Anders Hanson

Don’t get me wrong. I am a big fan of Liberator magazine, and I particularly enjoy Radical Bulletin. But when one of the stories that it covers is one that you have some knowledge of, it does annoy you if they get it wrong.

In the January 2008 edition it inevitably discusses the two recent leadership campaigns. Much of what it says is true, but I found one comment interesting:

Clegg’s second mailing reposed in a Sheffield sorting office to the annoyance of Inverness MP Danny Alexander, who arrived late to stiffen the campaign’s resolve and discovered no-one had asked whether the sacks could be dispatched from elsewhere.

The ‘non-delivery’ of the second Nick Clegg mailing has become a bit of an urban myth. I know countless people who received it, many within only two or three days of it being posted second class from Sheffield and one of those lived in rural Sussex. But if the mail sacks really were hanging around the Sheffield Mail Centre then I would love to know how they would be retrieved and ‘despatched from elsewhere’. I can see the phone conversation now:

Hello, I’m calling from the Liberal Democrats. You collected about 60 mail sacks from our office in Sheffield last week. Now I know that some people have already received the mailings that we sent out, but we think you might have forgotten some of the bags, so I wondered if I could come down and pick them up from you and post them elsewhere

(confused reply from the other end of the phone)

What did they look like? Well just like every other mail bag in your building.

(further reply from Royal Mail on the phone)

Oh, what did the mailing look like? Well it was a fairly anonymous C5 white envelope with a printed label on the front. Do you have anything like that in your premises?

(further incredulity from the other end of the phone)

You mean you have lots of envelopes that look like that, and that you don’t store bags from the Liberal Democrats in a specific place where they can be found again when we want to retrieve them at a later date?

(irate reply with the word ‘wasting our time’ mentioned frequently)

So even if I came down myself and personally searched all 13,000 square metres of the mail centre you don’t think that would be helpful

(phone is put down by Royal Mail with some force)

I think that probably clarifies the matter.

The real scandal was that three times Royal Mail managed to lose the booking that I had made for a van collection from our office (it’s a good job I kept checking with them that they knew about it). In the end it was collected on the day it was supposed to be, but that was after much hassle and asking of favours. It might have been easier if I could ring the local mail centre directly, as I could a year or two ago, but now you can only ring a central number which is only open on weekdays until about 6pm.

I was going to comment on Ming’s ludicrous call for a General Election now that Blair is going, but Jonny Wright has got there first with exactly what I wanted to say.

As has been pointed out: we elect local MPs, we elect them to represent a party not a leader (if they did represent a leader, maybe all Lib Dems should have caused by-elections when Charles went), we knew that Brown would probably take over some time in this parliament, and we didn’t say this when Major took over in 1990.

When I was told about this this lunchtime, I couldn’t quite believe it was something Ming had said. I assumed it must have been one of Norman Baker’s hobby horses. Obviously not!

JONNY WRIGHT: Ming Campbell - constitutionally incoherent

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.

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?

As a member of The National Trust, I recently received my magazine and with it the voting papers for its internal elections and Annual General Meeting. I suspect the majority of members simply throw these away. I used to, until I realised how many issues on which they were voting were areas where I had an opinion.

What is intriguing though is the way they encourage people to vote the ‘right way’. For the election to the National Trust Council (the organisation’s governing body) they helpfully put in bold the names of the people they want you to vote for. If this was proposed for public elections it would be considered highly corrupt and the election would be heavily criticised as neither free nor fair.

I suppose we should be grateful for some progress. They used to have a system that allowed the chairman of the National Trust to have a block vote by being proxy for all those National Trust members who couldn’t be bothered to choose between the candidates. Indeed, in the past the National Trust actually ensured that some of those people elected by the popular vote, were then unelected by making sure they used the block vote to vote for their preferred candidates.

I have noticed today that Chris Patten also raised concerns about it in the House of Lords back in 2001! He said:

The complaint, in brief, is that the National Trust council turns out a list of those standing for election, putting an asterisk next to the names of those whom it favours. If those people do not get enough votes directly cast…the block vote is used by the National Trust to get them home and dry even though they do not have a majority of the popular vote as expressed by those present in the hall and those exercising their undoubted and proper right to vote by post…At the 2000 annual general meeting, a motion against the block voting system was proposed and seconded by two QCs…and supported by 10 silks in all. The motion was supported by a majority of the direct votes of those present and those who had filled in their postal ballots, but then—yes, you have guessed it, my Lords—that vote against the block vote was promptly overturned by the use of the block vote.

However, although this bit of corruption has now been scrapped in favour of more gentle persuasion, (thanks to criticism by the Charity Commission rather than some sudden democratic conversion), it still exists in elections for choosing what they call the ‘Council’s Appointing Bodies’. In effect, those organisations like conservation charities and countryside lobby groups, that are deemed to be interested in the work of the Trust and so deserve to be represented in their decision-making.

As much as I am a supporter of what The National Trust does, and was a volunteer with the Trust for five years, they seem to have a decision-making process that foreign dictators would be proud of. If you consider that The National Trust is both a charity with 3 million members and is also one of the biggest landowners in the country, this should really be a bigger scandal. Alas, arcane voting systems are not something that excites either journalists or the public. So instead I have had my own mini-protest by only voting for candidates who are not recommended by the council. It will probably make no difference, but at least I have expressed my view.