In the last leadership election I went to several of the hustings. They were interesting enough events but didn’t really probe much into the candidates. The format was usually a speech by the candidates followed by questions and then a final summation. The candidates trotted out the same stories and jokes and answered the same questions they had been asked before.
What was missing was any sense of the sort of testing questions which someone would get when they were Party Leader and in particularly the follow up questions. Both Tim and Norman were well prepared for the questions they were likely to be asked – but without further questioning we couldn’t really probe.
I would suggest that this time at least some of the hustings should feature, as well as a speech from each candidate, an interview by an experienced journalist, who will press them on their areas of weakness. Why did Vince triple tuition fees? If Ed and Norman run, how does Ed justify Hinckley Point? How does Norman think we should proceed on Brexit in light of his abstention on Article 50?
I’m sure they would all have a good soundbite response – but I want to hear beyond the soundbite and see how they would respond to a Cathy Newman or Andrew Neil relentlessly following up if they are leader.
I am not suggesting all hustings should be like this but one or two, recorded and available online, would give members valuable additional information to consider when choosing who to back
* Simon McGrath is a Councillor in Wimbledon and represents Lib Dem Councillors on the Party’s Federal Board
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20 Comments
Simon , this is good preparation for a contestant based process, with one candidate thus far !!!
The worst hustings , were those where the questions were not put vocally by the person asking them, but by the moderator or chairperson !
No follow ups, stuffy halls with no air conditioning , and too short.
We really need to get with the American way on one aspect.
They take their time , often because you can breath in a hall there, here I walked in with a sense of closeness at one event, and out with a splitting headache, not the fault of the candidates, but the room temperature !
We need more online activity. And yes, more questioning.
I fully support this idea. And I’ll tell you who might be up for it – Bernard Ponsonby.
Another thing is that I’d like to see is a live online hustings to allow people around the country to put their questions to the candidates without having to be in a major population centre.
Spot on, and the first comment is right re: live online hustings.
We cannot afford to have another situation where a leader is basically torpedoed by a question from a journalist the day after their victory is announced. We need all candidates to be vigorously road tested.
There is no reason why there couldn’t be Facebook live Hustings, online radio and TV styled Hustings and even internet chat room Hustings to compliment live Hustings and Question Time (though I was surprised to hear Dimbleby state this will happen so matter-of-fact).
The important thing is that we widen the opportunities rather than swap one for another or worse still narrow them.
All good ideas but we need an actual Contest first & that needs someone else to stand, ideally someone as different from Vince as the limited field allows. This is a request, no pressure.
I agree with all the suggestions, in particular on line hustings.
We need a radical Liberal programme to take this country forward
Having a radical programme needs a vision to take it forward. We need a leader with a vision who can communicate a positive agenda. This needs to be tested by members at the hustings.
For ex Cabinet Members “What are you going to do about Student Fees and the Bed Room Tax?
(Both of those will cause far more damage at the next election than Tim’s christian views)
Norman Lamb will not be a candidate for Leader. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jun/22/norman-lamb-rules-himself-out-of-lib-dem-leadership-race
Having seen Norman is not standing one of the new MPs needs to put his/her name forward. Not an easy call but we need these searching hustings and we need a radical agenda.
I attended the hustings at Southampton and they picked the questions out of a box, rather than picking those which they thought were the most difficult or challenging.
What struck me at the Farron/Lamb hustings was that choosing between them was just like Soviet-era Kremlinology.
For those who don’t remember that era, it was notoriously difficult to know who was up and who was down in the Soviet leadership. Analysts had to resort to the most subtle of clues – who was looking confident at public events, who was absent and so on. Really, of course, they didn’t really know – confidence could be a front, absence could be ‘flu.
Similarly, for the Clegg/Huhne contest I would have liked to know that Clegg intended to take the party in a neoliberal direction I found hard to tell from Tory-lite. As it was I never felt he had a proper mandate and found myself increasingly at odds with official party positions. I don’t think I was alone in this!
The problem is that policy-making is semi-detached from the MPs and even the leader. Of course they are way more influential than us provincial folk (who have no leverage on policy) but probably less influential than the party’s byzantine policy-making bureaucracy.
A ‘proper’ (by which I mean a properly functioning) political party would ask its rising star MPs (and not just the leader) to, ahem, lead rather than just be mouthpieces for obscure committees. And those who turn out to have the secret-sauce talent for articulating Liberal positions and giving them voter-appeal should be promoted while those who don’t should be returned to the back benches before they do too much damage.
We instead treat leadership as a beauty contest where it’s perfectly OK to spout utter nonsense as long as it’s fluently delivered and the speaker is the sort of person we might enjoy a drink with.
Rant over!
Vince was interviewed by Andrew Neil on the daily politics today. Questions were mostly focused on his position on the 2nd referendum on the EU deal – in light of his comments last September that re-running the referendum would be disrespectful to the electorate. Vince made the distinction clear as well as expressing the need to bring a closure to the process that will be accepted by all. He said he expects Ed Davey to run.
@ Gordon
“A ‘proper’ (by which I mean a properly functioning) political party would ask its rising star MPs (and not just the leader) to, ahem, lead rather than just be mouthpieces for obscure committees.”
Not in my book. The policies of a properly functioning political party are made by the members at conference after they are debated. One of the many problems with the Clegg era was the idea that MP’s should have a greater role in making policies (classic example was free school meals which was never party policy until Clegg agreed it with Cameron!) The Policy committee role should be to ensure ordinary members have control over the process.
(I would hate to have a policy making system like the Conservative Party.)
As much as I favour the idea that all policies should first be fully discussed and supported at conference, this isn’t always possible once Parliament is in session and a report is published or a proposal comes along.
Political interviews will become frustrating if every second question is answered with “I’ll get back to you after conference”. We need to trust our MPs with a decent amount of autonomy to represent the values of the party as well as the best needs of their constituents.
I’m not sure that having someone involved in the tuition fees decision would be worse than now. The party as a whole was tarred with that brush, and those who wanted to make political capital, which is all of our rivals, didn’t care that Tim wasn’t actually involved in that decision. No leader is going to get the public, and especially not rival politicians, to forget about it, so we need a leader who can give plausible answers for the policy and why we made the decision, what we stopped the Tories from doing, and why its wrong for other parties to claim innocence.
With a minority Tory government, now is the time to get the message out that if your party doesn’t win an election, then you don’t get to do everything you want.
Andrew Neil’s interview with Vince Cable (referred to by Joseph Bourke above) is available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p056mk34. This is just the 8 minute interview rather than the whole programme.
Given that the hustings I went to was chaired by someone who was then revealed to beb involved in Norman’s campaign during the ‘push polling’ farago, I would be all in favour of a journalist cross-examining candidates with them both present.
As long as they are clearly neutral, ideally a non-party member.
Michael BG – I think you are finding something in my earlier comment I didn’t mean.
Conference, as currently constituted, is too much a rubber stamp for policies born in or passed through a maze of committees. It’s a model that simply don’t work properly for multiple reasons.
One is that, as Fiona points out, it’s often simply not possible to run everything through Conference (it’s not just when Parliament is in session). No policy made in advance can cover all eventualities in a fast-moving world yet strictly speaking MPs are ultra-vires when they make policy on the hoof – as they often must in practice. That’s not clever.
Moreover, MPs (and spokespeople generally) have clouded responsibility for policy, shared with multiple committees in unclear ways. In particular, no-one determines the big-picture strategy leaving everyone to work in isolated ‘silos’. I think the Federal Board (was Executive) has the formal constitutional responsibility but doesn’t actually do it. It’s an approach that has a long record of grinding out detailed policy ad nauseam but in nearly three decades hasn’t delivered a narrative. And the reason for that is organisational flaws baked into the constitution.
Moreover again, because there is always an ‘official’ policy any MP that argues against it is ultra vires. So, the constitution enforces deadening conformity despite the preamble to the constitution.
Also, circling back to my original extension to Simon McGrath’s point, confused responsibility means that MPs aren’t expected to develop and demonstrate to us, the membership, either in hustings or at Conference that they have the political ‘smarts’ needed to survive in a tough world. A political cloth ear might be tolerated in a newbie MP but we should expect better of senior MPs.
None of this critique implies side-lining Conference in any way. Indeed, a more sensible approach would be to make MPs responsible for policy and getting it through Conference which would enhance its influence.
The party leader would then become primarily responsible (as first among equals) for the direction of travel and hustings would become REALLY interesting!
I think it would be a useful addition to the campaign to have some interviews that try and probe as close to a hostile media interview as possible. I would suggest that we should be applying these more modern approaches to selections generally, candidates looking for selection to PPCs should have “media style” interviews as well as general hustings.
We should have a selection approach that is more reflective of how candidates for any role are likely to be required to perform in the world today.
Thanks for so many supportive comments
@ Gordon
I understand that MPs sometime have to come up with views relating to events. However I really hate it when the leader makes policy on the hoof.
I like the idea that I could write a motion and get it passed at conference and it would become our policy and end up in our manifesto. I understand some members can’t be bothered with policy and if they are happy, I am happy, but don’t try to take away the power of the membership.
I am sure MPs have enough to do, with dealing with their constituents, drafting, discussing and voting on laws, hold the executive to account, ensuring they get re-elected to have the time to have sole responsibility for our policies. MPs can bring motions to conference just like any ordinary member, they don’t need extra powers.
Michael BG – MPs do indeed have a lot to do but taking the lead in policy-making in the sense of setting the agenda should be central to their role as legislators. However, that emphatically does NOT mean that they should have “sole responsibility”. The leader should coordinate and any sensible MP will take advice and good ideas from wherever they are to be found. And that shouldn’t in my book excuse them for getting policy through conference.
For the ordinary member having MPs lead may well mean (depending on the MP) that it’s easier to get ideas into policy than the present system where they have to run a bureaucratic gauntlet where policy can be rejected simply because they are poorly phrased. And none of that means that ordinary members’ policy motions shouldn’t also have their chance at conference – that’s surely a good thing that should be preserved.
Bottom line – we need to make changes since the present arrangement demonstrably don’t work. We therefore need a new approach that preserves the best of the old but makes it functional and fi for purpose.