Chris from Brum
Lib Dem
What I need is a strong drink and a peer group.
Posts: 9,746
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Post by Chris from Brum on Oct 12, 2021 15:37:47 GMT
It is not about the way a party works internally. It is about the way parties work in general. What their representatives and leaders do is what they are responsible for. No conference resolution exempts them. This forum went through this quite a bit at the time when other Lib Dems tried to avoid their government's record. And back in the 1990s I remember the annual mess as Paddy Ashdown had to tour journalists to distance the Lib Dem offer to the country from the basket case basket motions passed by your conference. Then there was 2009(?) when Clegg and Cable tried to drop the abolish tuition fees pledge even if the party bodies refused (and backed and shamelessly signed the NUS pledge). How many times has a Lib Dem conference had the leader and policy making bodies in this sort of turf war? It is irrelevant what it does to the policy file. It's what the party's leaders do. And the idea of compromise itself is little defended. Bearing in mind out party is our membership, not the leader's plaything to do what they will with, that's part of the job of Lib Dem leader, that they are as much subject to the will of conference as anyone else. Again projecting your party's approach to things is a bit useless in this context. You might think that there's a one size fits all approach and, while that's your individual opinion, it's not done kind of objective truth. I think it used to be the case in the Liberal Party that the leader had a veto over party policy - but only at the stage that the GE manifesto was being written. That went with the merger with the SDP, though I'm sure that some leaders have wished that they'd still had it available (the 2010 commitment to "legalise" undocumented migrants being one case in point). |
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Post by timrollpickering on Oct 12, 2021 18:47:04 GMT
Bearing in mind out party is our membership, not the leader's plaything to do what they will with, that's part of the job of Lib Dem leader, that they are as much subject to the will of conference as anyone else. How a party wants to (dis)organise itself internally remains irrelevant to the wider world. To the wider world it is what the party's representatives do and push that matters. No amount of special pleading about how the party chooses to ru(i)n itself changes that. |
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