Editor’s Note: In November party members will be voting to elect our next Party President. At Lib Dem Voice we welcome posts from each of the candidates – one to launch their candidature plus a maximum of one per week during the actual campaign.

Anyone who has attended a hustings, read our manifestos, looked at our websites (mine is https://prue4president.co.uk/ ) or has otherwise been following the internal federal Presidential election, will know by now that my vision for the role includes a significant focus on promoting more collaborative working more consultation, more co-operation, and more constructive engagement across the party.   

To some people those might seem soft and woolly and “nice to have”.   They are in fact crucially important for the future success of the party.   We are good at campaigning and in recent years, we have been good at winning elections.  But we could do so much better if we were all collectively pulling together in the same direction.   And that is not always the case.

In my view that is what the job of the President is about: getting the party into the best shape it can be to support campaigning.  In our enthusiasm for the politics and the campaigning, we sometimes forget that we are a multi-million pound organisation that has to be run properly and effectively so that the politics and the campaigning can also be effective.

The reason I am standing for President is that on too many occasions I have seen the negative impacts of failing to collaborate, failing to consult, failing to co-operate and failing to engage.  It holds us back, it makes us less effective, and it sometimes causes massive upsets. And one of those has happened this week.

You get a lot more out of people when you trust, empower and involve them than you do by disrespecting them, ordering them about or failing to communicate with them.  No-one – well, to be strictly accurate, hardly anyone – does any of that bad stuff on purpose.  People are human and when they are stretched to the limits of their capacity, they tend to focus on dealing with the things directly in front of them.  In a pressured situation it can be hard to lift your head and look more widely.  We end up with too many people working in silos, not being aware of what others are doing that could help them or how they could help others.  And too many people not realising the negative consequences of their actions for others,  or not understanding that they don’t have all the information they really need  to get the best outcomes.  We should see each other as allies, not rivals, and our activities as complementary, not as competition.  

I am not trying to suggest that everything is wrong all of the time.  It isn’t.  But there are too many mis-steps and missed opportunities.  And I find that immensely frustrating.   We have few enough resources, and it we need to use them wisely.

I see the primary mission of the President as being to shift our culture so that we routinely consider how we can best leverage the impact of everything we do to serve the interests of the party as a whole for the long term.   What kinds of things do I mean?   Joining up all our efforts on improving our diversity and reaching into diverse communities.  Joining up all our efforts on improving membership recruitment and retention.  Joining up all our efforts on candidates.  Joining up all our efforts on training.   Involving our Affiliated Organizations and other bodies in a more organised way.  And producing a party strategy that prioritises the organisational activities that are needed to support our electoral plans.

The way we run the party needs to align with our values.  Not just because to do otherwise would be hypocritical, but because aligning with those values will make the party work better.  

You may have noticed this piece is a little toned down from the one I wrote earlier in the week.  Please be assured I am still furious at what has happened over the diversity quotas in the election.  I am trying to channel that fury constructively, to make things better.  And that is the fundamental reason I want to be President: to make things better. 

* Prue Bray (she/her) has been a member of the Lib Dems since 1994. She has been a councillor in Wokingham since 2000. She was the Chair of the Candidates Committee in England during the 2017 and 2019 General Elections and the 2019 European elections, Vice Chair of the Party in England and was chair of ALDC until November 2024. She writes in a personal capacity.