One of the things that has been noticeably absent from this year’s Conference agenda is much in the way of potential for a scrap. There are a few contentious points in some of the motions but nothing that is really going to generate much in the way of heat.
All that may be about to change.
Last month, I reported that Federal Conference would be given the chance to debate the revocation of Article 50.
This, I felt, was a very sensible move as, let’s face it, taking a clear position on the biggest issue of the day is always preferable to sticking your finger up getting a vague feel for what the party is feeling. We suffered at the election because of our equivocal position and we need something more robust.
Originally, only a consultation session on the direction of our Brexit strategy was planned. I was glad when I saw that the Federal Conference Committee had relented and decided to offer Conference the chance to debate a motion that would call for the revocation of Article 50, legitimised by an election. Since then, the leadership has put in an amendment which ramps up the Exit from Brexit language and offers a referendum on the deal.
The movers of the motion, I understand, thought that Federal Conference Committee would remain neutral on this. However, the Committee decided at its most recent meeting to oppose it. This has been seen as a bit of a breach of trust by the movers of the motion. They actually had enough signatures to call a special conference on the issue, tacked on to this one. They were persuaded not to submit their request on the basis that they would have the chance to get their motion debated. This was a very sensible thing to do as the procedural Conference within a Conference thing would have been an optical nightmare for people to understand and would not have given a good impression of us at all.
Now, my very strong advice to the movers of the motion is to forget about picking a fight with FCC. Nothing has changed. That vote is still taking place tomorrow morning. What they need to do tonight is work the bars and make sure that enough people turn out to vote for the suspension of standing orders to get their motion on the agenda. If they start to talk about fighting with FCC, people’s eyes will glaze over. If they talk about the very clear merits of their proposal, then they can enthuse and engage people into getting out of bed and into the hall for 9:05 tomorrow morning.
Oh yes, I didn’t mention. It’s first thing on the agenda, so you need to be up with the lark,
So, see you very early tomorrow.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
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23 Comments
We should not allow a few people threatening the expense of a special conference to over rule the elected FCC. Blackmail is not a very liberal thing to do
Simon – If the FCC make commitments and then renege on them, then people are entitled to act accordingly. Nothing that is being suggested here is outwith the rules. I think most members would like to see a proper debate on the biggest issue of the day.
I’m not at Bournemouth but I hope very much that people there will turn up early tomorrow and vote to ensure a proper debate.
In a party that has proper debates and not just set piece ministerial platforms its good to see members can still influence and challenge what goes onto the agenda.
The electorate of the whole of the UK will no doubt be awaiting the outcome with bated breath, whilst Jeremy C. and St Teresa’s knobbly knees will be knocking. It’s very exciting.
Sensible Lib Dem, however) might be advised to avoid the bars (Dens of Inquity) and try to get one of the few remaining tickets for tonight’s Premier League match, Bournemouth v Brighton & Hove Albion – or better still watch it on Telly (in a bar, woops ?).
Caron you have stated a number of times that ‘we lost out in the General election because of our equivocal position on Brexit’.
Can you share with us the evidence that this view is based upon?
In the canvassing I did it was very clear that we were viewed as an irrelevant ‘one trick pony’ who banged on incessantly throughout June 2016-June 2017 about opposing Brexit and the outcome of the 2016 Referendum. This was a clear cut stance which lost us votes even from previously long standing supporters and indeed Members.
The Party that equivocated over Brexit with some, such as the Party Leader being pro Brexit and others against, was Labour.
Remind me which way the votes went?
Have to agree with Paul Holmes. Let the powers that be in govt bugger it all up. People know where we stand on this issue . Could we now spend a little time telling them where we stand on other issues as well please?
@david
Yes! Let the EUfanatics have their day in the sun and then can we move on …
Please?
Simon,
I think by a few people, you mean “a significant proportion of the average Conference delegation”. If you feel that 200 signatures is too few, feel free to propose a constitutional amendment to the next Conference.
It would make little this difference in this case, as I believe the Special Conference petition had enough signatures several times over.
With that considered, it was actually rather generous for the proposers to accept a motion for the suspension of standing orders, on the understanding that FCC would not stand in their way.
If FCC are to backtrack on this assurance and successfully prevent the debate, then the proposers would be completely justified in restarting the Special Conference petition.
Simon, the fact that it was “a few” (about 400, but still a small number in the grand scheme of things) who petitioned for a special conference, myself amongst them, is the fault of the party’s constitution, which sets that threshold. Had the threshold been higher, it would have taken a few more days to rustle up enough signatures, but I don’t imagine the outcome would have been any different in this particular instance. I personally would be in favour of raising the threshold, which I think is too low and which, as a rule left over from the pre-OMOV days, has a clear rationale to be revised upwards.
None of that has any bearing on the merits of the case for having this debate, which I think is very clear. Our policy on Brexit at the last election was perfectly reasonable, but it wasn’t so straightforward when we were actually questioned about it.
At the very least, there is a case for reviewing the policy, in the light of our poor performance at the last election, when in many voters’ minds it was the dominant issue of the election. Yes, Labour did well with a much more equivocal policy, but I would argue that they did so in spite of that, not because of it. Many Remain voters had an unenviable choice before them: vote for a party that reflected their policy position best, or vote for the most viable spanner in Theresa May’s works. They voted Labour not because they were conned, but because the calculation they made went that way. We didn’t give them a clear and bold enough policy to weigh heavily enough in the opposite direction: that even though they weren’t sure we could win, we were saying something worthy of support.
As a party on 7% and with 12 seats, we don’t have the luxury of nuance. Passionate support is what we need to build momentum, and that comes from clear, bold, liberal policies.
On the merits of a “Stop Brexit” policy itself:
Our policy is a statement of what a Lib Dem majority government would do, by definition. The logical conclusion of our current policy is that, a Lib Dem government having been elected (itself a democratic earthquake), we would continue to negotiate with the EU on Brexit, albeit with a clear mandate to stay in the single market, and then having finalised a deal, put it to the British public and advise them to vote against the deal we just negotiated (which would of course prompt all sorts of accusations of bad faith from the Leave side, not unreasonably). Further, the rhetoric of “letting the people decide” which we used to sell the policy looked mealy-mouthed and evasive, when most of the voting public know perfectly well that we are on the Remain side. That is precisely the problem: they know that’s what we really want, and if what we say isn’t that, it looks shifty.
Consider instead this statement of policy: “We believe it is imperative that a democratic mandate to halt Brexit be secured; nothing has altered our view that Brexit will be a disaster for the country. We are standing on a platform of stopping Brexit, and will interpret the election of a Lib Dem majority government as a mandate to seek to withdraw Britain’s Article 50 notification. Failing that, we will continue to make the case for a referendum on the final deal, because we believe it is essential that the will of the people today continues to be heard, not just the will of the people on a single day in 2016.”
It is coherent, and crucially, it is a statement that doesn’t leave people, even people who disagree with it, feeling like we’re not really saying what we mean.
This is dancing over the heads of pins at its worst.
We are against Brexit, people know that. Some people though view every deviation from the purist of pure anti-Brexitism (such as suggesting that some democratic legitimacy might be required to stop Brexit) as treachery. If they are really serious about stopping Brexit they need to realise that with only 12 MP’s we need to offer some way out for people in other parties to stop this calamitous process in this parliament.
Richard: Literally nobody that I have seen is arguing that no form of democratic legitimacy would be required to stop Brexit. That is a silly straw man.
We are a political party, ergo we are in the business of conferring democratic legitimacy on policies through the process of standing for election under a manifesto containing them. If “stop Brexit” was our policy, it would only happen because a Lib Dem government had been elected, which would of course (under our system of representative democracy) confer democratic legitimacy.
The issue here is about matching our official policy and rhetoric to what the core principles of the party actually are. I am delighted that we have made significant strides towards this under Vince (despite some of us’s reservations about his previous statements on FoM): less fudgy nonsense about a Soft Brexit and staying in the single market, more clear statements of the need for an Exit From Brexit.
As you say, from where we are now, the rhetoric and the support of the party in practice for positions for which we can build wider support is arguably more important than what our official party policy is. That’s no reason not to have a bold, coherent official party policy.
As I’ve said in the past: if you stop brexit without a referendum then you can start it again without one. Giving so much power to MPs risks turning Britain into an indecisive joke.
If we can stop brexit without a referendum then why can’t Nicola Sturgeon take Scotland out of the UK without one?
I’m making plans to move to France in January, so I’m no little Englander, I like the EU, but soft-brexit is the best way out of this mess and then we can campaign to get back in it. An in-out referendum on the deal is also fine.
Andy, we entered the GE on 11% and finished on 7.4% which was even worse than our abysmal result in 2015. Plus we had an even higher number of lost deposits than in our previous ‘worst ever in history’ in 2015. Given that the only policy we were known for and the only policy we had gone on and on and on and on about for the previous year was being anti the Referendum result do you not think there was some link?
The idea that many of the 48% of Remain voters were going to abandon traditional Party loyalties and vote for us because of our stance was without any foundation. However correct our prognosis of the ultimate results of Brexit may or may not be there is no evidence whatsoever that it is a vote winner. It may be when the Brexit outcome becomes apparent in a couple of years -and it may not be, we don’t know.
What is clear is that we were perceived as an irrelevant single issue lobby group in this years General Election. Worse still that single issue may well have strongly motivated some Leavers to vote Conservative but for most Remain voters the issue is on a back burner. Progressive voters voted for the message of ‘hope’ (remember Obama in 2008?) that Labour offered on areas of domestic policy that we had said next to nothing about for the previous year.
Given the events of this last week, nuclear incineration by North Korea and/or a larger terrorist attack in UK might possibly be of slightly more importance for Conference to consider. And please don’t cite EU as a bulwark against either, it’s not.
Paul Holmes
Once upon a time I used to disagree on certain issues with you , considering you to be to the left of me on certain issues and wanting the status quo on public services and such.
Now you seem to be the voice of common sense .
I think what you say thus above to be in the same vein but with bells on !
Can we stop this navel-gazing and consider how we communicate our stance to a wider public. Put simply, the GE2017 second referendum proposal didn’t sell. We need a message that will. General motherhood/apple pie stuff won’t differentiate us in the public’s eyes. A strong Remain stance will. Then, they might even vote for us.
Ken, as far as the voters were concerned we had a firm Remain stance – and nothing else. It drove even long standing supporters away from us in June.
Labour did fairly well, they had anything but a firm stance on Brexit. Come to think of it, apart from going along with Tory spending plans, I cannot recall anything on which they had a firm stance – I’m sure there must have been something.
Could it also work for the LIb Dems? – I doubt it.
Could someone who managed to get here in time please report what happened?
Martin, There were some rather nebulous musings to scrap existing Student Debt. I do though seem to recall that Labour’s proposals on scrapping Tuition Fees, Nationalising various industries such as the Railways and providing more money for the NHS/Education etc were all pretty firm stances. Like their firm proposal to fund it all by reversing the Coalitions £18Billion Corporation Tax cut, these proved pretty popular with voters who were rather less obsessed with Brexit than some imagine.
The suspension of standing orders was not opposed by the FCC and was overwhelmingly passed. The motion for debate tomorrow, if an amendment is passed, makes it clear that a referendum on the outcome of negotiations is the only feasible instrument whereby “exit from brexit” could be achieved.
Paul – I’m not at all sure it is that simple. I’d certainly accept that the general public would be aware that we were opposed to Brexit. However, I do think that the policy of having another referendum felt too vague and downright irritating that it diluted our overall position – and I also suspect that this was one of the contributory factors in so many Remainers drifting towards the Labour Party. I think we would have been, and still would be, better served with a simple policy that if elected we would seek to reverse Brexit. There is no issue of democratic legitimacy when that has been put before voters at the ballot box, and it would be a stronger, more radical, more distinctive, more internationalist, position.