Reports suggest that Steve Hilton’s departure from Downing Street will leave the Conservatives desperately short of ideas. This seems astonishing: Liberal Democrats surely don’t need to turn to expensive advisers for creative ideas, new initiatives and the odd quirky example of tangerine sky thinking! Party members present and debate ideas at conference, and the party does not usually suffer from a shortage of novel suggestions. But these debates also produce serious policies, something which was perhaps beneath Steve Hilton’s pay grade.
These differences in how the two coalition parties handle policy making have a direct impact on the workings of government. Steve Hilton’s ideas could prove a headache for Liberal Democrats, and many Conservative MPs are exasperated when a Liberal Democrat conference throws a spanner in the works of coalition policy. But what is more reasonable: giving such great influence to one adviser, or consulting a large group of activists with a collective expertise and experience which one man could never match?
Steve Hilton was known for rumoured temper tantrums in Number 10; but if Nick Clegg’s ‘advisers’ are unhappy, the disagreement will be played out in public. In fact, it’s a complicated relationship: some suggest that the membership is not producing enough appropriate policies, while some members complain that many suggestions are never debated. There is certainly scope for improving communication and for using the expertise of members more systematically. But in the meantime, the debates continue, and the party membership is not about to decamp to California just because the coalition isn’t much fun most of the time.
So, where the Liberal Democrats draw on the ideas of an unruly, creative crowd of party members, the Tories relied on one man – one man who now seems irreplaceable. It looks like a rather serious weakness to me. Perhaps the Conservative Party should look into holding proper conferences instead of five-day rallies: as Steve Hilton himself could perhaps tell them, policy making by crowd sourcing has to be trendier than simply employing an unconventional adviser.
* Maria Pretzler is a Lecturer in Greek History at Swansea University. She blogs at Working Memories , where ancient Greekery and Libdemmery can happily coexist.
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5 Comments
Thoroughly agree. The general activity of the membership more than compensates for the lack of a central ‘guru’.
Neat contrast. Some thoughts about this here.
LonWon,
I really enjoyed your blog post, and I agree with your main points. In fact, my little polemic arose from a discussion in the forums, which soon moved on to the question of how one might improve the party’s ways of turning members’ ideas into good policies, and in a way, we moved on to the more ‘boring’ processes you are highlighting. In a way, the currently available main methods, namely through consultation and policy motions at conference, are only suitable for ideas which are already fairly well developed. There is some brainstorming going on locally in some places, but (and my post only hints at this) there should be better ways of feeding in and discussing ideas at an early stage of development.
Anyway, I think you sum up some crucial aspects of the process, and I’d like to quote a bit of it here:
“Working groups, committees, reviews, monographs, academic studies, limited pilots, and the like might be unglamorous, but they are how good policy gets developed: policy that clearly identifies the problems to be addressed, carefully compares a range of proposed solutions, and puts the best ones to the test. ”
(source: http://hopingformorethanslogans.blogspot.com/2012/03/policy-development-tories-need-gurus.html)
Professional research is often what turns good ideas into government-proof policies for manifestos. However, I think the membership can play a role – there is a value to harnessing the ideas, experiences and expertise which people acquire in their various lives, professions and campaigns all around the country. We just have to find more ways of doing so at different stages of policy development, to gather more ideas and to help turning them into useable policy. Nevertheless, motions at conference should remain important, too: I do think that this ‘quirk’ (compared to the two big parties anyway) has served the LibDems well so far, and we shouldn’t underestimate the symbolic value of enacting democracy in front of the camera, particularly now when many people actually appreciate that it might matter.
To say that the Tories rely on one man, however influential, for policy is plain silly. There are lots of intelligent thinkers in all parties, some elected, some staff, some volunteers.
Thanks Maria. 🙂
I’m hoping the “symbolic value of enacting democracy in front of the camera” outweighs the fallback media narratives of “splits” & “extremists defeating moderates” that led to the neutering of Labour conferences. But even so, democracy is healthy, and is no less an asset when a party is in government.