There’s been a lot of debate, dare I say controversy, over the recent proposal to Federal Conference regarding how Parliamentary candidate selections are managed. But perhaps it might be interesting to see how the process actually works…
I’ve been a Returning Officer for the Party for a very long time, more than thirty years. My “patch” has generally been the South East of England, covering four of the Party’s Regions – London, South East England, South Central and the East of England. There was a time when I “had ballot box, will travel” but, for a variety of reasons, I’m not willing to take on too many these days. On the other hand, the modern processes don’t actually require me to leave my home office, so I can theoretically cover more territory.
A few days ago, I had a phone call from our Regional Candidates Chair. That’s not totally unusual, as I was foolish enough to stand for the Regional Candidates Committee which, of course, she chairs. And, as a veteran of the candidate selection processes, she apparently values my opinion – or humours me, you’d have to ask her that. She had a request, would I take on a selection? I thought about it for a moment, but agreed readily enough. She promised to put me in touch with the Local Party and, after a quick chat about general business, we said our goodbyes.
So, I need to do some preparation. First of all, there are new Selection Rules, approved by English Council in March. As I’m not a member of English Council, I hadn’t read them. And now I have. They are, it must be said, a streamlined version of what had previously existed which, in turn, was a streamlined version of its predecessor. The new version runs to just nine pages plus some Appendices, which cover another ten. They aren’t as daunting as they might have been.
The next task is to get in touch with the designated Local Party contact. I need to know a few things:
- Are there multiple Local Parties involved, i.e. does the constituency cover parts of more than one Local Party? In my neck of the woods, Suffolk, Local Parties are organised on local government boundaries, so it’s not a given by any means. Each Local Party has a right to be involved and ideally engaged in the process.
- Has the Local Party’s Executive Committee formally decided to initiate the process? There should be a relevant minute just to ensure that all is in order.
- Is the seat defined as a target seat for the next General Election?
- Has the Local Party Executive given consideration to the diversity provisions contained within Appendix D?
We have, after all, promised that diversity will be at the core of our selection process and, as a mixed-race Returning Officer, I unsurprisingly tend to be quite sensitive to that. It’s not a bad idea to contact the relevant Party groups to give advance notice that we’re starting a selection process, especially if it’s a target seat. After all, it’s difficult to turn up late in the day and expect to win a selection contest over someone well known locally or who has strong and established links to the Local Party. Advance notice helps.
I also need to talk to the following:
- the Local Party Secretary;
- the Membership Development Officer, and;
- if appropriate, whoever issues e-mails to Local Party members.
Selections are now done predominantly online, so I’d really like to be confident that the membership list is up to date, and that contact e-mail addresses are too. It’s in the interest of the Local Party that this is the case anyway, but it’s an opportunity to do some tidying.
And so, we’re off and running, hopefully…
* Mark Valladares is the Monday Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice, a “senior” Returning Officer and a member of the East of England Region’s Candidates Committee.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Hilaire Belloc's persecution of Charles Masterman
Finding your moral compass
Live in the sky with Liverpool Labour's pie in the sky housing policy
Cheney Payne re-selected for Cambridge
Electoral register update
Unions and campaigners opposing ban on Palestine Action
Craig Levene
Tim Rogers
David Le Grice
Tristan Ward
Jack Meredith
20 Comments
All good stuff Mark!
Problem is that when one of the local parties isn’t interested in the part constituency that they regard as minor to their main interest, campaigning can be totally stifled. We really do need to move to constituency parties – they have a vested interest in District activity. Sadly, the reverse is not the case. And so our current, unattractive MP, lords it without reproach.
Mark, this is a real question, genuinely seeking an answer (honest!) : How does the diversity clause work? Is a selection (when say, there is a white male “incumbent”) ever held up to find a more diverse group of candidates who might not even be in the party yet? Or might there just be a ring-round of currently approved women and BME candidates in that region?
@Graham Jeffs
“We really do need to move to constituency parties – they have a vested interest in District activity.”
Unless constituency and local authority boundaries are coterminous how is moving to constituency parties going to improve the situaion? The territory outside the constituency may or may not be promising to campaign. If it isn’t promising then why would you expect resources to be spent on it when that may compromise work in a better prospect area?
I wouldn’t expect resources to be diverted from the ‘key’ objective, however that might be defined – clearly it’s going to differ from area to area.
What is totally unacceptable is political activity being effectively banned in the non-key areas such that what organisation there has been (along with the membership) wilts away and plays straight into the hands of the Greens and Reform.
Currently, the Conservatives are getting a free ride at both national and county council level. At District level, nobody is speaking up for the LDs. We don’t exist, but we are responsible for everything that is wrong!
The system is designed for people who like meetings and bureaucracy, and are suspicion of outsiders or “campaigners” (Mark has admitted he is not a campaigner). The selection rules are written for a twee pre-broadband age and for plum seats that dozens of hopefuls might apply for – think back to 2004, when at least two future Leaders went for the Sheffield Hallam seat. Why do we have all this pointless admin, wasting months of campaigning time, for derelict local parties where we probably lost our deposit in three of the last four general elections? You end up with the same plodders standing time and time again (look at Wales).
Being on the shakeup. Why can LDHQ not simply appoint someone of genuine ability who wants to use the platform of being the PPC to win some council wards?
Yes Lyell, there was a time when one of the paths to ‘sparking up’ a moribund constituency was to encourage the adoption of PPCs who recognised that their role was to campaign, gain positive exposure for the party and as a result increase membership, create local organisations and thus improve the party’s vote at all levels.
I must confess that I don’t have much knowledge of the bureaucracy involved currently. But if it is indeed an impediment to rolling out the early adoption of campaigning PPCs in non target seats, then things need to change – and change fast.
@Lyell Yardarms
“Why do we have all this pointless admin, wasting months of campaigning time, for derelict local parties where we probably lost our deposit in three of the last four general elections? You end up with the same plodders standing time and time again”
“Why can LDHQ not simply appoint someone of genuine ability who wants to use the platform of being the PPC to win some council wards?”
If the local party is derelict but lurking among its membership is someone with PPC/councillor potential it seems to me that one mailing (which can as far as I can see be by email where email addresses are available) is essential and might trigger an improvement in activity. If that produces no result then there seems to me no problem in LDHQ appointing someone suitable if such a person can be found.
I’ll be honest – I don’t generally expect many responses to articles like this, given how dull most things bureaucratic are. But let’s have a go… In no particular order…
@ Ruth,
That’s a genuinely interesting question, and it’s fair to say that we might be seen to be in limbo at the moment on this point. There has been a lot of effort to find and encourage members from underrepresented groups who might make effective PPCs and, hopefully, MPs down the road. And I do think that everyone involved in the process would like to see such efforts succeed. It’s something I want to look at in “Week 2”, so bear with me.
@ Graham,
Local Party boundaries are a choice for the local activists, limited only by the constraints of the Constitution. In England, that means:
Each Local Party shall contain either:
(a) one or more parliamentary constituencies, or
(b) one or more principal local authority areas, or
(c) a combination of all or part of a parliamentary constituency and all or part of an
adjacent or overlapping principal local authority area.
In some places, where Parliamentary success has been sparse, like my own county of Suffolk, organising to face Local Authority boundaries makes more sense, allowing more effective coordination of campaigns. But it strikes me as liberal to allow members to organise in a way which suits their needs.
@ Lyell,
I never describe myself as a campaigner, partly out of respect for those people who are genuinely better at it than I am, but also because effective political parties are formed of three strands, policy, campaign and bureaucracy. If they all work in a co-ordinated way, each is more effective. I often joke that I go to meetings so that campaigners don’t have to. But my primary role, if I’m effective, is to remove some of the obstacles to effective campaigning,
I’m not sure though that dropping a candidate onto a Local Party from a great height necessarily leads to positive outcomes.
@ Nonconformistradical,
I agree with you to a great extent. Building up weak Local Parties from the outside can only take you so far – a Local Party has to have a core of motivated members and activists in order to succeed.
@Mark: I can see the attraction of letting local parties decide how they want to organise themselves, but the geek in me wants to know: How on Earth does that work out if a constituency partly overlaps a district, and most members in the constituency want to organise as a constituency but most members in the district want to organise as a district?
(Actually not entirely a geeky question since it does relate to my life: I live in a constituency that is split equally between two districts. The local party is organised by district, and I find it somewhat frustrating that that means I have no means to be in touch with anything that might be going on in my constituency but across the district boundary – which lies just a few hundred metres from my home).
@ Simon,
It can be frustrating in such circumstances but that’s where I’d expect your County Co-ordinating Committee (if you’ve got one – they’re a feature of my Region) or the Regional Party to step in.
In Suffolk, we brought everyone together to agree the principle of new boundaries on a common basis, formed on District Council boundaries but with scope for mergers where appropriate – ironically, the District Councils then merged in line with the organisation of our Local Parties!
In the situation you describe, as a former Local Party Secretary, I’d wonder why the two Local Parties didn’t extend their e-mail lists to include members of the other Local Party as appropriate. That seems like an elegant solution and might help to build a team across the constituency.
If there are branches in the other Local Party, you might ask to be on any nearby Branch mailing list that exists too.
In England outside London, we are about to move to a system of unitary authorities at least the size of five authorities. That means that most constituencies will find themselves wholly within an authority and many of the rest will have an obvious ‘lead’ authority. The proportion is likely to rise after the next boundary review if they take the new boundaries into consideration. In those cases, it makes sense to organise at authority level with the right to devolve most of the activity to constituency committees.
Obviously the simple answer is to make each unitary an STV constituency.
Thanks Mark. I’ll try and make a few enquiries locally.
Back to the geeky level, I’m still puzzled how a mixed district/constituency system can work. You’d think that, as soon as one party gets organised as – say – a district party, that immediately forces all neighbouring parties to also organise as district parties, whether they want to or not, because otherwise it’s impossible to make the boundaries match up so that every location is covered by one local party. That then forces all the parties in the next geographical ‘ring’ to be district parties too, and so on. That makes me wonder whether parties really can have as much freedom as you’d like.
Having lived in the same part of the country as Graham Jeffs I wholehearteadly agree with him.
The Arundel and Southdowns constituency has no ‘centre’ which results in it being very much an afterthought for the local party based in Horsham who unsurprisingly are primarily focused there.
Despite the challenges we were second in ASD last time, with the Tories polling even lower than they achieved in 2024 and a relatively high Labour vote to squeeze winning should not be ruled out.
Putting a structure in place and selected a PPC early could well make the difference!
@Simon,
I sense you are experiencing similar problems to the members in my area. The reality is that to sort our problem would require the whole county to come on board – and the reality is that that is unlikely to happen. Essentially it’s inertia, selfishness and a failure to appreciate the disincentives to campaigning that the existing structure is allowing. I question whether the party can afford that.
@ Simon,
The English Party Constitution is your friend here, specifically paragraph 3.6:
@ David and Graham,
Paragraph 1.3 of the new English Selection Rules require the Regional Party to act if a selection process is not underway by a set deadline:
There’s also, as I understand it, work being done to establish a schedule for PPC selections, focusing on potential target seats at the outset. Seats like yours may well meet such criteria.
Thank you for this information Mark.
Our issue is that the constituency is part of three DCs. I’m not being picky, but as there is no constituency party – my start point – how can members who don’t even know if each other exist get any action?
@ Graham,
I’d suggest that the Local Parties involved might form a campaign committee to address issues relating to the constituency. They’re going to have to do something in order to select a candidate in any event.
And, if they don’t have the momentum to act, perhaps offer to co-ordinate something yourself. That would put them in the position of having to either actively stop you (and they probably won’t want to do that) or support you. A members’ mailing list covering the constituency might be a start.
If you demonstrate a willingness to be a team player, that might help persuade others to lend a hand.
Thank you again Mark. What you say is eminently reasonable. I’m afraid others are not.
It is an unfashionable opinion but this is where Reform (for example) have a huge advantage over the Liberal Democrats and Greens.
Approving, vetting and – yes – selecting candidates early allowed them to field almost a full slate in the 2025 elections, and also persuaded “inactive” members who won’t attend a party meeting to stand for election. Generally Reform candidates were also obliged to be their own Agents, whilst signing a legal agreement with the central Reform party that they would not produce their own literature, conduct themselves in a certain way on social media, etc.
Meanwhile in the Lib Dems the solution proffered is to create an overarching “County Campaigns Committee” or similar. I’ve sat on a few of those over the years. They are effectively talking shops for the kind of people who enjoy meetings and have a lot of free time. Dare I say it, they’re also not especially diverse.
Do I recommend the Reform model? No. Does the existing model grow the Lib Dem campaigning footprint outside of a few blessed constituencies? No.
I like the emphasis on involving the local party(ies). Ideally, they should institute the process. I note the new power of Regional Candidates Chairs to start the process under defined circumstances. I hope the power to override local parties is not used too often.