One of the most thoughtful MPs of the 2010 intake – Gavin Barwell – has written a good blog which laments the pause in Lords Reform, and the Lib Dem tit-for-tat response. He is basically right on both issues.
There is one sentence that is worth lifting out of the blog to consider on its own.
“To be fair, the root of this problem is that Liberal Democrats MPs went through the Coalition Agreement line by line and signed up to it; Conservative MPs did not and hence many do not feel themselves bound by every detail.”
When the Coalition was formed the Lib Dems held a special conference so their members could discuss and ratify the decision to go into the partnership with the Conservatives. Our views – and in “our” I include most backbench MPs – were not necessary.
The current management style of the Conservative Party is not inclusive. It is very much top-down rather than bottom-up. The A-list for example was a short-cut way to improve the Conservative Party’s face, but it did nothing to improve involvement at a lower level. Change is only sustainable if it has depth. The Big Society was created at the top of the party and the first most members knew about it was when we saw Cameron standing in front of the smiley logo on the news. This was a month or so before the election. The next day when volunteers were knocking on doors in marginals across the land the question we were asked was: “What is this Big Society all about then?”. No-one had included us in the creation process, none of our literature explained the Conservative’s big idea, no short scrip had been provided. The foot soldiers only had their leaflets in their hands.
Entering Coalition, pushing the Big Society concept, evolving the make-up of the Conservative Party so it better reflects society are all the right things to do. But the top-down way they were implemented meant that no individual Conservatives had to agree, thus no-one had to buy into the programme.
From @betapolitics: The Conservative Party is still a very top-down organisation – http://t.co/J0YNQJn2
RT @MustBeRead: From @betapolitics: The Conservative Party is still a very top-down organisation – http://t.co/J0YNQJn2
RT @MustBeRead: From @betapolitics: The Conservative Party is still a very top-down organisation – http://t.co/J0YNQJn2
New blogpost: The Conservative Party is still very much a top-down organisation http://t.co/yhKwaiQ8
Nick, you’re right on no Conservatives other than a very small number at the centre having any sense of ownership over forming the Coalition; as I wrote at the time, having something – even if only as minimal as the Lib Dems’ process – would have given a greater sense of engagement and involvement and should have meant an increased commitment.
But it always comes back to the perennial problem of politics – do I lead or do I follow? When things are going well, activists etc are quite happy to follow. When things aren’t, they’re not (reasonably so). There’s then the added complication of accusations of pandering to opinion polls versus doing what people want you to do. It’s a very difficult thing to balance – and depends largely on factors other than what you’re actually DOING, more on how people THINK you’re doing.
I am all for greater public involvement – I want people to suggest their great ideas and for them to be taken seriously. I want them to get on with implementing their great ideas, ring up their MP and say ‘this is a problem and this is why you need to change the law’ and for that to happen to make peoples’ ideas bigger, better and easier.
But we have a representative democracy so we elect representatives who we believe will do the right thing, the best thing for our country – if we decide we want that to change, great, but it won’t happen overnight and it requires a national decision.
The Conservative manifesto was supposed to be the first steps in turning the way the state deals with citizens on its head. Whether it will end up being so remains to be seen.