Tag Archives: f10

Dorothy Thornhill

Dorothy Thornhill writes: We need to modernise our approach to candidate selection

By Dorothy Thornhill | Thu 20th March 2025 - 10:07 pm

People who know me well know I always say it as it is. So I won’t mess about.

For me, there is some unfinished business at conference this weekend – and that’s why I’m asking you to support Motion F10 on Saturday.

How many more reports do we need before we modernise the party’s approach to candidates?

The 2015 General Election Review called for serious changes to candidate selection and support. And so did the 2019 General Election Review that I chaired.

And three years ago yet another report by my colleague Alison Suttie spelt out the real changes that needed to happen.

Yet here we are. A decade later, three major reports on – and there are still people arguing we don’t have a problem, and there’s no need for change.

I know that a lack of change is wrong – and so do many members up and down the country.

The need for speed

There has been a lot of information flying around about F10 over recent days, some of it not always completely accurate.  We need to face facts. What we’re currently doing on candidates isn’t working. For a start, it’s just not fast enough. In the last parliament we had virtually no candidates selected for two years. In the end, time ran out to run member ballots – with only just over 200 candidates in place.

That meant members in over 400 constituencies didn’t get to choose their candidate. They were all appointed, many right at the very last minute. It also meant that there was no time to train and support those candidates properly after selection, and no time for them to grow their constituencies.

Any campaigner worth their salt knows that having a candidate in place, building a team and showing leadership, drives up campaigning activity. That’s just common sense, and we have clear stats to prove it.

Yet we insist on sticking with a system that delivers too few candidates, and too late on in the election cycle.

Clarity and diversity

Continue reading »
Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged | 7 Comments
George Sykes

Making the cement for the yellow wall – how candidate selection reform will make us stronger

By George Sykes | Wed 19th March 2025 - 1:48 pm

On May 22nd last year, I watched Rishi Sunak announce the general election. Little did I know that a few hectic weeks later, we’d be celebrating having 72 MPs, an enormous achievement that is a testament to the hard work of volunteers and staff across the party.

However, we did not achieve that success by continuing to do what we had always done; we did it by ruthlessly introspecting and improving. Just because we have won does not mean we should stop our self-reflection. By my calculations, if we introspect as hard as we did last time, we should end up with 468 MPs at the next election…

As the chair of a Local Party that covers ten constituencies (with two being shared with other local party’s) in a labour facing area I had a few key aims at the election:

  • Stand a candidate in every constituency
  • Campaign in the seats we had existing campaigns in to ensure our voters had their views represented in the general election debate
  • Win in our designated local target seat

I’m proud to say that with the hard work of a team of volunteers across Leeds and the whole region, we achieved all of those. However, all was not entirely rosy for the following reasons:

  • Failed to stand a single women candidate across all ten seats
  • Lost our deposit in all but two seats (costing the party £4,000)

This is far from ideal, and if we are serious about being a diverse, representative, national party, we need to fix it.

Firstly, we need to enable our amazing volunteer teams to focus on what they can do best, identifying the members in their areas who can be recruited as parliamentary candidates. We know that proactively identifying and talking to potential candidates rather than waiting for them to come to us is key to increasing diversity. Who is better placed to do this than volunteers drawn from and embedded in our local parties?

By offloading the administration element of candidate recruitment, we can enable our volunteers to focus on building connections with potential candidates. This will develop a deeper pool of potential candidates more representative of the communities we seek to represent.

Continue reading »
Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged and | 6 Comments

Why Liberal values require us to vote against the Federal party’s conference power grab

By Thomas Prince | Tue 18th March 2025 - 6:02 pm

The F10 function key on my keyboard serves as a Mute button.

And that, unfortunately, is what the F10 motion up for a vote this Saturday in Harrogate would also do: mute the voices of all those that want to be able to choose their candidate for Parliament in their hometown.

You know when the Federal Party is worried because it takes a sudden interest in what ordinary members think, and uses the same skills it directs at the electorate in an effort to win votes.

Continue reading »
Posted in Party policy and internal matters | Also tagged and | 5 Comments
Mark Valladares

F10: the right means to a desirable end?

By Mark Valladares | Mon 17th March 2025 - 12:15 pm

As a veteran of the Party’s candidates process – Returning Officer, candidate assessor, member of Regional and State Candidates Committees – over more than thirty years, you might not be surprised to find that I’ve been following the debate on this ornate, detailed constitution proposal with some interest.

And, whilst the General Election review published in January was, whether inadvertently or by design, somewhat bruising towards those who have been at the heart of running selection and approval processes over past years, what it stated as desirable outcomes had a lot of merit. Getting candidates in place earlier, finding and developing more Returning Officers and candidate assessors, and increasing transparency and consistency across the piece, are all obviously sensible.

The “solution”, however, appears to be to take responsibility from the structures that currently exist and replace them with a new Federal one, in the expectation that it will do a better job.

This may or may not be true. It does rather depend on who takes on the new responsibilities, how well they are resourced and how well they work with a core group of volunteers who will still be relied upon to do the “grunt work”. For very few people act as Returning Officers and candidate assessors “because it’s fun”. They do it predominantly because someone has to do it, and they fit in it around a range of other commitments.

Continue reading »
Posted in Conference, Op-eds and Party policy and internal matters | Also tagged and | 6 Comments
Victoria Collins MP

Fewer committees, more diversity – why I’m backing F10

By Victoria Collins MP | Sun 16th March 2025 - 10:28 am

I want us – as Liberal Democrats – to select great candidates, improve diversity in the party and empower our local parties to elect the best candidates to represent them. That’s why I’m backing motion F10 at conference – the one that seeks to implement the recommendations of the General Election Review around Westminster candidates. 

I am doing so for two reasons:

  • By reducing three committees to one it makes it easier to address the problems in our current candidates system;
  • By creating a place on the committee for the Vice President responsible for increasing engagement with ethnic minority communities, candidate diversity finally becomes a keystone in our Westminster candidate system.

Now, I am sure many in the party can give you verbatim – in probably the most intricate of detail – the constitutional intricacies and implications of the motion. However, I wanted to share with you my personal story of my journey to becoming a candidate and how this has led me to strongly support real reform of our candidates system.

From the top, I wish to say that none of this is criticism of individuals involved in the process. This is criticism of the process itself that volunteers spend hours dedicating their time to administer and deliver. I am truly grateful to them for this, but I want the system -those volunteers have to work with -to be better for them and for candidates.

I am in the incredible position of writing this post as the first Liberal Democrat MP of East and South East Asian origin, and the first MP for the newly formed seat of Harpenden and Berkhamsted. When my mother arrived from Malaysia 50 years ago, I don’t think she could have imagined that such a thing was possible. And yet here I am.  

Becoming a candidate is not easy. I should quickly add that nor should it be. It is right that we are put through our paces. But becoming a candidate shouldn’t be made harder by the inadequacies of our own systems and processes, inadequacies which frankly stand in the way of us improving our candidate diversity. 

Continue reading »
Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , and | 19 Comments
Chris White

Ten years on – it’s time for change

By Chris White | Fri 21st February 2025 - 5:50 pm

Ten years ago I wrote in Lib Dem Voice about the need for a governance review of the English Party. I urged consideration of what functions of the State party could be better delivered at a Federal level, recognising money and time are always in short supply (not much changes there then!).

In that article I highlighted the Westminster candidate approval process as a function that should be coordinated Federally, with key State and Regional volunteers therefore benefiting from a more efficient, joined-up structure. More broadly I pointed out; “The current situation is a mess. Most members think they belong to the Federal Party (impossible in fact) and can vote for the committees which look after campaigning (but the Federal Party has no role over candidate approval).”

Roll forward a decade and last week I was struck by a strong sense of déjà vu.

I read this article from Julian Tandy (Welsh State Chair of Candidates) and Charles Dundas (Campaigns and Candidates Convener of the Scottish Lib Dems) and I see the challenge of doing Federalism properly continues still, and that decade old “mess” I referred to, remains.

I hope all of us who have been active in the English Party will pause and take with humility their unhappiness at feeling dictated to by the English Party. That may be uncomfortable to hear, but the best way to respect their complaint about not being listened to is to listen and act, not to dismiss them as wrong.

As a councillor some problems can be quick to fix, some take a little longer – but ten years? Even in local government terms that would be considered a long wait! But is a growing movement for change gathering steam? And, perhaps the bigger question to ask is: “Will the English Party finally get on board”?

Just like Charles and Julian, I will be backing Tim Farron’s motion (F10) at Harrogate conference which seeks to make our Westminster candidates system a Federal function.

Continue reading »
Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged and | 1 Comment
Hannah Kitching

Giving more support to our regions

By Hannah Kitching | Tue 18th February 2025 - 9:06 am

I wear many hats in our party. From being a councillor in Barnsley through to former Westminster candidate in both Yorkshire and the North West, and now, Regional Chair in Yorkshire and the Humber and the new Vice Chair of the English Party.

In every role I have taken up, I have done so to highlight problems and find solutions. As a Regional Chair, it is clear to me we are long-overdue change.

It is time our English regions were better supported to deliver their vital responsibilities.

Continue reading »
Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged | 3 Comments

It’s time to practice what we preach

By Charles Dundas and Julian Tandy | Wed 12th February 2025 - 12:30 pm

Headshot of Julian TandyIt’s not often a motion comes along to Federal conference that is actually about true Federalism. Federalism is a concept synonymous with the Lib Dems. We campaign for it at a national level and we practice what we preach when it comes to the internal organisation of the party. Or do we? There’s a motion coming to Harrogate conference in March which addresses this for candidates – and we are delighted that it points towards a much more progressive and federal approach to how the party operates..

As those responsible for overseeing the approval and selection of Westminster candidates in our respective States – Scotland and Wales – we added our names to support the motion (F10) to implement the lessons of the General Election Review.

You can read the candidates motion here.

For us, this motion is about three key things:

Getting Federalism right for the three States

It gives the three States an equal seat at the table when it comes to setting Westminster candidate selection rules and procedures. Rather than Scotland and Wales being treated as the poor relations expected to follow wherever England goes, all three States will have parity in decision-making, reflecting the views of our respective State committees in Joint State meetings to collectively decide the way forward. This is exactly how Federalism should work – State parity and democratic accountability to members through conference of our processes and procedures.

Diversity and equality

Continue reading »
Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , , and | 16 Comments
Advert

Recent Comments

  • Steve Trevethan
    My response to the latest comment of David Raw is that I too am a resident in Scotland where I also find the health service to be outstanding, as well as being ...
  • Geoff Reid
    For a good short read to mark VE Day I recommend George Orwell's 1945 essay "Notes on Nationalism", which manages to be both eccentric and insightful in his hop...
  • Michael BG
    Mark Frankel, Israel broke the terms of the cease fire announced on 15th January, by not engaging in stage two negotiations. Instead of engaging in negotiati...
  • Peter Martin
    "The Palestinians are their own worst enemies." Benjamin Netanyahu would probably claim the 'credit' on that one!...
  • Peter Davies
    by 'The Palestinians' do you mean Hamas. These guys https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c175z14r8pro and https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g20pj6epvo don't....