In future I will be posting ‘guest opinions’- I may
not however agree with the entire contents.This is the first one.
'No single political party has a monopoly on wisdom - we can all
learn from each other'- Naomi Smith is
Chair of the Social Liberal Forum
Earlier this week, I was lucky enough to be invited to speak on
a panel at a fringe meeting in Brighton at the Labour Party conference.
Organised by Compass, the theme was Building
progressive alliances for a new economy. The main thrust of
what I spoke about is below, but I thought it might make for an interesting
blog post to share some of my thoughts about the conference and the mood in the
room.
As I pitched
up in Brighton, it felt like any other Lib Dem conference I'd attended. There
were lots of people walking around with lanyards, rushing to the next fringe
meeting, or propping up the Metropole's bar. There were journalists, famous
political faces from now and days gone by, and plenty of eager young charity
execs trying to thrust flyers in to the hands of hungover delegates.
But I soon
realised a difference in just how much bigger it was than a typical Lib Dem
convention (despite our own membership boost since the General Election, it's
notable that more people have joined Labour since Corbyn's victory than the
entirety of the Lib Dem membership). As I wandered through the maze of
corridors to find the room Compass had booked, I realised that the majority of
the hotel is simply not opened up for the Lib Dems. Vast halls and rooms exist
beyond the partition walls that enclose a Liberal Democrat conference, and in
any fringe slot, there are dozens and dozens of simultaneous meetings going
on
.
The second
thing that struck me was a) how many young people were there and b) how many
non-white people there were by comparison to our own conference. Our diversity
is woeful. Atrocious! and Unacceptable!. We need to reconnect with voters, and
we can't do that properly when the vast majority of our parliamentarians are
white, middle aged, middle class, heterosexual, Christian, and male.
I arrived at
the fringe meeting about ten minutes early, and as the room started to fill up,
it suddenly struck me, that I've never before been perceived as being the most
'right wing' person in the room! I got a few suspicious looks from some
attendees but once we got under way, it of course became immediately evident
that you could probably put a cigarette paper in the political gap separating
me from people like the excellent Chair of Compass, Neal Lawson. What united everyone in the room, was the need for
progressives to pull together on issues of common interest.
It's not just
a challenge for the UK. Only 8 out of 51 centre left parties are now in
government across Europe. But those centre right and right wing parties in
governments, aren't there with enormous democratic mandates. Few, if any
political parties in Europe currently command more than 30% of the vote. This
isn't the kind of democracy we should be proud of, and we need to figure out
how to make pluralist politics work.
And that
shared belief, is what made the fringe so uplifting. Lisa Nandy (the impressive new Shadow DECC Minister - and someone I think
could succeed Jeremy Corbyn as leader one day) Caroline
Lucas and Clive Lewis, all made the case for
proportional representation, and more than once did I hear the phrase, 'no
single political party has a monopoly on wisdom - we can all learn from each
other'. There was a real appetite for collaboration in the room. Lisa reminded
us to look to the cooperative movement for inspiration and said, 'the clue is
in the name!'. Caroline encouraged us to build trust by working together on
less contentious issues first to give us a more solid foundation for
collaboration on the tougher stuff. And Clive took us on his journey from being
against, to being in favour of electoral reform. He said, 'First past the post
just pits the good guys against one another'. No one disagreed.
There were at
least 20 questions at the end and I left buzzing. If we want to rise above the
pathetic tribalism of some in our respective parties, we can. There are enough
enlightened, talented and energised people with a will to collaborate. If we're
clever, we really can stop the Tories at the next election.
Here's some of
what I said at the fringe. (It's not exactly the same, because I only had
speech points).
"In 1959,
after Harold Macmillan won an unprecedented third consecutive Tory General
Election victory, Jo Grimond the then Liberal leader, called for “A realignment
of the Left.”
Many thought
Grimond meant hooking up with the revisionist Gaitskellite wing of the Labour
Party with its “Future of Socialism” agenda drawn up by Tony Crosland. But he
didn’t. He meant joining forces with the likes of Sydney Silverman, a
libertarian Socialist who had been mainly responsible for the abolition of the
death penalty. Labour have done some pretty liberal stuff over
the years.Others
regarded him as a Fellow Traveller and as such perilously close to the Soviet
Union. The Soviet slur was a calumny but it is interesting that Grimond’s
instincts was to reject the sort of managerialist politics espoused by Crosland
and the Gaitskellites.
The parallels
with today’s political scene are obvious. Jeremy Corbyn is vilified as
being an ultra-Leftist, worse than Michael Foot, by the revisionist architects
of New Labour (and I hasten to add by some former SDPers in the Lib Dem party),
while he gathers support from a public that has grown weary of the vacuous
mutterings of what’s left of the New Labour “narrative” and strongly reacts
against the austerity politics of George Osborne. The SNP has thrived on
exploiting this public mood in Scotland and Corbyn seems to be resonating in a
similar way in England.
So where does
this place the Lib Dems? Some argue that Corbyn has effectively seized the
centre left ground, scuppering any aspirations on the part of social liberals.
This has encouraged the Cleggite, Orange Book centrist element, whose approach
proved such an electoral disaster for the Lib Dems last May. The problem with
this line of thought is that the Centre is always defined by the other on
either side of the divide and gives them most of the initiative. It’s neither
politically appetising nor, more importantly, operational.
As my party
flounders with a miniscule number of 8 MPs and an overblown number of Peers,
shell-shocked and still largely in denial, some urge a re-vitalisation of
‘pavement politics’ in an attempt to garner grassroots support, while others
seek a modernisation and restatement of liberal principles. Tim Farron offers a
greater energy than Grimond was ever prepared to exert, but lacks the
intellectual support Jo was able to mobilise. It’s very un-British to say so,
but the problem with UK politics is essentially an intellectual one. The start
must be to recognise how the nature of western democracy is changing, not least
in the UK. The new populism and the increasing role of social media, are making
for total change. And we, too, will have our Donald Trumps, Le Pens and others
if we haven’t already got them.
I believe
Farron would like to fashion a Left-of-Centre stance. I would encourage him in
that: there’s no point in paddling around in a boat being buffeted by the waves
created by others. He must address the issues that both the SNP and Jeremy
Corbyn have seized upon. First and foremost is inequality: inequality that
stems from income, gender, ethnicity and, not least, regional
differences. Unless the Lib Dems can come up with a relevant, convincing
and distinctive set of policies on inequality, my party will be lucky to have 8
MPs in 2020.
Jo Grimond may
have been 60 years too soon when he called for a realignment of the left, but
he wasn’t wrong. There is much that unites progressive liberals in all parties
(and yes there are even a few in the Tories!) and we must work together on
issues such as Europe, the slash and burn of public spending and the egregious
attack on the most vulnerable in our society by the now unbridled Tory party.
In the Lib
Dems, we often say that the Tories are the opposition, and Labour are the
competition. Well I come from a business background, and in business we’ve long
cottoned on to the benefits of the collaborative economy. In the 21st century, collaboration is the new
competition. And so it is incumbent upon us all, to go back to our
constituencies, and prepare for collaboration."