The shameful truth behind Donnachadh McCarthy’s demise

In yesterday’s Independent, former Lib Dem member Donnachadh McCarthy slates the Lib Dems in his article “The shameful truth behind the Lib Dems’ demise”.  He is wrong on so many counts, but I will pick out two.

Firstly, he says that instead of promoting its “good policy paper on how to reduce carbon emissions” the party is instead wanting “to waste enormous political energy over the next few years tackling a pointless referendum on Europe”.  Whatever the rights and wrongs of the party’s call for a referendum on Europe rather than on the new European treaty, he completely misunderstands what the party is doing, but then as someone who resigned in a huff then that is understandable.  The party has spent considerable time over the last year promoting its green tax switch, and constituencies all over the country have been campaigning on it.  I have already been given materials to help me campaign on the extension of our environmental policy that the party adopted yesterday.  The referendum on Europe is not our big campaign idea, it is simply our view on how Europe should be tackled.  Does Donnachadh really believe that when Ming is asked about Europe he should say, “sorry I don’t talk about that I will only talk about the environment?”

Secondly, Donnachadh uses the article to give more publicity to his favourite conspiracy theory about the “corrupting influence that politial lobbying has on the internal dynamics of the party”.  I accept that there are a lot of lobbyists who used to work for the party or still have positions within it.  But that is an inevitable result of the skill sets in both jobs being similar and so moving on from being party staff to be a lobbyist or PR person is a natural career path.  But what Donnachadh forgets is the party’s campaigning is usually driven by the party’s campaigns department, and is not in the hands of a clique around the leader.  The nature of Liberal Democrats is that if the leader told its staff to not campaign on a policy, they would tell him stuff it and they would go ahead and do it anyway.  One of the traits of Lib Dems is that they are non-deferential and a little bit rebellious.  He has a fair comment about some of the unhelpful advisors that Charles Kennedy had when he was leader, but has he not noticed that Charles is now no longer leader?  The staff in Ming’s office are now a completely different set of people, many of whom are far more grounded in the party and its campaigning than those who worked for Charles.  That is one of the things that Ming has improved since he became leader.  Donnachadh really needs to learn that When it comes to things going wrong in the running of the Liberal Democrats, the answer is usually cock-up rather than conspiracy.

Donnachadh does make some valid points about expanding the appeal of the party and broadening its base of supporters and funding.  When Donnachadh was a party activist, he served a useful role in pressing for those sorts of things, and was a useful voice of conscience on party executives.  But what always undermined his arguments was his obsession about conspiracies and apparent misdemeanours when there was no evidence and his concerns were small beer when compared to all the other things in the party that he would have been better spending his energy on.  Unfortunately for Donnachadh this meant that he fell from being a useful person for the party to have around to someone who was wasting his talents on ridiculous statements and unproven allegations.  The Independent should stop giving him the oxygen of publicity for his views on the Liberal Democrats, and instead leave him to concentrate on his excellent work in promoting greener living.

INDEPENDENT: The shameful truth behind the Lib Dems’ demise