Anders Hanson

It might be four days late, but I should perhaps still comment on last week’s local election results. I make no apologies for the time it has taken to write this, as I was determined to have a weekend that was, almost, completely free of politics.

As Sheffield held its count on Friday this year, I went there knowing that most of the results in the country were not so great for the Liberal Democrats and the partly looked set to do worse in Scotland. So it was as much a relief as anything else to see the Lib Dems do well in Sheffield, picking up three seats from Labour and one from the Conservatives.

All of these results gave me a huge amount of satisfaction. Not only has the Liberal Democrat Group gained four excellent new councillors who will contribute a lot to their wards and the group, but they are also people I like on a personal level. We have picked up our first seats in Gleadless Valley and Hillsborough after close results last year, and we now have a full set of three Lib Dems in Walkley for the first time since 2002.

In my own patch in Sheffield Hallam, the Tories ended up losing another seat and now have only one left in the city. The Lib Dem vote in Sheffield Hallam had increased again from last year, and bodes well for the next General Election. Despite the Tories running bigger campaigns and delivering leaflets in more places than last year, their vote went down. The Lib Dems also managed to top the poll in Sheffield Central, which is a marginal seat that the Lib Dems can take from Labour at the next General Election.

But despite the excellent results in Sheffield, the national result has once again been a disappointment. Naturally the national party website puts a positive spin on these results, but I hope the official analysis will reflect on what really seemed to happen.

The accepted wisdom of the elections is that the Lib Dems did badly against the Tories in the South and well against Labour in the North. That is largely the case, but it does not explain why the Lib Dems did well against the Tories in places like Winchester, Taunton Deane and Caradon, but lost seats to Labour in York and in a surprisingly high number of other councils across the North albeit in smaller numbers. It also cannot simply be put down to people giving the Lib Dems a kicking where they are in charge, as we gained seats in a number of authorities that we have now run for a significant amount of time such as Eastleigh, Three Rivers and Oadby & Wigston, all of which have the Conservatives in second place and are in the South or Midlands. In any analysis it is also probably not fair to look at those authorities that have won or lost big on the back of just one major local issue, or those like Torbay and Bournemouth that have now developed a tendency to swing dramatically at each election, without any obvious direct effect at the subsequent general election.

Some Lib Dems have immediately jumped to criticise Ming Campbell for the result. I have always argued that the leadership of the Lib Dems is usually irrelevant to local election results, and it is as unfair to blame Ming for a bad result as it has been to praise Charles for the good results when he was leader. The inconsistency of the election results show that cannot be the case, as it would be like saying that the voters of Eastleigh think Ming is great whereas the voters of Southampton can’t stand him. But I also believe that by blaming Ming we are making him a scapegoat rather than looking for real lessons from last Thursday.

The think that has struck me most about these elections is that the party is beginning to return to the way seats were always won or lost in the past. In the bad old days when there were only a handful of Liberal Democrats, the party only did well where there was a critical mass of campaigners who knew what they were doing and where they had the drive and work ethic to make us win. Although the party has achieved this in certain seats since 1997 it has also picked up many more by simply being seen as the opposition or because of a national swing. This is fine to start with, but when you reach times like those we have now, (where the Lib Dems are starting to get squeezed out by the battle between the bigger two), much more is needed to keep winning.

The areas we have done well in this year tend, (although there are always exceptions), to be those where there is either a group of campaigners who are organised and know what they are doing, or where we have a key individual who is leading a team of less experienced people. I can look at a few councils around the country and tell you exactly who in that local party is the key individual that has given us such a good result. Where that isn’t the case, it is usually because there is a good team of activists who know what they are doing.

So the solution? We need to stop living beyond our means. I don’t mean financially, but in terms the number of activists needed to sustain a successful election campaign. We have more parliamentary seats than we’ve had since the 1920s and, despite the events of last week, more councils and councillors than we had in the old days. Yet, our membership is either static or in decline. We have the professional campaigns staff that we never used to have, we now need the grafters who can make it happen in each constituency and council. In many places we don’t and it simply isn’t sustainable when we are now clearly in the toughest political times that we have had for 15 years or more. The Tories are now motivated and have improved their campaigning know how, but I still believe that the Lib Dems know more about what wins elections than they do. What the Lib Dems now need is to boost the membership, train up more of the membership to run good campaigns and use the extra income that more members brings to give us extra financial resources that will also help us to win.

Liberal Democrats seem to be struggling on how to deal with the new green Tories under Cameron. Should we dismiss them as not really being serious about the environment and what Cameron is saying is just spin and he will never develop real green policies? Or, should the conversion to environmentalism be welcomed with us arguing though that we got there first? Or the other option of saying that they are being green but it doesn’t go far enough?

It is a difficult one, and certainly Cameron’s recent announcements appear to be very bold and very different. But where I have a problem is that they are completely unrealistic.

Rationing people to one ‘cheap’ flight a year may sound good, but how on earth are you going to police it and what size of bureaucracy do you need to achieve it? Plus, how will he deal with airlines using overseas fuel instead of British fuel to get round the fact that ours will be more heavily taxed.

It was reassuring listening to Chris Huhne on television this lunchtime. Not only was he clear on where the Liberal Democrat view was better than Labour or the Tories, but he reminded people how distinct the Lib Dem view is and why it would work. He didn’t need to say “we are greener than you”, which is becoming an increasingly repetitive argument, but simply stated why the Lib Dem policy would work.

On the environment I am happy to compare the Tories to the Green Party. That may sound like a compliment in terms of their environmental policies, but it isn’t. What I mean is that what they say may sound good, but it will never happen as it just doesn’t take in to account reality. The difference is that the Greens go even further and are even more restrictive.

I was interested in environmental issues long before David Cameron was, and so of course I want to reduce carbon emissions. But just talking about flights is I believe is a red herring. There are many other ways of reducing our carbon footprint. But even when it comes to air travel, the discussion should be much more about cutting internal flights and road use in the UK. These two link together. If we put money in to high capacity, fast rail lines criss-crossing the UK, like the French TGV, we would not only end up putting out of business the vast majority of internal flights, but would also reduce long-distance car use as well. Rail travel in this way is credible and would work, and would be the biggest carrot that anyone could possible want, without the need for a huge stick.

All of the evidence suggests that Patrick Mercer is probably not a racist. What he said was ill advised, but I think in the reaction to it we have failed to look at the implications of what he said.

In my view the real problem, and it is far from exclusive to the military is macho cultures in workplaces. The military is probably no more or less racist than many other workplaces. But the very nature of what they do breeds a macho culture that can lead to bullying. Banter is one thing, but prolonged racist, xenophobic, homophobic or sexist comments are unacceptable regardless of whether they are meant or not. As a senior military figure, Patrick Mercer should have tried to clamp down on it, and the military as a whole should be more aware to it following what happened at Deepcut.

But as I have said this is not unique to the military. I have worked in a few places where you regularly hear homophobic, racist or sexist comments. Some is inoffensive banter, and most of it is not meant seriously, but it is still wrong. The places that I have heard this are those businesses that either have a lot of older staff that still operate in an old-fashioned manner or they are places that are traditionally masculine environments. I suspect the people who make the comments are not intending to be racist or homophobic, to take two examples, but are just picking on someone’s characteristics (as Patrick Mercer pointed out). It is not unusual to find people who have enough awareness to not make racist comments in front of someone who is black, but will still join in with racist banter behind their back.

I have said that I have seen this is in places I have worked, and to my regret I have failed to take a stand against this sort of thing myself. Perhaps because I don’t want to be labelled as a politically correct whinger, perhaps because people could easily see me as someone who is weedy and over-sensitive. And also as someone who is a foreigner, gay and liberal you are conscious that you tick many of the boxes of the things that people that are genuinely trying to be offensive hate. I am not sure I would be quite so reticent about it now though.

You can’t stop people from racist thoughts. Indeed it is someone’s right to have whatever opinions they want. But what is unacceptable is to allow a workplace environment to develop where people feel they can be openly racist and treat people differently because of it.

Patrick Mercer has raised a valuable point about bullying in the military. A bullying that happens in so many other workplaces. But the whole way he raised it made him appear complacent and racist and did not further the cause of abolishing it. He may also be right that some, (and it will be some), soldiers use racism as a way of covering their own misdemeanours. But he did not need to raise it in the way he did, and for that you have to question his political judgement.

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

I’m still on with John Major’s very well written autobiography, a book which is very prophetic when he talks about all the problems there would have been in Iraq if they had gone all the way to Baghdad and deposed Saddam Hussein following the Gulf War.

But as a bit of a break I have switched to some lighter reading for a bit - Boris Starling’s “Messiah”. I say lighter reading, but it is a thriller and some of the murders in the book are pretty gruesome. I have been reading it for nearly a week and have ploughed through it at some speed as it is really gripping. You really want to know what will happen next, and it also includes quite a few twists and turns in the plot and more general character background than a lot of thrillers. I didn’t see the television dramatisation of this book (there is only one Messiah book and the rest of them were written for TV) but I am told it is nowhere near as good as the book.

AMAZON UK: Messiah by Boris Starling