Are the Liberal Democrats manageable? - the bureaucrat’s cut

Last Wednesday, I had an article published by Liberal Democrat Voice and, I think, was well received. But perhaps I should take the opportunity offered by my own blog to expand a little... the original article is in italics...

Two weeks ago, I wrote a piece questioning a proposal for managing the Party through a Steering Group, pointing out that, based on what I had been led to understand, it appeared to duplicate existing bodies while adding another step between those in charge and those to whom they are accountable. Subsequently, there were reassurances given, which I think were reasonable.

But today, I have another question.

When the Liberal Democrats were formed, it was said that it was a merger of one Party whose motto was “never trust the members” with another whose motto was “never trust the leadership”. The problem is, that the two beliefs continue to run in parallel, and are reflected in how we run our Party today.

Our Committee structures are designed to ensure that there are myriad people whose role is to reflect and defend the views and positions of their “client group”, and others whose purpose is of oversight without apparent responsibility. So, for example, the Chairs of the various Federal Committees are members of the Federal Board so that they can be held accountable. Meanwhile, the Federal Board appoints representatives on the various Federal Committees. Why? Do they not trust the Chairs to report backwards and forwards faithfully?

So, perhaps somebody might like to explain the following;

1. What are the Federal Board’s representatives on its subsidiary committees for?
2. What instructions are they given in taking up their roles?
3. To whom are they accountable and how?

We could slim down the various Federal Committees by stripping out some of the duplication - how many of the represented groups have members who have been directly elected in their own right, for example, and wouldn’t that be better anyway? Does the Federal Board need to be represented on every other Committee?

I would argue that it does not. “Report up, scrutinise down”, should be the thread that runs through the Party’s committee structures. And besides, wasn’t one of the key concepts of the last Governance Review that people shouldn’t, as far as possible, serve on more than one Federal committee?

And members don’t help. Every three years, we elect a bunch of people to Federal Committees to “break up the Establishment” and then, as soon as they’re in post, we charge them with being “the Establishment” and display as much distrust of them as we ever did their predecessors.

I’m afraid that I’ve observed this too often. People are elected on the basis of their claims that they can change things without necessarily understanding why things are as they are or, in a few cases, caring to find out. Federal Conference Committee is a case in point - a committee which has, from an outsider’s perspective, been rather well run over the years, with a willingness to engage. And yet, we go through a regular cycle of members complaining about the lack of variety in terms of venues, running for election to FCC, and then discovering that the criteria for a successful physical conference are surprisingly restrictive.

The problem is that the Party’s democracy is performative, not real. We have elections, but accountability and scrutiny are poor. Finding out what the Committees do between elections is difficult - the various minutes are seldom published, very brief reports go to Federal Conference. Here at Liberal Democrat Voice, we publish reports as they are sent to us, but we’re an imperfect way of reaching the wider membership. Meanwhile, it is difficult for individual Committee members to report back on their own personal activities, which makes voting on their records challenging and occasionally unfair when they run for re-election.

Jennie Rigg made the very reasonable point that it isn’t easy to report back as an individual, as she noted in her frank comment;

When I was elected to FCC by the wider membership I blogged about what happened, and included vote numbers in my blog posts. There was significant pushback against this from almost all of the rest of the committee. I took to instead saying things like “unanimous” “large majority” or “close vote” instead because one doesn’t like to upset people, but it just shows that even someone like me can be pushed into being less transparent than they would like by the urge for secrecy from others….

I feel her pain, having written extensively on the dilemma eleven years ago. It gets no easier, and with the fragmentation of social media, it becomes harder to reach a wide audience in any event. Is the angst worth it?

Openness and transparency are supposedly liberal values. They’re certainly mine, even allowing for the fact that there are certain subjects where discretion is not only appropriate but wholly necessary. But for openness and transparency to be practical, you need trust - on both sides. Is anyone willing to start the process of building that trust?

I would courteously suggest that the Party President takes a lead on this, preferably not via his own blog, but through official Party media. Whilst as individuals, our cynicism doesn’t necessarily create difficulties for the Centre, we have little means by which to make change happen. The Leadership, on the other hand...