Tony Blair, ‘master of the dark arts’, has a point the Lib Dems could learn from

For all the pomp and circumstance that occurred around Tony Blair’s return to making the headlines, an awful lot of newspaper coverage has been given to not a lot. However, he did say some things which the Lib Dems could indeed learn from.

Ask yourself this question: If 0 is the Lib Dems have no friends in the mainstream media and the worst possible light is portrayed about the party and people within it every time something is printed about them (if they are lucky enough to get anything printed about them in the first place), and 10 is the Lib Dems have as many friends in the media as possible and the party and people within it are shown in a favourable light; what number would you currently scale the situation today?

Of course we would have differences such as the Daily Mail may get a 0 and the Independent may get a 6, but overall my guess would be somewhere near 3. At the general election it was perhaps somewhere closer to 6 or 7 at times but not so right now. I have tried to scan the papers since I started this blog for positive news stories about the Lib Dems and I have found it increasingly difficult to find stories in the last 6 months. Many will argue that we shouldn’t focus on the mainstream media as more people don’t read papers than do. I think that they are important opinion formers and perhaps more importantly opinion embedders and obviously so did/does Tony Blair.

Tony Blair said that it was revolutionary for Labour to be given a fair hearing by the Sun when he became leader of the Labour Party and he sought to make sure that Labour’s case was given a fair hearing by the media.

‘My minimum objective was to try stop them tearing us to pieces. My maximum objective was to try get their support’ – Tony Blair

If we forget his politics and his record for a second and think about what he set out to do, this is a very reasonable thing for a leader of any party to want. The fact that the party went on to win 3 general elections, and one of those was following the Iraq war, says a lot. What would the Lib Dems give right now to be given a fair hearing by the mainstream media? I don’t believe in compromising principles for favours but I do believe we deserve a fairer hearing than we are currently getting. I don’t expect the Daily Mail will ever give us a fair hearing but I do think the Guardian should; both seem to be a mouthpiece of hate for the party right now.

“Personally my advice to any political leader today would be: you have got to have a very, very strong media operation.’ –Tony Blair

Perhaps we need to think about our media operation? Perhaps we need to think about the opinion formers and embedders. Would Clegg be hated as much if his case were given a fair hearing in the media? If we were to rank the papers in terms of Lib Dem voters the Daily Mail and the Sun are top of the list, but we are not going to start our recovery by pandering to them. We need to regain our appeal and we need mouthpieces to express our case. The Independent is pretty much the only paper to give the Lib Dems a reasonable hearing of late but we need to expand our appeal from the smallest of papers. We need to find some friends in the papers, we need to get party members to write in the mainstream papers (like Vince did in the Sun), we need to have a fair hearing. To do this we could perhaps learn a thing or two from Mr Blair – we just need to stay true to who we are in the process.

Rethinking long term Lib Dem political strategy: Towards returning the Lib Dems to the largest party in the UK

“The dark does not destroy the light, it defines it” (Brene Brown) in the same way that the political right does not destroy the political left (or vice versa), they define each other. The Tories and Labour are inextricably linked to each other through a symbiotic relationship. Some people vote Labour not because they like Labour but because the hate the Tories. The problem for the Lib Dems is that we were defined not by left and right but by not being Labour or Tory. Now we are in Coalition with the Tories we are no longer defined by not being Tory and hence we have lost a significant part of our definition. While we are in Coalition with the Tories the risk is that the lack of definition erodes the party identity to a critical point.

There is an assumption that the centre ground of British politics is where parties need to be to pick up the majority of votes and win elections. In terms of the left and right spectrum the current assumption would look like this:

But in actual fact the reality is that such a chart would look more like this:

When the results are generalised/averaged it looks like the majority of voters are in the centre because of the 2 peaks but the reality is that people are more divided than the generalisations appear. So Labour occupying the Left collect the majority on the extreme left, left and some in the centre while the Tories collect the majority on the extreme right, right and some in the centre. Historically, without the battle for centrist voters elections would be a dead heat. Tony Blair was very good at fighting for the centrist votes and paid little attention to his leftwing voters who ended up being very upset with him. David Cameron has emulated this approach and we see him in all kinds of trouble with his rightwing voters. Now we have the rise of other parties we see how the SNP has out flanked Labour to the left and UKIP out flanked the Tories to the right.

The Lib Dems were very upset that the General Election 2010 result was only 23% of the votes when the campaign had gone better than expected. If you assume most voters are centrist, such as in the first chart, then you will think there are more votes to be had in the centre but it may be that 23%ish is as high as the centrist voting block goes? Labour and the Tories can fight in the centre because they have the leftwing and rightwing parts of the party to anchor them. The Lib Dems have leftwing and rightwing factions and have the potential to not see eye to eye more than the factions in Labour and the Tories. This is because in the Lib Dems the factions span the left/right spectrum whereas the Labour and Tory factions span the left/extreme left or right/extreme right so still share a common framework of understanding.

Clegg has made it his mission to place the Lib Dems in the centre ground of British politics whereas Ming Campbell openly stated the party was a centre-left party while policy under Charles Kennedy placed the party as centre-left. Tony Blair has recently advised the Labour party on the fact that the Lib Dems have vacated the leftwing positions they took up in 2001 and 2005 to seek to collect these votes for Labour today. We can see the move Clegg has made in his comments that the Lib Dems are not a dumping ground for disaffected leftwing Labour voters, which makes some sense in the fact that we define ourselves as not being Labour (left) or Tory (right) but limits our electoral success in the fact that there are fewer people to target and the centre ground is a much harder place to fight in.

You could argue that the Alliance rode high in the polls in the early ’80s by sticking to the centre ground and indeed we were the highest polling party at one point. The context was that Labour had moved leftwards under Michael Foot and the Tories had moved rightwards under Margaret Thatcher leaving the centre ground unoccupied. However, many people who started saying they were going to vote for the Alliance were part of the left and right block of voters rather than the centre – the illusion was that they were all centrist voters. The result was Labour and the Tories moving towards the centre who regained their left and right voters.

John Bercow has recently said “It’s that people feel partly that the parties are still quite similar, and that perhaps there isn’t a huge choice, and partly they feel, well I said what I wanted and I voted accordingly but I haven’t got what I wanted or what I voted for two years ago” blaming low voter turnout on the fact that all 3 parties are fighting in the centre and so there is little definition of the parties. What many people wanted when they voted Lib Dem in 2010 was neither Labour nor Tory so the only way to have achieved that would have been to create a supply and demand agreement rather than go into a Coalition. Going in to the Coalition shocked many members and supporters because we were defined by not being Tory (or Labour) and the effect is still current.

Additionally, what has defined the Lib Dems in recent years in addition to not being Tory or Labour has been our Liberal stance which was well defined when Labour were displaying their authoritarian ideology. Now Labour are not in power, and we are governing with another party who wants to be perceived as liberal, there is less authoritarianism to define our Liberalism. So we have been hit with the double whammy of a lack of definition on the liberal front and the left/right spectrum leaving people to ask the question on the doorstep – what do you stand for? If we want to start winning back voters we need some definition. We need some darkness; some authoritarianism to demonstrate our liberalism.

We have never squared the circle of the Lib Dems being left/right economically. Our end game is the introduction of proportional representation and the creation of coalition governments as standard practice. This means we don’t necessarily need to define our left/right status and can work with either party in this new regime. As this is our end game (until we get it upon which things change) PR should be necessary in all Coalition negotiations/agreements. However, the chance of gaining PR has eluded the party for 100 years and while I hope we will get it in the next 100 years it might still be a long shot. A different strategy could be the one Labour performed on the Liberal party at the beginning of the 1900s and take over from Labour as a main party.

Vote share by party from 1820 – 2010:

Labour wrestled the voters away from the Liberal Party who were disillusioned with the party, who many felt had were not representing them. The Lib Dems today need to do the same – wrestle the disillusioned voters away from Labour and/or the Tories. The problem is that in the centre there is plenty of choice (or many would say no choice as all parties say the same thing) and even if you gain all the centrist voters this is not enough for the Lib Dems to win an election. We need to start wrestling the left and/or right voters away from their traditional bases.

To unseat the Liberal Party as a main party Labour placed themselves firmly to the left, created a firm voting base to work from, and moved from the left to the centre squeezing the Liberals into a small 3^rd party. We have struggled in the centre ground ever since. In more recent days the Lib Dems made good progress placing themselves to the left of Labour and gained control of councils all over the UK, particularly at the expense of Labour in the North. We pushed Labour into 3rd place a couple of times in local elections because we were to their left not because we were in the centre. Now we are in the centre we are losing the councils back to Labour. These are not centrist voters; these are leftwing voters choosing a leftwing party.

Labour did serious damage to themselves in the 13 years of being in government with many traditional voters deserting the party. We seem to believe that if we prove to people we are a better alternative than what is already there then people will vote for us, but this is only half the equation, people have to be disillusioned with their current party to want to change. There was, and still is, appetite for a party that is not Labour on the left, but we no longer occupy this space and so we are no longer a viable alternative for these voters – they have turned either back to Labour or ‘Others’ such as Respect. While Labour fight on the centre they leave their left flank vulnerable, just as the Tories are vulnerable to UKIP on the right. It took Labour less than 50 years to overtake the Liberals and there are many in Labour who are openly saying that the Lib Dems would be cleaning up in elections right now if they weren’t in Coalition.

A mistake we have made, or certainly the leadership has made, is that we think we are playing the same game as Labour or the Tories. We are a much smaller party and people treat us differently. The rules for us are different. If we stand in the middle we can hope to get perhaps 25%. If they stand in the middle they can hope to get up to 40%. We could get 40% if they moved to the extremes but this is not going to happen. As a smaller party we need to be more responsive to the political climate.

Perhaps we need to think about our end game and the strategy we are running. FPTP will change but how long will it take to bring in PR? How long will it take to make Britain a more Liberal place given the current system? How important do we think it is to make Britain a more Liberal place? Perhaps we would have more chance of fulfilling our aims by targeting the left block of voters, wrestling them away from Labour and making Labour the 3^rd party. We won’t do this by staying in the centre, there just aren’t the votes there and every time we enter coalition we lose significant elements of our definition, hampering our progress.

Making the Lib Dem message on Compassion Meaningful: Ideas for a distinctive Liberal message

This was published in the November Liberator magazine which you can access for a short time here.

What is the point in voting for the Liberal Democrats? The May 2011 elections gave a distinctive answer – “I am not quite sure”. So the Independent (9 May 2011) offered some advice to the party to “retain a unique selling point – a belief in compassion” and the party may have taken them up on this advice.

Competence and compassion will be the slogan that the Liberal Democrats fly under in future elections, arguing that they are more economically competent than Labour and more compassionate than the Tories.

We see the Liberal Democrats making preparations to flesh out the competence strand with their tax proposals for 2020 underway, but very little in the way of fleshing out the compassionate strand. This may be because compassion has not been seen to provide a tangible benefit beyond a positive perception of those who espouse it. But perhaps we have missed the real benefits of what compassion can provide politics.

On realist terms, politics is about power, security and order, and the question of whether politics can practice compassion is often seen as irrelevant. However, where politicians are seen as compassionate, they have not only been successful politicians but have also genuinely made the country a better place for all. A politics of compassion is therefore possible and some would argue necessary to address human security needs.

WHAT IS COMPASSION?

Compassion is a concept that can bring up strong reactions in many – from Thatcher who said it was “a very patronising word” to Albert Einstein who said that “our task must be to free ourselves… by widening our circle of compassion”. Yet if it is Liberal Democrat selling point and we are going to sell ourselves on it, then we must make it mean something, otherwise there will be no point to it.

Despite Thatcher’s thoughts on the word, she still believed she was being compassionate, stating that “efficiency is the ally, not the enemy, of compassion”. But this misunderstands the concept of compassion. Compassion is to recognise the suffering of others, then take action to help, and is very much ‘suffering with’. Efficiency drives do not show that you understand someone’s situation, let alone feel ‘with’ them, and there are many who will argue that you do not need compassion in politics to be successful or create a better society. Yet there is a very strong case for compassion in politics and one that the Liberal Democrats should meaningfully embrace.

COMPASSION AS VOTE WINNER

While stressing compassion in politics may have been seen as a ‘fringe’ activity, there are many examples where compassion has been, and continues to be, a defining element in elections.

Jack Layton was the leader of the New Democratic Party in Canada and took the party from being a minor party to become the official opposition for the first time in the party’s history in 2011. The interesting thing about Jack Layton was how he was seen by the voters. A poll by Angus Reid Global Monitor asked voters to describe the party leaders. All were described as intelligent but, with the exception of Layton, they were also described as arrogant and out of touch, while Layton was described as compassionate and down to earth. This offered him a unique standing in Canadian politics. His leadership was a success for his party and turned the tide on its electoral fortunes; the view that he was compassionate played a significant part.

During his election night for Governor of Texas in 1998, George W. Bush announced his desire for a ‘compassionate conservatism’, only to be ridiculed by many at the time. While it was a controversial election, he campaigned on this theme heavily in the 2000 presidential election campaign, which swung many non-traditional Republican voters to vote for Bush. In such a tight race, this proved to be decisive. Fast forward eight years to the 2008 presidential election campaign and we saw opinion polls showing the presidential hopefuls on similar footings but with Barack Obama being viewed as the more compassionate candidate.

Tony Blair knew when he took over as leader of the Labour Party that he needed to be seen as compassionate and talked extensively about it in the run up to the 1997 general election. David Cameron tried his own version of compassionate conservatism in the 2010 general election and, while he did not win the election, he did manage to achieve the best result the Tories have had since 1992. The point about compassion being a vote winner is the fact that it reaches to a majority on both sides of the political spectrum as well as beyond traditional political boundaries; the Dalai Lama, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein have all been advocates for a secular compassion in society.

COMPASSION AS A STRATEGY

Jack Layton and Tony Blair’s skill was to turn compassion as an ideal into something more meaningful, so people could see it put into action. Here in the UK, the Human Rights Act 1998 and the minimum wage were just some examples of how this was framed. Bush and Cameron do not quite have the same skill and have not tried to keep it on the agenda. This offers lessons for the Liberal Democrats to ensure that compassion is right at the heart of policy making, otherwise the claim that they are a compassionate party will only breed contempt and mistrust.

There are also lessons for the Liberal Democrats from Ted Kennedy, one of the longest-serving senators in US history who has also been considered to be one of the greatest. For Ted Kennedy, it was his compassion that gave him his outlook, the causes he fought for and how he went about his business. He played a major role in passing many laws that have had a dramatic effect on people’s lives, including apartheid, disability discrimination, AIDS care and civil rights. He stood out from others in his party, working with anyone, even those outside of his philosophical comfort zone. Compassion gives a sense of purpose that transcends party political lines to strive for a better society. It gives a framework on which to work with others, even when you do not agree with their politics. It provides principles by which to guide our policies.

As the Liberal Democrats have been seen as compassionate, and they have now begun to market compassion as a selling point of the party, they need to start making it mean more than just words or gestures. The Liberal Democrats need to begin to define what kind of society they offer and how compassion fits into this. A liberal society is not the same thing as a big society as there are no principles which guide a big society. Without guiding principles, a big society could mean anything, but a liberal society is a compassionate one.

SUPPORT THE CHARTER FOR COMPASSION

The first thing the Liberal Democrats should do is sign up to the Charter for Compassion, which is an international grassroots movement promoting a secular vision of compassion for the modern world. It is a document that transcends religious, ideological, and national difference. Supported by leading thinkers from many traditions, the Charter inspires worldwide community-based acts of compassion. The Charter demands people take action, recognising that our present policies – political, financial, environmental – are no longer sustainable, and that if any government, religion or person does not emphasise the compassionate ethos, they will fail the test of our time.

This Charter has been developed to be a grassroots movement so that everyone can get involved. It has begun to grow widespread support, with the Australian parliament recognising the Charter for Compassion and working to get it included in the educational curriculum. In the UAE, it has been introduced to the rulers and imams of the Arab world and they are beginning to sign up. In Malaysia, the former prime minister has formed an organisation devoted to implementing the Charter, and there are similar motions afoot in Singapore. It is a shame that there is not such recognition for it in Britain, considering the issues we have experienced in society; and that the idea came from Britain in the first place.

In April 2010, Seattle became the first city in the world to affirm the Charter for Compassion and the Mayor of Seattle proclaimed Seattle a ‘Compassionate City’. The city has a group of committed people who meet citizens, non-profit organisations, educators, youth, businesses, and others to find ideas of how to make the city a more compassionate place. This has in itself spawned a whole range of local, onthe-ground initiatives to promote compassion and offers many policy initiatives that would fit very well into community politics and the Liberal Democrats’ localism and community agendas. There are distinct similarities between the Charter for Compassion and the Liberal Democrat constitution, and it offers the Liberal Democrats a chance to make the theoretical idea of compassion a practical reality.

It would provide a more distinctive voice in local government by Liberal Democrat councillors and councils taking up the Charter for Compassion and setting up British Compassionate Cities/Councils. It taps into an established grassroots movement, which attracts many who may otherwise not get involved in politics, as well as those who might. But more importantly, it offers opportunities to make the places we live genuinely much better places to live. It offers a principle of how to use the Big Society – and it is this which is closer to a Liberal Society than the one currently on offer by the Conservatives, as compassion is a virtue and the cornerstone of greater social interconnectedness

COMPASSION AS AN IDEOLOGY

Yet there is a bigger reason for supporting compassion in politics than just a tactical one; there is also a very strong moral case for compassion in politics. Without compassion, human sympathy or emotional identification with people, our politics would be a cold and brutal affair. Nelson Mandela could have taken a very different path to the one he did but he said that he learnt compassion from others while he was in prison. As President of South Africa, Mandela set out to transform the nation through compassion, which sought to bring understanding to those wronged by injustice as well as those accused of perpetrating the injustice.

So while technology moves rapidly forward with ever increasing ways to connect people, perhaps we should take a lesson in politics from Einstein. He believed compassion should be seen as a spiritual technology, and one which mankind needs as much as all other technologies that have connected us, as compassion is the only technology which provides us with the terrifying and wondrous possibility of actually becoming one human race.

The Lib Dems should make a new coalition of shared beliefs and reach out to the 4th largest party in Westminster

The Lib Dems have caused a headache for Labour and the Tories. So first Tony Blair moved Labour to Lib Dem territory. Then Cameron moved the Tories to Lib Dem territory. Now Cameron and Miliband are closing in and the Lib Dems are being squeezed. Why should anyone vote for the Lib Dems if Labour say they stand up for social justice, fairness and have become more liberal while the Tories are now compassionate, liberal and care for the environment? The Lib Dems need to reach out to others to build support so perhaps they need to look at who believes in what we believe and begin working with them in a smarter way.

The current Lib Dem strategy is not working. People are skeptical of the Coalition being good for the country and the Lib Dem vote has significantly decreased. So lefts get back to basics. What works in politics in building a voter base? Parties are not built from the inside out they are built from the outside in. Labour was not a Labour Party until it had recuited many factions and interest groups who eventually became a united party. The Lib Dems were not the Lib Dems until the Alliance formally united. Each of these moves increases your voter base and electoral chances. What we know works is when a party works with others on shared beliefs.

So I was interested to read Nick Clegg’s recent email/letter to members about the first year of being in the Coalition. He wrote that the Lib Dems were:

a party which knows we can do more together than we can alone.

This maybe a statement of the obvious to many in the party but it is also a founding statement of the fourth largest party in Westminster, The Co-operative Party. They bill themselves as the Party of social justice who

believe that people will achieve more by working together than they can by working alone.

So the Lib Dems and the Co-operative Party have a shared belief. They are therefore natural allies. Their objective is to support the efforts of those who seek success through co-operatives. And there are many good examples of co-operatives around the country – not least the bank which faired the financial crisis rather well.

So this offers the Lib Dems a perfect opportunity to work in the Coalition for the good for the country while reaching out to others, except that the Co-operative Party has an agreement with the Labour Party, which makes reaching out to them difficult. However, there is a perfect way to do this which could benefit not only both Parties but also the Coalition.

David Cameron sought to move away from the state as the preferred provider of public services and this has attracted a lot of criticism from the Labour Party. The Lib Dems sensing voter backlash at the fear this creates in the public have sought to apply brakes to Tory proposals. This in itself is destabilising for the Coalition. But what if the Lib Dems worked with the Tories and the Co-operative Party to form a more agreeable policy.

As John Redwood points out the Lib Dem website states

Both the Conservative (p27) and Lib Dem  (p 42)Manifestos promised that new social enterprises would be created to deliver NHS services.  The Conservative (p45) and Lib Democrat (p42) manifestos promised that all types of providers – NHS, voluntary or independent sector- would be free to deliver NHS services.

So the Tories want to move away from a state monopoly, the Lib Dems acknowledge this could improve services but Labour are deeply distrustful of any such plans. So the Lib Dems should promote the belief that ‘we can do more together than we can alone’ and seek others who believe this i.e. the co-op party, to work towards making co-operatives which can run public services.

The Co-operative Party should relish the idea that the Government is realising their dream, the Tories should relish the idea that there would be no state monopoly of public service provision, and the Lib Dems should relish the idea that this could improve standards. A win-win-win situation. Except the Labour Party would not see it this way which would cause tension between the Co-operative Party and the Labour Party. This should be seen as a good thing. Beliefs drive politics and shared beliefs attract each other. Those shared beliefs belong together – the third largest and fourth largest party in Westminster joining forces.

The Lib Dems should be reaching out to those who believe what we believe. Here is a great opportunity to do just that.

The golden rule of governing: How the Lib Dems have repeatedly broken it and what they need to do to start building support again

Politics is littered with lessons and the Lib Dems are finding that what made them successful in opposition is not what will make them successful in government. They need to start learning some lessons fast. So what lessons can they learn from 3 Labour leaders in 3 different countries about the golden rule of governing?

Tony Blair won an unprecedented 3 consecutive election victories for the UK Labour Party in 1997, 2001 and 2005 and in the first half of his premiership enjoyed healthy opinion poll ratings. The Australian Labor Party, under Kevin Rudd, won one of the most sweeping victories in Australian election history in 2007 and during their first two years in office, Kevin Rudd and his government set records for popularity in opinion polls.

Many consider Tony Blair to be a master politician yet he was forced to stand down by his own party to be replaced by Gordon Brown. Kevin Rudd and his party were buoyed by their landslide win in 2007 yet within 3 years he found himself forced to step down as leader and was replaced by Julia Gillard. So what went wrong and could it have been avoided?

For Tony Blair many feel he never recovered from the decision to go to war with Iraq. No one supported Saddam Hussein, yet the decision to go to war without UN sanction shocked many, not only in the nation but around the world. As the war progressed, people became shocked and surprised at both the information that was used to take us into the war and what was happening in the war.

For Kevin Rudd many feel he made a mistake in how he handled the issue of tax reform where the Australian Government made an announcement to impose a 40 per cent tax on Australian miner’s profits. The tax announcement was described as “shocking” (Tom Albanese, CEO for Rio Tinto), a “shocking idea” (The Australian), and “a surprise attack on us” (Andrew Forrest, CEO of Fortescue Metals). It resulted in the mining industry spending millions in adverts against the tax which affected public opinion of the government and the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd.

Of course these were not the only reasons as to why they were forced out by their own party as they were indicative of their premierships. The United States diplomatic cables leaks reveal that the former US ambassador to Australia described Rudd as a ‘control freak’ and considered Rudd’s mistakes to have arisen from his propensity to make ‘snap announcements without consulting other countries or within the Australian government’. Tony Blair took bolder and bolder decisions as his tenure progressed resulting in allegations of cash for honours and the lowest opinion poll ratings for a Prime Minister since polls began.

The tale of these two men provide a good example of the golden rule while in government: The no shocks and no surprises rule. There are many examples of this rule being broken on many levels such as Gordon Brown’s abolition of the 10p tax rate or Margaret Thatcher’s Poll Tax. But the tale of a third leader of a Labour Party shows how to make this rule work.

Helen Clark won the leadership of the New Zealand Labour Party and kept it for a record 15 years and then led her party to three victories in general elections. She consulted widely, people knew what she was going to do and when and as a result is the most successful politician in New Zealand ever.

[and] that’s Clark’s modus operandi. Take a bit here. And do a bit there. Move cautiously. Flag what you are doing before you do it. No shocks. No surprises. And if something does go wrong, fix it. And quickly. All of which makes the Labour-Alliance coalition a difficult government to attack. (see here)

A surprise can be seen as an unexpected occurrence, appearance, or statement while a shock is a sudden disturbance of the mind, emotions, or sensibilities. Clark managed to avoid these for much of her premiership which resulted in few confrontations with any stakeholders involved in keeping her staying Prime Minister.

This golden rule goes some way to explaining why the Tory vote is holding up in opinion polls while the Lib Dem one has not. While the decisions that have been made have been unpopular, and in many ways have been Tory policies, they do not surprise Tory voters as these decisions were discussed before the election or are within their political philosophy. Where they may come unstuck are NHS reforms, which have shocked even some in the Tory party.

Now the Lib Dems have shed a dramatic amount of support which has worried many in the party. But it is not necessarily the shedding of support which worries party members and voters but the decisions that have been made in the Lib Dem name. This can be seen through the golden rule where the Lib Dems have already broken this on several occasions:

• Entering coalition with the conservatives has surprised many on the left of the political spectrum
• Nick Clegg changing his mind on the economy shocked many
• The Lib Dems voting for a tripling of the tuition fees for university has been a shock to everyone

Entering the coalition is one which would not have been too damaging as people understood the political situation and many believed it would benefit the party. However, taken with the change in stance on the economy, created shocks which began to effect the poll ratings more dramatically. And then we have tuition fees. We have to acknowledge that these decisions have been devastating for the party and have made people question what the party is for and whether they want to vote for them again.

If the Lib Dems want to survive in government they need to stick to the golden rule: No Shocks and No Surprises. We need more consultation and more dialogue; more predictable Lib Dem decisions that fit in Lib Dem philosophy; more announcements of what is going to happen, announcements of when it is going to happen, and announcements that it has happened. The Guardian highlights this point and it is a lesson worth learning. Only by sticking to the golden rule will the party build back the support that it has shed by breaking the golden rule of governing.

The secret to winning elections (lessons by Gisela Stuart???)

They say Tony Blair had it and because of it David Cameron considered him unbeatable. But the magical ingredient of electability disappeared eventually and he would have been beaten had be not been beaten by his own party. So we can only assume that electability can come and go. This is either because it is something intrinsic within him that at that particular time resonated with the electorate and then later didn’t, or it was something he was doing that later he was no longer doing.

If we believe it is an intrinsic value within him then we will always seek someone who possess’ that magic ingredient. If we believe it was something he was doing, then anyone can learn the skills of electability. To understand if we are able to learn the skills we can look at exceptions to the rule during an election and see what we can glean from this.

During the General Election there was generally a swing away from the Labour Party towards the Conservative Party. Yet Gisela Stuart managed to buck this trend in one of the top 12 seats the Tories were targeting. So why was this?

For a start she was a popular MP with a record of defying Labour whips. She began the campaign with a programme of questionnaires and ‘manifesto meetings’ for voters to tell Stuart’s team about their concerns. From this she drew up a ‘local manifesto’ that became the focus of her campaign and paid virtually no attention to the national Labour message. She recruited a volunteer team who were urged to bring in more friends to help and used whatever idea came from this team. You can view her leaflet here. This strategy has not gone unnoticed by Ed Miliband.

Lessons for the campaign team:

• Gisela essentially formed an alliance with the electorate by engaging the community which allowed the team to learn from the electorate about what they wanted and avoided a struggle over definitions of the problems
• Her team viewed themselves as ‘essentially able’ – able to influence the election despite the circumstances and so ideas and energy were used to good effect
• The team had clear, specific and attainable goals which with the help of volunteers were just about achievable in the time available

Lessons for MPs:

• She was seen as active and openly influential
• She was seen as competent, hopeful and confident
• She focused on the here and now

Where you stand affects your view. Gisela believed that the party she belonged to was unpopular because they did not have the same starting point as those she wanted to vote for her, so distanced herself from it. She created a new starting point by forming an alliance/coalition/relationship with voters (call it what you will). A quick look at what Tony Blair did with the Labour Party was similar, as was David Cameron’s.

And this is the most important lesson in learning electability:  People vote for those who accept the voters definition of the problem. This is why listening is seen as so important but why so many fail to actively listen to the electorate.

The Times had an interesting story recently called ‘If you don’t like the voters, they won’t like you’ which pretty much sums it up:

After 1997 Conservative politicians knew what they were supposed to say, the boxes they needed to tick. And they said it, they ticked the boxes. But this didn’t mean they really understood, or quite believed, what they were saying. They would use phrases such as “I know we seemed out of touch”, rather than “I agree we were out of touch”. Many of the words Mr Cameron later used about changing the party were being spoken from the moment of the 1997 defeat, but the sentiment wasn’t the same at all. The Labour leader’s speech yesterday reminded me very much of those early Tory speeches. The more this week that Mr Miliband has said that he gets it, the less I have believed that he does.

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.

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

Image via Wikipedia

‘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.

Public Service Reform (Tory/Labour vs Lib Dems)

There is much that politicians say that we may all agree on

We wish to change politics itself, to bridge the gap between governed and government and to try to address the deep seated and damaging disaffection with politics which has grown up in recent years

Tony Blair 1996, 14 May, Speech to Charter 88

Real change is not what government can do on its own, real change is when everyone pulls together, comes together, works together, when we all exercise our responsibilities to ourselves, our families, to our communities and to others

David Cameron, 11 May 2010, First Speech as Prime Minister, at 10 Downing Street

But as politicians look for words in speeches which they think we want to hear, they look around to create the action we want to see. There is a debate going on about how to manage public services which was on the fringes of the General Election campaigns. There was talk of forming easycouncils (Tories)  and John Lewis Style Councils (Labour). There has been debate for a while about how to create more responsive public services through offering more choice.  But the issue of forming responsive services has dominated the debate for years.

The UK was supposed to have moved on from the New Public Management (NPM) in government

In the UK … NPM has been challenged since the turn of the century by a range of related critiques such as Third Way thinking and particularly the rise of ideas associated with Public Value Theory which have re-asserted a focus on citizenship, networked governance and the role of public agencies in working with citizens

However, the previous and present government continues along agendas which look remarkably similar to the NPM agenda which relies on the theory of marketplace and on a business-like culture in public organizations. NPM favours massive socialization of business management practices in the public sector to provide governments with better tools for policy implementation, moving decision making closer to the service recipients and restructuring government  to emphasise results rather than processes which all parties seem to want to achieve. These are even the aims for the Obama administration.

However, such an agenda was opposed by the Liberal Democrats at one stage who were concerned that the choice agenda would not produce the results we wanted and this has again been looked at here.

So it is not surprising that Labour and the Tories are looking to business for answers to their questions if they continue to be stuck in NPM thinking. Yet this creates inconsistencies which they fail to see. The Labour Government had a Respect Agenda which sought to get citizens to take up their responsibilities in society, and this is reflected in Cameron’s comments above. The issue is that if you produce services based on the choice agenda, bringing in business practices to make services more responsive, you are giving the people the power of ‘exit’ i.e. you can choose to go somewhere else. This restricts and discourages the productive political voices of the people as they use the passive power of ‘exit’ rather than the progressive power of their ‘voice’ to improve services. This approach therefore ignores the active roles of citizens and their obligations in the community. This is neatly put by the Cabinet Office

User choice is an effective instrument for promoting quality, responsiveness, efficiency and equity in public services. It is in many cases more effective than alternatives, such as voice mechanisms

Responsive services are nice and may meet some people’s needs some of the time but it does not reflect a modern society where people want more say in how things are run and want their voices heard. As politicians look around to create the action we want to see, they fail to see that we are the action we want to see.

I have written about collaboration here and here and this will be a defining issue. Moving from responsive services run by government and public administration (G&PA) to collaborative services between the G&PA and citizens and other social players. The Tories continue to look towards business as do Labour.

The Lib Dems can take some learning from Business but should not define how we want our country and services to be run based on them; we are not a business. We are people in a country where we feel we have little say in how our country is run and our services provided and we would like this to change. We can be on this side of change by embracing a new collaborative way of working with citizens in running, managing, and reforming the services we use if we understand there is an alternative and listen and support the people.