Tag Archives: party reform

Party President Sal Brinton has told members at the North West Regional Conference this morning that the Federal Board will discuss whether there should be a special Conference to decide on Vince Cable’s proposals for Party Reform. There are two that require a change in the Federal Constitution. The first is the idea that any registered supporters would get a vote for party leader and the other is that the leadership would be open to someone who isn’t a member of the Westminster Parliament.

The supporters’ scheme itself doesn’t need the authority of Conference to set it up – that could happen straight away.

Doing away with the time that you have to be a member before you can be a candidate for the party is something that is decided by the state parties individually.

I wrote in August about what was needed to put the changes into action.

So, to change any of these things, the constitution would have to change. Here, article 2.10 is your friend.

• 2.10  This Constitution may only be altered:

  1. (a)  by a two-thirds majority of members present and voting at the FederalConference;

  2. (b)  where any such alteration has been submitted in accordance with theStanding Orders of that Conference by the Federal Board or any other persons or bodies entitled to submit motions or amendments under Article 8.6 and notified to Local Parties at least six weeks in advance; and

  3. (c)  in the case of any alteration to the relative powers and functions of the Federal Party and the State Parties or to this paragraph (c), it is passed by the internal procedures of each State Party.

So we know we’d have to go to Federal Conference. But when?

We can’t change the constitution in Brighton because we would have had to have been notified of a constitutional amendment by now. Are we seriously going to do it in Spring or at any time between Autumn and Spring as the Brexit stuff reaches its climax? You’d have trouble setting a date that wasn’t likely to be consumed by a referendum or an election.

And are we really going to spend our Spring Conference, two weeks before we leave the EU, on internal constitutional matters? I would question the wisdom of that one because it really  would not look good. For me the sensible time to do all this would be September 2019.

So what does the Constitution say about how we hold a Special Conference?

Here we have Article 8.12 to help us out

The Conference shall normally meet twice a year, for a week in the early autumn and a weekend in the early spring; additional meetings may be summoned upon the requisition of the Federal Board or the Federal Policy Committee or the Conference itself or 200 members, in not fewer than 20 local parties. A meeting may be cancelled by the Federal Board in exceptional circumstances.

The cost of a Special Conference is measured in tens of thousands of pounds. Even if that is covered by a donation (and if it is, I think we ought to know who is paying and think about what agenda they might have), we have to look at the opportunity cost. The political situation is so fragile at the moment that there could be a referendum or a general election at any point in the next few months.

I have kept reasonably quiet about Vince’s reforms since his announcement on 7th September because I wanted to let others have their say.

My sense at Conference is that people were interested in what he had to say. Everyone had things they liked and things they didn’t. They were all going to respond to the consultation with varying degrees of pleasure and pain. This is how it is supposed to be.

I do want to slightly disagree with my fellow Federal Board members who have been talking to Politics Home about the process, though. They complained about being “bounced.”

Now, I don’t think that’s fair. Certainly, back in June, there was an attempt to slip in something about a Supporters’ Scheme into the motion of the Federal Levy and Subscriptions to be discussed at Conference. The Federal Board then said “Hang on a wee minute, here.” The Federal People Development Committee was given the job of looking at this in more detail. The Committee’s amazing chair, Miranda Roberts, one of the most competent and patient people I know, has written about that process here and here. The process of holding the leadership back had thus worked.

In between times, after articles had started to appear in the press over the Summer, Vince spoke to a special meeting of the Federal Board in July about what he was thinking about. At the end of August, Federal Board members were asked to contribute their views about his ideas. He hadn’t told us fully what they were, but given that his 7th September speech reflected most of the press coverage, well, you didn’t need to be a rocket scientist.

So, on the last day of my holiday, I had to drag myself out of bed at the crack of bloody dawn to write down my views for Vince. I actually forgive him, because I was able to take this amazingly atmospheric photo of the bay outside the holiday cottage as the sun rose.

By this point the only bit he hadn’t told us was what he was going to say about the future of his leadership. But then that didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out either.

I wrote him an essay of epic proportions which I might actually post on here one day.