The Farron Review is an excellent piece of work, the east option as a party would have been to paint a glowing image of success following our General Election. Yet the review does not shy away from asking some difficult questions of our structures and what we can improve going forward.
The main area singled out for criticism is our candidates process. At the moment, our candidates process is that people who wish to stand for any office above that of a local councillor, must attend and pass, an approval day (think grad scheme assessment day). Once they have done so they are on the list of approved candidates and can put their name forward for any seat that advertises.
In addition to this, if someone wishes to stand for a body such as the London Assembly, or as a Police and Crime Commissioner, they must first pass the Westminster approval day, then take a conversion test to become an approved candidate for that body.
In England, this entire process is run by the English Party, leading to an extraordinary concentration of power in the hands of very few people. In Scotland and Wales, the state parties have control over their selection processes particularly for Holyrood and Cardiff Bay.
The English Party is not without its issues, principally inefficiency and opaque operating procedures. But their control of the candidates process is one of the more inappropriate functions they have control over.
This is because Westminster elections align with federal party boundaries so therefore should logically be a federal responsibility. In this vein, the Scottish and Welsh parties already do a decent job in running their selections for their parliaments but follow a broadly federal set of rules for Westminster.
In moving the decision making for Westminster elections to a federal level, we can press reset on a significant period of failure by the English party, to effectively run the process by which we end up with Liberal Democrat Members of Parliament.
Similarly, there is an elephant in the room, regional government is happening and whether or not we support it, Labour are delivering a set of Mayors to England.
The skillset to be a Mayor and the skillset to be an MP are quite different, as a Mayor your responsibility is primarily a governing one over a series of local or regional issues. Whereas an MP will more often than not, find themselves in opposition and be scrutinising the government of the day.
As mayors are regional figures, the principal applied in Scotland and Wales for our selections, should be applied here, and we should devolve the process for overseeing Mayoral and GLA selections to the regions.
The overall impact of this would be the removal of the process for candidates away from the English Party and vesting it in more accountable and transparent structures, giving our party the kick it needs to improve our candidates process significantly.
* Callum Robertson is a teacher and member of the Federal Board. He is a Watford Borough Councillor.
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8 Comments
While I have some sympathy for the point your are trying to make, I do not believe that Scotland and Wales being responsible for candidate selection to their national parliaments is any precedent for giving selection power to English regions over mayoral candidates. English regions are not state Parties…Scotland and Wales are.
The England approval process and selections are devolved to regions. The problem is surely identifying the people who want to be PPCs and getting them to apply, and then having the adept and trained volunteers to do the assessment and then run the selections (luckily, not necessarily the same people). There are 543 MPs in England, 32 in Wales and 57 in Scotland, so involving the regions evens out the numbers a bit. And a basic/PPC approval process with extras bolted on as necessary seems better than running the two in parallel. Most mayors will doubtless be expected to have cut their teeth on a constituency as PPC in order to gain experience.
The party needs to select candidates much earlier.
Here in Barnet the candidate emerged during the actual General Election campaign and no literature went out.
No wonder we finished 5th!
I am one of those who has always thought that the English Party should be abolished. It is far too large and cumbersome even though many of its members do not attend meetings. In a “federal” system I have always supported the English Regions being at the same level as Scotland and Wales which tend to be over-represented at present. I have previously suggested that the Federal Board should have regional representation, with the present membership biased to the south-east. We should strengthen the Lib Dem’s Regional Parties and abolish the unnecessary tier of the English Party. Apologies to Baroness Caroline Pidgeon MBE.
I agree with David Murray – I’ve long thought the party has (at least) one tier of organisation too many, and the number of members who understand which tier is responsible for what could all be accomodated in a very small room.
We can’t move in revolutionary manner if we want to progress in a way that improves our Party whilst making room to test changes out.
I think that the report from Tim and the essential ‘others’ involved makes great reading offering as it does genuine progress. I would like to see an annual progress report which should follow a SMART implementation delivery plan.
Being a bit of an old hand around Lib Dem internal politics, I wonder why, among all the other recommendations so much more vital to the party’s future success, we have already had two Articles on this minor administrative issue.
I wonder what the English party have done to irritate the powers that be so much?
The democratic structures to whom the selectors are accountable are largely irrelevant. There are few enough people qualified and willing to do the job that we would end up doing the job. As David Warren says, the important thing is to start earlier.
The point about the need for separate processes for mayoral and parliamentry candidates is a good one though. It’s not just the different skillsets but the different timescales.