Over at Our Kingdom I’ve given my view of the new Lib Dem policy paper on British governance. Broadly I think its great; but then I did have a hand in writing much of it! That isn’t the whole story though – predictably I have an amendment to propose. Watch this space for more details.…
Over at Our Kingdom I’ve given my view of the new Lib Dem policy paper on British governance. Broadly I think its great; but then I did have a hand in writing much of it!
That isn’t the whole story though – predictably I have an amendment to propose. Watch this space for more details.
UPDATE: I’ve now posted an article about my proposed amendment on Lib Dem Voice, and have set up the obligatory accompanying Facebook group. Please sign up!
Campaigners would be wrong in saying there’s no votes in constitutional reform.
I remember my father saying that ‘He won’t vote LibDem again because Kennedy has dropped the commitment to PR’. Quite where he got that idea I don’t know, but PR is certainly a factor for him.
Of course, there may not be many votes in constitutional reform, but we must be clear about it whether that is the case or not.
The point that the party and, sadly, the wider democracy movement often misses is that the basic rule of marketing is to sell benefits not features.
If we talk about the sort of democratic culture we’d like to see – one where people have a greater say over what happens in their locality, nation and even globally – you start talking about constitutional change. I don’t think you can talk about what liberalism means without talking about the constitution (at least until certain basic reforms have been won). The trick is to get the narrative right.
Sadly though, I suspect that the resistance on high to us having a meaningful narrative goes hand-in-hand with the resistance to us campaigning on an overtly liberal platform. That’s why we keep ending up with these lists of policy-bites pledging extra spending/targets/etc.
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