As much as it saddens us we need to be realistic about our electoral chances over the next few years. We have the opportunity, especially with the ongoing collapse of the Labour Party, to do quite well, but we have a very tall mountain to climb – to come back from just 8 seats to a position of potential government is a tall order.
That doesn’t mean that we should give up, of course, but it does mean that we should look at alternative ways of having influence over the politics and governance of the country. If our prospects of getting into government soon are minimal, then we should consider how we can get other parties to implement our policies.
Policy is perhaps our greatest strength; because of the unusually broad selection of views inside the party, particularly in the sense of the left to right spectrum, our policy is more robustly examined before adoption than policy in many other parties. When Labour or the Conservatives release policy, it speaks of a specific author and outlook, and it is only at first exposure to the public and discerning voices that compromise is forced upon it. For the Lib Dems, compromise is something we do before we let other people see our policies.
This means that our policies are remarkably acceptable to a broad sweep of people, and how much the Lib Dems managed to achieve as the junior partner in the coalition government is not just testimony to the hard work of our MPs and party members working to support them, but also to the consistency and practicality of our policy positions.
If our goal is to make the UK a more liberal place, then we should focus on achieving that goal regardless of if we are in power or not. That means not just campaigning, but drafting policy with the intention of it being used by other parties, and even encouraging other parties to adopt it.
To facilitate this, we need a more open policy making process. My proposed solution would be a radical new way to draft, discuss and publicise policy.
The wiki format, as used by Wikipedia, is free and open, and requires remarkably few resources to establish and run. We could recruit moderators from the party, create pages for existing policy from conference records and the manifesto (thus also providing a much needed searchable resource for identifying current policy) and have those pages locked to moderator edits only, but open up the conversation tabs on those pages, allowing members not just to discuss policy that occurs to them, but to discuss our actual policies.
If someone wanted to propose a policy, they could then create a page on the wiki and let people alter and discuss it. When the process is complete, the page can be locked as “proposed policy” and taken to conference. If it comes back without being passed the page can be opened again and a new round of discussion can take place. If it passes, then the page is locked to all but moderators, and it’s marked as active policy of the party.
This would be a resource that not only would be fantastically useful for members looking to discover or create policy, but also members of the public wanting to discover what the policy is on a particular subject. As to our goal of influencing government, politicians of all parties could be encouraged to use it as a resource from which to build their own parties’ policies.
If we can be open, transparent, community-focused and free with policy making, and take those principles forwards to influence other parties, we can achieve a huge amount of our agenda even if we can’t get back into government in the next couple of election cycles. For some many things now, community content is king, and we should be ensuring that the Lib Dems make the most of it.
* Edwin Moriarty joined the Liberal Democrats in 2016.
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15 Comments
Good idea, but Labour’s leadership debate yesterday is not encouraging.
Tories always steal our ideas and claim them as theirs.
Edwin, welcome. I hope we meet your expectations.
But actually our strength has always been our campaigning zeal.
I commend any attempt to increase the flow of ideas and sound policies so you are to be praised for this concept.
I like online collaboration for such as open source software where there are convergent goals but a politcal debate tends (in online space) tends to become divergent very rapidly.
Also I appreciate your plan to create policy for the good of the nation but no one likes to work without even a little credit and any good new ideas would be stolen by the other parties if developed in public.
Edwin – I totally agree that we ought to be developing a wiki format for policy-making. I have said so before in comments and included just such an idea in my submission to the governance and policy-making consultations (I called it ‘wikipolicy’).
The dirty little secret of Lib Dem policy-making is that it’s mostly done in a remarkably small and closed little world, with a very top-down mind-set, a great deal of groupthink (read the preamble to the constitution and weep!) and no real way to tap into the expertise that exists in the party and among fellow-travellers. The policy establishment too often reacts to challenges it can’t answer or finds uncomfortable by simply blanking them. And, of course, it’s based on an entirely pre-Internet model, now as stale as last week’s bread.
In short there’s an immense potential upside for improvements that could be accessed with, as you say, relatively little work. That said, the devil would, as always, be in the detail and that would require a lot of careful thought plus a willingness to make changes if it didn’t quite work from the off as expected.
I also agree that we should manoeuvre other parties into implementing our policies. The perfect example of this is UKIP who, even when they had no MPs, had the Conservatives dancing to their tune, eventually with a highly successful outcome (from their POV).
In sad contrast the Lib Dems are more like those little fish that were briefly fashionable in salons a few years ago. They might nibble the establishment’s toes but they most certainly don’t threaten it and (on the national stage at least) are simply used as window dressing to give the impression of more political variety than in fact exists.
There’s a variety of online collaboration tools and with password protection we can reduce the risk of vandalism and plagiarism. It can’t be too open during drafting. You want to be able to debate a silly point without the press and other parties using it against us. Anything said would be Lib Dems support … Even if most don’t.
The danger is the members come up with better and more realistic policy than the leadership and researchers.
I suspect it would be a lot more effort than you imagine to set up and administer, especially the security, and the diversity of opinion may make agreement impossible. However you could use it to develop say 6 different policies on university tuition fees that the full membership choose from.
An online think-tank open to all members would be a really good idea.
Thank you for a most interesting, positive and practical piece.
Something like it seems to work well with 38 Degrees!!!
Edwin Moriarty…”This means that our policies are remarkably acceptable to a broad sweep of people, and how much the Lib Dems managed to achieve as the junior partner in the coalition government is not just testimony to the hard work of our MPs and party members working to support them, but also to the consistency and practicality of our policy positions”…………………….
Did Council, European, By-Election and, finally, the 2015 fiasco NOT show you that repeating such fairy tales will be a guarantee of our future obscurity?
Steve Treveth: 38 Degrees is a Labour party front organisation offering simplistic slogans. For example their campaign against TTIP was against a proposed deal with USA which had not been negotiated in full, which might not happen at all. and which ignores the priority given to TTP, which may not happen either. Uncertainties include an EU referendum in what is currently the United Kingdom and a Presidential election in the USA. The easiest deal to do would be with Canada, as the Canadians are saying, but even that has not been finalised.
“38 Degrees is a Labour party front organisation”
Evidence? Just because you don’t personally agree with them about TTIP is not evidence!
I think their “let’s-plan-a-good-Brexit” campaign is a bad idea, but I think it is all their own!
The TTIP negotiations have been conducted in secrecy. We have been prevented from being informed of content, consequence and costs. This is undemocratic. Therefore those who believe in Democracy, Liberal or any other brand, have a duty to oppose the TTIP, at least until we know what it is and will do and have the power and time to oppose or modify it democratically.
Whether or not 38 Degrees is a front organisation matters not in this case. Their concepts and techniques comprise the relevant matter.
David Allen: “38 Degrees is a Labour party front organisation” Just because you don’t personally agree with them about TTIP is not evidence!
Not “Just because”. I formed this view before their campaign against TTIP. I agree with what Catherine Bearder MEP said about TTIP on Liberal Democrat Voice. The simple fact is that international trade deals are very difficult to negotiate, as the Canadians have said. Nigel Farage’s comments about Iceland and China were seriously misleading.
Trouble is Libdems need to be taking votes from the Tories rather than Labour or the Tories are guaranteed ever-lasting power. This was made difficult by the lurch to the left following the SDP merger: For a while Libs were farther left than Labour and this has only changed since Milliband. However even targeting Labour voters is better than trying to steal green votes: who on Earth thought that was a great idea? If we ditch the ‘green crap’ and the neo-puritan, neo-luddite socialism then we have a chance of reconnecting with the voters.
JamesG: Some of those who care about green issues have children and think deeply about the future. Al Gore should have been President of the USA, not funny.
@ JamesG ” This was made difficult by the lurch to the left following the SDP merger”.
Sorry, it was a lurch to the right.
First a bit of Liberal Party history.
In the 1950’s and early ’60’s the Liberals had just 6 seats in the Commons; and 33% of those were the result of an electoral pact with the Tories. In Bolton & Huddersfield, cities with just 2 electoral districts, the Libs and Tories each had one district, with the othet not putting up candidates at general elections; both were thus able to clobber Labour who didn’t stand a chance in those four districts (nNowaday we can leave the clobbering to Labours factions themselves).
But that fragile electoral position didn’t stop Jo Grimonds Liberals from using its large academic following (students, lecturers and professors among its memership) from producing a whole raft of policy papers, some of which raised new issues like the EEC/EU; and didn’t stop the grasroots “Unservile State”-group from publishing radical, leftist proposals of their own.
My point being: smallness and fragile local pacts in the Commons never stopped the Liberals being innovative and original in their policies; so why should it stop the LibDems.
A fruiful excercise was done by interns (students who come to work for 6 months) at the D66 parliamentary party last year: they collected and read the English versions of the platforms and election programs of all (social- or leftist) Liberal Parties in ALDE; and made a list of new policy ideas from those parties which D66 could adopt (we have general elections coming up in 2017; so an Election Program Commission was just starting).
It is an enriching experience to read what other, likeminded, parties have come up with; and to see how much we share attitudes and approaches to specific issues. And in proposing new policies and raising new issues, the LibDems can use the same process by adding “This was also a proposal by XXX, the social Liberals fron EU country YYY”. And you could add a study how much of those prpoposals made it into coalition government programs those foreign parties participate in.