Kafka meets Spectre

I have just completed the strangest election I have ever been involved in. Candidates were banned both from knowing who the electorate were and from campaigning. You could apparently chat to any friends you had who happened to be entitled to vote, but only of course if you happened to know by some random chance that they qualified.

These were I’m told the English Party rules for holding Regional Party elections. A special extra twist meant that, due to an English Party ruling, Chesterfield voting delegates were barred from voting so I couldn’t even pitch to them for a batch of first preferences to get me through the all important first round in an STV count. Despite that I topped the poll for the Regional elections to English Council. Yes, contested elections for such positions! This Lib Dem Fightback idea is taking root in all sorts of strange places.

Even stranger in a way is that I stood for such an election at all. For 32 years I have been an extremely active campaigner for our Party, including 25 years in elected public office as Cllr and MP. But I have usually resolutely steered away from internal Party Committees of this kind. Indeed up to being elected as an MP in 2001 I had only ever even attended Autumn Conference once in 17 years and weekend Conferences rarely. I always felt that, working full time and with a young family, such time as I could spare was most usefully spent campaigning on the doorsteps. After all, within the Party we were all surely on the same side anyway so the internal Committees could look after themselves?

However all too often over the years I can recall myself and others exclaiming “who came up with this nonsense?” Of a decision for example on where membership fees go, or yet another rewrite of candidate selection procedures that seemed designed to prevent selecting candidates who knew how to campaign. Or a new and delayed set of internal rules that in turn delayed candidate selection in crucial contests. All too often the answer has been ‘The English Party’. A little like the key moment in the latest Bond Movie when the head of Spectre recounts to Bond a litany of the obstacles he has faced over the years and gloats “and they were all down to me James and you never realised it”.

As for Kafka, the various commentators on Lib Dem Voice in recent days have more than made my point for me. Secretive, anonymous and unaccountable are bad enough where supposed Liberal Democrat principles are concerned. But when ‘organs’ of the English Party refuse to answer questions such as why is this being done, on what Constitutional grounds is this happening, what rule is being applied here, who took this decision? –then Kafka becomes more relevant than Ian Fleming.

I look forward to my chance to serve the English Party from January. Like most people I know next to nothing about how when and where it meets or how it works and I look forward to being enlightened. It may be that my perceptions are entirely wrong and so are the views expressed on LDV recently, that the English Party should be scrapped and its responsibilities transferred variously up to the Federal Party and down to Regions. We will see.

The first test will be receiving my ‘induction pack’ as soon as Region has sent in notification of the new representatives. After all the English Party have urged us to welcome new members and involve them in vigorous, campaigning local parties. So I expect them to provide a cutting edge model of how it’s done.

I’ll let you all know how it goes.

* Paul Holmes is the former MP for Chesterfield and currently leads a 17 strong Council Group.

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10 Comments

  • David Faggiani 10th Nov '15 - 10:55am

    Intriguing! I imagine they have some sort of volcano lair….

  • Caron Lindsay Caron Lindsay 10th Nov '15 - 11:39am

    There is a bit of me that wants to be a fly on the wall at the first English Council meeting of next year…

  • Having seen who we elected from Y&H, Caron, me too.

  • Caron Lindsay Caron Lindsay 10th Nov '15 - 3:14pm

    Maybe we should smuggle ourselves in and hide at the back. I’ll bring the gin, you bring the popcorn.

  • Mark Valladares Mark Valladares 10th Nov '15 - 8:56pm

    Well, I’m a member now too, and as my Region doesn’t whip, I look forward to holding the English Party accountable. If you’re bringing popcorn, I prefer salted… 🙂

  • Steve Comer 11th Nov '15 - 8:05am

    Congratulations Paul!

    Your article struck a chord with me. Many of us who spent time campaigning in local communities never paid much attention to internal party business. Hardly surprising, there are only 24 hours in a day, and most of us had jobs and families to look after as well as doing politics. Trouble is you then find that while you were working yourself into the ground to get elected and fight for your community, right-wingers were taking over the party, and committees were bringing in nonsensical rules!

    When Bristol voted for a Mayor in 2012, I was staggered to find that a Mayoral candidate had to be selected by the parliamentary candidate rules. So it was OK for a Council Leader and Cabinet, selected under ALDC model candidate approval rules to have responsibility for running a city with a budget of £350million, but for an election for a Mayoral candidate (who was unlikely to win) we needed a much more rigourous selection process!

  • As one of the Yorkshire members of EC, I hope they will not fix dates for their meetings in 2016, which clash with meetings of other party organisations, like ALDE so that I can attend. I think Paul has been quite kind in describing the obfuscation that the English party goes in for in hiding its activities from scrutiny!

  • When I was on the English Council some years ago, I discovered that they were fairly powerless; their job appeared to be to rubber stamp the (often damaging) decisions of the English Party Executive, which on a number of occasions they did despite my and a few other sane members voting against.

    I never go onto the English Party Executive (nor wanted to), so whether that in turn, like some evil Russian doll, contains and answers to some even higher power I do not know.

  • Steve Jarvis 12th Nov '15 - 9:31am

    I know that it is fashionable in some quarters to blame the English Party for everything but it is actually the Federal Party rules which prevent candidates in internal elections from knowing who the electorate are or from campaigning. For English party elections (i.e. elections of the English Party officers and committees) the electorate is published and candidates can campaign in any way they like, so long as they don’t spend any money .

    How regions run their internal elections (including electing their representatives to English Council) should be their own business so long as they are run fairly and by STV.

  • Steve, thanks for responding. I did carefully say “I had been told that….”Clearly there is indeed a great deal of confusion about various rules, who makes them and who if anyone enforces them. Let alone who if anyone takes responsibility if it goes wrong.

    Do you have any response to all the other issues that have been raised?

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