As much as it saddens us we need to be realistic about our electoral chances over the next few years. We have the opportunity, especially with the ongoing collapse of the Labour Party, to do quite well, but we have a very tall mountain to climb – to come back from just 8 seats to a position of potential government is a tall order.
That doesn’t mean that we should give up, of course, but it does mean that we should look at alternative ways of having influence over the politics and governance of the country. If our prospects of getting into government soon are minimal, then we should consider how we can get other parties to implement our policies.
Policy is perhaps our greatest strength; because of the unusually broad selection of views inside the party, particularly in the sense of the left to right spectrum, our policy is more robustly examined before adoption than policy in many other parties. When Labour or the Conservatives release policy, it speaks of a specific author and outlook, and it is only at first exposure to the public and discerning voices that compromise is forced upon it. For the Lib Dems, compromise is something we do before we let other people see our policies.
This means that our policies are remarkably acceptable to a broad sweep of people, and how much the Lib Dems managed to achieve as the junior partner in the coalition government is not just testimony to the hard work of our MPs and party members working to support them, but also to the consistency and practicality of our policy positions.
If our goal is to make the UK a more liberal place, then we should focus on achieving that goal regardless of if we are in power or not. That means not just campaigning, but drafting policy with the intention of it being used by other parties, and even encouraging other parties to adopt it.
To facilitate this, we need a more open policy making process. My proposed solution would be a radical new way to draft, discuss and publicise policy.
The wiki format, as used by Wikipedia, is free and open, and requires remarkably few resources to establish and run. We could recruit moderators from the party, create pages for existing policy from conference records and the manifesto (thus also providing a much needed searchable resource for identifying current policy) and have those pages locked to moderator edits only, but open up the conversation tabs on those pages, allowing members not just to discuss policy that occurs to them, but to discuss our actual policies.
If someone wanted to propose a policy, they could then create a page on the wiki and let people alter and discuss it. When the process is complete, the page can be locked as “proposed policy” and taken to conference. If it comes back without being passed the page can be opened again and a new round of discussion can take place. If it passes, then the page is locked to all but moderators, and it’s marked as active policy of the party.
This would be a resource that not only would be fantastically useful for members looking to discover or create policy, but also members of the public wanting to discover what the policy is on a particular subject. As to our goal of influencing government, politicians of all parties could be encouraged to use it as a resource from which to build their own parties’ policies.
If we can be open, transparent, community-focused and free with policy making, and take those principles forwards to influence other parties, we can achieve a huge amount of our agenda even if we can’t get back into government in the next couple of election cycles. For some many things now, community content is king, and we should be ensuring that the Lib Dems make the most of it.
* Edwin Moriarty joined the Liberal Democrats in 2016.
