Liberal Concerns: whither party democracy

Okay, so having enthused about the possible benefits of the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition arrangement, I want to raise something of a concern.  Something that I hope might be raised on Sunday at the special conference, whether I can make it or not, which I hope to do.

Party internal democracy.

The Lib Dems are, rightly I think, well known for their internal party democracy; particularly in the area of policy making.  Where other major parties appear to drive policy with grand announcements from the platform, Lib Dem policy has to get passed by conference reps from all the constituencies and a few special interest groups who have voting rights of their own.  

More than that, as has been recently shown to good effect with the campaign on the Digital Economy Bill, we are more than capable of getting the parliamentary party to change its course mid-stream through the various mechanisms available to members to submit emergency motions and to question the executive and parliamentary and other elected bodies' representatives.

Of course the very fact that we are having a special conference on Sunday to ratify the coalition agreement is even further testament to the rightful role of the wider membership in the party not just in fundraising, doing as we are told and campaigning, making tea and the like (though many do all of those very well too, naturally!).  Whilst other parties do have strong internal democracy, it has been noticeable with Labour, for example, that that has been much more difficult to sustain whilst in power.  And it could be much more difficult whilst in power with a partner party with whom we have signed a long-ish term coalition agreement that may appear to limit the areas we can differ.

Now, for sure, the coalition agreement cannot set every possible policy in stone - much government action is responsive to things that happen in the real world that will not have been foreseen by the leadership in these negotiations.  But just because they are in power, there must continue to be robust mechanisms by which we can all challenge the leadership on issues of the day as well as longer term policy.

A favourite example for me of course is drugs laws.  None of that appears to have been included in the coalition agreement.  So I am presuming that we can still go ahead with the federal policy review the successful motion at last autumn's South Central regional conference called for, and we can expect the leadership to fight whatever position comes out of that process in their new positions as participants in government, not merely in opposition.

Another would be Land Value Tax - an absolute no-no for most Tories - though few probably understand it properly.  Whilst I am personally not sad to see the back of the Mansion Tax as I don't think that was a good introduction to LVT, we have long held commitments to work toward LVT if we ever got power.  Whither our policy on replacing business rates with SVR for example?  The only mention of business rates in the coalition document appears to have been of relief of back-dated claims out of the money to be used for government savings.  But we ought to be robustly presenting the case that business rate relief is not in fact a relief on businesses, but on landlords - helping them to hold out for higher rents because some of the other costs of doing business have been removed in the form of rates.

On the other hand, if we can successfully maintain our internal democracy, perhaps it will rub off on our partners.  Perhaps more and more Conservative members will get jealous of our rank and file's ability to influence policy and direction so transparently and start to demand some more of the same.  That can only be a good thing for democracy as a whole (if we want good things for democracy of course!) as more people participate in "government" and don't leave it to the once every five years' elected dictatorship!

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