Before anything else, I want to make clear what I mean by “good policy.” I specifically am not defining it as policy I agree with, I mean policy that is specific enough to be implementable without a significant amount of further policy development, lacks vagary and stands up to basic intellectual scrutiny. Plenty of policy which I am opposed to passes that test.
So does our party’s policy meet this standard of good policy? As a test case, let’s look at the agenda for our upcoming conference and it’s first policy motion, F5: Backing Youth Work to Build Communities. It begins by setting out quite clearly setting out both the value of youth work, both as a social good and in economic terms and the inadequacy of current provision and reaffirms that we believe that youth work is a good thing.
However, when it reaches the section Conference therefore calls on the government to: the section where specific steps for the government to take are proposed, it quickly loses it’s clarity. Calls are made for “fair, long term funding settlement” with no detail as to what that might be, a strategy for “high quality, targeted and open access youth work” and another “comprehensive Workforce and training strategy” to ensure a “sustainable pipeline of youth practitioners.” No details are available on what either strategy might entail or how it may be implemented. Worst of all is a call for a statutory duty for local authorities to provide sufficient youth services, while refusing to define what “sufficient” means. All in all, it sounds less like the policy of a party that has loads and loads of good policy if only the media would just look, and more like one which generally likes good things. In my opinion, this isn’t “good policy.”
Now you might be thinking, policy motions aren’t meant to be precise, it’s policy papers and the manifesto, where policy papers and motions passed over the last few years are gathered in an overarching plan which has to be precise and “good policy.” I’ve had many people say that to me.
Let’s look at the manifesto, the overarching document that brings together what we pass at conference and brings it all together in one plan to tell people how we would govern the country. It’s far too big a document to go through all of it, but let’s apply it to an issue which, recently, seemed to be very tough for our spokespeople to answer direct questions about. That issue is public sector pay rises. (Watch Jess Brown Fuller, our Hospitals and Primary Care spokesperson talk about the subject on Question Time here)
The position in our manifesto is that pay should be determined by independent bodies, which at face value seems reasonable enough. However, this manifesto is fully costed, but when checking the costings document, there is no money allocated to pay rises and no estimates over how much said pay rises would cost with the appearance that, given we do not know how much they would cost and we would not be setting the pay rise ourselves, we have allocated no money to pay for it.
No public sector pay rises for a period of 5 years is obviously a ludicrous policy, guaranteed to cause massive strikes, and yet, in the context of us pushing Labour to go further on the NHS and Social Care when they have already increased funding by multiples of the £8.4 billion figure found in our manifesto it is hard to see how this is not the implication of our positioning and costing.
Given how important the funding of policy is, this oversight undermines a massive portion of our manifesto.
However, is it even important to have “good policy” anyway. After all, the other parties, Labour, Tory and especially Reform, whose policy platform contains plenty of straight-up lies, definitely do not. Despite this I believe that “good policy” is definitely important.
It is important to have good policy to prevent unedifying spectacles like the one on Question Time earlier in the article which damage our reputation. It is important to have good policy out of respect for our activists who spend countless hours taking our pitch to people on their doorsteps, so that when they tell people what the Lib Dems pledge to do, they can be confident that the work has been done that means we can deliver it. It is important because our ultimate aim is to be in government and Labour has shown us the consequences of trying to govern with vague plans.
For as long as I have been involved in the Lib Dems, I have been told by members of the public that they don’t know what the Lib Dems stand for and by fellow members that we need to find quick way of showing the public of what we stand for or that we need to show our values more. If we want our values to shine, we need to tackle, head-on, the toughest structural problems of our country, remove ambiguity from the policies make and bring rigour to our political thinking. We need to know and be able to state, clearly, what it is that we want and what we stand for, because, how can we tell the country what that is if we don’t know ourselves.
* Abrial Jerram is chair of the North East regional policy committee
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12 Comments
In a word, no.
Not having “good” policy may not be important when winning elections but is very important after elections are won. The Labour Party too did not have “good” policy on public sector pay and tripped into a fiscal black hole on being elected. “Solutions” such as means testing the Winter Fuel Allowance floundered because the solution had no electoral mandate. This contributed to disillusionment with the political process and provided further opportunity for the Faragists etc. William Wallace has been patiently calling for the Lib Dems to make some hard choices leading to good fiscal policy but as yet I see no sign that his call is being heeded.
Really good article. I agree with you.
It’s made even harder when the media often do so little to interrogate our opponents, so exposing ourselves to scrutiny risks creating opportunities for upsetting voters. But perhaps we should take the view that there’s no such things as bad scrutiny, and that every time we’re attacked in the media for a painful policy decision, we use it as an opportunity to remind the audience that we’re the only party actually putting forward a serious answer to the question.
And there is also the risk that trying to avoid tough questions leaves the public with the impression that we’re not actually serious about governing.
@Richard I agree with you, but in our case I believe good policy is key for us in campaigning as well, not because we should recite policy papers to campaign (we absolutely shouldn’t), but because our party lacks a sense of what we stand for. If we want to find our ability to communicate Liberal values, we need to first thoroughly apply them to the UK’s current structural problems.
@Johnathan Brown Thank You. There could also be a possible boost in the media as better, more rigorous policy would better equip our spokespeople to deal with media questioning, even Jess, one of our best media performers, was stumped by a question in her area due to our lack of proper policy.
If we want to project a sense that we know what we’re doing, we need policy that we honestly believe would both work, and be actionable. We are not conmen like Reform UK and will not be able to sell our policy as convincingly as they can if it does not have the detail that’s needed for us to believe in it.
What is a good policy? Surely that is subjective. Labour would say keeping their union paymasters happy and Conservatives wanting ever lower taxation. What policies are good lib dem ones?
I personally think good policy is critical – both for actual governance and for convincing people who are interested that we’re serious.
However it’s less critical for getting people interested in us. For that, we need something closer to a vision or mission statement (that should then drive which flavour of good policy we develop). And that’s what comes through as ‘I don’t know what the Lib Dems stand for’. People think they know what the other parties are for: Labour are for workers, poor people, welfare state. Conservatives are for business, individuals, traditional values, law and order.
(I know we can all argue with whether they are *actually* for those things in light of actual track record, but that’s not the point I’m making here).
I’m very suspicious by nature of such trite simplifications – and I get the impression so are most Lib Dems – but I do think that’s what’s needed to drive cut through.
Perhaps, in areas where we’ve been successful, it’s because local people can say Lib Dems are ‘for our local area’ – which is enough, without a national equivalent. Not sure it scales up though.
@David, I’m not arguing for my ideological views in this piece, I’m asking that our policy be specific enough to mean something.
@Charis, you are right, but the use of vague language to paper over structural issues that we need to make policy for is what is preventing us properly applying our values to those problems, sapping our sense of purpose.
The other reason for “good policy” is that it gives us something distinctive (and credible) to earn media coverage.
I do think the big issue you identify – of voters not knowing “what you stand for” – is more about a clear narrative (the big idea, not the specific policies) but distinctive policies are the best way to communicate that. 1p on income tax for schools/NHS in the 1990s-2000s was an example of a bold policy that communicated values (progressive taxation and public service investment).
What you stand for is your defining principles and values. Policy is what you’d like to do given the resources. A manifesto is similar to policy but prioritised according to cost, importance and political acceptability. So they are all intertwined. If our spokespeople are clear about what they’re discussing and educate the public about the differences so much the better.
Good article, and glad I found it, having just finished wading through a policy document that is up for debate this weekend. I found the policy document and policy motion to be full of the very vagueness you have highlighted here. Moreover, the vagueness is concentrated in the thorniest part of the policy, where it mentions costs to consumers, but does not mention how we would tackle this ….. We are just leaving ourselves open to attack by Reform and in some ways it would be a justified attack.