Liberal Youth - time to stop fighting, time to start doing?

I wrote this article early on in the campaign and, following some actually quite justified criticism, withdrew it from circulation pending the end of the election. I did say that I would put it up again afterwards, although in hindsight, it probably deserves a revisit...

One of the quirks about being a kindly Returning Officer is that people talk to you. Sometimes, and I emphasise only sometimes, you wish that they would stop, but most of the time, you get to learn an awful lot about a person and the organisation they're involved in. In the case of Liberal Youth, this hasn't always been impressive. I'll start with the good stuff...

They have a good administrator. Paul Pettinger has been a pleasure to work with. He has a pretty good idea as to what he should be doing, is able to manage it to a degree, and is patience itself.

The activists are fizzing with enthusiasm and ideas. That is exactly how it should be and, whilst I don't necessarily agree with Lembit's suggestion to them that they should be radical and on the cutting edge, there is no reason why they shouldn't be exploring new ways of doing things, new ideas for policy and asking the questions that most of us would like to see asked but haven't quite got the nerve to.

My concerns start with achievement, I suppose. Liberal Youth and its predecessors have, in recent years, been weak here, or at least, perceived to be weak, which amounts to pretty much the same thing. Their freshers campaigns have been sub-optimal, reliant on hard graft by Paul in the office, under-funded and occasionally late. For example, in my years on the Regional Executive in London, requests for financial support were frequently late (if they turned up at all), poorly supported in terms of planning and worse still in terms of reported outcome.

Campaigning has appeared fragmented and the disconnect from the campaigns run by the Party nationally has been glaring. If Liberal Youth is to run its own campaigns, might it not be better to link them to a salient campaign run by the Party? Better still, might talking to the Policy Unit, or the parliamentarians, or Campaigns Department help in terms of materials, press or strategy? If it is going to campaign 'independently', it needs to link up with other parts of the Party, to build up a mutual support network.

For me, the most disappointing aspect is the lack of unity. It has been put to me that an organisation that is doing little is most vulnerable to infighting, and I have to say that it has been a recurring theme of my time as Liberal Youth Returning Officer that most of the conversations I have been part of revolve around who isn't getting on with whom. How does such distraction help in the building of a better organisation?

Another problem is one of continuity. This has always bedevilled the students - a maximum of four years is likely to do that - and now that the new organisation is predominantly student-led due to the comparative difficulty of organising individuals spread thinly across an area, it seems to have infected Liberal Youth.

A much better transition process is the key. Unless you are changing the entire Executive, and even in Liberal Youth, that is unlikely, you should have some continuity. Proper record keeping, and better information publishing, allows an incoming Executive to pick up and go with comparative ease.

Lastly, Liberal Youth has, in the past, been weak on the use of the Internet. ironic, really, when you consider how keen they are on Facebook and blogging. The website needs more content, more frequently but most importantly, it needs relevance. In the autumn, when Ros and I were attending their conference, we arrived on the campus of the University of Surrey to discover that we had no more information that that. If we hadn't run into John Dixon, we might never have found them.

Details of their conference, its venue, the agenda and some contact details would seem to be an obvious thing to put on the website, as well as news of those candidates standing for election. With an Executive the size of Liberal Youth's, it shouldn't be difficult to get the work done without placing further burdens on the sole staff member. Using the website as a core campaigning tool would enable it to be linked to other readership groups within the Party, build goodwill and, possibly, attract funding from other sources.

I have no personal interest in who might be able to achieve this, especially as the things that I am proposing are the basics of running an organisation, i.e. what do you need to do, who are you doing it for and how are you going to deliver it? Once the elections are over, I may well suggest some ideas that help the winners. It's up to them to listen, should they choose to do so...

UPDATE - 20:50: I am advised that there is a separate website for Liberal Youth conferences...