A wounded, but still feisty, Regional Candidates Committee meets…

Occasional readers (and in fairness, this is an occasional blog these days) will recall that in the dying days of last year, I was elected to my Regional Candidates Committee. I had a slightly naïve notion that, especially in the early stages of the Parliamentary cycle, my knowledge of both process and the rather less tangible morality and ethics aspects of candidate selection and approval might prove useful. And then it went quiet.

Someone rather better connected to the internal politics of the Liberal Democrats might have wondered if it wasn’t too quiet. But that really isn’t me now - you forget just how connected you are as a Regional Officer, especially in London.

The publication of the General Election Review did lead to a slight indrawing of breath at the claim that the candidate system is broken (“English Candidates Committee aren’t going to like that.”, I thought) but I didn’t put two and two together until the publication of the Constitutional Amendment F10, effectively withdrawing key functions from the State Candidates Committees.

It wasn’t, and it remains, wholly unclear how a repurposed Federal Committee, with a majority of members with no experience of candidate system management, will “fix” the system and there had evidently been little or no consultation with English Candidates Committee, so one might imagine that, three days before the debate in Harrogate, a first meeting of our Committee might be less than entirely positive.

The agenda was, pretty much in its entirety, a discussion of what had happened, how we perceived the proposal, and what we might do next. One of the problems with a constitutional amendment which is justified by a not easy to deny sense that the system is broken but without any suggestion as what the fixes might be, is that people tend to assume the worst - that it’s a power grab (which it is), or that Local Parties will lose the power to decide who their candidate will be (unlikely, but hold that thought for another day).

And, as a result, we were unable to agree, either as individuals or as a committee, to supporting the proposals.

I did raise two matters of ‘Any Other Business’, however, suggesting that we invite the Regional Campaigns Officer to talk us through their aims for 2025 and where we might fit into that, and that we would write to the seven MPs across the Region to courteously remind them that we’ll be coming to them in the summer of 2027 to ascertain their intention to re-stand (or otherwise), in accordance with the current rules.

We’ve agreed to both, so I have at least made a contribution early…