Engaging Voters: A Lib Dem Short Story Competition

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How many politicians talk about engaging the voters? How many talk of engaging people outside of politics? How many achieve this? Nick Clegg seemed to enthuse many voters prior to the General Election but many didn’t turn out to vote for the Lib Dems. So what should political parties do?

The Tipping Point gives an interesting analysis of how ideas become social movements, which would include voting for a political party. A part of this analysis would be the idea that every member of a political party does not have to be the person who spreads the word or convinces others, they just have to convince certain people who are then much more able to spread the word to more people, who are more likely to act on it.

The trick then becomes about finding these special people and convincing them. While this is difficult (and not necessarily true) it does at least provide some interesting ideas. In one experiment a public health campaign was woefully unsuccessful until they brought on board hairdressers to convince people. With access to large amounts of people and with a good relationship with them this message got out to more people, quicker, and they acted on it.

So how can the Lib Dems reach more people that it is not already? By basically going outside of politics to recruit, as is always the aim of many a politician.

Starting with something that would be useful for the Lib Dems would be long term problem that people see with a need for the Lib Dems to have a narrative. Whether this accusation is indeed fair or not there have been renewed calls for a grand narrative of Liberalism by the Guardian.

Narratives are linked with stories and there are many people out there, outside of politics, who are professional, semi-professional, or budding writers who spend their time working with narratives and stories. By tapping into this world the Lib Dems could engage more people, convince more people, and maybe convince those special people who go on to spread the message so effectively.

There are already many short story competitions from weekly, monthly to yearly ones, see here, to more famous ones such as in the Guardian. However, I can find no specific political short story competition or a Lib Dem short story competition, unless someone can tell me otherwise.

Starting a Liberal Democrat Short Story Competition would give anyone, within the party and without, a chance to express their view and creativity. The Party already has a large membership base giving the winner access to a wide audience for their work and may be able to get sponsors for this for a prize and further publishing. At the least it can do no harm, at the best it can produce a large increase in voters.

It could be a yearly short story competition of less than 2000 words with the theme of liberalism. The winner could be presented at conference and the story could be published in Lib Dem News and if there were some sponsors then it could be published in magazines/newspapers/online and maybe even a cash prize?

If anyone is interested in this idea then please get in touch solutionfocusedpolitics@gmail.com

Big Society vs Liberal Society

Is the ‘Big Society’ how the Liberal Democrats want society? I guess some of this is as I have written about (here and here) and some of it isn’t. I would like to see democracy being expanded, decision making being given to a wider group of people, and a change in the way the government works. The Big Society is David Cameron’s vision of how he wants things which includes some of this. However, he has framed his debate as Big Government Vs Big Society. I believe this is a mistake as it is a negative statement which is a very ineffective way of communicating what you are trying to say. This poster sums it up:This says nothing about devolving power, involving citizens, or changing government which David Cameron says the Big Society is all about. It is for reasons such as this that people do not understand what he is trying to do and it is seen as a cover for cuts and shrinking the state.

So how do the Liberal Democrats communicate the change they want to see. I came across this poster and felt that it summed up the liberal cause very well and says more about forming a new way government works i.e. collaborative services, based on a partnership model where power is devolved to those it closest effects, including giving power back to the people (see my previous posts on Collaboration):

This is more a Liberal Society than the Big Society and one which the Lib Dems have been campaigning for for a long time.

Never thought I’d be praising David Cameron! Isn’t he supposed to be an out of touch Tory PR man?

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I am a Liberal Democrat and I believe that there needs to be big changes to how this country is run. I believe in the Lib Dem commitment to reinvent the state and do something different to what we have always done. I was uneasy about the Coalition and wasn’t sure how it could make these changes; and I am still not. But something strange is happening. David Cameron is starting to make sense?

If we start with where we are, which is with a large public sector without the money to maintain it, centralized power which inhibits local decision making, and a disenfranchised public who don’t feel they have any power in the decisions being made. Then where we want to be is a place where the power is in the hands of those closest to those it will affect, where people are able to join in the decision making process, and a stable financial system where the money is in a position where it can make the biggest difference to the people.

So when David Cameron starts to say that he will

liberate four areas from the strictures of red tape and central government with central government budgets handed over to them to administer at street level, attempt to improve local transport links themselves, take over command of local assets such as pubs and community services, have a greater say over planning permission or local transport and, in the case of Liverpool, allow volunteers to keep a popular local museum open for longer hours.

It starts to sound like the liberal answer to the problems we currently have. But won’t all this cause a big upheaval and be too difficult? Well David Cameron goes on to say

yes, there will be problems – financial problems, legal problems, bureaucratic problems. Yes, there will be objections – local objections, objections from vested interests. But you know what? We’re happy about that. This process is all about learning. It’s about pushing power down and seeing what happens. It’s about unearthing the problems as they come up on the ground and seeing how we can get round them. It’s about holding our hands up, saying ‘We haven’t got all the answers. Let’s work them out, together.

But aren’t we told this is not what Conservatives like

This will be unappealing to conservatives, who prefer people to live tidily, along carefully signposted paths.

So praise where praise is due. David Cameron’s Big Society is turning out to have some good ideas. I prefer to call is collaborative governance but then I am not a PR man but I think people know what collaboration is and it gives a sign to a change in relationship between state and citizen. We can learn a lot from these experiments if they are allowed to flourish and the Lib Dems should benefit from the liberal solutions. We need to champion the idea and find our own language for it for this to happen.

Three quarters of voters side with Cable after speech

PoliticsHome completed some interesting research; that people like the Lib Dem’s best when being Lib Dem, as personified by Vince Cable’s speech:

Following his comments on capitalism, seventy four per cent of the public have sided with the Business Secretary, who has also beaten his party leader to become the public’s favourite Lib Dem.

A huge three quarters of the public have sided with Vince Cable after his controversial comments on capitalism.

Cable’s colourful comments, which included the statement that ‘capitalism takes no prisoners and kills competition where it can’ earned him the disparagement of business leaders, but seventy four per cent of voters either ‘strongly sided’ or ‘generally sided’ with the business secretary.

In a speech to the Lib Dem conference, Vince Cable said:

‘Why should good companies be destroyed by short-term investors looking for a speculative killing, while their accomplices in the City make fat fees? Why do directors forget their wider duties when a fat cheque is waved before them? Capitalism takes no prisoners and kills competition where it can.’

Overall, after reading this is your instinct to take Cable’s side or to oppose him?

Cable favourite for Labour and Lib Dem supporters, Clegg top choice for Tories

Cable has also pipped his party leader to claim the accolade of being the country’s favourite Lib Dem.

Voters were asked to choose any from a list of prominent Lib Dem politicians they thought were ‘especially good’.

Cable had the backing of forty three per cent of voters, pushing him past the Deputy Prime Minister on thirty nine per cent.  He had a clear lead over his leader among natural Labour and Lib Dem supporters.

Nick Clegg was top rated by Conservative party supporters, but among Liberal Democrats had to settle for third place behind Cable and former leader Paddy Ashdown.

Simon Hughes, seen as a potential rebel against the coalition, did not fare especially well, either among Lib Dems or the public at large.

Cabinet members Danny Alexander and Chris Huhne were also among the low scorers.

PoliticsHome interviewed 1,023 adults by email from 22-24 September 2010.  Results are weighted by age, gender and political party identification to reflect the population of Great Britain.

The Big Society is a Liberal Idea the Lib Dems should capitalise on

What is the Big Society exactly? In an age of austerity and a government dominated by deficit reduction, is this just another way to go further on cuts state reduction? Certainly, the Liberal Democrats have not gone along with the idea of the Big Society with Julia Goldsworthy saying is was ‘patronising nonsense’. Some Labour members have seemed almost offended by the idea such as here or here and the Tories have not exactly embraced the Big Society.

So if social democrats and liberals don’t see this as a good idea and the Conservatives are not exactly fully on board, why does polling suggest that people do indeed want this idea despite its poorly communicated ideals?

Over the years people have started to become disillusioned with the current relationship between them and the state. We have seen how the state has got more and more in the way of doing simple things when it should have been an enabler. In education, business,   or more generally how the state has tried to provide for its citizens has been what the citizens have seen as the problem.

The Liberal Democrats see the answer to this as reinventing the state not necessarily reducing it as

The liberal endorses an individual’s autonomy unless there is a greater public interest in interfering with that autonomy. And any such interference – whether by legal instrument, the coercion of state power, the intrusion of the press, or the imposition of a value system – should only go as far as is required and should always be open to question and challenge.

- Jack of Kent

There is a feeling that the state interfered too much, hence the Your Freedom project.  But there has been, and remains, too little in how we can question and challenge what the state is doing. The liberal answer would be to build a system that allows for greater individual and community autonomy which also allows for open questioning and challenge. So it is interesting to hear David Cameron’s own words:

You can call it liberalism. You can call it empowerment. You can call it freedom. You can call it responsibility. I call it the Big Society.

The Big Society is about a huge culture change… It’s about liberation –the biggest, most dramatic redistribution of power from elites in Whitehall to the man and woman on the street.

I would argue that this fits into the Liberal tradition and is what the Liberal Democrats have advocated for. Cameron’s problem is that he is in the Conservative party. The risk to his idea is that they will reduce the state too much which will mean it will not be able to enable the people to fulfil their ideas or provide the environment for them to grow. While it seems generally agreed that a smaller state is needed, it is not that we need a smaller state per se, it is that we need a change in the spirit of government which changes the relationship between citizen and government; and it just happens that for this to work the state would need to be smaller.

There are a number of arguments to come in this change, one being to keep the old relationship between citizen and state only become more responsive to citizens’ needs or to change it. Then there is the argument of how to create this change of relationship. The problem is that this is not linear and so we are seeing a confusing picture of the need to have a new settlement and of how to create it at the same time.

Adil Abrar has excellently sketched out his thoughts on this suggesting that we are in the valley of nobody knows at the moment where

The solutions aren’t clear. We’re devising them on the fly. We’re in a valley, everything looks pretty shitty, and we’re going to make huge mistakes, but the answers will come

And it is here that the Liberal tradition has much to offer being a great reforming tradition which can fill this valley of nobody knows.  The Liberal Democrats state in their ‘The Power to be Different’ Policy Paper

At the core of liberal democracy is a belief that individuals should have the greatest possible control over their own lives… We want people and communities to wield real political power on their own behalf, and this means putting people in a position where they can make decisions about services that affect them. We believe that it is the duty of the Government to give people this power.

So it is the Liberal Democrats who should pick up the idea and communicate it effectively, champion those with good initiatives, and offer solutions to the unknown. As the Guardian states

It’s happening already, with dedicated local people – trusted and respected in the community – achieving unbelievably positive social outcomes… If David Cameron can implement policies that will enable more people from all backgrounds to be beneficiaries and deliverers of the big society, Cameronism will truly be an innovative radical approach, not just old-fashioned paternalism.

Nick Clegg has already stated that the Big Society fits with the Liberal Democrats’ idea of society but it would be a great shame for the Lib Dems if the Conservatives to take credit for a liberal idea. Or if indeed the Labour Party take up this idea and run with it as has been suggested by the Guardian. Despite the negativity, hostility and ridicule the Big Society has received it has a great opportunity to be a reform people genuinely believe in and one the Lib Dems have been believed in for a long time. The increase in the vote of the Liberal Democrats over the years fits well with the increase in the number of people who want a change in the relationship between government and its agencies with the citizens. People have been urging a change to a more collaborative relationship for a long time and some states have been looking at how to create this change such as in New Zealand or the USA. As it has been put by some academics

The new generation of public administration will need a different spirit… one that fosters mutual effort. This movement from a ‘they’ spirit’ to a ‘we’ spirit is perhaps the most important mission of public administration in our era.

The Big Society is the Conservatives way of responding to this. However, while the Tories run with the idea there is a risk that the whole idea will be seen as a mask for a way to create an ideologically smaller state, which misses the big idea of the Big Society. If this idea, in whatever form, is not taken up by those who can genuinely reform the relationship between state and citizen then it will be dropped and we miss a great Liberal opportunity.

Dear Nick, please stop this posturing madness

Dear Nick,

You told us that if we always do what we have always done then we will always get what we have always got, so we needed to do something different. I have admired your drive, vision, passion and clarity that have made the UK sit up and notice the Liberal Democrats and our distinctive vision for Britain.

I watched the hustings in Leicester during your leadership bid and was very impressed and I have been equally impressed since on presentation and positioning of the party.

The Independent today praised you saying that “Clegg has made all the right calls except for one“, yet it is this one call on wiping out the deficit in one parliament that worries me. No one denies there needs to be cuts and not many deny less money needs to be spent on the public sector. Everyone understands you are in a coalition and cannot do what you would if it were a Liberal Democrat Government. But you are not winning the argument on the level and speed of the cuts.

For a start it is not what you originally believed and so it seems insincere and the recent embrace you seem to give the policy therefore does not seem genuine. Your arguments make sense, but we are not dealing with rational human beings, we are dealing with human beings. Fear is a powerful force and threats of job losses, home insecurity, and an inability to provide for yourself and your family creates more fear than many other issues.

You have always been very good at coming across as very human and we need to see this again in your positioning on cutting the deficit. Fear will take people so far, but too much will turn them off. We need hope that this is a policy with enough humanness in it that people feel there is support for them.

I believe that if it is not working then stop doing it and do something different. The sweeping embrace of this policy is not convincing voters and if it continues I fear people will continue not to believe it, which risks them not believing you. There are many other options on how to support the Tory policy while in coalition and still come across as human and sincere.

Maybe the advice if you keep doing what you have been doing, you will keep getting what you have been getting is both familiar and useful at this time? Maybe it is time to do something different?

Yours sincerely,

Matthew Gibson

In Praise of the Independent: Finding strengths in Nick Clegg

Finding strengths are an important part of the change process as we are able to identify them, build on them, and expand them into other areas. This regular feature finds the Independent giving a good assessment of Nick Clegg’s speech at conference:

Clegg’s speech reflected the clarity of purpose. I cannot recall a leader’s speech that was so clearly expressed. There was nothing multi-layered about it, no coded messages or flowery passages that appeared to make one point, but really made another. He popped up on stage, put the case for this particular coalition at this particular time, and left again. Clegg knows what he is doing – quite unusual for a leader of a party.

Voters looking for something different from political parties: Does the Lib Dem message fit the bill?

In the past public services have generally been viewed as the responsibility of formal government and its (non-elected) agencies. As a result, the vast majority of management regimes had distinctly ‘top‐down’, technocratic characteristics. When Tony Blair started his New Labour project he wanted to change this. Recently he was talking about the NHS and said

The aim should be to change fundamentally the way the NHS was run: to break up the monolith; to introduce a new relationship with the private sector; to import concepts of choice and competition; and to renegotiate the basic contracts of the professionals.

So now we now have a quasi‐market system, public‐private partnerships, attempts at collaborative governance as well as the traditional government bureaucracy. Tony Blair would argue that this is a transformation and a fundamental shift from ‘government’ to ‘governance’. However, Guy Aitchison from OpenDemocracy has an interesting point when he says

Although voters may think public services could do with “reform”, they largely do not want private companies taking over provision… between 1997 and 2010 Labour lost 5 million votes, with only 1 million going to the Tories. So the idea that not carrying out enough privatization is what did it for Brown just doesn’t add up.

Of course it does not take into account of all other aspects which influenced the elections, however, it is worth considering the narratives at play here. The narrative that Tony Blair would have us believe is that services are now more efficiently run and better for the people. However, I think there is the counter argument which is that that for all the money pumped into the public sector, it hasn’t changed the quality or performance of the services a great deal.

So there are many who believe these changes to be little more than incremental adjustments in management roles and responsibilities designed to reduce some of the financial, regulatory, and operational burdens placed on governments and their agencies, while doing little, if anything, to alter asymmetrical power relations or enable genuine collaborative governance.

So the argument becomes about managing public services better. Labour lost the argument but people were not convinced the Tories would be that much better at it. I don’t think the Lib Dems gave a distinctive enough approach to the public service and so failed to win the arguments.

Alternative governance approaches in which non‐state actors play a substantial role in policy making and implementation are currently attracting attention. However, this should be taken further to seek full collaboration with citizens and other social players in policy making and implementation which will require a fundamental shift in the spirit of government and the bureaucratic system to allow it. This shift beyond bureaucracy and the beginning of a new era of multi‐party governance fits well with the Lib Dem message of devolving power and involving citizens. It is distinct from the other two parties and would signal a significant change in how public services are run and managed.

In Praise of the Guardian: Finding Strengths in Vince Cable

The Guardian gives a good review of Vince Cable’s speech at Conference in its editorial which shows the distinctiveness of the Lib Dems finds people wanting the Lib Dems to be more Lib Dem

Yesterday, at the Liberal Democrat conference in Liverpool, Mr Cable finally made a dramatic return both to the limelight and to top form. His speech was technically very accomplished, with lots of good quotable lines, but it was the political substance that mattered most. Lib Dem delegates have proved themselves more resolute about the coalition than some expected before the Liverpool conference, but they remain anxious that the government’s deficit-reduction package next month may leave them stranded on the wrong side of the divide as apologists for Conservative-driven cuts in which they do not, at heart, believe. Mr Cable’s job was therefore to send the delegates home not just as a party of government but also as a party of progressive radicals. Mr Clegg, in New York on government business, might have struggled to do that. With something to prove personally, Mr Cable succeeded.

Blair tells why he felt bureaucracy was the answer to the UK’s problems

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‘Bureaucracy’ has shaped the organisation of the public sector and organisational change has been seen as an important part of the solution to a whole range of problems, including poverty, unemployment, housing, health, and education etc. That is not to say that efforts had not been made previously to address some of these problems, but bureaucracy has been regarded as a far superior organisational model which offered greater efficiency and reliability.

It has not been the establishment of government bureaucracies that has defined much of public policy but the idea that professional and bureaucratic responses (rather than political, personal, or cooperative solutions) were necessary to deal with major societal problems.

As Tony Blair points out

We were saying, forget about complex, institutional structural reforms; what counts is what works, and by that we meant outputs. This was fine as a piece of rhetoric; and positively beneficial as a piece of politics. Unfortunately, as I began to realise when experience started to shape our thinking, it was a bunkum as a piece of policy. The whole point is that structures beget standards. How service is configured affects outcomes 

Which basically what he means is that once the legislative and administrative treatment began, the process of professionalisation and feedback set it, by which the professionals uncovered new problems which demanded further legislative and administrative solutions… and so on. This shows how his progressive idea meant progressively growing an ever expanding bureaucracy to form these structures which he hoped created better outcomes – which never happened.

It is sad that he doesn’t quite get the full picture of what he was doing, much like the time when he had no idea of the effect of his own policy when he was confronted by a voter on national TV during the 2005 election campaign  and then failed to fix it despite saying he would as the bureaucratic system wouldn’t allow it.

The world is changing, information is more available and ‘professional expertise’ itself does not carry the same sort of authority and legitimacy as it might have carried in the past. The bureaucratic arrangements therefore no longer fit the environment of public policy. New Labour and Tony Blair did not get this. David Cameron gets it and so called the Tory manifesto ‘An Invitation to Join the Government of Britain’, but failed to grasp the specific concepts to achieve it.  The Liberal Democrats get this but have not demonstrated a clear commitment to it or communicated what a post-bureaucratic government will look like. As a result, all are coming under increasing pressure to adapt to the new environmental conditions, integrate new holistic framings of societal problems and to respond to the loss of public confidence in government.