The Lib Dems have unveiled the results of a recently commissioned MORI Poll today with great flourish, insisting it confirms that their position for an in-out referendum is supported by twice as many people as a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

That’s fair enough, but there are two caveats. First of all, the questions are incredibly leading, being (in order):

• Do you think there should be a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union, or not?
• As you may know, the Lisbon Treaty, currently going through Parliament, makes changes to the way the European Union is run. If there were to be a referendum on Britain’s relationship with Europe, would you prefer it to be a referendum ONLY on the Lisbon Treaty, or a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union altogether?

On a subconscious level this translates as:

• A referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU - what a good idea, eh?
• A referendum on just the Lisbon Treaty? Poor show. A referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU - what a good idea, eh?

Secondly, what it suggests more than anything else is that the electorate hasn’t really been thinking very hard about this issue. 19% answered Don’t Know in Q1; 26% answered Don’t Know in Q2. 56% of people said they wanted an in/out referendum in Q1. 46% of people said they wanted either an in/out referendum or both an in/out and a Lisbon Treaty referendum in Q2. What happened to the other 10%? What this poll, more than anything else, tells us about the electorate is that it is all over the place on this issue. That shouldn’t be much comfort to anyone in this debate; no one is making an impact.

In fact the best thing I can say about this poll is that at least it is less desperate and contrived than IWAR’s silly “referendum” claiming that 88% of the public want one on Lisbon.

Back to the fall out over last week’s Ed Davey interview, I have to say I find it amusing to be accused of both “following the party line” and “going easy” on Davey and “tearing Ed Davey into pieces” at the same time. I happen to think neither is accurate: the first half of the interview was glowing with praise, the second half was critical but hardly ad hominem, but there you go. I do reject one criticism I’ve received which is that I shouldn’t have written it as it will be useful for William Hague to quote from in interventions this week. That ain’t my problem and the day it becomes my problem is the day I have to stop this blog.

In terms of the debate over the European Parliament’s role in appointing the President of the Commission, one other factor has come to my attention. A group of Europhiles have set up a new website calling for just one President of the EU. They are arguing that under Lisbon it would be both legal and desirable to combine the Council and Commission Presidents into one.

Personally I’m not convinced. The answer to the quoted question posed by Henry Kissinger “Who do I call if I want to call Europe?” is surely Javier Solana. Combining two of the most senior posts in the EU into one without another treaty sounds dodgy as hell (”In general the provisions do not directly restrict the unification of the two posts. Only the new article 245 does not allow the Commission President to engage in any ‘other occupation’. But chairing a meeting of the European Council is not an occupation. We are confident that the legal services of the institutions and member states will be able to interpret this in the way they intend (as they so often do in other matters of political Kompetenzstreit).” - Davey’s description of a “bizarre interpretation” would seem rather more apt here IMHO!). And how would you hold the post to account? Could the office holder be sacked from one post while holding onto the other? What if the Council sacked him/her as their President but Parliament wanted him/her to stay at the Commission? I seem to spend my life calling for separation of powers; why would anyone want combination of powers? (another quote: “in the UK most ministers (=executive) are also members of parliament (=legislative). In Britain judges (=judiciary) can be members of parliament” - yeah and isn’t that a peachy system?)

But what this website does show is that far from giving the Parliament a more central role in electing the Commission President being a controversial “interpretation” of the Lisbon Treaty, many pro-Europeans have already moved on and are arguing to go much further. It is pointless to pretend otherwise and to insist that talking about it will only help the eurosceptics’ cause.

According to the website’s facebook group, that includes Jeremy Hargreaves, the Vice Chair of the Lib Dems’ Federal Policy Committee. Zany euro-fanatic though I may be, it is comforting to discover that there are zanier fanatics than me out there holding much more senior positions within the party!

A number of interesting applications of game theory in this article by Fred E. Foldvary. Land value taxation and the green tax switch you would of course expect me to approve of, and the principle of constitutional liberty is something I would very much be interested in exploring further as well. Demand revelation is an idea that I’ve heard of before and would like to see how it could be applied in practice.

Cellular democracy though. My kneejerk reaction is to think that this sounds remarkably similar to Chinese-style democracy. Internal party democracy however is rather similar. There’s a technocratic aspect to it that I don’t like. Ultimately democratic systems must enable the person at the top of the system to relate to the person at the bottom as far as possible. A cellular system does not enable this.

But should the Liberal Democrats consider it for things like the selection of candidates for the European Parliament or GLA? I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that we should. If we aren’t prepared to give candidates (or allow them to raise) the resources necessary to competitive OMOV contest that meaningfully engages members, then we should lose the pretence and have the candidates elected using a college system where the candidates would concentrate their campaigning on a few elected representatives.

One nice side effect is that it would mean that members in relatively small local parties like mine would actually have a voice instead of being utterly ignored (beyond the occasional round robin email which is almost worse than nothing).

I’m sure I’ve said this before but at least in the case of the Euro selections it really is one member one vote. In the GLA selections, the local parties with the largest membership bases get to both appoint their own constituency candidates and dominate the top of the London-wide list. Given that they are the ones most likely to get their constituency candidates selected, this means they effectively get double the candidates. This is so manifestly unfair - and blatantly self-defeating as it confines our appeal to South West London - that we really do need to reconsider.

Tories simply adore Nich Starling, they like to remind us. He’s apparently the only Lib Dem blogger who tells it like it is, and gets snubbed for his troubles.

Personally speaking? While I occasionally find myself agreeing with him, I find he tends to be ill-informed and reactionary. Different strokes for different folks I guess.

But I can’t allow this to pass. This evening, following on from a post by Iain Dale, he has decided to have a pop at the Lib Dem’s gender balance rules for selecting Lib Dem Euro-candidates:

The Lib Dems have an odd system for selecting candidates for European elections. For the uninitiated this means that you are forced to vote as your second preference for a female candidate if your first preference is for a male (and vice versa). This means that you might have two favourite male candidates, but one of them has to be in third place because you have to vote for a woman in second place (and again vice versa).

So this mean that in the Eastern Region in the Euro Elections you had to vote for Linda Jack (who I think would be a very good MEP), even if you didn’t want to because she was, apparently (don’t ask me, I never received a voting paper) the only woman on the list.

Sounds dreadful doesn’t it? And indeed it would be, were it not for the fact that it is a load of dingos’ kidneys.

The fact is, you can vote for candidates in whatever order you like. If your first ten preferences are all men, you can number them all, one through to ten. It’s really not hard.

Just so there can be now doubt, the manifesto booklet has printed in large, friendly letters:

You may vote for the candidates in any order you wish.

What there is is a rule that ensures that a third of the selected candidates overall, and one in three of the top three, must be a man and a woman respectively.

Now it is entirely possible that a candidate like Linda Jack, being the only woman, might end up getting placed in the top three despite not doing any work. That is obviously unfortunate. However, in Linda’s case, the reason she came second in the Eastern Region was that she got elected to second place fair and square. You can read the summary here, showing that she got the second largest number of first preference votes, and you can read the detailed results here, showing her getting elected to the top two places.

Why did Linda do so well despite apparently doing much work for it? I would guess because she is relatively high profile and was the only woman. A lot of people on these list selections tend to positively discriminate themselves out of habit.

In fact, while it would have been used if female candidates did particularly badly, the one third rule wasn’t actually applied on any Euro-list in England. Indeed, it is only rarely applied in any internal elections. See Colin Rosenstiel’s website for details.

Now, we could argue that the gender balance rule should be removed because it isn’t necessary, but to claim that it has distorted the results when it hasn’t actually been used is batshit crazy talk.

Don’t get me wrong. There are serious problems with our existing Euro-selection rules. They are similar problems to the ones with the GLA candidate rules that I wrote about earlier in the year.

The rules make it almost impossible for candidates to campaign. This year, candidates were told they couldn’t even get supporters to join Facebook groups as that was deemed to be against the rules (why, when no-one joins a Facebook group unless they want to?). Linda may brag about the fact that she didn’t do any campaigning but she would barely have been allowed to do any if she’d wanted to. Living in a relatively membership-free part of London, the only evidence of any campaigning I received was a smattering of emails. I didn’t get a single person telephone me or deliver a leaflet, and I wasn’t able to attend the one hustings that the London region ran.

The severe curtailment of campaigning disproportionately benefits the incumbents who of course are allowed to communicate with the selectorate regularly throughout the rest of their term of office at the taxpayer’s expense.

The fact that most of the incumbents appeared to get anything between 70% and 90% of the first preference votes (London appeared to be the closest we got to a contest) suggests that for them this wasn’t really a selection at all, but a coronation. The fact that these are selections for what amount to closed lists ought to compel the party to be more rigourous, not less. Reviewing the gender balance rules is just about the last thing we should be doing.

And as for the non-arrival of postal votes, Nich appears to be the only person in the country unaware that we had a postal strike during the selection. Whatever the rights and wrongs with going ahead with the ballot under such circumstances, it is a bit rich to imply we are going to have the same experience with the leadership election. And it should be pointed out that overall turnout was up compared to the last Euro-selections. Not exactly a disaster then.

Keep telling your Tory fans what they want to hear Nich, but I hope you won’t mind if I continue to issue the odd correction.

If you can ignore the fact that the Conservative policy is for the House of Lords to be elected using the first past the post system, which is itself a closed list system, you could be forgiven for thinking they had quite a principled take in the Lords reform debate a few weeks ago. To quote Theresa May:

Yes, under the Government’s proposals 50 per cent. of the new peers would be elected, but the Government propose that those elections should use a list system. Effectively, therefore, the parties choose who is elected, so peers would owe their place in the Lords to their party bosses. Crucially, it would make it much harder for independent candidates to run for office successfully. We should do all that we can to encourage independent elected Members in the other place, and I doubt that the Leader of the Opposition believes that a list system would make for a truly independent upper Chamber.

That was all, so, last week though. Now they are considering tearing up the existing rights of party members to order the closed lists for the European Parliament elections. No doubt Theresa May’s response to this will be, as it was at a Hansard debate last month, that the Tories use primary selections, so it shouldn’t matter how the choice of candidates is restricted (as it has been by the A-list), but it doesn’t wash. The hunger for control from the centre is just as strong amongst Cameroons as it was amongst the Blairites.

Say what you like about the Lib Dems, but we tend to take these rights for granted. We have real debates at our conferences in which the leadership occasionally has to fight to save their cherished policies; the Tories pretend to be on Dragon’s Den. If a commitment to democracy doesn’t actually run through you veins, faking it tends to make you look slightly ridiculous.

(Hat tip: Iain Dale. More info: MEPWatch)