Tim Farron came to Scotland on Thursday and spent an hour taking questions from party members at a very hastily arranged event at Party HQ in Edinburgh. Even though it hadn’t been organised until Tuesday afternoon, there was standing room only. A fair proportion of the audience was made up of new members.
He spoke about our place as a party, positioning ourselves as a party of economic credibility and compassion ready to stand up to the authoritarian governments in London and Edinburgh. His words complemented what Willie Rennie was saying about us being at the heart of the radical centre in his speech on Wednesday.
It was very clear that he had been very strongly affected by his trip to Calais. His frustration at the misrepresentation of these vulnerable people in the press and by Government ministers was clear.
He promised to be back in Scotland many times for campaigning in the lead up to the Holyrood elections.
Here is a Storify thingy which covers the highlights:
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23 Comments
Looking forward to hearing what Tim considers to be “economically creditable”. Watch this space! We will know a lot more after conference I imagine.
Tim needs to write an article explaining what he believes in, because it seems to have changed a bit since the leadership election.
Does this matter? Well, I think it does. There are people like Caroline Flint, Liz Kendall, even the Lib Dems own Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander, who really believe in this agenda, and people would rather listen to them than someone who might not be very committed to it.
@Eddie summon – Tim has said these things since the leadership campaign. Eg his speech here:http://timfarron.co.uk/en/article/2015/1086283/tim-s-gladstone-club-talk
Just wondering…. is it possible to be radical and moderate at the same time?
Yes. You can be moderate on some issues and radical on others.
@Maria
I think perhaps a radical moderate is someone who is two things:
They may, at present, be somewhere close to the centre in the conventional political spectrum. However, they aren’t some soggy compromise of other people’s views, but have strong and principled views of their own.
If that’s the case, I’d like to think of myself as a radical moderate.
.@timfarron says huge majority of refugees in Calais [aiming for England] are fleeing war and tyranny.
Does France have so much war and tyranny that refugees have to flee France for England?
Methinks such refugees must in fact be economic migrants.
Wise businessmen think radically and act conservatively.
Also a good approach for the Lib Dems in my view.
Successful women in business do much better than David Evershed’s men.
They think radically and act radically. Hence the success.
I once went on a ‘Moderates Unite Against Things that are not Moderate’ march. We chanted loudly down Whitehall…
‘What do we want ?’
‘Moderation’
‘When do we want it ?’
‘In due course’
It’s all mood music. No actual policies. Burnham and Cooper have been criticised for their blandness, but even they have come up with a few real policies, e.g. Burnham’s integration of health and social care. Tim hasn’t. Perhaps that’s because he doesn’t think he needs to compete with Burnham et al. But if he doesn’t compete, he loses.
Tim makes Calais his biggest thing, but I don’t see any specific proposals. If he doesn’t make them, the Daily Mail will be tempted to invent his proposals for him!
Its interesting Tim equates poor housing and poverty to liberty perhaps he recognises ill health , poor housing and conformity are all linked and that without opportunity ,good housing and a better quality environment we human beings do not prosper. Much in the housing policy document is supportable but we have yet to tackle the problems of brownfield site and urban regeneration .This is where Osbourne has got it wrong.It is estimated the City of Coventry for example could generate 21,000 new homes on brownfield land. planning permission on brown field sites is not hard to come by but the redevelopment costs in terms of land decontamination are steep .The challengers banks are still nervous about investment following sub prime and the national builders just eye up green fields leaving small independents to struggle to get a project off the ground. Homes Bonus could be invested in such sites but requires the political will and central government supporting local government and smaller developers .
I am so glad that Tim is putting housing at the top of his agenda. It’s good if brownfield sites are in the right place for homes to be built but quite often they aren’t because employment opportunities are lacking. Greenfield sites may well be in the places where there is employment and where people want to live and where it is easier for developers to make a profit. Planning permission could be granted on these sites if the developers bore the costs of decontaminating a brownfield site elsewhere as a planning gain. This would allow those sites to be returned to green belt status or to be developed if there is a housing need. Of course this would require different local authorities to work together but let’s start thinking the unthinkable!
PS I should perhaps say that by housing development I mean social housing as well as private sector .
This is a Q&A with a few members of the Scottish Party.
It would be formative to know how many members.
If Tim Farron were to have a Q&A session with party members from two London Boroughs (Richmond and Kingston) I doubt if it would be treated with the same prominence. If it was reported at all.
Just trying to provide a bit of context and perspective
Tim Farron will do many such meetings, conferences, etc etc over the course of the years leading up to the 2020 general election. In many ways he has got off to a flying start and should be congratulated. At the equivalent time at the beginning of his predecessors’s period of leadership all most members of the pubic knew about Nick Clegg was how many women he said he had slept with (or that is how it was reported even though that was not what he actually said).
@David Evershed
Does France have so much war and tyranny that refugees have to flee France for England?
Yes, I’m afraid this is the undeniable truth.
As I said last week on the Calais post, Tim’s position on this is simply not credible especially when a refugee gets around £56 in France and only around £35 in England.
The truth of what these few thousand people are after is, I’m afraid undeniable, and we’re fooling no one suggesting otherwise.
However, having said that, the different debate of should we be accept more diverse economic migrants anyway, is a different matter.
We do need to remember though as has been mentioned by myself and others here:
“you can have a welfare state or open borders but you can’t have both” Another, thorny issue 🙂
@Maria “Just wondering…. is it possible to be radical and moderate at the same time?”
Hah, not really. Neither is it possible to believe in a fairer more progressive taxation system and complain that 50% tax for bankers bonus is state sponsored theft but the Lib Dems seem to claim to believe in both reading some of the comments on this site.
Anyway, the Liberal Democrats are a moderate political party, not a radical one.
Supporting gay rights it not radical, it’s a moderate position and has been since Blair’s time.
Believing that cannabis legalisation is a step to far but that medical research is OK is a moderate position.
Believing in the European Union and it’s free movement of people principle is so moderate it’s status quo and the way things have been for years.
The Lib Dems are very much a moderate, status quo establishment party. You’d be pushed to find any policy all 8 MPs agree on which could be described as radical. And PR is not exactly a radical position, more like a self serving one when they believed in AV when they thought that would benefit them
I hope you find this answer useful 🙂
John Tilley said: “Tim Farron … has got off to a flying start and should be congratulated.”
For a real flying start, look at Osborne and Faslane. Corbyn has not even been elected yet, but he soon will be. Corbyn would like to begin a campaign on ground of his choosing, and win a honeymoon with the voters. Osborne, tutored by Crosby, knows how to stop that. Fight early, fight dirty, fight often. There is no such thing as “peacetime” in politics. Get your retaliation in first, get your enemy on the defensive and keep him there. Good tactics. It wins elections.
We don’t need to match Osborne for cynicism and dirty tactics. We do need to develop our own professionalism. Not hitting the headlines all summer isn’t professionalism.
DavidW 31st Aug ’15 – 5:55pm
“You’d be pushed to find any policy all 8 MPs agree on which could be described as radical”
This is indeed true, because 2 of the 8 MPs have a political direction rooted in the past. Until they stop looking fondly back to their “glory” years of The Coalition and The Orange Book we will at best be carrying a couple of passengers.
Unfortunately we are about to suffer various Memoirs from ex-ministers who think that the book buying pubic are sitting on the edge of their seat just waiting for the inside story of the Junior Minister for Administrative Affairs 2010. These books will not help shift the party onto a radical footing.
Update, since Tim hasn’t made a positive proposal on refugees, he has now been upstaged by Yvette Cooper, would you believe. Lesson to learn?
@John Tilley: ““You’d be pushed to find any policy all 8 MPs agree on which could be described as radical”
This is indeed true, because 2 of the 8 MPs have a political direction rooted in the past. Until they stop looking fondly back to their “glory” years of The Coalition and The Orange Book we will at best be carrying a couple of passengers.”
This “we’re a radical party” nonsense is actually so delusional it’s cringe worthy.
There is no such thing as a “moderate radical” or a “radical centrist” and there is certainly not one single radical policy. In fact, the party don’t even seem to want to talk about policy. I read on here today that the party doesn’t have a position on funding higher education. Yeah guys, that’ll work, showing up to the next General Election without policies on key subjects that matter most to the very people who’s support you’re trying to win back.
I’m seriously beginning to think some people on this site are as blind to the reality of the party now as they were the day before the General Election when they told us that those predicting most of the parties seats would be lost obviously didn’t understand Psephology like they did.
The Liberal Democrats not a radical party. They have no radical policies and fought the last general election on being more centre than a coalition of Labour and the Conservatives. They won’t even tell us what some their policies are due to fear of offending. And there aren’t very much of them left in positions of power at a national level other than 100 of so old time establishment ones sitting in the Lords. You cannot get more unradical and establishment than that.
If the party don’t wake up and smell the coffee most of those 8 seats could be gone next time. Some of the MPs will be gone very small swings of just a few percent.
David Allen
Yvette Cooper is coming across very well.
Maria, “Just wondering…. is it possible to be radical and moderate at the same time?”
What a good question! The obvious answer I’m afraid is, this looks like a party which is trying to be all things to all men (if you’ll forgive me a historic sexist phrase!)
To be more charitable – Once upon a time (and maybe again soon), we faced a Labour opponent who thought the only way to deal with the problems of capitalism was to scrap the free market. We claimed to be “moderate” (we weren’t going to scrap the market) but “radical” (we would seriously change things, in a way that could actually work).
I guess that that made a reasonable amount of sense, a generation ago. Whether it still makes sense is more doubtful.
If you try to work with free market ideologues and Tory kleptocrats, you get corrupted. That’s the lesson of Coalition, in my view!
Assuming we can escape from that and put the past behind us, we still have awkward choices to make. In a whole host of areas, we face huge problems which seem to demand radical solutions, for example a massive reduction in energy consumption. But something much more moderate, and ineffectual, will be easier to sell to the public. Arguably, the worst thing we can do in such cases is to duck the question, pretend that we can be radical and moderate at the same time, pretend to bite the bullet while actually not doing so. Equivocation won’t solve the problems, and it’s out of fashion with the voters, anyway!
Paul Reynolds 30th Aug ’15 – 7:11pm This is a version of a Matt cartoon in the Daily Telegraph.