A University Challenge (For Nick And Chris)

Of course, amidst this week's flurry of blog posts (this is now my fourth day in a row, I'm not sure which of the seals I've opened, but it's definitely one of them!) I have unaccountably failed to explain the disappearance of certain information from my profile.

I can therefore confirm that I have resigned from LDYS Executive and LDYS Policy Committee. I'm not going to go into detail at this stage, mid-leadership election and all; suffice it to say, my resignation was on a point of principle relating to LDYS' future direction.

In that vein, I offer a challenge to our leadership contenders. The numbers are stark; there are 22 held or target seats in which the student vote alone could decide the seat. And yet, LDYS is the single most neglected part of our campaign arsenal, with the Federal Party taking notice only when it wants its picture taken in front of good things and when it wants bad things hushed up. My challenge, therefore, is this; tell us how you are going to ensure that LDYS is supported, not only by our words, but by our actions.

And On The Fifth Day...

Halle-bloody-lujah!

No, not Ming's speech (though I'll come to that in a bit!) No, I refer to the fact that BBC News Online have finally given us a plug for Lib Dem Top Trumps, LDYS' big fundraiser at Conference. I'd be more impressed, mind you, if they hadn't plugged another organisation's free Top Trumps on carbon reduction two days ago and if the plug wasn't just under a story saying that the "Homophobia Is Gay" badges are kicking up a fuss (which I'm sure they did when we introduced them a whole year ago!)

Mind you, they did miss the bigger angle, which is that because of the way Top Trumps works there is essentially a statistical ranking of all the cards, which also means that there is a best card. Heck, a really eager journo might have tried to find the person who put together the statistics for the cards to find out which card was best, but I haven't had any calls yet...

As for Ming, can't disagree with the general opinion on the blogosphere, good speech. But I do wish he'd stop doing the arm-wavy thing at the end...

Bringing You All The Results That Matter

And so, two weeks after all that fuss about the devolved assemblies, the truly important results are announced; those of the LDYS elections (at least provisionally; my apologies to the Returning Officer for some mild impetuosity...)

Chair:
Mark Gettleson (London)

Vice-Chair Campaigns:
Adi Smith (Aberystwyth)

Vice-Chair Membership Development:
Rocky Lorusso (Hull) and Nigel Smith (Bristol)

Vice-Chair Finance:
Alan Muhammed (Guildford)

Vice-Chair Communications:
Matt Wilkes (Bristol) and Katherine Bavage (Leeds)

GEM:
Gareth Aubrey (Cardiff)
Matt Cormack (Newcastle)
Amanda Crane (Winchester)
Abi Gliddon (Taunton)
Paul Harding (Montgomeryshire)
Jon Massey (Bristol)
Ben Mathis (London)
Mark Mills (Reading)

England Convenor:
Rachel Hamburger (London)

International Committee:
Peter Bancroft (London)
Mark Mills (Reading)
Paul Seery (London)
Martin Shapland (Birmingham)

Conference Committee:
Matt Cormack (Newcastle)
Amanda Crane (Winchester)
Simon Drage (Norwich)
Hamish McCallum (Falmouth and Camborne)

Policy Committee:
Gareth Aubrey (Cardiff)
Paul Clarke (Southampton)
Matt Cormack (Newcastle)
Mark Mills (Reading)

I am, of course, delighted to be re-elected to continue the policy work I have been pushing on since October. For everyone who is soon to be one of my colleagues, congratulations.

But at the same time, a reminder. Our job descriptions as executive members are in the constitution and should be foremost in our minds over these next twelve months; we exist as a committee to serve, not our own whims and fancies, but the needs of one of the heftiest organisations within the Liberal Democrats. In doing so, we should also keep in mind the following;

“The objectives of LDYS shall be;

(a) to represent LDYS members to the party;

(b) to promote Liberal Democrat policies amongst young people and students;

(c) to develop and train its members”

No part of that is negotiable; regardless of the name or structure, any organisation in the role of LDYS needs to fulfil those objectives to justify its existence. I hope that over the next year we can actually start taking steps to address or faults and really move forward.

LDYS: Return Of The Readership

A funny thing happened to this blog last October, as reader numbers soared for three particular entries about the state of LDYS following its Autumn Conference in Colchester. In the spirit of giving the people what they want, I shall hope to provide the same service for LDYS Spring Conference 2007, held in Bristol on the weekend.

In terms of the actual business of the weekend, we had a diverse range of speakers, including Stephen Williams MP, Tony Vickers (ALTER), John Bridges (ALDC) and Martin Tod (Wired Group), plus a Manifesto consultation session with Steve Webb MP (who, perhaps scarily, recognises me from Facebook…)

The policy debates were fruitful, the headline being a commitment to Land Value Taxation as a replacement for Council Tax (and yes, Tony Vickers did speak immediately before that motion was discussed but that was entirely coincidental!). Topical motions denouncing Robert Mugabe, Gordon Brown and Rupert Murdoch were also carried; indeed, the only motion to fail was a proposal for short-term renationalisation of train operating companies to facilitate future systemic reforms (and I’m sure regular readers will have no trouble working out who wrote that motion ;)

At this point, I’m painfully aware of the now-legendary warning LDYS once received from Lord Shutt of Greetland, namely “beware those who use constitutions as a substitute for sex”. Nevertheless, the most important piece of news from conference is that LDYS adopted a new constitution. But while we must savour the joy of passing a motion that includes the section;

Conference Resolves:
1. To delete the Standing Orders
2. To delete the Constitution and replace

The true importance of this constitution is not what it is, but what it is not…

To explain, at Spring Conference 2006 LDYS’s executive brought proposals, with essentially zero notice, to reform the constitutional amendment procedure so as to facilitate a complete review. Although the measure succeeded, the plan on which it was based (which included calling two special conferences to occur consecutively on the same day!) failed to materialise.

At Autumn Conference 2006, another proposal was brought at no notice, this time by way of a policy motion giving a mandate to the Executive to investigate and execute certain changes to LDYS’s systems and strategy. Although that motion failed, a desire to effect substantial change was clearly stated.

Soon after, LDYS VP Adam Killeya noticed that, having changed our procedures, the only difference between the Constitution and the Standing Orders was their name. As one of the most experienced users of the document, he embarked on a complete rewrite, to combine the two and tighten the package as a whole. A team including Merryn Pearce, Chris Nelson and myself weighed in, and the new document was published for consultation in January and passed nem con at Bristol.

None of that delivers the structural reform that many are calling for. But until we have firm proposals from them, nothing can deliver those. I understand that there are some valid reasons for that at this stage, and I’m sure those involved are acting in good faith, but I think two comments must be placed on record. First, governing is done by those who show up; if things fail to happen, the credibility of the reform efforts will be shot to hell.

More importantly, however, the proposals must be concrete. My experience of LDYS has very much been that there is a cultural fear of professionalism and of organisation; those elected to lead seem very much to want to be given carte blanche to do fluffy things and be trusted to do them. I have no objection to people wanting to do fluffy things, but I also want a guarantee that those functions that LDYS is duty-bound to fulfil are being fulfilled.

Ultimately, LDYS is a significant component in both membership and finances of the Federal Party and has responsibilities with significant legal repercussions to the Federal Party; you cannot manage an organisation of that size from the back of a fag packet. I want to see reform, I want to see us improve, but that has to be done in a manageable, accountable fashion. I truly hope that the process that is to follow will be thorough and inclusive, as we have been let down too often in the past.

PS As I’m certain it will appear nowhere else on the web, I’d like to give credit to those who did so much to deliver conference. At the host end, Nigel Smith, Jon Massey, Dan Aylen, Matt Wilkes and many other whose names I forget; from the LDYS office, Paul Pettinger; and from Conference and Steering Committees, Amanda Crane, Mark Mills, Adam Killeya, Merryn Pearce and the legend that is Simon Drage.

Activity: The Politician's Substitute For Accomplishment

Blog etiquette is clearly a still-evolving concept, but I suppose it’s only fair to my readers (theoretical though you all are) to give some apology for my recent sabbatical; unfortunately I’ve been discovering that the old adage about moving house and stress is all too accurate. That’s not to say that I’ve been completely inactive party-wise, and it seems a fitting time (both from my current state of creativity-sapping exhaustion and from the progress of things) to fill you all in on what I’m doing on the LDYS side of things.

But first, let us be frank and admit that, on policy matters, LDYS have in recent years dropped the ball. That’s not to say that this is anyone’s fault; turnover of activists has not helped, neither has the institutional single-mindedness generated by what I shall call, in order to protect those who should be shouted at/sacked/shot (delete as applicable), the Royal Festival Hall Incident and the Black Hole Plot.

Equally, solving those issues is not exactly within the remit of a Policy Officer; I can’t exactly be held responsible for the fact that ***** ******* is a complete ******* ****** who should be ****** *** ** *** ****, after all! What I can do is ensure that the process is right, which for fear of sounding unbearably grandiose is a massively important role in a youth politics organisation simply because the vast majority of its members will consider such things to be fundamentally boring.

The plan, then, is to completely revamp LDYS’s policy management systems. Instead of the current mass of policy motions, Policy Committee will maintain a constantly evolving policy book, building into what will essentially be a complete manifesto for the organisation from which the committee can build motions to Federal Conference. Moreover, shorn of the onerous nature of the current management system and empowered by a new, bolder development remit, LDYS Policy Committee should become a commissioning body in the role of FPC.

My point in mentioning all this is to remind the rest of the party that LDYS’ days of lying down and taking it are over; we are, to coin the delightful West Wingian phrase, Roberto Mendoza, and we’re coming to rob your house…

Are We Really All That Bad?

As I trekked round most of the North of England today (specifically, York - Harrogate - Leeds - Settle - Carlisle - Preston - Manchester) a question dogged me; what does the party really think of LDYS policy?

I ask because it has now become something of a professional concern; as an LDYS Executive Member I've taken on a portfolio loosely entitled "Policy and Education" concerned with improving policy generation and management within LDYS and regaining some of our influence on Federal Party policy. But equally, as someone who has never attended Federal Party Conference (though only because it's always the same week as Manchester Freshers Fair and it's now become something of a protest for me) I can't really gauge the true feelings of the party at large.

Obviously I know we've something of a reputation for radicalism (I have after all at least read the pornography motion so that was ever so slightly obvious!) But is the dismay at our supposed irresponsibility real, or do people secretly take Paddy Ashdown's view that what LDYS thinks today will be mainstream in the party in five years?

In fairness my interest is only really academic; I certainly have no instinct to reel our radicalism in and I would hope that a democratic party would at least take it on the chin as an inevitable consequence of our nature. Still, it would be good to know exactly how mad people are at us before stepping in with me big size 12's...

LDYS: Winning How?

Of course, if I'm going to sit here all week being critical of things going on within LDYS, at some point you'll have every right to ask me what I'd do about it. And to be honest, I've spent all week struggling with it, until just now I realised that actually I have a get-out clause (but more of that anon...)

Meanwhile, I think it's only fair that I tell you what I disagree with;

• We must not drop the word "Democrat" from our name. This is something that the whole party needs to be made aware of; LDYS is considering changing its name (which is fair enough, LDYS isn't exactly memorable) and there is a strong body of opinion in favour of only using "Liberal" as a descriptor. Even without the PPERA problems that might arise from such a change, it is fundamental that we not seek to deny our status as the youth wing of a political party. The moment we cease to have pride in the party we seek to represent, we cease to have any right to do anything.,
• We must not allow the accountability situation to get worse. LDYS Conference has its problems, true. And yes, the idea of having one annual Convention with a greater focus on workshops and blue-sky thinking is good and should be pursued. But we must not allow our desire to get a convention in place to ride roughshod over the need to have an accountable executive.
• We must not have a Sabbatical Chair. LDYS has suffered in recent years from only having one full-time staff member, but the problem has been a lack of skills and a lack of time to apply them, not a lack of political leadership. Yes, we need a second staff member, but that person should be a stable, professional presence with the skills we need to do the things we need to do.

But what, you may well ask, of my get-out clause? Well, put simply, we must have an open process. LDYS has an enormous range of stakeholders; parliamentarians, local parties, university branches, youth branches, ordinary members... and so far the efforts to engage them properly have been negligible Until we're getting that bit right, I'm not going to feel guilty sniping from the sidelines.

Either way, the lesson to those on the outside is clear; if you want a strong youth wing, if you want to take advantage of the clear advantage Lib Dems have among young voters, don't wait for it to be delivered on a plate. Get informed, get involved, and help us get it sorted.

LDYS: Winning Soon?

As with anything else at all, when discussing the present state of LDYS, context is everything.

Since what can only be described (in order to protect the guilty) as the Royal Festival Hall incident, the attitude of those charged with running LDYS and in particular of its Chairs has been that the only solution to LDYS' problems is the political equivalent of carpet-bombing; complete overhaul of every section of the organisation's activities led by a completely new constitution.

Now that in itself is fair enough; even those in the constitutional wonk end of the organisation (or as it has come to be known, for reasons that will hopefully soon be obvious, the Committee for Public Safety) agree that the organisational structure is by no means perfect. The idea in and of itself continues to have little to do with what is holding LDYS back.

For that, we must turn to the mentality evidenced by the actions of those pursuing reform. The last two LDYS Conferences (Spring 2006, Leeds and Autumn 2006, Colchester) have essentially been dominated by the reform debate, and in both cases the approach of the ringleaders has been the same; propose your reform as late as possible, ram it forcibly onto the agenda and railroad conference into accepting it before anyone can really consider the implications of it all.

The reason for this approach is simple; the perception is that somehow the whole of LDYS is being held back by a small group of reactionaries who are implacably opposed to any form of change and will use any form of constitutional manipulation to have their way. As a result, successive Chairs have deemed it necessary to conduct business without the involvement of even their own executives, in the hope that the reactionaries will not notice until it is too late.

So far, this approach has been pretty successful, but only because of the nature of LDYS's membership; it's easy to sell the idea that the ends justify the means to young people who are slowly discovering their political identity. In any case, the idea that procedure might exist for a reason is one you learn through bitter experience rather than teaching.

The irony, of course, is that this is a classic chicken-and-egg problem, in that the reactionaries do not foster the attitude so much as the attitude fosters the reactionarism. As Liberal Democrats, we instinctively believe in free and open debate followed by measured decision making; so long as people will insist on trying to make changes in secret and at the last minute (often using the very constitutional procedures they criticise in others), there will be people who will oppose them for the undemocratic way they have pursued things.

My point is, we cannot guarantee that proceedings inside LDYS will meet the standards of accountability and inclusiveness that the Federal, State and Local Parties should expect of us. The consequences of that could easily be disastrous, both for LDYS and for the rest of the party. Now more than ever, we need people outside LDYS to be involved and informed as the future of the organisation is thrashed out.

LDYS: Winning Where?

The passage of LDYS Conference understandably draws my consideration to the state of our youth wing (not least as at this one I was elected to the LDYS Executive!) This week, I'll be offering a few perspectives on where we are and where we might be heading.

In youth politics as a whole two trends dominate debate; single-issue campaigns and the "rise" of Conservative Future. The first is an issue at all levels of party politics and one I've no real insight into solving. The same cannot be said, however, for the second.

As much as anything, it all depends on your idea of success, and that very much depends on the party you are referring to. From the point of view of the Conservatives, Conservative Future is hugely successful, in that the traditional route to becoming a Conservative MP or Association Chair is through being an utter socialite. All Conservative Future is thence required to be is a social organisation with a broad but not necessarily committed membership, and it does that very well.

Similarly, advancement within the Labour Party has always been about your hack rating; you become a hack in Labour Students, then a hack in the NUS, then a hack in your Trade Union of choice or within the party itself before finally reaching Westminster.

But for the Liberal Democrats, the aim of the youth wing is very much different. To become an MP, you must learn your trade and the benefits of hard work. From the point of view of the local parties, then, the aim of Liberal Democrat Youth and Students is to produce activists, men and women with motivation and skills ready to fight the good fight.

It's tempting to believe that any form of success is something to be pursued. But success is about doing the right thing, not doing anything and then claiming it was right to begin with.

The CSI Edition (aka Who Are You?)

Oh, another political blog, quoth you, and with good reason; political blogging is now perhaps the ultimate example of the internet’s greatest flaw, namely that it doesn’t distinguish between the ability to publish something and the merit of publishing it.

So why should you care about the blog of someone whose only claim to political significance is as Chair of Manchester Universities Liberal Democrats? It’s all a matter of membership.

Specifically, Liberal Democrat Youth and Students, like any segment of any political party, is made up of four groups of people.

1. The Socialites – Those who see political parties, much like the Church of England, more as a social organisation than a religion.
2. The Careerists – Those who believe a political career is their destiny and whose every action is to that goal.
3. The Nutters – Those who can’t quite bring themselves to actually be communists and/or fascists.
4. The True Believers – Those who actually buy the hype and believe their particular party has struck on some deep philosophical truth.

From a policy perspective, the first three groups don’t really matter; the socialites will just drift through life occasionally being helpful, the careerists will assiduously avoid dirtying their hands and the nutters will be usefully active without ever achieving real influence (I mean, it’s not like the Parliamentary Labour Party is chock-full of screaming revolutionaries who think that just because they do a day’s work that somehow means they should get paid, or equally that the 1922 Committee is dominated by Oxbridge-educated Old Etonians who believe in shooting poor people and the extension of slavery to anyone who hasn’t got a knighthood… erm…)

The true believers matter though, particularly in the youth organisation; like it or not, they probably constitute half the people who in twenty years will be leading your party. In the Liberal Democrats it matters rather more, because the party still hasn’t identified what its ideology is; Labour and the Tories have been around so long they figure it doesn’t matter that they’ve ceased to have one.

The reason this blog exists, then, is that most of the current batch of true believers (and certainly the vast majority of those who are sufficiently erudite to matter) in LDYS are, for want of a better word, pure liberals; an eclectic mix of influenced europhiles, barrack-room economists and post-Gulf War II rights of man types. The Liberal Democrats have only ever had one clear ideological identity, so the argument goes, hence the only way to get one back is to reclaim that one.

If I were a cynic (oh wait, I am) I would undoubtedly point out that Labour and the Conservatives don’t have identities either, instead relying on a perverse combination of race memory and collective psychosis (for example, Labour are still left-wing really) and that we can’t escape from that process any more than the egos of Messrs Blair and Cameron can make it so.

Beyond the glibness, however, I would simply declare myself unconvinced by the certainty of chance. I certainly do not believe that the only possible Lib Dem identity is a combination of academic economics, nostalgia for the Liberal Party and the seduction of European Liberalism. On the other hand, while I am in that class of people who would have been members of the SDP back in the day, I’m certainly not looking for another burst of social democracy; if I were I would have joined the party that at least thinks it is social democrat.

Either way, as a youth wing (and indeed as a party generally) the debate has to be real. If nothing else, the purists need to win the argument properly, having explained what they want to do and, more importantly, why it makes the world better. Equally, if any of us want a more pragmatic, less narrow-mindedly liberal solution, we have to fight for it on level terms.

So to start off, this blog; no gossip, no minutiae of life, just some perspectives on issues topical and not. To paraphrase Mr. Spock, “Liberalism is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.”