A favourite pastime of cynical journalists with space to fill is to take select phrases from the speeches of different party leaders, remove the names of the authors, jumble up the order and then ask the reader to guess which leader said which. Even with the wondrous variety of the English language, it’s no surprise that words and phrases often overlap, even between politicians with radically different views of the world. There is, even so, sometimes a deeper truth in this parlour game for cynics.
It’s a truth that the words of Liberal Democrats in the run up to last Thursday’s …
Broadly speaking, the party’s local government base is now back to where it was in 1993. As I put it:
For those who joined the Liberal Democrats in the last 18 months, and may not yet even have been in school in 1993, that may well seem a long time away and a big step back; for those who have seen the party’s ups and downs in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and ’00s, 1993 looks rather better – and nothing like as bad as the dog days of having a party leader on trial for conspiracy to murder (late 1970s) or
One of the curios of some library campaigners extolling the virtues of books whilst also mocking the Big Society for supposedly being incomprehensible or non-existent is that there is a short, clear and well-written book which lays out just what it is. Conservative MP Jesse Norman’s book, The Big Society, is certainly not uncontroversial, but it makes a sufficiently strong and clear case to have received favourable comments from across the political spectrum on its publication last autumn, including from Labour MP Jon Cruddas.
At times the book seems to have two, almost contradictory, purposes – to persuade traditional Conservatives …
I have a secret to admit. I quite like big organisations.
Of course – as you would expect of a liberal – I think power should be kept at as local a level as possible, that organisations should be responsive to individuals, and so that smaller is frequently better – and that individuals’ freedom and rights get trampled on when Big Brother gets free rein.
But faced with the reality of actually trying to change the world, …
Party conference in Sheffield saw the publication of Delivering Localism, a pamphlet from the Liberal Democrat Local Government Association Group which lays out the detailed policies being enacted by government to free up local councils and give them more power.
It’s very reliant on long lists of bullet points at times but it has some excellent content and is well worth a look through.
Oh, and Nick Clegg even uses “community politics” in the foreword; a response, so I hear, to my post on the matter. Ah, the power of blogging 🙂
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This is the chapter I contributed during the last Parliament to ALDC’s Community Politics Today publication. The John Pardoe quote applies all the more now the party is in coalition government and the general advice to local campaigners is in my view even more important now than it was then:
It’s a common complaint – that modern Liberal Democrat election campaigns have lost the original campaigning and ideological spirit of community politics. Instead, so the critics say, campaigns have become a dumbed-down recitation of techniques, campaigning by numbers, where the only objective is votes and only the ballot box …
During the week I commented on how “Community Politics” is a term becoming worryingly scarce amongst the public utterances of senior Liberal Democrats. One practical example of this is how so much of the running, both intellectual and practical, in political circles on developing social investment is happening in the Conservative Party.
Finding ways to improve the availability of funds to social enterprises is an issue that has got increasing intention in recent years and is an important part of the Conservative vision for a Big Society bank, but Liberal Democrats have been mostly silent as it has become all about the Big Society, with Community Politics rarely getting a mention on the national stage even from Liberal Democrats.
If you are not familiar with the issue, here is an example of a social enterprise taken from the government consultation paper published during the week:
Bikeworks was set up in 2007 with the aim of using bikes to tackle environmental, social and economic challenges in Tower Hamlets, east London. Bikeworks provides employment and training opportunities for marginalised individuals in recycling and refurbishing second-hand bikes. Bikeworks’ approach is to develop and build on the best of small-scale community cycling initiatives but to do so on a greater scale, achieve significant outcomes and build a viable replicable model. They recently opened a second community cycling hub in Kensington and Chelsea, west London, in September 2010, and have aspirations to replicate the service further. Bikeworks’ income is earned through contracts to provide a range of organisational cycling services to local authorities, civil society organisations and corporate clients. It also generates income from the retail sale of recycled bikes and the provision of repairs and maintenance services to the public.
The consultation paper looks at how more investment funding can be made available for such enterprises, particularly through fixing flaws in the current state of the financial markets (section 3.10 lists five major areas where markets are not working properly in this regard). Here it is in full:
One of the reasons – in fact, probably the main reason – why so many Liberal Democrats are relaxed about the Conservative Party leadership’s enthusiasm for the Big Society idea is the overlap between the Big Society and the traditional Liberal Democrat belief in Community Politics. That’s a topic I wrote about at greater length before Christmas, but what has struck me since is how little senior Liberal Democrats talk about Community Politics now.
Despite the frequent media discussion about the Big Society, which provides an opening to talk about the Liberal Democrat alternative/supplement (delete as you wish), Community …
David Cameron’s recent speech laying out his vision of the Big Society provides a yardstick to judge it against traditional Liberal Democrat (and before that Liberal) beliefs in community politics.
The underlying motivation for the Big Society, as expressed by Cameron, could have come from one of the many Lib Dem / Liberal pamphlets or articles about community politics:
It comes from the belief that over many decades this country has become too centralised, too bureaucratic and too top-down.
And this is not just inefficient and overly-bureaucratic but also has an insidious cultural effect, because it robs people of responsibility.
I recently spent a couple of days visiting some of England’s surviving windmills with a couple of friends. Though it was a holiday rather than a deliberate exercise in political education, two political points came out clearly.
One, which I’ve blogged about previously, is how the windmill not only used to be a key part of the English landscape but also, in its horizontal axis / vertical sail form, is an English invention.
So windmills not only are a British (or perhaps more accurately English) tradition, they are also an example of technical inventiveness of which we can be proud. And yet …
By Helen Duffett
| Tue 16th November 2010 - 11:18 am
Paul Scriven, the Leader of Sheffield City Council, has won a Europe-wide award for the work he and his Liberal Democrat colleagues have done to put power into the hands of Sheffield people.
The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in Europe held their Leader Awards last night, “recognising the work of outstanding local and regional liberal and democrat politicians.”
Cllr Scriven received the Achievement in Local Government Award. Others up for award included local politicians from France, Croatia and Holland.
Since Paul became the Liberal Democrat Leader of the Council in 2008 Sheffield has seen a raft of new ideas to devolve …
“Enough of the cuts already!”. We should be shouting. Not because of some ostrich-like desire to deny we’re part of a coalition that’s taking a scythe to public spending, but because the message is wrong. It’s not the cuts stupid, it’s not even the economy stupid. It’s the vision thing, clever.
Businesses are not in business to cut costs. Of course, they need to be efficient to compete (which includes not burdening themselves with debt that they can’t cope with). But their purpose, the reason someone set them up in the first place, is to make something or sell a service. …
I write this having just got back from a very successful Lib Dem Conference in Liverpool. Everyone seemed to be in good heart, and keen to see what a Liberal Democrat government minister really looked like. Conference is a great occasion to talk and listen to activists directly, and so I really got stuck in. On more than one occasion I was “doing a Simon Hughes” and trying to attend multiple meetings at once! But, though we covered a diverse range of topics, there were two recurring themes – localism and the Big Society.
Localism shouldn’t need any explanation for Liberal …
One of the fringe meetings I spoke at during the Liverpool conference was ResPublica’s on the topic of “Growing a civil economy through a civil society”. Accompanying ResPublica’s fringe program is a pamphlet with pieces accompanying the talks we all gave and here is my piece from it.
Both a successful market economy and a healthy democracy require individuals from all walks of life to feel they have the power to change the future. The belief that you can make a success of your own business, that your firm can innovate and that existing suppliers are not locked in to permanent dominance creates the vibrancy which generates wealth in a market economy. The optimism that your voice can count and your actions can alter your community gives live to a democracy, making it more than a token intermittent meeting of pencil and paper in the polling booth.
Our economy and our democracy therefore present us with a common challenge – to tackle that lack of confidence in your own ability to alter the future which suffocates far too many communities and far too many parts of society. Removing that malaise requires a mix of many policies, only a few of which I highlight in this piece.
One of the most important is improving education in people’s early years. Those formative early years leave intellectual and psychological marks that can be very hard to shift in later years. It is a tough question for government, because so much of the evidence shows that what matters above all is the commitment of parents to their children. That is a deeply private and personal affair which the state can only touch the edges of. Nick Clegg’s commitment to the Pupil Premium to channel extra funds to help educate the most disadvantaged children is one example of the exceptions to that where the government can take effective action.
A second strand is the sort of political reform the coalition government is embarked on, devolving power from Westminster to local councils, to the Scottish Executive and offering a referendum in Wales. Going too is the worst sort of insular political elitism –one of the two houses of Parliament still completely locking out the public from electing its members. It shows a fantastic contempt by for the public that when MPs are booted out at a general election, how does the political establishment react? By giving a good number of those defeated MPs a seat for life in Parliament courtesy of the Lords.
A third strand is – or should be – tackling the elitist insularity in the commercial sector. Whether it is the deeply lopsided rules that give the favoured company directors a huge head-start in elections or the widespread use of “commercial confidentiality” clauses to keep scrutiny at bay, what would cause outrage if tried by a politician is far too often par for the course by those who like to look down on politicians.
Tying the different strands together needs to be a stronger sense of how people can successfully work together, because so often the collective voice has the strength and skill to succeed where lone individuals are thwarted. Whether it is the Community Politics of the Liberal Democrats or the Big Society of the Conservatives, success will come not from seeing voluntary collective action as an excuse for cost cutting but as a means to a vibrant and successful country.
As Ed Maxfield wrote about last month, the LibDem conference in Liverpool will see a consultation session on the party’s strategy and priorities. Penned by Gordon Lishman, the paper is a good starting point for debate and goes through the obvious yet important questions, such as how does being in government change the party’s approach. Being a paper from Gordon it also places many of the questions in a broader context, with nods towards history, community politics and the variations in political perspective across the UK.
Reading through it, there was one section I found particularly welcome, and one rather too conventional.
The particularly welcome section was this:
How can we create a liberal movement?
The liberal movement goes beyond party, asserting our leadership on a wide range of issues and themes, including climate change; civil liberty, equality and human rights; political reform; rural affairs; and many more. This is partly a matter of working with other campaigning organisations, think‐tanks and popular movements where our goals coincide; it should also involve Liberal Democrats in leadership of such organisations: what better role for Parliamentarians outside government and other competent members of the Party? For instance, how do we build on Liberal Democrat overall responsibility for human rights: in the Foreign Office, Home Office and Ministry of Justice?
Gordon’s absolutely right about the need to place our electoral campaigning and our work as a political party in a wider campaigning context. The debate we will be having at conference about marriage being open to same-sex couples illustrates this. It’s a cause dear to many liberal hearts, but is by no means exclusive to Liberal Democrats. Cross-party support is often a key ingredient in securing legislative change. Moreover, the issue is not just about what Parliament does or doesn’t legislate. Parliament decides whether same-sex marriages result in the same legal entitlements as traditional marriage. What Parliament cannot directly do is make society hold same-sex marriages in the same esteem. The emotional and cultural parts of equality come from how we all feel and behave. That requires broader change and campaigning than the MPs of one party trooping through the right lobby in Parliament.
The part of the document that struck as me as far too conventional is about regional parties in England:
The English Regional Parties should have a key leadership role in supporting and motivating activists, representing the Party publicly, influencing the UK Party and ensuring that we have the right candidates in place at the right time.
Those are roles that regional parties have had for a long time and overall they have a very mixed record in many respects. The context in which regional parties operate has changed significantly. It used to be rare in most regions for there to be significant elected Liberal Democrats outside of local government. Now we have MPs and MEPs right across England, with GLA members in London too. Our membership and its perspectives has also changed, along with society more generally, with people often having looser geographic roots and interests and instead placing themselves more firmly in non-geographic communities which share particular interests. At a time too when many councils are looking to share large amounts of their back office organisation with neighbouring councils, to simply restate those roles for regional parties misses out the bigger questions of what they should be for.
Do regional parties really have a role in representing the party publicly? When there are Lib Dem MPs and MEPs in their patch could they ever hope to do so effectively? Are regional conferences best organised by many separate teams working independently in each region? How effective really are regions at maximising the number of local council candidates (a very important question in my view)? The list of questions goes on and a good review should address the role of regions rather than work on the basis that the old model is still the right one to try to make work.
Move along please, nothing to see here. Just a body of ideas that died a natural death some time in the 1990s.
I have just read Gordon Lishman’s Federal Executive paper on future party strategy. It is encouragingly clear and geared towards future action and it contains a number of interesting proposals. But is it undermined by its insistence on tying future party strategy to the ideology of community politics?
Questioning the relevance of community politics in a Lib Dem forum feels a bit like trying to sell Richard Dawkins in a seminary but there are a number of reasons …
Three months ago, if I had said that the Liberal Democrats would be in government, and I’d be a Minister in the Department for Communities and Local Government, you would have laughed at me. Yet here we are. I’ve fought no less than eight general elections and at the first seven, all we did was tell people what the Liberal Democrats would do if we got into power. This time we get to show them instead.
At the time David Cameron started talking about the Big Society, the concept struck me as a mix of traditional community politics and vagueness. Looking at the specifics in this section, there is still a fair amount of vagueness, but the specifics are ones that often touch on themes which our party (or more precisely the Liberal Party) has talked about in the past and rather neglected in more recent years. In other words, it’s …
I’m usually the first to moan about the party’s propensity to jump on populist bandwagons. In darker moments I have imagined a press release attacking Galilee’s Labour-controlled council for poor litter collection after the feeding of the five thousand, or poor traffic management at the Sermon on the Mount.
However is there a campaigner alive who can resist a phrase like the “Rain Tax”?
www.dontdrainus.org is a non-partisan campaign site set up to oppose new, deeply unfair surface water charges which may cripple many churches, charities and clubs.
The regulator Ofwat has allowed – or encouraged? – water companies to charge non-profit-making community buildings at the same rates as commercial businesses, often leading to huge increases in bills. As such groups often don’t use a lot of water, or make any profit, this is hardly fair or green taxation.
Without getting into ‘the heavy stuff’, surely a central strand of modern liberalism is that we are more than atomised individuals, but that our common life together is often best mediated by local, voluntary, citizen lead groups rather than the state?
As society begins to warp, stress and strain under the forces of credit cold turkey, what sort of government allows the little guys and girls to pick up the bill? Of course the money for investment in our water infrastructure has to come from somewhere. Of course water companies have big programmes of environmental improvements.
However there are three reasons why for many groups the “Rain Tax” is part of a perfect storm.
Duncan Brack and Ed Randall, authors of the Dictionary of Liberal Thought, have kindly agreed to let us publish extracts on Lib Dem Voice. This month, Community Politics. The entire book is available on Amazon here.
Community Politics
Community politics encompasses a restatement of the intellectual basis for liberalism, based on devolving power to communities, and a strategy for winning elections, particularly focusing on local government. It emerged as a concept in the late 1960s, and was officially adopted by the Liberal Party at its 1970 assembly.
The theory of community politics emerged from the intellectual ferment of the Young Liberal movement during the late 1960s. Young Liberal leaders drawn to the Liberal Party by Jo Grimond sought to rethink the intellectual case for liberalism, earning the nickname ‘Red Guards’ because their radicalism conflicted with the more staid orthodoxy of the party leadership. After the Red Guards disintegrated following a series of doctrinal disputes, those members who remained with the Liberal Party set out ‘a restatement of Liberalism in a new synthesis to meet the changed perspectives of a new generation’. Bernard Greaves (1942–), Tony (now Lord) Greaves (1942–), Gordon Lishman (1947–) and Michael Meadowcroft were among its main proponents.
If 2006 was the year of the renaissance of 007, 2007 could be the renaissance of the Lib Dems.
Despite taking a seat from Labour in a great Parliamentary by-election victory, launching the most radical green tax switch policy to reward work and punish pollution, and remaining the only force in Parliament around which opponents of the war in Iraq could unite, it was something of an Annus Horribilis.
The New Year offers us new opportunities to carve out distinctive positions on foreign affairs, domestic reform and where we stand in relation to the Government and Conservative opposition.
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Our economy and our democracy therefore present us with a common challenge – to tackle that lack of confidence in your own ability to alter the future which suffocates far too many communities and far too many parts of society. Removing that malaise requires a mix of many policies, only a few of which I highlight in this piece.
Gordon’s absolutely right about the need to place our electoral campaigning and our work as a political party in a wider campaigning context. The debate we will be having at conference about marriage being open to same-sex couples illustrates this. It’s a cause dear to many liberal hearts, but is by no means exclusive to Liberal Democrats. Cross-party support is often a key ingredient in securing legislative change. Moreover, the issue is not just about what Parliament does or doesn’t legislate. Parliament decides whether same-sex marriages result in the same legal entitlements as traditional marriage. What Parliament cannot directly do is make society hold same-sex marriages in the same esteem. The emotional and cultural parts of equality come from how we all feel and behave. That requires broader change and campaigning than the MPs of one party trooping through the right lobby in Parliament.
If 2006 was the year of the renaissance of 007, 2007 could be the renaissance of the Lib Dems.
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