Tag Archives: miranda roberts

Changes to Lib Dem leadership rules – what the constitution says…

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 2nd August 2018 - 1:25 pm

Can I just make a very polite suggestion to those who are briefing the press about potential changes to the way we elect leaders and who can stand in those elections to make sure that they understand our party’s processes for doing these things?

Because some things that the journalists are writing are just wrong.

Over the last week, we’ve seen a number of stories in the press which seem to be drip-feeding out some sort of process to change the rules for the election of a leader. There’s an article in Buzzfeed today which says that the rules for all this will be changed by a membership vote in November.

Lib Dem members will get the chance to debate a “supporters’ scheme” during a lunchtime session at the party conference in Brighton in September.

The rule change allowing non-MPs to stand as leader, which was first revealed in The Mirror last week, is expected to be formally announced to the press in early September and put to a vote of the membership in November.

This actually conflates two very different ideas.

We already know that Vince is keen to have a registered supporters scheme. There is a debate going on at the moment about what rights those registered supporters would have. Federal People Development Committee Chair Miranda Roberts looked at some of the issues in her latest report.

Would they, for example, be able to vote in leadership elections? That’s what happened in the Labour party and that didn’t exactly work out well for them.

It would be really ironic if those people displaced by Corbyn’s election by registered supporters’ Momentum takeover of Labour then came to us and used our registered supporters scheme to turn our party into New Labour mark 2. While they are a million times better than the irresponsibly destructive government we have now, they are no respecters of individual and civil liberty. There is a big danger that the Liberal Democrats as we know it would end up as the smile on the face of the tiger of some new flaccid centrist affair which won’t change much and we need to think very carefully before we take such a move. This country is in such a dire state that radical change is vital to heal divisions and make it a kinder and fairer place.

There will be a consultation on all of this at the Brighton conference, with provision for those who can’t go to Conference to take part.

The other piece of the jigsaw is that there may or may not be a plan to allow a non-Parliamentarian to stand for leader. That may or may not have its merits but, as I said the other day, is all this process stuff where we really want to be as we approach the most intense time in the anti-Brexit campaign?

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged buzzfeed, liberal democrats constitution, party leadership, registered supporters and vince cable | 19 Comments

Committee Reports: Federal People Development Committee – 21 February 2017

By Miranda Roberts | Thu 23rd February 2017 - 2:34 pm

Tuesday night saw the inaugural meeting of the Party’s new Federal People Development Committee. This group oversees the Party’s work in the areas of Diversity, Membership and Training.

The committee was established by the Party’s Governance Review, with the idea being that the work in these three areas has a lot of overlap and would benefit from co-ordination.

This first meeting was mostly about us getting set up as a committee, electing our various Officers and representatives. To that end:

I was elected as Chair of the committee
Adrian Hyyrylainen-Trett was elected as the Chair of the Diversity Sub-Committee
Sarah Green was elected as Chair of the Training Sub-Committee
Claire Halliwell was elected as Chair of the Membership Sub-Committee
Prue Bray was elected to serve as our Committee Secretary
Steve Jolly was elected as our Committee’s representative on the Federal Conference Committee

We discussed our future meeting dates and agreed that the four meetings the constitution sets as the minimum did not feel enough for a new committee with such a large remit.

We decided to hold an extra meeting before May, focusing on the committee’s strategic purpose, to explore how we could work as a committee, scope the different projects and ideas that committee members have and explore possible avenues of work. We felt it was important to add in this earlier meeting, since waiting until May to decide what to do felt too late to us. We were very conscious that the big membership surges happened in the summer months, meaning that those members will come up for renewal (or lapse) this summer, so we need to have engaged and activated them before that time arrives.

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged committee reports, featured and federal people development committee | 1 Comment