There is a substantial debate taking place within the Liberal Democrats at the moment, though you may have heard nothing about it: should the Party be a member-led, volunteer-based organisation or become professionalised, organised by a paid staff funded mainly through high-value-donor contributions?
You may remember that at Spring Conference in Harrogate, the Federal Party adopted a constitutional amendment to take on the responsibility for candidate approval and selection (item F10 on the conference agenda), putting these into the hands of the paid campaigns team.
In that way, F10 was a step towards the “professional” Party route.
Whereas, the current system for candidates, which in England consists of regional candidates’ chairs working together though the English Candidates Committee, with the elected English Candidates’ Chair, represents in this case the “member-led” approach.
As the Liberal Democrats are a Federal organisation, the F10 amendment will only come into force if it is approved by the three State Parties: England, Scotland and Wales. (Here we should recognise Matt McLaren and other members of the English Council who were able to confirm this in the meeting.)
Therefore, on Thursday last week, there was a meeting of the English Council, the 150 members elected to govern the Liberal Democrats in England, with the main item on the agenda being a constitutional amendment submitted by the Chair and officers to transfer those responsibilities to the Federal Party.
If you are a member of the Liberal Democrats in England you may already have read an email from the English Chair, Caroline Pidgeon, laying out the result.
There were 132 members of the Council present.
80 (60.6%) voted for the amendment (as amended).
52 (39.4%) voted against.
Leaving the motion 8 votes short of the two-thirds needed to amend the constitution.
Full disclosure: I was one of the 52 votes against, because – and I said this in the meeting – there are substantial financial implications, and that would require a revised English Party budget to be approved by English Council. I am sure the officers would never risk bringing the Party into disrepute by spending money without authorisation, but the failure to present that revised budget showed – to me – a distinct lack of preparedness for the changes that were being proposed.
It had been a rather fractious discussion.
The case “for” was often made as “the Federal Conference voted for this, so we have to” – which, if you have met Liberal Democrats, was probably less persuasive than the people making it thought they were being.
Several council members also raised that they had been lobbied by members of staff and felt that the Federal Party had been “leaning on people” to vote for the motion.
It also does not help that the Farron review itself, and several members of the Federal Board have chosen to couch this debate in terms of “failure” of the candidate process.
Following on from a general election where we have had more successful candidates than ever before – 72 elected, 65 from England – and from a five-year parliament that saw candidates in place ready to hit the ground running for every by-election (and several that did not happen), this does not look like failure. And it makes the people making that argument look deeply disingenuous. Attaching words of thanks to volunteers to the opening of the motion were made to look insincere. That didn’t help the case for the motion, either.
Where does this leave us?
Let us try and put bad feeling behind us. This is democracy in action, and we should celebrate that.
The existing systems remain in place, and this allows us to start selections for candidates in England, including some crucial mayoral candidates. (And we can continue to pay salaries for two members of staff.)
The English Candidates Committee have already met and are quickly moving forward with training for returning officers in the new candidate selection rules that were agreed earlier this year, and selections can therefore begin soon.
We do need to re-establish good relations between the Parties in Wales, Scotland and England on this. There was, established under Alison’s chairing of the Party in England, a States’ forum that discussed matters – including candidate selection rules – of overlapping interest. That seems to have fallen into abeyance this year, and that’s unfortunate.
And I do hope that the Chair and officers in England will reflect on and accept the outcome of the vote – as Caroline has said she will do. Their decision on reducing the number of English Council meetings means there will not be another until November this year and, as almost everyone in the debate said, selections need to start this year. (Some have suggested an Emergency Meeting, but “we lost a vote and want you to vote again”, is not an emergency in the accepted sense, and so such a meeting would potentially lead to challenges through the English Appeal Panel, and put even more serious delays in any selection process). It is their job to represent the decisions of the English Council, even where they had a different opinion. And I hope they will go forward to do that with a positive spirit.
In terms of the wider issue: a professional or a member-led party – the debate goes on.
* Richard Flowers has been a Party member for 30 years. He’s campaigned in many an election, stood as a local councillor, Greater London Assembly member and Parliamentary candidate. He has been Chair of Tower Hamlets Liberal Democrats (twice), and from 2020 to 2025 he was English Party Treasurer. Thanks to Liberal Democrats in government, he is married to his husband Alex Wilcock. He also helps Millennium Elephant to write his Very Fluffy Diary.
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10 Comments
just awaiting the biog to be updated: I am now *former* Treasurer for the Party in England 🙂
An interesting piece, but my suspicions are that this isn’t going to go away.
After all, given that it was initially touted as “English Candidates Committee are responsible for all the failings and only moving responsibility to the Federal level will bring greater diversity and faster/earlier selections”, the idea that the movers behind the original motion are suddenly going to decide that leaving it in the hands of English Candidates Committee is now entirely acceptable seems… optimistic?
And the Chair’s message doesn’t suggest that much time is going to be lost before another attempt is made to get F10 ratified by English Council…
The question should not be an either/or one, but rather both and. We have always been member-led and we have had professional paid staff. In an ever-changing environment and in the context of increasing pressures we need to find the best ways of working out who does what and how. We need to do so in ways that inspire our supporters and scare our opponents. Because we are merely stewards of the Party for a short time.
Mark is correct. It was certainly being put about , sureptisiously, at conference that it is the English candidates committee that is the stumbling block to faster candidate selection. So I share Mark’s view that Richard Flower’s wish for the status quo to be maintained is at best optimistic and at worst a delusion..
I was not convinced by either side of the debate on F10 and didn’t vote, but I accept the result as the will of the Federal Party and, I suspect, of the Scottish and Welsh Parties as well.
The idea that a policy passed so overwhelmingly at Federal Conference is quietly going to be abandoned is fantasy, especially since the vast majority of those supporting it are members of the English Party. English Council will be up for reelection at some point and I suspect that many of its members may find they are unceremoniously booted out if the continue their current course.
Far better, in my view, to accept the changes and find a more important hill to die on.
I must admit that I was distinctly unimpressed by Tim Farron’s review which seemed to be far too of a “Everything was perfect thanks to these four astonishing paid officers who single-handedly turned things around from chaos to triumph – except for one area where blame is being put totally on the volunteers”. Indeed this team “came up time and again as the single biggest contributor to the Liberal Democrats’ success.”
I’m sorry that it is necessary, but it was the volunteer activists who turned it all around for the party by turning out in droves to make sure we won those four by-elections, while the only mention of the by-elections in the report was “using parliamentary by-elections to train staff”. Those by-elections moved us from being a party largely considered to be irrelevant in national politics, to a team that could be seen to be winning.
Without those people who kept the show on the road in the dark times and then turned out repeatedly to make sure our message got out there in those by-elections were the ones that did it.
I think that it is unfortunate that the full financial implications for the Party in England were not mentioned in the debate at Harrogate, that I also attended. The Party has ‘form’ for not properly considering the financial implications of decisions they they make; looking back to 2010, I remember the consequences of losing Short Money because we chose to go into a Coalition Government rather than a Confidence and Supply arrangement, meaning that we had to make many of our Parliamentary researchers redundant, which then came back to bite us because we no longer had their independent advice to call on but had to rely on the Civil Service. If we become dependent on big donors then we may find our ability to make policy circumscribed.
@David Evans. The Farron review praised volunteers to the hilt and acknowledged their contribution in full. Only in one area was fault found, the candidate selection procedure. The solution? Instead of finding ways to overcome the very real problems in candidate selection, Farron and his team decided they needed a new one. The result was F10. I abstained in the vote on F10, unconvinced by either side, but the overwhelming support for a change means that those of us against it or unconvinced by it need now to accept the democratic will of Federal Conference, so clearly expressed.
A last ditch stand by some members of English Council, presumably primarily motivated by a desire to keep themselves in charge of candidate selection, is utterly ridiculous and will succeed in only one thing, namely delaying further candidate selections.
Come on people. The overwhelming support for F10 was achieved primarily by the votes of English Party members. English Council should recognise this and act accordingly.
@ Mick,
I suspect that it’s all a bit more complex than that.
But, from the perspective of someone who has spent most of his “life” in the Liberal Democrats involved in the candidate approval and selection processes, I was puzzled by the need to move this to the Federal level. There’s nothing stopping the State Parties from doing all of the things that apparently (and in truth, probably) need doing.
There has always been a obvious case for the Campaigns and Organisational wings of the Party to work together, and it is equally obvious that selecting candidates from a properly representative cross-section of the population is likely to help us win more seats in more places.
But it shouldn’t have been necessary to take power from one place and reassign it somewhere else and you wonder how we got to a position where campaigners felt it necessary to do just that, rather than discuss their concerns like adults should.
We are where we are though, and I do wonder whether or not, on reflection, key players might reflect on whether or not they took a step back and asked themselves the fundamental question that bureaucrats should always ask, “Who am I doing this for, and how does it make their lives better?”.
My fear is that, in attempting to gain control of the process, we’ve lost sight of that key question. And, whilst I have my doubts about what has happened and why, I’m not in a position where I can do anything else but express my own concerns and do what I can in my own Region to try to make things work.
@ Mark
I am led to understand that there have been many attempts over some years to get the English Party in particular to address the concerns that the Farron review expressed, but without success.
Hence the decision to go for F10.
The English Party, or at least some sections of it, seem to think that they can ignore or otherwise stymie F10 and carry on as before. In my view, that is neither practical nor desireable.
It seems vital to me that the federal party and the English party sit down and discuss this as a matter of urgency. I am not holding my breath.
A hybrid structure that combines professional staff with a central orientation for target seats and more reliance on the current regional structure with volunteers for non-target seats would seem to be the best solution. It is important that more candidates are elected sooner so consituency infrastructure can be increased. Also we need more fluidity between target and non-target seats so we can quickly adapt to altering political circumstances.