Herbert, Hywel,

    Surely income is a useful thing that we want to encourage? Surely much better to minimize income tax because, as a transaction tax, the higher it is the more potentially beneficial transactions it is ruling out. On the other hand, a wealth tax taxes stockpiled income that isn’t being used for anything productive. Much better that someone live in a £500k house and invest £500k in their own business than just living in a £1m house.

    (At least, I *think* that’s what Keynes said…)

  • sanbikinoraion 1st Oct '09 - 1:37pm

    Oh, and don’t forget that there’s an awful lot of money sloshing around in this country that was not taxed as income when it was received and so moving to a purely income-based system would give the existing owners of capital an even bigger free ride than they are already getting.

    (Is that a muddled enough combination of glibertarianism and tubthumping socialism for you? 😛 )

  • Herbert Brown 1st Oct '09 - 1:43pm

    “Much better that someone live in a £500k house and invest £500k in their own business than just living in a £1m house.”

    That would be fine if there were a magic way to convert half the value of your house into ready cash, but as far as I know there isn’t (I wish there were!).

  • sanbikinoraion 1st Oct '09 - 1:52pm

    Er, move house…?

  • Herbert Brown 1st Oct '09 - 2:33pm

    But unless the plan is to demolish a lot of bigger houses and build a lot of smaller ones – which might be good for the demolition and construction industries, but doesn’t seem a terribly efficient (let alone environmentally friendly) idea – the average size of a house will still be the same.

    You may succeed in depressing prices at the upper end of the property market a little bit, but I don’t think you’ll succeed in shrinking the average size of a house.

  • sanbikinoraion 1st Oct '09 - 3:01pm

    Yes, because no-one ever redevelops larger properties into flats. This is all sort of tangential to your original point, of course, which was that incomes should be taxed instead of wealth, and hopefully I have gone at least a little way to suggest why one might want to tax wealth.

  • Herbert Brown 1st Oct '09 - 4:00pm

    “Yes, because no-one ever redevelops larger properties into flats.”

    But splitting larger properties into flats still doesn’t solve the problem.

    Apparently what you’re trying to achieve is a transfer of money from property ownership to other forms of investment. But if the property is still there, essentially the same amount of money is going to be tied up in its ownership. Obviously dividing a million-pound house into two half-million-pound flats wouldn’t do anything to change that. If they turned out to be £600,000 flats, you would end up with more money tied up in property!

    I think this is one of those arguments which is superficially attractive, but which on closer examination turns out not to have been thought out at all.

  • Herbert Brown 1st Oct '09 - 4:32pm

    Joe

    But ordinary people don’t “invest in property”, they buy a place to live. And they’ll still need somewhere to live, whatever the tax regime.

  • Herbert Brown 1st Oct '09 - 4:43pm

    _Maybe_ if you penalise corporate investment in property you can engineer some kind of deflation of the housing market, and I can see that could be beneficial to first-time buyers, though it would be mightily unpopular with home-owners in general.

    What it wouldn’t do is enable ordinary home-owners to transfer part of the value of their property into other investments, as sanbikinoraion suggested above. The value of their property would simply be decreased.

  • Herbert Brown 1st Oct '09 - 5:12pm

    Joe

    Well, this particular “mansion tax” isn’t going to influence anything significantly, because it’s too small – only about £1bn a year for a limited period.

    If you wanted a more extensive tax that would reduce property prices in general, then that would benefit first-time buyers, it would disadvantage people at the other end of the process, selling inherited property, and it wouldn’t have much practical effect on those in the middle (though it would give them an enormous “feel-bad” factor).

    In any case, it wouldn’t magically free up a lot of extra money for investment in other things.

  • re mortgages, sanbikinoraion is missing my point.

    Surely you would accept that someone with a 1m home and a 200k mortgage is better off than someone with a 1.2m home and a 500k mortgage? (ceteris paribus)

    Hence Vince’s idea (and let’s be clear, this is an idea, not party policy) is a very blunt instrument and an extremely poor proxy for a tax on wealth

    Interesting though it is to read about sanbikinoraion’s household income, it’s really not very relevant to this thread …

  • Libdem Guru 4th Oct '09 - 7:08pm

    A hit? don’t make me laugh. It was a PR disaster man!

    They had a chance and failed, yet again!

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