Anders Hanson

It’s starting to feel as though a huge tidal wave has been unleashed. You get lots of people being cagey about the Lib Dem European candidate selections, and then suddenly when the result is known everyone has an opinion. The best of them so far is from James Graham, who explains some of the problems with the selection process, but also clarifies the gender balance situation very well.

Firstly, on a positive note I am really pleased to see some the results of some selections, particularly Ed Maxfield in the East Midlands who has come second on their list and now looks a good bet to be the next Liberal Democrat MEP for that region. I first knew Ed when we were activists in the East Midlands (he as the regional campaigns officer and me as a councillor in Derby), we both then ended up in Hampshire (he as county campaigns officer and me as constituency organiser for Eastleigh) and then have remained friends ever since. Ed is down to earth and personable, a great campaigner, but also has some very strong views on the way Europe and politics generally work.

But as far as I am concerned that is where the good news ends. These results show once again that it is impossible to defeat an incumbent MEP in a selection. Although that should not be a huge surprise, the margins by which they were all re-elected were massive and show that anyone who harbours the idea of defeating them is doomed to defeat. So far though most Liberal Democrats are blaming the selection rules which allow MEPs to continue their ‘normal duties’ such as putting out glossy leaflets to members and news updates by email. But really this huge advantage for the incumbent is no different from the one we have with MPs as sitting MPs are also impossible to shift. In fact it is probably worse as MPs don’t even have to go through a full selection process. With MPs we rightfully blame the first-past-the-post electoral system, rather than the party selection rules. Just as with MEPs selections, the real villain of the piece is the closed list system that was adopted by the Labour Government and which we rightfully argued against at the time. We have some excellent MEPs like Sharon Bowles, Fiona Hall and Chris Davies, but they should win on the grounds of them being excellent rather than just because they can get taxpayers and party members to pay for their re-selection.

Despite these comments that sort of defend the selection procedure, I do wonder though how we selected some of the people on the lists. Linda Jack, has already admitted that she didn’t try to get selected, and yet she came second in Eastern Region, although incidentally, having met Linda for the first time in recent weeks I reckon she would make an excellent MEP. Colin Ross, a long-standing friend who has wanted to be an MEP in the West Midlands for many years, who is determined to be an MEP and not an MP, who has campaigned hard to get selected, and who has done a lot for the party in the region over many years, only managed 4th. Now I know that I am biased because it is one of my own friends who has not performed as well as I would have hoped, but it does seem quite odd as the mantra of all party activists is that you have to campaign hard to get elected. In this election, it has almost seemed as though campaigning is counterproductive and you’d have been better off sat at home doing nothing for two months.

So the only reason I can come up for the selections is fame. Whilst Colin is relatively well known in his region, maybe he is not as those who came higher up the list such as Phil Bennion, Susan Juned and Liz Lynne. A similar thing happened in Yorkshire, where James Monaghan, who ran a good campaign and tried hard to get selected, came fifth for his efforts. It appears that with such a huge region, where you are not permitted to post anything as a part of your campaign and where you are never going to get close to meeting the majority of the membership, you only win by being famous. The best parallel I can come up with is the party’s own leadership election, where in previous contests Charles Kennedy and Ming Campbell won probably largely because they were the best known candidates rather than because they ran good campaigns. This time I suspect the fame of the leadership contenders is more evenly matched. So to get selected you can be famous, competent and be a good campaigner (see Jonathan Fryer and Catherine Bearder) but most of all you have to be famous.

My final thoughts though on the European candidate selection come from the phone canvassing I did for Ed Maxfield and Colin Ross. Phone canvassing is usually a good indicator of support for someone, but I found that much of what I did this time told me nothing when people don’t know any of the candidates. In a public election, people have some idea as to whether they are Conservative, Labour or Lib Dem. In an internal selection, you don’t have people saying “I’m a convinced Maxfieldite, in fact I come from a long line of them. Did you know that my Mum delivered leaflets for him in the 1918 election?” So with every person you are starting almost from scratch. They may well have heard of your candidate, but they don’t know who else is standing until they get the ballot paper. So although they tell you on the phone that they will vote for your candidate as you are the only person to bother, that changes when they get the ballot paper and recognise other names too. In public elections, you have usually had leaflets from all of the candidates by the time it comes for you to vote. Perhaps in internal selections we need an early mailing to tell people that a selection is happening shortly, who the candidates are and some artwork from each one. This can then be followed up at the end of the campaign with the ballot paper and another piece of literature from each candidate. In the meantime each candidate can do whatever campaigning they want as long as it doesn’t breach an expenses rule and it doesn’t defame another candidate (although how you determine what is defamation and what is fair comment would be a nightmare, just look at the comments made by people about Chris Huhne and Nick Clegg so far). I have seen a selection done like this once before and it showed who were the real campaigners and who weren’t, and the result at the end of it was a fair one, with the famous candidates doing well, but with a previously unknown campaigner running them very close.

COLIN ROSENSTIEL: Liberal Democrat internal election results

Iain Dale has highlighted a number of recent defections from the Liberal Democrats to the Conservatives, mentioning that no Lib Dems have since commented on it. Well in my case, I read it first on Iain Dale’s website, although I notice that a few people have now responded but not so much on the defections but on how we should respond as a party. From my point of view it is simple - we don’t want to promote bad news. Instead though I do want to look at why people defect. Forget the reasons the people give publicly, there seems to be four main reasons:

• Policy principles: they think that their views are now better represented by another party (the more honourable one, but also the reason that virtually ever defector gives).
• Ambition: they can move their career forward more by joining another party instead.
• Anger: they are pissed off with their own party for one reason or another and so they decide that to give them a bloody nose they will defect even if it is to a party that they also hate.
• Madness: they are just unhinged.

So should Lib Dems be bothered about these latest defections? To some extent, they shouldn’t as there are always defections back and forwards between parties. Even at the darkest hours of a party there are always some people who will swim against the tide and go and join a party that in the polls is a lot less popular than their own. But in this case, that argument doesn’t apply. We are at a time when the Conservatives are doing well in the polls, David Cameron gets high poll ratings and the impression is that the Liberal Democrats are doing less well.

I don’t happen to believe these polls tell the real story as I think that we might simply be switching back to a time when the Lib Dems always dip dramatically between elections but it doesn’t give an indication of how the party will do at the general election. My prediction is that Ming will still be leader at the end of 2007 unless Gordon Brown calls a snap general election before then. Anything could happen after an election depending on the outcome.

It is very rare for defectors to be high profile and so I would usually dismiss a low profile defection as meaningless. But in this latest set of defectors, all of the people defecting are recent parliamentary candidates. Interestingly none of them say that the Lib Dems have moved away from what they believe, it is simply that they think the Conservatives are better. That should be reassuring as it does not suggest a big disagreement with the party’s political stance. What I think they do reflect though is a concern with the image of the party at the moment. I do not share this concern as I think the party has actually moved on a long way in terms of its campaigning recently, and with the party having now appointed a new Director of Campaigns and Elections it will be interesting to see if anything else changes. What I think the party is not achieving so much is presenting this well on a national basis. The Lib Dems however rely far more on their local image than their national one to achieve electoral success. That is why I do not worry about the poll ratings.

I do not know any of these defectors, but I do know of Richard Porter and John Barstow. I had never had a positive opinion of the latter, but the former is far more significant. Particularly because of his high profile role with helping to write the party’s LGBT manifesto and within the party in Southwark. To go back to my reasons for defections, I don’t see that his defection could necessarily be thwarted ambition as he had been selected for Camberwell & Peckham, which is a decent long-term prospect by Lib Dem standards, and I had not noticed that he was unhinged. Which leaves me with the other two - one positive and one negative - and it is difficult to decide between the two without knowing more about him.

With Liberal Democrats though I believe there is an additional factor with defections, which is a bit of a combination of all four reasons I gave before, and this factor is almost exclusive to the Liberal Democrats. The Liberal Democrats have achieved a lot of success through it’s community politics. That is actually listening to local residents and campaigning on issues that really matter to them and trying to get action for the local area. It is this campaigning that has pushed the party forward and led them to great success in some parts of the country. But the side effect of this type of campaigning is that you end up building up a coalition of the disaffected. That is great when you are trying to win power, but when the party actually then has power and put things in to practice, the coalition can start to fall apart. It may not be that the party is doing a bad job in power, but when you make some of the unpopular decisions that are inevitable in power, you lose those people who were never really Lib Dems but just didn’t like whichever party was in power. I have never seen an analysis of the number of defections between parties and whether there are any trends, but if there is an increase in defections from the Lib Dems, the biggest reason could simply be down to its increasing success leading to the party taking more stances on issues that don’t play well with those who were never Lib Dems anyway.

IAIN DALE: Three more Lib Dem candidates join the Conservatives

If the so called political ‘experts’ are to be believed then the Liberal Democrats might as well give up trying to hold Winchester, thanks to the Oaten effect. The latest debate comes as a result of the Liberal Democrats apparently trying to get Sandi Toksvig selected for Meon Valley - the seat that is largely in the current Winchester seat but also taking in bits of (I think) East Hampshire and Havant - on the basis that only a popular celebrity can now hold it.

Despite being an eternal pessimist, I don’t see Winchester as a lost cause at all. Indeed, I think the party must stand a pretty good chance of holding the seat.

• The new Winchester seat has a notional majority of more 7,000. By any reckoning that is a pretty decent majority, and unless there is a huge swing from Lib Dem to Tory at the next election, (which there doesn’t seem to be any sign of yet), then the seat should be safe. The bits of the constituency lost to Meon Valley are fairly Tory, and the bit gained from Romsey - Chandler’s Ford - is quite Liberal Democrat.
• Mark Oaten may have embarassed himself and his family, but that doesn’t stop him from having been a very popular and hardworking MP. Even those who do not approve of what he did, cannot take that away from him, and will not necessarily turn against the party.
• The often cited proof of Winchester turning away from the Liberal Democrats is the Tories gaining the local council this May. However this doesn’t prove anything. The Liberal Democrats on Winchester Council have been losing seat to the Conservatives for the last few years. Indeed they lost more of those seats before the Oaten affair, than afterwards, it is simply that 2006 was the year when the council finally tipped from No Overall Control to Conservative. Indeed with the Tories running the council, it could be a distinct help to the local Lib Dems who will no longer be held to blame for what the council does.
• My understanding of the situation in Winchester is that after the Oaten affair the local party suffered in the local elections from the uncertainty of his future and the continuing publicity surrounding what he did in magazines like Hello. It also meant that Oaten, who had always taken a leading role in running local campaigns, was not able to perform his usual role. With that issue now settled they are in a good position to put together a new campaign team with the determination to hold the seat.
• Due to selection rules, and the fact that I don’t know the full list, I won’t go in to who is on the short list for Winchester, but the names I’ve been told about are very strong candidates. Any of these people would be an excellent candidate and would be determined to win the seat.
• Winchester also has the profile of what has become a typical Lib Dem seat. It is affluent, but still contains areas that are not rich. It has a student population, that is currently growing. It’s population is quite liberal in its attitudes and is a fairly compact urban seat. OK, so the party has many seats not like this, but Winchester sits quite naturally alongside the likes of Cheltenham, Cambridge, Oxford West & Abingdon, Bath and so on, all of them now fairly solid LibDem constituencies.

OK, I accept that this is partly gut feeling and partly fact, but whatever way you look at it, it is clear that the Liberal Democrats are very much in with a chance of holding Winchester. Indeed, I would say it was a strong likelihood. This isn’t just to spin the party’s chances, as I don’t believe in using this website as a promotional tool for the party. But I am getting increasingly fed up of so called experts saying that because of Mark Oaten, the Lib Dems have no chance of holding Winchester next time around.

What those who promote the cause of Sandi Toksvig also don’t understand is that the Liberal Democrats have very rigorous procedures on approving and selecting candidate. The party’s hierarchy cannot simply override the usual rules to ensure a particular candidate is picked, except perhaps in a by-election. Whilst Sandi Toksvig may make a very good candidate, she needs to go through the same procedure as anyone else. Indeed, knowing what the Liberal Democrats are like, party members are more likely to reject someone if they think the leadership is interfering rather than select them.

IAIN DALE: Sandi Toksvig to stand in Meon Valley?

If the comments on other websites and blogs is anything to go by, next week’s debate on equality and diversity at Lib Dem conference looks set to be a bit of a row. Up to this point I had expected the row to be the debate on taxation, but as the party in its wisdom decided that I shouldn’t receive a copy of the agenda despite being an elected conference representative that had registered to go, I missed this particular motion. Presumably as I only registered as a steward and therefore haven’t paid to go I don’t deserve to be kept informed of what is on the agenda. Despite having been told initially that this was the case, I now understand that agendas were posted out but many people didn’t receive them thanks to problems with Royal Mail.

I usually judge how good a motion is by the fairly simple criteria of whether I read it and decide that I disagree with parts of it and/or read it and think “now there’s a good idea”. Instead I read all of this motion and I can’t find either anything to disagree with or anything that seems like a good novel suggestion.

First, the big flaw. This motion is put forward by the Federal Executive with federal applicability. Yet, the whole process for approving and selecting candidates is run by the state parties, i.e. England, Scotland and Wales, and within England the job of ensuring that seats have candidates is largely done by the individual regions. So FE can say what it likes, but it can’t actually do much about it except monitor what is happening. Perhaps that is why the motion is so fluffy and yet vague. This certainly isn’t the first time that something like this has happened. Countless statements are made by the party, often by Simon Hughes, on how candidates should be selected and yet no one has even seen fit to talk to the English party’s candidates chair or the English party executive, even though they run the process in England. The motion says:

Conference calls on the FE to continue to consult regularly with the Women’s Liberal Democrats and the Gender Balance Task Force, Ethnic Minority Liberal Democrats and the Ethnic Minority Election Task Force, the Liberal Democrat Disability Association and DELGA and all successor organisations, as well as with appropriate national organisations outside the Party

But what it doesn’t say is that it will also consult those people who actually have to put any of this in to practice.

To me, the nearest this motion gets to making any sort of statement on which it can be held to account is where it says that selecting a candidate from any under-represented group should “be considered when assigning target status to UK parliamentary constituencies”. As someone who has always opposed all-women shortlists, this is something that I have previously advocated as a fairer way of achieving a similar result. Instead of forcing constituencies to pick a candidate that they don’t want just because they are from the right under-represented group, we should instead elect more MPs from under-represented groups by letting people pick who they want and then give extra support to ensure that those people stand a better chance of getting elected. Whilst the motion does not say how this will be achieved, we can at least come back in the future and ask what specific actions have been taken to support specific candidates. My primary concern however is that some people already seem to have a belief that the only way they can be a target seat is to pick a female candidate. Whilst this may inadvertently encourage people to give greater consideration to female candidates, it is not the way it should be happening. When people ask which are the Lib Dem target seats the simple answer has always been to tell them to look at the previous election results and the ones with the smallest swing for the Lib Dems to win next time are the target seats. That is the right approach, but I think there is a case for adding to the list of target seats, those places that are still credible seats to target but with a candidate from an under-represented group. The big proviso to all of this is that none of these seats should be allowed to remain target seats if they fail to run a good campaign.

It is ironic that two weeks before conference starts, Liberal Democrat News is full of letters complaining about how lengthy the candidate selection process is. Indeed, one suggestion has been that constituencies should be able to re-select their previous candidate by just holding an EGM. Whilst this may well speed up the process, it is the best way of just selecting favoured sons. Party members will only be exposed to good potential candidates if there is an open selection. It has not always been the case that PPCs are re-selected, but perhaps they would have been if the members were not presented with a better option. The way the party selects candidates quicker is to have more trained returning officers and to ensure that there are more people around who can train selection committees. The English party has been addressing this, and there are already far more returning officers out there. The selection rules may seem complex, but they have gone that way to cover all potential selection problems and we’ve had plenty of those. A good returning officer will understand the selection rules to an extent where the process should not be complex for the local party.

Of the comments I have seen on other websites on this motion, the most astute come from James Graham. He rightly points out where the real problem lies:

In my view, the party’s fundamental problem is not in finding strong candidates from under-represented groups or in local parties discriminating against them. The main problem is we don’t have enough of them. The approach of both the Campaign for Gender Balance and the Ethnic Minority Election Task Force was to provide a mechanism for proactively going out and finding candidates in significant numbers.

Instead the party puts forward a fluffy but vague motion and created a ‘diversity tsar’ in the form of Steve Hitchins. As much as I think Steve Hitchins is good and to be fair, he has a good track record in this area, the approach we need is a lot more simple. We do need headhunting, but not in an exclusive tokenistic way. Instead the party, and that means all party members and not just “the powers that be” should be encouraging those who are good to stand for us, no matter who they are. Those good candidates can present themselves to local parties for selection, and if they are good, that will show through.

LIBERAL DEMOCRATS: Conference Agenda Motion “Diversity and Equality”

ALEX WILCOCK: Sex and the President

JAMES GRAHAM: Reflecting Britain Update

PETER ON THE APOLLO PROJECT: Rough and ready rhetoric