The esteemed political journalists Patrick Wintour and Nicholas Watt of the Guardian have made an interesting, if long contribution to the debate about how the Liberal Democrats ended up in their current predicament.
Interestingly, it says very little about the 2010-12 era when Tim Farron and Norman Lamb chaired the party’s two main committees, the Federal Executive and Federal Policy Committee respectively. However, it does shed some interesting light on the internal debate on the central issue that caused the electoral catastrophe: tuition fees. The tales of what might have happened had David Laws not resigned, and why fees was not debated at our Special Conference, remain to be told.
Perhaps its biggest flaw is the typically lazy conflation of the debate around the party’s as being between “Liberals” and “Social Democrats”: an analogy that should have been buried quarter of a century ago. As a social liberal and indeed Co-Chair of the Social Liberal Forum from 2012-14 I can testify that plenty of social democrats were on both sides of the debate.
There are at least three areas where the piece is weakly researched or just plain misleading. All are the result of relying on a relatively narrow number of interviewees. The full account offers lessons for the new leader as to how to avoid future pitfalls.
The first is just how the party at large was prevented from engaging with the issues that most damaged the party. Wintour and Watt suggest that the SLF emergency motion on the economy in Spring 2013 was defeated: it was not. Despite a majority in Conference voting to suspend standing orders to hear the debate at a critical time for the party, Conference Committee did not take it and the vote did not achieve the required two-thirds majority. At the time there were desperate efforts made by Clegg advisors to influence Conference reps to block the debate. The ‘Shirley Williams view’ of the Health and Social Care Bill is another; Shirley’s name was used to try and defeat, with only partial success, a motion to get our MPs to vote this legislation down at Third Reading.
The second is how the party’s internal apparatus failed or was not allowed to do its job to hold leaders to account. From 2011-14 Nick Clegg attended the Federal Policy Committee only once, suggesting as he has said since that he did not hold this body with very much respect. Party secrecy rules were ramped up so members of Federal Committees, elected by the party, were forbidden from communicating what they were doing or even discussing. The Party President, Tim Farron, was being as regularly briefed against by Lib Dems as Vince Cable was. Largely as a result of the huge and ever-increasing phalanx of Special Advisers, discussion at all levels on key issues was curtailed. This is probably the time to highlight that there was an attempt to have me removed from being the FPC observer to the Parliamentary BIS and Treasury backbench committee after my outspoken opposition to his and Vince Cable’s stance on tuition fees. The standoff lasted for some months.
Finally, the botched coup on Nick Clegg. As co-chair of SLF at the time, this record needs to be set straight, as Wintour and Watt have taken the word only of the person they bill as the sole chair at the time, Naomi Smith. I was well aware that backbench MPs were restless, but that a number of people were not prepared to put their heads above the parapet and call for a contest or say that they would stand. One of those people, unreported, was Vince Cable in 2013. I felt before the European results were declared, while the party’s situation was dire, but whereas in 2013 a new leader might have stood a chance of getting the party’s reputation back on a sound footing, in 2014 it was too late. Worse, nobody wanted to do it. So I didn’t join the coup; while being critical of he leadership’s strategy but not calling for an election I consulted SLF’s 20-strong Council, and they made clear the Oakeshott coup did not command support. This tallied with the lack of momentum for the coup among Parliamentarians resulted in 28 May 2014, an odd day where The Times reported completely wrongly that SLF was backing the coup, and I used the pages of LDV to correct this gross inaccuracy and request a correction that, in the finest tradition of the Murdoch press, never came. The next day all became academic as the coup imploded.
In due course I am sure a fuller account can be written of the goings-on of the secret “Wheelhouse”, but this will have to wait. In part, it is what conversations at Conference are for. Overall Wintour and Watt – two of the more authoritative and informed journalists on Liberal politics – could have done better this time. The full story, as ever, will out in due course.
* Gareth Epps is a member of FPC and FCC, a member of the Fair Deal for your Local campaign coalition committee and is an active member of Britain’s largest consumer campaign, CAMRA. He claims to be marginally better at Aunt Sally than David Cameron, whom he stood against in Witney in 2001.
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53 Comments
“Party secrecy rules were ramped up so members of Federal Committees, elected by the party, were forbidden from communicating what they were doing or even discussing.” Well there goes “No-one shall be enslaved by ignorance”. I suppose the key questions are “Who were supposed to be our watchdogs over these changes?”, and “Why didn’t they have any success in getting it changed?” Were they unwilling, too nice, unable or even worse not listened to?
No wonder the party collapsed, if it was unable to defend itself and its values from attacks from within.
Gareth,
You are quite correct to say —
“…Perhaps its biggest flaw is the typically lazy conflation of the debate around the party’s as being between “Liberals” and “Social Democrats”: an analogy that should have been buried quarter of a century ago. ”
It is hugely misleading to describe members of the Liberal Democrats in 2015 in this way. I can seldom if ever remember too many former members of the SDP even being on the “left” of the party. Yet even in his LBC interview today Nick Clegg referred to Vimce Cable as “one of the most left-wing Liberal Democrats”. A bizarre comment.
Perhaps in future we might drop the habit of describing existing groups and individuals withn our party in terms of another party which briefly existed in the 1980s.
Many of our voters and Liberal Democrat members were not even born when the SDP ceased to exist.
Perhaps the Guardian will catch up on the last 25 years eventually.
Sorry you feel upset about not having been interviewed, though as you write, the coup wasn’t an SLF thing, so I don’t understand then why it follows you should have been interviewed as one of the then SLF co-Chairs. I am further confused because you said you were privately in agreement with the letter at the SLF AGM last year in Reading.
The Oakshotte coup didnt flop because of a lack of support from MPs but because the wider membership were against. The idea that it was too late & that it would be better for the Party that Clegg carry sole responsibility for the losses was quite widespread. Its important for the future that the majority of us take responsibility for our defeat, blaming this or that person isnt helpfull.
Reminds me of the TweedleDee TweedleDum charade in 1987, that contributed to me not sustaining my membership after the unification as back then neither SDP or Liberals on the ground were getting realistic information about how things were going at the head of the campaign. Plus local folk with all their democratic channels were not able to determine ACTUAL policy priorities.
I am not naive about this and do realise that ultimately an effective parliamentary or council party depends on the collective decisions of those who are ACTUALLY elected, although in my opinion, the actual election manifesto, should not depend on a charmed circle.
In the final analysis, no person needs to accept a nomination to represent policies with which they actually do not support!
You middle sentence was certainly my view at the time, Paul Barker, though if the MPs HAD been up for it, my view might well have been different, even at that late stage! That they were not spoke volumes. With hindsight, they might have been wrong, but that is arguable both ways. 2015 might well have been an even bigger debacle had we been seen as divided.
Gareth says that a leadership change in 2013 would have been OK but 2014 would be too late. While this might have been true were the Party merely floundering a bit and in need of a bit of a fresh injection, what was actually happening in 2014 was the latest in a series of absolute disasters. While it was true that ‘nobody wanted to be leader’ then, the bottom line was that we were doing so badly that even having no leader at all would have been better than continuing with the one we had. It was that bad.
It appears that a majority of the Parliamentary Party simply did not want to believe how bad things actually were.
What intrigues me is the line in the Guardian article:
“Clegg commissioned an official review of the election defeats, but little changed in the aftermath.”
Can someone explain to me where this ‘official review’ is and how one can get to see it? Or is that an ‘official secret’ upon which the Party will never Act?
Paul Pettinger is factually incorrect (as indeed is the article that quotes Naomi Smith as the then sole Chair).
Having identified that SLF opinions were split about the merits of the Clegg coup, I set about gathering opinion. That and indeed the view at the SLF AGM was against the attempt to remove Clegg.
My position was thus that I could not commit both co-chairs to sign a letter when the members didn’t agree. I made my personal views absolutely clear in my writing at the time, which did not include supporting that letter. What made this worse was the briefing of newspapers including The Times that SLF was part of the coup when it absolutely was not.
The links in my post above make the position absolutely clear.
I am sure that more people could, and should, have been interviewed, but we’re down to 8 MPs and the media don’t care that much. They seemed to have talked to many people in the know and got a sense of who was on each side of the divide as the party took major turning points. Martin Shapland, Naomi Smith, and Shirley Williams probably came off best from the whole farrago. Richard Reeves looks like he probably emigrated because he would never be able to get a job in British politics again!
I think newspapers use SLF to put some heft behind accusations of plotting. I think accusations that Ms Smith must have briefed that SLF was (why do that anyway?) is probably undermined by the broader point that the article had many inaccuracies.
Honestly I think these Patrick Wintour long-reads are over-rated. Good, but not fantastic. A lot of the time people rebel in politics because they personally disagree with policies or because their support base does. It is not because some principled activists have suddenly become cold-hearted political strategists and panicked because they saw the party was going to lose seats. They mainly panicked because they didn’t like the policies.
So you would have signed the letter had you sensed more people supported it? No one signed the letter on behalf of anyone but themselves – the letter wasn’t about groups, but individuals
“The Times reported completely wrongly that SLF was backing the coup…”
Officially, SLF did not back the coup. Just prominent members of SLF including Naomi Smith and Martin Tod using Seth Thevoz as a front. An inaccuracy, perhaps, but a gross one? As if…
@Sara: I can’t imagine anyone “using” Seth. He’s one of the best minds in the party, and not easily manipulated. I’m not privy to knowledge about organisational minutiae, but I can’t imagine Seth going along with and leading something he doesn’t agree with.
@William – I was dating Seth at the time. I distinctly remember the phone calls he had will Naomi at the time. He liased with Naomi before every media appearance and media brief. He fully agreed with it and agreed to front the coup. He wasn’t manipulated – he agreed to be front for the coup.
This is completely wrongly turning into a finger-pointing debate about a potential coup over a year ago, when it should be about what went wrong and how we all fix it. The SLF was totally divided as to whether Nick Clegg should go – many thought he should, many thought it was wrong to change horses. As a mature, consensual group we respected each other’s opinions, made a post which explained our joint position, and left it to other groupings to pursue the removal of our leader. Though I personally thought Nick Clegg should have gone and signed the letter (and I still do – I’m sure we’d have more than eight seats if he had), that’s irrelevant. I was and am an SLF Council member and had hardly heard of Seth Thevoz, and to my knowledge had never met him. To claim he was some sort of front for the SLF is verging in the libellous, and is utter nonsense.
If their was a single person driving for the coup it was Naomi Smith with many, many prominent members of the party supporting her. It’s really unfair to blame the “Murdoch Press” for blaming the coup on SLF when the Chair of SLF is briefing them that there’s a massive coup. Was this not obvious to everyone?
“To claim he was some sort of front for the SLF is verging in the libellous, and is utter nonsense.”
He wasn’t a front for SLF. He was a front for Naomi Smith.
If anything, Naomi seems to have been the front for more prominent people in deeper cover – her father and Matthew, and perhaps Vince. Though she was Joint Chair at the time, the other clearly thought it disloyal and/or bad tactics. Personally I have a great deal of respect for both Naomi and Seth, but It wasn’t an SLF coup – merely one which a prominent member of the SLF was involved.
I’m sure a denial from Naomi and Seth will be imminently posted on this thread. When they are please remember that I have no skin in the game… Besides, I don’t necessarily think their actions were wrong.
@David Evans25th Jun ’15 – 10:53am
[[“Party secrecy rules were ramped up so members of Federal Committees, elected by the party, were forbidden from communicating what they were doing or even discussing.” Well there goes “No-one shall be enslaved by ignorance”. I suppose the key questions are “Who were supposed to be our watchdogs over these changes?”, and “Why didn’t they have any success in getting it changed?” Were they unwilling, too nice, unable or even worse not listened to?
No wonder the party collapsed, if it was unable to defend itself and its values from attacks from within.]]
Clearly comments made on LDV and elsewhere regarding the bunker mentality prevailing in the upper echilons of the party were completely accurate.
Party structures must now be changed and power dispersed to ensure this can never befall the party again.
“If anything, Naomi seems to have been the front for more prominent people in deeper cover – her father and Matthew, and perhaps Vince.”
😉
‘…merely one which a* prominent member of the SLF was involved.”
*several
It should be clear that SLF did not agree to the ousting of Nick Clegg as leader of the party. Some prominent members were vehemently opposed. Those who did get involved did so as private individuals. End of story as far as SLF is concerned.
“End of story as far as SLF is concerned.”
Absolutely true. I do not deny this. But when the chair of an organisation is briefing the ‘Murdoch Press’ about a leadership coup, it’s not unreasonable for the ‘Murdoch Press’ to make the assumptions that the organisation is backing said coup. I’m just pointing out where that assumption came from.
As an outsider I think it was the MPs who should have stepped up to the plate. The others overestimate their own importance. Clegg was correct about the committees.
Sara Scarlett25th Jun ’15 – 1:28pm
… and when the person attempting to stir things up is a self-declared member of the Conservative Party Sara, what shall we make of that?
As liberals it ought to be fundamental to our beliefs that leaders are our servants and not the other way round. If we wish to dismiss a servant and put another one in place, that should be regarded as natural and normal, not dramatised and portrayed as some horrendous and terrible thing. We are not Leninists and we should not subscribe to the Leninist view of political party.
Simon Hesketh
I left long after this happened. Largely due to the fact that this episode proved to me that the LibDems are unreformable. Clegg was a bad leader. I have given the reasons many a time on my blog. I was in agreement with Naomi and Seth that Clegg should go. You only had to look at the Facebook comments to know exactly who was behind the coup. Frankly, if anything I’ve said comes as a complete surprise to anyone then they are too stupid to be in politics.
Also, I have emails proving it. 😉
“As liberals it ought to be fundamental to our beliefs that leaders are our servants and not the other way round. If we wish to dismiss a servant and put another one in place, that should be regarded as natural and normal, not dramatised and portrayed as some horrendous and terrible thing.”
Well said, Matthew Huntbach! There’s something I never thought I’d say…
Gareth Epps
The esteemed political journalists Patrick Wintour and Nicholas Watt of the Guardian have made an interesting, if long contribution to the debate about how the Liberal Democrats ended up in their current predicament.
The Guardian ran plenty of “nah nah nah nah nah” attacks on the Liberal Democrats during the time of the Coalition, yet its own coverage and commentary on the party has always had a very firm bias to its right. So the Guardian was running attacks on the Liberal Democrats for shifting to the right, alongside firmly contributing to that shift.
The two commentary articles in the Guardian today show clearly that bias. One is the usual Tory line that tried to make out that “liberalism” should mean Thatcherite economics plus a few token social liberal policies so long as they do not conflict with the interests of the wealthy. The other is the Wintour and Watt article, with its extraordinary claim that the “Orange Book” was trying to move the Liberal Democrats to a “centrist” position. That is the equivalent of saying that when the Militant Tendency was active in the Labour Party it was trying to move the Labour Party to a centrist position.
Stephen Hesketh 25th Jun ’15 – 1:06pm
“…Party structures must now be changed and power dispersed to ensure this can never befall the party again.”
Stephen, yes indeed.
But not just the structures, the culture and attitudes need to be turned upside down.
There has been an ever-growing tendency over decades for various leaders to win a leadership election and then claim legitimacy for absolutely everything they say and do.
We are seeing this repeated during the course of the present leadership election with one of the candidates clearly the choice of last year’s bunker.
By way of evidence — in our house we received a mailing today in the name of one of our octogenarian members of the HofL. She is someone who was a teenager during the 1939-45 World War, who has been near the centre of the British Establishment all her life and has bags of useful experience no doubt.
Is she or her annointed candidate really the best to chart the opening up and democratisation of the party in the 21st Century with their underlined leadership message of “more of the same”?
There is a clear choice in this leader election and everyone knows who is the candidate for change and who is the candidate of the Ancien Regime.
If only those brave enough to try and take action against a party heading for disaster had got the support they deserved. Those in SLF who sat on their hands probably shouldn’t be that eager to correct a record that made the others look prescient.
Stevo – nobody in SLF was sitting on their hands. A number of people believe Clegg should have gone before 2014, but t was too late by then (myself included).
To those saying the Guardian was using lazy shorthand on the ‘Orange Book’ – yes, I agree.
The point was that without a completely different strategy – see the links to posts from last May – who was the figurehead was and is for the birds. As Tim Farron correctly spelt out today, tuition fees and the associated loss of trust acted like a forcefield preventing us from connecting to the electorate. A new leader with the same wrong strategy in 2014 would have led to much the same result.
Leaving aside all of the rather personal posts above I echo the words of Stephen Hesketh. Much more challenge to the error-strewn narrative of the leadership – or eternal vigilance as I like to think of it – was needed. Until both current leadership candidates spell out a clearer strategy it will remain so (and I am clear on who I am backing).
And my piece was slightly edited to conceal the identity of the then Cabinet Minister who sought to have me removed as the FPC rep on the BIS/Treasury committee because he didn’t like being challenged on the biggest mistake made by the party in decades. Let’s just say I would only need to write a verse, not a song about him for the Liberator Songbook 🙂
Sorry, Gareth, but you can hardly blame the big, bad “Murdoch Press” for blaming the coup on SLF when the Chair of SLF is leaking to the press on behalf of Matthew Oakshott. Any journalist with half a brain – let’s face it that’s the most any of the have – going to think that SLF are behind the coup. Forgive me for not being surprised when they don’t want to give you an apology.
” “Clegg commissioned an official review of the election defeats, but little changed in the aftermath.”
Can someone explain to me where this ‘official review’ is and how one can get to see it? Or is that an ‘official secret’ upon which the Party will never Act? ”
Yes, it’s linked here:
http://www.libdems.org.uk/james_gurling_review_into_the_local_and_european_election_campaign
good guardian piece:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/25/labour-leadership-purity-power-benn-corbyn-lib-dems-farron
One of the Chairs, Sara. This one didn’t speak to Oakeshott after he took the hump when I took the mickey out of his notoriously quietly-supported football club (among other things).
My apologies. I have to admit I don’t know when the co-chairmanship ended and the sole chairmanship started!
Two good candidates – only one who will build “from the bottom up” – by listening to all members, make a modern system of participation. Then use all of us to remain up-to-date as a campaigning team – always listening and reporting from our voters to “representatives”. And please make it easier to change leaders [at all levels] in an organised and polite way.
All of this shows that the Party just wasn’t ready to deal with power . I am seriously worried about the secrecy tendency as it is the opposite of what Lib Dems campaign for in other organisations. Unfortunately there was no proper mechanism for MPs to consult their constituency members about major issues and I believe there was also a strong tendency for our MPs to see themselves as above anyone else in the party in every way and so they failed to listen. This culture has probably existed for decades.
Now we know what we don’t want to happen when the Party is next in power, we can change the Constitution and put checks and balances in place but above all we must change the culture so that the Party embodies our beliefs and values.
Paul Walter 25th Jun ’15 – 8:58pm
” “Clegg commissioned an official review of the election defeats, but little changed in the aftermath.”
Yes, it’s linked here:
http://www.libdems.org.uk/james_gurling_review_into_the_local_and_european_election_campaign
Thanks for this, Paul.
I followed the link which required me to transfer to another page and then to have a password to gain access.
My attempts to establish a password to access the document failed more than once.
I usually assume I am at fault (or my aged iPad) but I have persisted several times without getting through.
Is there a public version which does not require me to jump the impossible password hurdle?
@David Evans
You may think that this secrecy is something relatively new, but as Gareth and I both know from a LibDem conference in another place (in accordance with their rules I am not allowed to name it), it has been developing for more than a decade. When Paddy was leader he lurked there and posted occasionally. Charles never seemed interested in it as a means of communicating with and listening to members (or at least some of the active ones). Certainly, as far back as 2004 there were objections to FE minutes being posted there (in an environment where the circulation was restricted to current Party members, with one of the Membership Department staff acting as gatekeeper).
All we have seen over the last decade is a progressive tightening of who is allowed to know what is going on, with the inevitable result.
Thanks for that Laurence. It doesn’t surprise me. Indeed I rather expect it, even though I oppose it wholeheartedly and fight against it continuously. It is sad how many Lib Dems think openness and honesty are great, but for too many it doesn’t apply to them once they get in power, because it may allow others to stop them from getting just what they want. That includes some very senior figures indeed, who are sadly just too used to other’s deference leading to them getting their own way.
That is why, although I agree with Sue S when she says we don’t want it to happen when the Party is next in power, and we must change our constitution and the culture so that the Party embodies our beliefs and values, I know it won’t happen easily (and I think she does too). The one weakness in this is the assumption that you can have a party where everybody embodies our beliefs and values all the time and problems never happen. We all know that that is quite impossible in our party as in any other organisation. What is needed is a party whose members are prepared to stand up for its beliefs and values when it is being attacked and destroyed from within. There was what has happened over the last few years but sadly although quite a few were prepared to moan about it, too few were prepared to do anything about it.
QUOTE: Mark Blackburn 25th Jun ’15 – 12:43pm:
“This is completely wrongly turning into a finger-pointing debate about a potential coup over a year ago, when it should be about what went wrong and how we all fix it.”
Hear, hear. I’m depressed by the to and fro about who did what. It also seems fairly basic to me that a quality newspaper should say an organisation is backing something if that organisation, as an organisation, is doing so, and not say this if some leading people within it were taking one position, and others thought differently, and no vote had been taken.
I don’t know there’s much point those who, like me, thought Nick Clegg was the wrong leader, arguing over precisely what happened in 2014. As it happens, I thought a graceful resignation by Nick then would have been good for the cause and the party, but a messy assassination, very likely a failed one, seemed unhelpful to put it mildly. What struck me at the time was that the coup was ill-organised and didn’t seem well-prepared, while the counterattack from those around the Leader seemed effective and well-prepared. Oh, and some people may have “panicked”, but hardly, Eddie, because they didn’t like the policies, since at that stage the policies had hardly changed for four years and those who didn’t like them were hardly panicking.
The comment that Nick had the right opinion of the party committees is depressing if I’ve understood it correctly. They’re elected committees of the party and a leader must engage with them seriously. By analogy, there’s some profoundly unimpressive people in Parliament, or on any local council, but that doesn’t mean they should be bypassed by those who know better.
Finally, the confusion over Liberals and Social Democrats is depressing from journalists who should know better, but it does point to a need for Social Liberals to set out clearly how a Social Liberal is not the same as a Social Democrat.
Like John Tilley, I have struggled and failed with the nationbuider loop trying to get into the site to see that report.
I am, however, interested in the summary of his own report published on LDV by James Gurling:
“we made clear that over the next 9 months the party should ensure that we are producing inspiring and motivating messages for our activists and the electorate, and ensuring that our manifesto is centred on Liberal Democrat policy – not a defence of the status quo.”
I would suggest that in the nine months leading up to the May 2015 election (and for a long time before) precisely the opposite happened.
I have, however, found a public copy of the review into the 2011 election
http://www.scribd.com/doc/63934201/Liberal-Democrats-Election-Review-May-2011-elections-and-AV-referendum
Interestingly, it is conducted by the same James Gurling as conducted the 2015 review. Unfortunately, there appears to be no similar review available of the disappointing 2010 campaign.
Given that the effectiveness of the Party’s campaigns and communications would seem to me to have been a major issue in all these elections, it seems rather surprising to me that anyone should feel it appropriate procedurally that the Chair of Campaigns and Communications should have been invited by anyone to conduct one such review, let alone two. That is said without any knowledge of or inference about the individual concerned.
John and Tony
That report is only available to party members. Any member can access it – there’s the option to activate an account by following the link I posted above. I’ll email the pdf to the both of you. You both manage to post vast quantities of comments here but can’t manage a simple registration! Tshh! What are we going to do with you? 😉
If we are ever to survive as a coherent political force we need a thoroughgoing rejection of the rightward drift of the party, the trend towards secrecy, the Westminster-centric focus, the constant denigration of community politics wrongly dismissing it as “delivering leaflets”, a reassertion of the party as a whole as the only legitimate source of policy authority and much, much more. Our party has been comprehensively hijacked and electing Tim Farron as Leader is just the first step towards taking it back. That’s why the centralisers, the deniers, the MPs and the officers and advisers who failed so miserably hate him with such passion. We are in a death struggle for the conscience and future of what’s left of the party, and it is going to get uglier before it gets better.
The sad thing about this is that Cleggs inner circle began to believe their own propaganda and that despite result after result thought they would retain those parliamentary seats.The party in the country became the collateral damage they seemed prepared to accept.We must ensure we have an achievable mechanism to hold parliamentarians to account should their future actions put the liberal movement in jeopardy perhaps through a special conference or call in process.
I have enjoyed reading much of this, including the “must do better next time” strictures. Can I point out the piece does not mention the SLF as organisation supporting the attempt to oust Clegg in 2014 ? It quotes Naomi Smith as chair of SLF and states specifically she was anyway not the prime mover behind the letter calling for Clegg to stand down. Clearly, it would have been more accurate to describe her as co-chair at the time. Apologies.
Patrick, thanks for gracing these boards with your presence. :). I often cringe when I find someone has read what I’ve been saying about them – reminds me to be polite! 🙂
What is in incredible about 2014 is that now that the truth is starting to emerge that everyone including Nick Clegg himself felt he should go but only a minority of the party had the guts to make it happen. the revelations about how party managers were able to blunt the howls of anguish coming from the party. The complexity of party democracy is clearly anything but. The sad thing is were all thinking the same thing but not acting together. a metophor for our current mess and the plight of the anti-Tory progressives.
I have been reading the Manchester Guardian on a daily basis ever since it changed its name. For most of that time most of its political specialists have assumed that part of giving support to Labour means insisting that anyone quitting Labour for the Liberals / Liberal Democrats must become part of the “Liberal left”. God preserve us from that sort of sentimentality as we get on with the hard thinking and debate that is required within our party over the next twelve months. If ever there was a moment to stand by the Preamble while attempting ruthless analysis of what has happened, is happening and may happen, this is it.