This comes from a post by Party President and Co-leader Mark Pack, on the party’s website, explaining some output from Saturday’s Federal Board meeting:
Election Review
The (Federal) Board has commissioned a review into both the General election and the European elections.
This review will be run independently of those who ran the elections, with a panel of experts who have a broad range of skills from knowing about grassroots election campaigns through to understanding what the very best decision-making processes in organisations look like.
The Chair is Dorothy Thornhill, who was the elected Mayor of Watford for 16 years, leading a successful turnaround of the council’s administration and quality of services, and was made a Liberal Democrat Peer in 2015.
Watch out for more news soon about how they will be consulting further and there will be many more opportunities for people at all levels to contribute to the review.
Mark adds on his blog:
Dorothy brings three excellent benefits in particular to the role as chair – she understands campaigning, she understands improving organisations and she wasn’t involved in the running of the general and European elections. The second of those is particularly important as we need the review not only to look at whether particular decisions were right or not but also at whether the processes that led to decisions and the processes that then (tried to) implement them were right.
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4 Comments
This appears to be good news. We can only hope that this review is genuinely independent and its conclusions aren’t ignored by the party; the last thing we need is another whitewash which was sadly the fate of the 2017 election review.
One of the problems with the Liberal Democrats, like most groups, is that it is full of people with a passion for what they believe in. What’s wrong with that? They are so consumed by what they believe that they fail to step back and review their thinking or, better still get someone they trust to review it for them. Reviews need to be regular occurrence not just when the perception is of a major failure or disappointment.
Dorothy is a good choice to lead this.
Dorothy is a very nice lady and a good Lib Dem, but she is also a member of the party metropolitan establishment. And it is that establishment who got us into this mess by saying nothing, and doing nothing when the mistakes were being made by a leadership that they had the ear of – disastrous mistakes that could cost us everything. It is very difficult to be independent of a group you are a member of. I wish heer luck.
I hope that, as Chair, she will make the panel face up to the real problems we face, that of key influencers over the last 10 years being promoted way beyond their abilities and leading and promoting ideas that have got us into this mess. They should be nowhere near this review.
Indeed what we need is a majority on the ‘panel of experts’ who do not live in London and the Home counties, and certainly not another group of party worthies who regularly inhabit the party’s Westminster bubble.