Anders Hanson

The Liberal Democrats have won the Darley Ward by-election in Derby tonight, taking back a seat that they had held until the outgoing councillor became an Independent.

I am so pleased for them, as this was yet another tough by-election under difficult circumstances.  The previous councillor Wendy Harbon had been suspended and then thrown out of the Liberal Democrats following allegations about her partner misusing council resources.  After months of non-attendance (having apparently moved to Blackpool in the meantime) she was finally kicked off.  Although the Lib Dems took action as soon as the allegations were made, these things do of course damage the party.

Last Saturday I went down to Derby and helped the team there deliver some leaflets.  After spending three years on Derby City Council before moving away, it was nice to be back there giving the team a hand.  I also saw party members that I hadn’t seen for years ever since I went away.  It’s astonishing to see how far the party in Derby has come since I was there.  I would never have thought when I was elected and we went from four to six councillors that by now we would be the biggest party on the council (with my former ward colleague Hilary Jones as leader) and have a real chance of winning Derby North at the general election.

After considerable debate and conspiracy theories from party anoraks, I finally have my hands on a copy of the Party Reform Commission report.

Last night I only read a small part of the document but I have to get it all read by Saturday as that is when I have an English Council Executive (ECE) meeting.  ECE is one of many party committees that is being asked to vote to voluntarily hand over its powers on finance, strategy and staff management to a new “Chief Officers Group” (which surely will prompt jokes about COGs, and it being the big cog in the process etc etc) so they can then get on with running the party in a different way without the other decision-making bodies in the party getting in the way.  They will then try and neuter/scrap these committees formally after the next general election when they see how things have run in the meantime.  I paraphrase of course, but that is the jist of it.

I welcomed the idea of the Party Reform Commission (or Bones Commission as it has become known) when it was set up.  I think the party does need to be run much more professionally and with a clear long-term strategy.  My fear though was that the Bones Commission report would either end up very bland and nothing would change or that it would end up as an opportunity for people to whinge about certain bits of the party or people within it that they don’t like.  What I have seen so far is a good comprehensive report on how the party works and a genuinely fair overview of what works and what doesn’t work in the party.  So far there are parts that I definitely agree with and some parts that I don’t.

What concerns me though is that the party committees who are considering it feel as though they are being presented with a fait accomplis without any chance of commenting on the individual parts of it.  It’s a bit little like the Lisbon Treaty vote where all committees have to agree it or it falls.  However I understand that the Federal Executive (FE) has voted to set up a small working party that would consider the individual recommendations in more details and consider how or whether to put them all in to practice.  It has been said that the FE voted by 16 votes to 1 to approve the report, but in reality it was agreeing to set up this working party to consider it further that was agreed by that margin instead.  I know there are a number of members of FE who would have voted against it otherwise.

As I said, I am still in the middle of reading it, and I will give a more considered response later.

…and quite right say I.  But I would probably go further than the Government has and make it a standard part of being unemployed rather than it only applying to long-term unemployed.

What surprises me in the Government’s latest plans is the way they talk about people taking ‘personal responsibility’ for finding work when you are unemployed.  That is exactly what I have tried to do when I have been unemployed, but instead I have ended up spending a considerable amount of time explaining to someone in Job Centre Plus why a job they are suggesting isn’t really suitable and why they completely misunderstand my previous experience.  Not the best use of their time or mine, when I can take personal responsibility for finding a job myself.

To me there seem to be three categories of people who are unemployed:

• Those people who have a long record of employment who should be allowed more time and flexibility just to get on and find themselves a job.  That would mean that Job Centre Plus wouldn’t need to spend their time with those people who probably don’t need their help.  If my experience is anything to go by, they are probably the same people who will end up finding a job by going through newspapers and magazines elsewhere, rather than in the Job Centre.  This is exactly what personal responsibility should mean, and it should be fairly easy to tell from someone’s employment record whether they are going to be conscientious enough to find their own job.
• People who are genuinely not well enough to work, and these people need financial help to support them.
• People who cannot find a job or are unwilling to find a job.  This will cover a multitude of circumstances, ranging from those who want to work but either don’t have the right skills or qualifications to those who have a disability that makes it harder to find work to those who are simply lazy.  All of these will need to be dealt with in different ways, but that is where the Government should be directing its resources and everyone in this group will need their own tailor made way to get them in to work, which will range from extra training to employer incentives to a bigger stick.  No one solution will suit everyone, but if Job Centre’s stopped wasting their time on those people who can find a job on their own, then that they could do this.

But regardless of your circumstances, I think everyone can do some form of voluntary community service whilst being unemployed.  It keeps you in the habit of getting up and going to work (even if it is only once or twice a week that you do it) and it helps put something back in whilst you receive your benefit.  This shouldn’t be seen as a punishment as the Government seem to be making it.  It should simply be a way of contributing.

I am pleased though that Jenny Willott has highlighted that far from it just being the unemployed who are the worst off financially, it is many of those who are in employment.  Although the minimum wage has increased quite a bit over the last few years, it is still a small sum of money on which to live, and yet you are also taxed on it.

I had it pointed out to me this weekend that I get a very brief mention in the latest issue of Total Politics magazine.  I wish I could say it was an analysis of star campaigners in the Liberal Democrats, but it isn’t.  In fact I don’t even get mentioned by name, but I am there.

The context is in a story about politicians and cars, and a case study of one of my friends in the Liberal Democrats who did historic car rallies.  I have been his co-driver or navigator a couple of times and so I get a brief mention as “Nick Clegg’s agent” for that reason.

Rallying was both fun and terrifying all at the same time.  I enjoyed the sense of achievement afterwards, and even more so when we did well in tests, (which once I’d got in to the spirit of it was the part that I was best at), but I hated going off to do it.  They were very odd mixed feelings.  Afterwards you want to sleep for days because doing it takes so much out of you, and all I was doing was reading a map and shouting out instructions to the driver.  The proudest moment though was when in my first race we won our category in the Berwick Classic, although we were a long way back in the overall standings.

There’s been surprisingly little response in the Lib Dem blogosphere to the story on the BBC today that Nick Clegg is proposing that the Liberal Democrats should be offering tax cuts at the next General Election rather than increasing them or keeping them as they are.  The silence on the issue is in many ways is as it should be.

Although many Liberal Democrats seem to get very worked up about us being seen as tax cutters (cue conspiracy theories that we have been taken over by a bunch of right-wingers etc etc), this isn’t new news.  If the BBC is to be believed then the whole thrust of Nick Clegg’s argument is that we should be cutting taxes for those on low and middle incomes, whilst taxes may rise for those who earn a lot and those who damage the environment.  That is exactly what we have been saying for ages.

What has changed most of all is the language, and for that I am grateful.  The Liberal Democrats have always had a reputation as being a high tax party, when this is not the whole story.  It’s one of the many areas where there are huge misconceptions about our true position, because we often want to include caveats and exceptions and unnecessary clarifications when we explain our policies.  Instead we need a bolder and sharper message that will resonate with the public even if it isn’t quite the full story.  That is what seems to be happening with the tax story.  We are saying much the same as we have said before, but in terms that will stand out more in the news.  Given the coverage on the BBC it seems to be working.

The only thing with the policy itself that seems to be different, is that rather than directing government savings in to something else, we would instead hand them back to people in the shape of tax cuts.  I think this is the right call at the moment.  We have gone in to General Elections in the past (I particularly think of 1992 and 1997) promising that taxes would rise.  ‘1p in the £1 for education’ was a strong message that was in tune with the times that also made our priorities clear and seemed perfectly reasonable at a time when the economy was getting better and the tax burden was on the whole perceived as being low.  But times have changed.  The economy is doing less well, people are feeling poorer and people know that there has been huge amounts of investment in public services (whether it has been well spent or not is a different matter).

Being a tax cutting party should not be a complete surprise.  Many of our councils have been offering low taxation for years and we have won elections on the basis that we will commit to a lower council tax rise.  We haven’t been as blatant about it as today’s news, but I think this is the right time for us to be doing it.  We can all find things that we would like to spend more taxpayers money on if we had our way, but we just have to accept that now is not the time to be doing it.

UPDATE: Just as I finished this article I noticed that a) the BBC had already moved their article about Nick to the side bar rather than being a main story, and b) I’ve now spotted Paul Walter’s article on the same subject which is the first one I’ve seen on the subject by another Lib Dem.