Hopeless in Gaza

The Gaza Strip isn’t a big place.  You can walk across it in an hour or so.  I know because I’ve done it.  That was in 1979.

I had just graduated, and a group of us from Cambridge were volunteers at Kibbutz Be’eri on the edge of the strip.  The kibbutzim largely ignored their neighbour, but we were curious, and talked about visiting it.  One of the local Israelis suggested that we’d have our throats cut, but mainly I think the reaction was “What do you want to do that for?”.  We dithered.  Then one morning two of the girls in our group had enough and went on by themselves to the checkpoint nearby to walk into Gaza City.  Half a dozen of us others  decided that that was where they had gone, and that we had better follow them.  And we went to the checkpoint, and walked all the way up to the beach, finding the two girls as we did so.

We were made to feel welcome, including the Jewish lad amongst us who did not conceal his Star of David pendant.  I don’t remember much about what the Palestinian locals said, but we did meet at least one radical PLO type.  I remember most clearly a lad on the beach asking me to “Tell them at home how it is here.”

How was it?  It was a forgotten corner where stateless people lived, largely in poverty, and without much hope.  But they were human beings like us.  A lot has changed since, but not those essential characteristics.

I didn’t really fulfil that young man’s wish, certainly not in public.  I have avoided saying much at all about the Arab-Israeli affairs.  Opinions are so polarised that few would care to hear what I was actually saying, just try to decide whose side I was on.

Whose side are you on?  That’s where the Israeli narrative starts.  The world is divided between an “us”, the Western societies of Europe and America of which Israel is a part, and a “them”, assorted Arabs, Iranians and other Islamic nations, who wish “us” ill, and with whom we share little in terms values, culture and outlook.  I’m sure that’s how most Israelis see the world, excepting those for whom “us” can only be Jews.  It’s a view that seems to be accepted in America too.  In Europe we struggle with it, having learnt, the hard way, that model of the world really won’t do.

And after that we get into a tangled web of claims and arguments.  The Israelis ask, quite understandably, “What would you do if a neighbour kept firing rockets at you?”  We have very little conception as to how we answer that question.  It’s of quite a different order to the various terrorist threats we have faced in our own countries.  Kibbutz Be’eri lives on, but under constant threat.  In 1979 security was very discreet, and the sense of threat only in the far background.  These Israelis did not gratuitously flaunt their weapons, as so may Israeli and Arab men do, then and now.

The rockets aren’t pocket terrorist weapons, they require a degree of state organisation to support, especially the bigger ones.  Israelis must feel that Gaza civilians are to some extent complicit in allowing this to happen.

And the Palestinians point to a long history of injustice, which passes completely unrecognised in Israeli political life.  They feel that all means of progressing their cause other than violence have been blocked.  The Israels just want them to keep quiet so that they and the rest of the world can forget they are there.  Again we can have no idea about the depth of frustration they are feeling – just as we cannot understand how random violence against the innocent is any way to progress your cause.

Both sides are in a bind.  Hamas is spoiling for a fight, and they seem to be daring the Israelis to invade, so that they can bog them down in a horrible war.  The Israelis know that a military solution requires just such an invasion.  Both sides may draw back, but no ceasefire will tackle the fundamental issues that divide them.

Both sides seem addicted to the use of violence as the way to solve their problems – which only reinforces that conviction in the other side.  Any individual leader, on either side, that tries to break free from that logic risks being undermined by those that disagree.  I am a political optimist generally.  But not here.

The dark side of evidence-based policy

Speaking at a Lib Dem conference in the Coalition’s earlier days Linda Jack, a Lib Dem activist, called for a commitment to “evidence-based policy”.  She was interrupted by strong applause from the floor.  Ms Jack is a feisty activist, but is not known for thought leadership.  Her use of the idea, and the applause she got for it, shows that evidence-based policy has become a mainstream idea in some liberal circles.  Not long ago it was a rather abstruse, fringe idea pushed by academics who wanted the extra public funding that it would require.  Why is it now hurrah phrase used by political activists?  Is this a good thing?

But first, what is it?  No many people just think that it means that any public policy idea should first be based on some kind of evidence that it works, rather than just sounding like a good idea.  But, to those that take the time and trouble to advocate it, it in fact refers to a particular type of evidence: statistical studies comparing the effects of the policy in action against some kind of control group.  It takes its inspiration from medicine, and, indeed, some of its strongest advocates, like the writer and journalist Ben Goldacre, and Lib Dem former MP Evan Harris, are medical doctors.

Evidence-based therapies are all the rage in modern medicine.  Statistical evidence techniques have long been used in drug trials, but their use is widening to other areas.  It forms the core of policy advice put forward by Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (known as NICE).  What is interesting about these evidence-based therapies is their pragmatic element.  Treatments are recommended because they are shown to have benefits, even if the explanation is unclear.  I am taking medication to reduce ocular pressure, because ocular pressure seems to increase the risk of glaucoma.  My consultant told me that why this was so was not understood – the treatment was prescribed purely on the basis of the evidence.  Although the technique is often described as scientific, this pragmatism takes it away from classic scientific method – not in the rigour of the testing, but in the lack of a theoretical model to drive the hypothesis.  No matter; a lot of useful therapies are being put into use, and some ineffective ones are being weeded out.

So it is quite natural for people to want to use the technique for non-medical areas.  An early example of this was the testing of conditional cash transfer programmes in South America in a bid to raise levels of schooling and reduce poverty.  A programme would be devised, and participating villages would be compared to ones outside, preferably with a random assignment between the groups.  These studies helped make the case for these programmes, which are now a standard part of the anti-poverty tool set, and are credited with particular success in Brazil (the Bolsa Familia programme).  A lively academic debate has been provoked as to how useful the technique is.

What are the problems?  Most of the debate that I have read about focuses on two issues: the rather limited nature of the questions that you are able to gather evidence on, and the huge difficulties of gathering untainted evidence, especially if it is not possible to do large scale randomised trials, which it usually isn’t.  It is disappointing that wider public debate is so limited, though, and evidence-based policy has simply become a warm, apple pie idea, without people asking searching questions as to what it is and what its limitations might be.  There is a dark side to it.

This dark side is in fact evident in the medical model.  Dr Goldacre has made his name in using evidence-based ideas to expose charlatan claims for fringe treatments that often get uncritical publicity in the press.  This is good, but he*, and especially his disciples, swiftly move on to attacking alternative therapies in general.  Homeopathy is a favourite target, since its use of extremely diluted solutions defy scientific common sense.

This is an interesting case.  I don’t know much about homeopathy, but from what little I do know it places great reliance on three ideas: that you should look at the whole person; that mind and belief are a critical element of therapy; and that every person is an individual.  These are three blind spots in statistical evidence techniques.  They can only be used to test very simple propositions, so it is necessary to break down the whole person into a limited number of measurable symptoms.  It is impossible to distinguish mind and belief effects from the so-called “placebo effect”; the placebo effect often works, but is excluded and ruled out of order by the evidence advocates since it is so difficult to test.  And statistical evidence techniques depend entirely on using general rules, and do not attempt to find treatments that will work for everybody.  So homeopathy is untestable using evidence-based techniques.  That is a problem (how do you spot the charlatans?) but it does not make it rubbish.  In fact what the evidence advocates are trying to do is to impose a particular belief system on what should and should not be included in health therapies.  There is a world of propositions that are testable by statistical techniques, and a world that is beyond their scope.  Both are big and important.

And what about evidence-based policy?  The idea is bandied around very loosely by political activists, and most have very little understanding of the full implications of the technique or its limitations.  Why are they so keen, then?  At first I thought it came from the habit of politicians (including, and especially, the “non-political” sort) of using loose statistical associations to support their advocacy – to try and give themselves more credibility.  This happens: I see much nonsense around the wisdom or otherwise of the government’s policy of converting schools into academies free of local authority supervision.  But the cover was truly blown for me when I saw Dr Harris at a fringe meeting at the recent Lib Dem party conference.  This was on the government’s “Free Schools” policy.  Because of the difficulties of gathering evidence to test any policy proposal, he could knock any proposal down at will on the basis of lack of evidence.  It is a powerful weapon with which to defend the status quo (which, of course, you do not need to test…).

Evidence-based policy, in the limited sense that its advocates use, is no doubt a useful tool, but of quite limited value in practice.  We need to broaden our idea of what constitutes proper evidence, and develop an understanding of where good old-fashioned human judgement and instinct is more appropriate, given its speed, responsiveness and ability to handle both complexity and individual variations.

* Dr Goldacre is very careful in his use of words.  His actual attack on alternative therapies may not be as direct as I am implying.  He is, rightly, more interested in challenging false claims about evidence than in challenging therapies that make no such claims, but where conventional evidence is lacking.  This not true of many of his fellow travellers – I have read much mockery of homeopathy online.

BBC crisis – should it be radically reorganised?

The British political and media establishment hunts in a pack.  They pick one issue, everybody attacks it at once…and then they swiftly move on to the next.  There is no time for proper critical analysis, or maintenance of aim over any period longer than a few days, sometimes just hours.  This has been evident over the recent media scrum over the BBC and child abuse.  First it emerged that celebrity DJ the late Jimmy Savile was up to no good in the course of his work, some years ago, at the BBC.  This raised some deeper issues about the management of these sorts of risks at both the BBC and elsewhere.  Before any serious reflection  could take place on that, though, the pack had moved onto the editorial decisions of the BBC Newsnight programme when it dropped an investigation into Mr Savile in late 2011.  Then came another Newsnight investigation into a long past scandal at a Welsh children’s home, which supposedly implicated a then senior member of the Conservative Party, who wasn’t named.  The individual concerned, who was quickly outed in the usual social media, then counterattacked, and it quickly became clear that the allegations against him had no basis.  The pack moved onto the role in this of George Entwhistle, the BBC’s Director General (DG) of less than two months.  After a particularly aggressive interview on BBC radio by John Humphreys, Mr Entwhistle was considered dead meat and duly resigned.  Briefly the pack went onto the question of the BBC ‘s cumbersome management structure, before, this morning, focusing on Mr Entwhistle’s severance terms.  Each of these issues deserved more considered analysis than it generally got, although a few thoughtful articles were published (like this one from the FT’s Philip Stevens – behind paywall).  The issue of how the BBC should organise itself is a particularly difficult and interesting one, though.  This blog is a lone wolf who only occasionally hunts with the pack, so I make no apologies for backtracking a bit to give it a bit more thought.

First, the health warnings.  I have very little experience of the BBC except as a consumer of its output.  I have never worked in a media organisation.  But as a manager I have a lot of experience in the design of organisation structures.  There is a tendency for introverted managers like me to put too much weight on organisation charts, which we can play with to our heart’s content in private, at the expense of other vital organisational elements, like strategy and culture.  But they are nevertheless very important.

In the BBC’s case, the general accusation is that it has too many layers of hierarchy; it is also said that it is too complex, which probably means elements of “matrix management” and multiple reporting lines.  At the end of a BBC comedy News Quiz a couple of weeks ago, the programme writers made this point by adding into the credits all the managers responsible for the programme up to Director General.  It was a long list (including heads of comedy, Radio 4, Radio broadcast, etc.). The BBC Trust’s Chairman, Christoper Patten, voiced his frustration at the sheer number of managers at the BBC.  This, it is said, diffuses responsibility for any given decision, allowing poor decisions to go unchallenged; either that or there is excessive challenge and innovation is stifled.

But this type of structure is quite typical of large organisations dealing with complex processes.  Indeed it can be seen as the common sense way of organising things – the sort of structure most people would come up with if they were asked to organise things.  This was illustrated wonderfully when a former BBC Chairman, Michael Grade, was interviewed.  What Mr Entwhistle had lacked, he explained, was a deputy specifically responsible for keeping an eye on BBC journalism, and moving to head off trouble, or at least alerting the DG of trouble ahead.  The problem wasn’t that Mr Entwhistle had too many managers, he seemed to be saying, but that he did not have enough.

And, of course, that is exactly how such structures come into being.  If you have a particular problem or challenge, you create a management position to own it and give it due focus.  And so organisation structures grow.  This can work, but it usually doesn’t.  It is rear-view mirror driving, and can create so many conflicting tensions that organisations seize up.  Both of these problems can be overcome by the right sort of leadership at the top – which indeed is what Lord Grade also suggested.  Somebody who can cut the c**p and short-circuit the structure when required.  But this did not seem to be Mr Entwhistle’s management style, whether from inexperience or natural preference, he seemed to want to let his managers get on with their jobs.  This gives another clue as to the endurance of manager-heavy organisations – they suit big egos at the top.  They also offer lots of promotion paths to people further down the organisation.

So multi-layered management is common sense, and can work with firm leadership from the top.  That does not make them efficient.  The alternative is known as a “flat” structure, from how it looks in a classic organisation chart.  There are fewer layers of organisation (five is not untypical from cleaner to Chief Executive, perhaps seven in a very big organisation), but each manager has more other managers, on average, reporting to them (say from three to seven or eight).  This requires many less managers.  But it also requires clarity, vision and managers who don’t mind acting on initiative, and other managers who don’t mind it when they do.

How might this work for the BBC? To my inexperienced mind the obvious way to go would be to organise it into a series of separate brands aimed at particular audience segments, and each given a number of television and radio channels, and then give each head of brand a lot discretion how and what to deliver through the channels under their control.  BBC News would probably best be treated as its own brand, even if most its distribution would be through other channels.  There would be some technical functions too, with generally lower organisational status.  Duplication and clashes between the brands would be tolerated.

But this does not sound very BBC.  We like to think of it serving the nation as a whole – and duplication looks wasteful, even if in the long run it isn’t.  But maybe it would force the BBC to sharpen up its idea of who it is trying to appeal to.  That is appropriate in a multi-channel age.

But without that type of customer-centred organisation you are forced into something functional, which would soon resolve itself into something very similar to what it is now.  And no doubt that is what will eventually happen.  A few managers will be knocked out; and a few multiple reporting lines removed, amid claims of radical change.  But the underlying tension causing the complexity wouldn’t have been dealt with.

The BBC is a wonderful institution.  Its news brand is somewhat tarnished, not just by these recent episodes, but by sloppy reporting generally.  And, as Philip Stephens suggests, it is perhaps too beholden to celebrity presenters.  But it’s still the best there is on TV and radio.  And at least this episode shows that it can report objectively about itself (how unlike the Murdoch empire’s papers).  It won’t be the end of the world if it does not have the courage to reorganise itself properly.

 

The US election -why does the world hate the Republicans?

I do not advise citizens of other countries how to vote.  It’s very bad manners.  But there’s something very striking about viewing today’s US elections from outside that country: how few foreigners support the Republicans.

This is unsurprising amongst my own contacts and Facebook friends – they are largely Liberal Democrats, with the odd Labour supporter.  In the US these would be well within the Democrat family, with an outlok that largely fits the American understanding of the term “liberal”, a dirty word to Republicans.  But a number of opinion polls show that support for the Democrats is widespread right across the world.  In this instance Britain is very much at one with the rest of Europe, rather than part of some Anglo-Saxon block that some Britons suppose exists.

It is not immediately obvious why this should be so.  It is true that Republicans are generally more socially conservative that those outisde America, or those that are politically aware, anyway…but that really is the Americans’ own private business.  Mitt Romney is a perfectly intelligent and plausible presidential candidate, when looked at objectively, with much much more experience in getting things done than has Barack Obama, in the public sphere as well as in business.  Furthermore, the Republicans believe in strong U.S. armed forces, something that the rest of the world has been free-riding off for a long time, though we might not like to admit it.

So what’s the problem? Perhaps it is economics.  The Republican attitude to the US financial state defies mathematics – to think that its massive fiscal deficit and national debt can be tackled without rasing taxes.  But I’m not sure how much people in other countries understand this debate.  Something deeper does lie behind it though: the belief that the state should provide a minimal social safety net if anything.  The idea of a welfare state is pretty much consensus in Europe, so this is a clash.  Republican Americans are convinced that Europe is a basket case as a result – though things look different to us.  To the extent that we think about the US, we would worry about the breakdown of social cohesion as a proportion of the population gets stuck in an underclass.  But I don’t know how troubled Europeans are about this really.  And non-Europeans may well be more sympathetic to the Republican view on this.

I think there is soemthing bigger going on.  We associate the Republicans with a particular world view that combines a sense that the US has a wider mission in the world with an almost wilful ignorance of what is actually going on.  Many Americans feel that it has carte blanche to interfere in other countries’ affairs to protect their interests and advance their view of civilisation.  But that does not seem to imply making any attempt to understand the complexities of what is happening in the rest of the world: simply dividing the world into good guys and bad guys. Everybody will have some example of how this paradox has led to injustice and suffering.  It might be George Bush’s “War on Terror”, or the Iraq war and, especially, its aftermath.  Or else it is an unquestioning support for Israeli government policies, on little more than the idea that they are “people like us”…a situation that is drawing the world ever closer to a war with Iran.

Democrats get credit for trying a bit harder to understand to understand and respect the rest of the world.  Bill Clinton and Mr Obama stand in clear contrast to George Bush Junior.  Mr Romney’s campaign has not reassured non-Americans that he is any better than Mr Bush – though I personally believe he is head and shoulders above him.

There is an asymmetry about all this.  America appears on our TV screesn and cinemas every day.  American news is world news.  A lot of people outside America feel that they know about America, even if they actually know a lot less than they think.  But it is not true the other way around.  Few Americans seem to care about the world outside their country, except to the extent that it is a nest of vipers posing a threat to their wellbeing.  Fewer still will care what the rest of the world thinks about their election.

And yes, I too hope that Mr Obama will win, though I’m not as scared as many are of Mr Romney.  I also hope that the Democrats will hang on to the Senate, and do well in the House of Representatives.  Except that a small part of me wants the Republicans to win all three elections, and so have nowhere to hide from the impossibility of their policies, so that a t last America can start to move on.

My heart attack

Last Monday, three days ago now, I lay, conscious, on an operating table at St George’s hospital, Tooting.  A tube had been inserted into my artery in the right arm at the wrist, through which dyes and then wires were inserted.  On my left wrist a drip had been inserted into vein so that drugs could be injected rapidly.  Two surgeons were doing their stuff around the area of my legs, looking up at two monitor screens.  A large cylindrical  device was being pointed at my chest at various angles.  I lay as still as possible, as the surgeons exchanged comments and gave occasional orders to technicians outside the room, who would respond over the intercom.  Some music was playing quietly in the background.

The surgeons were doing an angiogram.  They were pumping dye into my bloodstream to make the blood flows visible through an X-ray camera and spot any problems with the blood flow to my heart.  And they did find a problem.  “One of your arteries is completely blocked.  This almost certainly caused your heart attack,” one of the surgeons said to me, “We want to insert a piece of wire to clear it.”  I consented.  The surgeons then completed a procedure known as an angioplasty.  This involved using a piece of wire pushed through my arteries to insert an stent, a small length of tube, into the blocked bit to open it up, after first inflating a small balloon to create the space.

It was really only then that I fully realised what had happened – that I had indeed suffered a heart attack, and that as a result my life was in the hands of these two surgeons and their team.  Until then I had thought the problems might be some sort of viral attack (as my elder brother had suffered a few years before) with few longer-term implications.  The previous evening, my family visitors remarked on how well I was looking – though the medically literate among them could spot the abnormal trace on the heart monitor that I was wired into.  This is a shock.  I had no indication until then that I was at risk.  I take regular exercise; I’m not overweight; I have never smoked; I eat my five a day; I even make sure I have a couple or more portions of oily fish a week; my blood pressure has always been normal; no tests that had been run on me had shown me with anything other than a very healthy heart.  It really can happen to anybody.

The problem seems to have started over two weeks beforehand, while we were on an organised tour of Sicily.  One night, after dinner, and a day when I had felt slight constrictions to the chest area, I started to suffer acute chest pains.  I couldn’t sleep.  Eventually, at about 3 or 4 a.m I took some aspirin, and the pain subsided and I got some sleep.  I was puzzled at what had caused this episode.  The chest pains pointed to a heart attack, but none of the other symptoms did.  I wasn’t breathless, I could carry out normal physical activity.  As the pain subsided, the idea that it was severe indigestion took hold.  Gavascon seemed to help with the contuining mild episodes of pain.  The local diet can be pretty acid.  The day after the attack I had no trouble in climbing to the top of a stone tower to get a wonderful view of the western Sicilian coast.  The next day, though, I  felt lethargic and a bit feverish, collapsing into my hotel bed for an afternoon; but a couple of days after that things seemed to return to normal.  We continued with the tour, returning home at the end of the week.

The episode has was scary enough for me to go to my GP in the week after we returned.  I probably wouldn’t have done this had my wife not insisted on it, though I had noted that my fitness at the cardio-vacular exercises in the gym had fallen rather sharply.  My GP tended to agree with my diagnosis of acute indigestion, as he would have expected that a real heart attack would have had more of an impact.  But he did recommend that I did some blood tests.  This I did last Friday morning, at 8.30 a.m.  By midday my GP had rung me to say that one of these tests had revealed a high troponin level, indicative of heart problems.  He recommended that I go to St George’s A & E to get an ECG (electro cardiogram – where they put a dozen electrodes on your skin and get traces of your pulse).  This I did straight after lunch, expecting to be home for tea.  But the ECG showed an abnormal trace.  I was admitted to hospital, hanging around in A & E while a bed was cleared.  The next step was the angiogram – but that couldn’t be run until Monday.  Meanwhile I was kept under observation, with a cocktail of drugs administered by tablet and injection.

Now I am at home in rehab, recovering from the damage to my heart from the blocked artery, and the operation itself – but the prospects for a full recovery are good.  But I’ll be on pills for a long time, probably for the rest of my days.  At the moment there are six different sorts of pill, but it should come down to less than that after a year.  My fitness regime will have to be adjusted downwards so as not to place too much strain on the heart.  I am quite lucky though, first that the original attack did not do more damage, and second that the problem was picked up before the blockage to my artery caused more damage to the heart and maybe a more serious attack.

Why me?  I don’t hit any of the main risk factors – except that I was not avoiding cholesterol in my diet.  In fact I was a heavy cheese eater, and relished meat fat and chicken skin.  That will now change.  But some peple are just more at risk than others.  My physical fitness may have helped reduce the effect – though a bit too well if it had meant that I had avoided having it checked out.

It is customary at this point to praise Britain’s NHS and scorn its critics.  I will try and be a bit more objective, after my close observation of the service at work.  But it doesn’t come out badly.

Firstly I am immensely grateful to all those many professionals that helped me through the episode.  I always felt that they had my interests at heart and they did their best to help me.  Nurses, doctors, technicians, pharmacists and surgeons – I can’t fault any of them.  I now have very benign feelings towards St George’s hospital, which happens to be my local one – from being a rather anonymous presence beforehand.

Second I cannot fault the overall effectiveness of what the NHS acheived.  From the point of that blood test a system was quickly kicked into action that was appropriate at every step, acheived the right outcome, while managing the risks properly.  And at points the service was better than good.  The surgery was world class; the briefing from the cardiac rehab nurse afterwards was also deeply impressive.  The speed with which my blood sample was analysed and acted on was very impressive too.

Effective, yes, but how efficient?  Here I was left with a few question marks.  I ran into an awful lot of different professionals in my journey, having to repeat my story to up to ten different doctors.  This is a warning sign from a process management standpoint – though the need for specialists, 24 hour cover and risk management does not make the matter easy.  And there was an awful lot of paper records and documents.  It isn’t surprising that there were communication breakdowns; I’m still waiting for my discharge papers.  And the whole thing about the service going on hold for the weekend does not feel right either.  At least one, and probably two nights of my four night stay were clinically unnecessary.  Room for improvement, I would say – and that matters in a tax funded system where overall resources are subject to arbitrary limits.

It is clear though that I was much better off under the NHS system than I would have been under the US one, especially before Obamacre kicks in.  I would not have qualified under any of the government funded schemes, and neither would I have been covered by an employer plan.  I would either have to to have bought my own insurance plan, which would suddenly have become a lot more expensive.  Or I would have to have winged it without insurance, which would have landed me in serious trouble.

But then very few people outside the US think that their system is in any way sensible.  A universal insurance scheme, like most advanced countries run, would have caused a little more bureaucracy at the start of my hospital visit, but nothing very burdensome.  And I don’t believe that health professionals would be any less caring or professional if they were not working for a state provider.  Neither do I beleive that the vagaries of private sector management are any worse than the arbitrary resource management of a nationalised, tax-funded system.

But the NHS did do the job it was supposed to do.  And for that I am thoroughly thankful.

Turning the Nice Party into a successful political force

Over the last two weeks the Lib Dem conference has awoken this blogger from a rather inactive period (so far blogging is concerned).  Today I will complete this active period with a longer post, before going quiet for a couple of weeks.  I want to follow through the thoughts provoked by my last few posts to set out what I think the Liberal Democrat strategy and policy stance should be.  I am not part of the party’s Westminster set, and failed in my attempts to join it.  Neither am I standing for any of the party committees.  But I want to get this off my chest, and I hope it provokes a constructive train of thought amongst Lib Dem readers, and offer insights into British politics to others.

In Monday’s post I discussed the question of the Liberal Democrats’ core identity.  I concluded that the party should base this around the values of tolerance and freedom, allied with a strong sense of civic responsibility and compassion.  An identity that rejects the classic identities of class and nationalism that the two other main political parties still depend on.  In other words, the Lib Dems should be the Nice Party.  Within this identity should be plenty of scope for differences of opinion around community politics, economic liberalism and so on.  But how to turn this rather challenging proposition into a successful political movement?

And here we run into the grim realities of how you create sustainable success in politics.  It isn’t very nice.  But it is a challenge that the party has successfully risen to in local politics in some parts of the country.  I have met a number of people in the Kingston Liberal Democrats, where the party has both an MP and runs the council.  I think they are nice people.  I don’t think their Tory (or Labour) opponents will share that opinion: they manage their politics with a certain killer instinct.

I think the best place to start is with where the party should be campaigning, and whose support it needs to win.  There are three groups: floating voters where the party is strong; core sympathisers everywhere, and potential donors.

The first group, floating voters, is entirely within the party’s comfort zone.  Other parties may be catching up, but there is a lot experience and wisdom promulgated by organisations such as the ALDC (Lib Dem councillors) or gurus like Mark Pack.  It is question of local campaigning, meeting people fact to face, good messaging (usually including a ruthless squeeze on whichever other main party is weakest), and ruthless targeting.  This is all very good, but it is not enough.  It needs activists and it needs money, and increasingly these have to be drawn from outside the targeted area, which is, by implication, being neglected.  And even the best local campaigns are helped by a bit of national bounce that comes from broader popularity.

So the party needs to build core support everywhere: say about 10% of the electorate who become reliable supporters at any election, anywhere, and who are a source of activists, who can then be used in target areas.  And here the party is completely out of its comfort zone.  It requires a completely different style of low-effort/high-impact campaigning from that used in target areas, where huge efforts are made to gather the last few votes.

The London elections earlier this year show us this graphically.  London is quite a liberal place, but the party’s Mayoral candidate, Brian Paddick, failed even to secure the 5% necessary to keep his deposit.  The funny thing was that, by the party’s standards, the campaign was quite well funded – much more so than in previous London elections.  The messaging was wrong.  With an ex-policemen as its figurehead, the party tried to reassure voters worried that the party was a bit soft, by showing a “tough” face.  “You break, you pay” was one slogan, emblazoned on billboards.  All this did was put off the party’s potential core.  They should have done the opposite – instead of trying to paint Mr Paddick as a Mr Nasty to reassure sceptical floating voters, they should have tried to reassure the core than in fact he was really rather nice and liberal (which he is).  It’s the difference between going after core votes and floating voters.

Also the party needs to do more of what I have called “insurgent campaigning” – light touch, quick impact campaigns than move on quickly.  The party needs to focus more of its campaign training on this type of campaigning, even though it wins no elections under first past the post, and celebrate success.  Unfortunately every trained activist seems to want to fight a full-strength floating voter campaign even in areas where this is clearly not appropriate.

But while this sort insurgent campaigning may be relatively cheap on activist time, it helps a lot to have some money – and money is increasingly important in target campaigns too.  If nothing else it makes the party look slick and credible – and our increasingly consumerist society puts the two together.  I have noticed this especially here in London amongst ethnic minority voters, who tended to laugh at our cheap, old-fashioned literature.

And money requires donors.  It also requires success at things like European elections, where the party’s weakness at core-vote campaigning threatens oblivion in 2014.  But this is where coming into government should be a big help.  People tend to assume that the present is a template for the future.  While the party was confined to the sidelines it was often assumed that the party would never get beyond local government.  Now people assume that future coalitions are a strong possibility.  And the party’s serious work in places like the European Parliament (compare it to UKIP!) make this a party that companies and rich individuals might see the virtue in helping.  But this requires the party to think about how it might go about persuading such people to part company with their money.  Here too the party seems outside its comfort zone.  All too often party activists think that fundraising is either local dinners and raffles that raise paltry sums, or else in the scope of professional fundraisers who can be left to get on with it.  But it has to be integrated into the whole campaign process.  Donors need persuasion in very similar ways to voters.

Now comes my next jump.  The party’s policy stance, both in what it says and the messages it chooses to prioritise, are an important part of its success, especially for core voters and potential donors.  They translate abstract notions into things that people might be really concerned about.  And here we can afford to raise our eyes for a moment away from the grubby business of political campaigning to higher things.  What is it, exactly, that the party wants to achieve in politics that is different from the other parties?

And here it is not just a question of doing a bit of work with focus groups.  We need to look at the bigger trends in society, and try to make sure that we concentrate on policies going with the grain of history – and not leading to cul-de-sacs.  The party needs to play long, and profit from slip-ups by the other parties.

For what it’s worth I suggest focusing on three broad policy themes: fair growth, limiting government, and global responsibility.

The idea of fair growth takes as its starting point the growing inequality of distribution in both income and wealth.  Modern economic growth, it seems, benefits only a small minority.  A large number of people are completely marginalised, and a lot of others fear that will be their fate.  The economic orthodoxy that growth benefits all society, and that pay reflects the marginal cost of labour are both flagging: not so much untrue as not enough.  A lot of the unequal distribution of wealth is not about due rewards for benefits conferred on all society – but about a skewed distribution of power.  This clearly affects policy on tax, benefits, and public services, which may redistribute wealth.  But there are also issues about how pay rates are set within organisations.  These are issues that Labour has now taken to heart (after being a bit blind in the Blair era), but where the Tories have a complete blind spot.  Here the party can distinguish itself from the Conservatives, but not Labour.

Limiting government, on the other hand, is Labour’s blind spot.  Unfortunately it is uncomfortable for many Lib Dems too.  I described the core problem that this addresses in this post earlier in the week.  The costs of most public services are destined to grow in proportion to the rest of the economy, and costs as a ratio to output.  This applies most clearly to healthcare (where it is being helped along by demographic trends), but we can see the same issue in education, policing and defence – not to mention the issue of pensions.  Tax is an imperfect way of funding anything – it  is difficult to make it accountable, and it is difficult to form a consensus on what a fair tax take is.  So it will not be realistic to fund these increased costs entirely from taxes.  The state will have to do less, and it will have to use new structures to do things more efficiently.  Here the Tories have a good understanding of what is happening, even if they muddy it with irrelevant talk about “competitiveness”.  If there is a unifying theme for the Coalition, this is it.  Labour, meanwhile, want to row back on many ideas to reform public services, for example by using private and third sector providers.  Their only cost saving idea is to freeze public sector pay – not at all sensible in the long run.  This is where the party needs to challenge Labour rather than quietly going along with it.

And on global responsibility we have to break free from the idea that this country can go on its own happy way, while the rest of the world deals with trade, regulation, carbon emissions and what have you.  This is most clearly visible in the Euroscepticism that fast becoming a national consensus, so say nothing with a general loss of momentum on climate change, and knee-jerk opposition to immigration.  There are friends and foes in both other parties on this – but the emerging Euroscepticism of the Tories offers the biggest opportunity.  I like this theme not so much because it plays well with the general public, but because it will resonate with large parts of the business community – who might start to realise that exterminating the party is not such a good idea.

Concentrating on these three broad themes, means excluding others.  These include a more explicit focus on global warming and the environment, Paddy Ashdown’s idea of re-enfranchising electors through localising politics, and constitutional change more generally.  Worthy as these ideas may be they are not going catch on quickly enough.

To exploit these themes the party rapidly needs to develop some heavy-duty and distinctive policies on taxation and Europe, and perhaps education; it needs to hold the line on health reform and university finance, and in needs develop insurgent campaigning on everything else.

Taxation is the critical issue: but it must be understood that that the total tax take is just as important as which parts of the economy are taxed.  If there is a torpedo heading for the good ship Miliband, launched with such a fanfare this week, it is the tax burden.  We can rely on the Tories to fire the torpedo, but we mustn’t let it sink us too.  Besides limiting government expenditure, and so taxation, this answers the question as to why we are in coalition.  But tax also plays to the fair growth agenda – we need to find ways of taxing the very rich that do not throttle enterprise.  A tricky issue will be the top rate of income tax; there is a strong case for cutting out the 45% rate, and no doubt this would help the party’s appeal to donors.  But it might be too difficult to sell.

Europe is critical because this would a central plank of the party’s appeal to business.  But the party needs to have a convincing answer on how we stay clear of the Euro, while still at the heart of the regulatory process.  The party is dripping with European experts – if it can’t come up with some good looking ideas here you really do have to ask what the party is for.

Education is important because it is a central part of the fair growth agenda.  There is a space for more constructive policy that stays clear of Conservative grandstanding and micromanagement.  I do wish the party hierarchy would make more effort to reach out to members invovled with education, though these can be quite tiresome: it may help to win over educational professionals, whom I am sure are being put off by the government’s current rhetoric.  But this does not sound to be a make or break issue for the next election.

On health and education finance I think the party needs to stick with the current governments reforms, more or less, on the grounds that the tax burden will get out of control if we don’t.  It will help with the proposition that Labour are profligate. We may be able to come up with some variations to soften the message, but I think the party has to grit its teeth.

And by insurgent campaigning, I mean grabbing a headline here and there, especially in areas where it plays to liberal principles and will motivate core voters and activists.  Human rights and the security state provide some issues, and environmental policy no doubt more. and there will no doubt be local issues that can be taken up, not just in target areas.

There I need to leave it.  This post is not quite as well developed as I hoped, but I hope it provides food for thought.

 

The Labour challenge gathers pace, but the ghost of 1992 still haunts

What to make of Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour Conference yesterday?  I did not see it.  On reading that it lasted 65 minutes I’m afraid I ducked out of watching it or reading transcript.  So what I am relying on is a very indirect impression – much as the rest of the public gets.  One thing is clear: it was a big success.  This shows that Mr Miliband is a leader who learns from his mistakes, and is consistently raising his game.  In my view Labour are now odds-on to win the next General Election with a full majority.  What happens after that is another matter.

One way of gauging the speech’s success is silence from the usual suspects.  The Lib Dem early morning briefing for activists decided not to mention it.  Even more egregiously the right-wing think tank Reform’s daily press summary contained only a tangential reference.  Contrast this with the hay that the usual critics were making last year.  The most important thing about this is that it confers on Mr Miliband and air of competence – something that is absolutely vital in modern politics.  As an aside, I think that the real reason why Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is in trouble is not the substance of his so-called gaffes, but that these make his campaign look incompetent.

As to content, this is harder to gauge.  Some commentators hail his appeal to the “One Nation” theme of 19th Century Tory Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli as a stroke of genius.  Maybe you had to be there – but this looks like a speech writing gimmick.  On the whole the speech seems to have been pitched at the so-called “centre ground”, apparently vacated by the Conservatives in spite of David Cameron, and also eagerly being eyed up by Nick Clegg and his advisers.  Vocational qualifications; apprenticeships; housing; not promising to reinstate all the current Government’s cuts.  Lib Dems complain that many of these things just exactly what they are already doing in government.  That’s politics: the Lib Dem message is being drowned out by the Tories.  Interestingly there were some sops to big business on encouraging long-term investment – rather spoiled from their point of view by his attack on the current government’s cut to the top rate of income tax – “writing a cheque of £40,000 to every millionaire in the country” – something that is palpably not true (many, even most, millionaires did not pay the 50p tax rate and are unaffected; quite a few non-millionaires did; almost none will actually get a cheque)…an ill-judged sound bight in the battle for donations, if not conference applause.

This is quite well judged overall, though.  Even better, the whole party seems to be singing from more or less the same hymn sheet.  This is so unlike the Tories after they were turned out of power in 1997.  With this discipline and intelligent messaging, they look set to retain the votes they took back from the Lib Dems, and pick up a few more – while the Tories look out of touch and incompetent.

What can go wrong?  All successful political movements require a balancing act, and Labour is no exception.  Labour need to harness the anger of public sector employees at government cuts and reforms to give them the ground troops to counter Tory money, and not a few votes too.  But, unlike Nick Clegg and his student fees pledge, they plan to win and be in a position to fulfill their promises, so that they can win again.  They need to commit to a set of policies that are reasonably workable.  It is here that trouble is building for the party.

First is the obvious point that government cutbacks are not just an ideological Tory attack on the state.  The size of the state in 2010 was systematically too big, and the country may never return to a state on this scale.  Many Labour activists misunderstand Keynesian criticism of the government’s economic strategy into thinking that more state spending will generate lots of growth forever and a day, rather than simply being about the tactics of how a shrinkage is best managed.  Mr Miliband is trying to manage these Labour activists’, and especially trade-unionists’, expectations on this front, and it featured in his speech.  But most of his ideas still seem to involve more state spending.  Expand apprenticeships?  That will require state subsidies.  The same can be said of turbo-charging housebuilding, now part of the centrist consensus.  Upgrading vocational qualifications?  This has been a state policy goal for as long as I can remember.  The problem is not lack of intentions – it is the prioritisation of resources.  Money is by no means the only problem with vocational education – but it is surely part of the solution.

And there is a further difficulty.  If Labour can’t promise their activists and union donors extra state spending, then they have to give them something else.  And that something else is an attack on privatising public services – especially in the NHS, and in policing too.  This will hobble attempts to make state services more efficient and make the problem of dealing with limited budgets that much harder.  This is a nakedly ideological policy, when they are trying paint the Conservatives as the rabid ideologues.

A spectre haunts Ed Miliband and the Labour Party: Neil Kinnock’s campaign against John Major’s Conservative government in 1992.  Mr Major’s government make the current government’s inept communications look slick.  In 1992 Mr Kinnock had them on the ropes; it looked as if the Tories did not even want to win.  And then Labour blew it.  A strong change of message by the Tories on Labour in the final week concetnrated on allegedly unfunded spending commitments under the title “Labour’s tax bombshell”.  Their newspaper allies relentlessly played on the idea that Mr Kinnock was not Prime Ministerial.  And Labour lost.  There are a lot of differences between then and now, but if I was in the Tory election planing department, I would be gathering evidence for another “Labour tax bombshell” campaign.  Labour are providing them with too much tempting material.

Why healthcare may grow to 50% of GDP and still be affordable

I can’t over-emphasise how important the concepts in this article in last week’s Economist are: An incurable disease, and I would urge my readers to try and get to grips with it.  If you want to understand how our economy is changing, and the implications for public services, the idea it describes is critical.  It ranks alongside Ricardo’s law of comparative advantage (gains from trade) and Keynes’s multiplier (fiscal policy) as a counter-inituitive idea that explains so much.

What it describes is something usually referred to as “Baumol’s cost disease”, and reviews a book by the eponymous William Baumol, “The Cost Disease: Why Computers Get Cheaper and Health Care Doesn’t”.  It stems from the observation that productivity grows in some parts of the economy faster than in others.  The paradox is that the more productivity in a sector advances, the smaller its share in the the economy at large.  Thus agriculture used to dominate the economies of the current developed world – but as agriculture became more productive, it needed less people and so shrank to a negligible propertion of GDP – while generating ever larger larger quantities of agricultural produce.  The same effect is clearly visible in manufacturing industry – producing more goods than ever, but from a shrinking workforce.  The more these areas advance, the bigger less productive sectors bulk in the economy as a whole.  It is, misleadingly, referred to as a “disease” because these less productive sectors, within the service economy, then act as a drag on economic growth as a whole.  It is not in fact a disease, but a symptom of success.  The failure of economists to understand the difference between creating wealth and realising it (i.e. turning that wealth into something that actually benefits humankind) is one the biggest failures of the dismal science, and it is a shame that Mr Baumol perpetuates it in the title of his book.

The most important of these unproductive services are healthcare and education.  Personal contact go the very heart of what these services are: to succeed these services must accept that people are individuals, and that a solution which works for one person may well not work for her superficially similar neighbour.  But, while productivity grows only slowly, if at all, costs, i.e. rates of pay, must reflect the increased productivity of the economy as a whole.  So costs advance faster than productivity.  Sound familiar?  But this only happens because we can afford it.

The eye-catching claim in the book is that on current treads healthcare will take up 60% of the US economy in 100 years, and 50% of the UK one.  But this is all paid for by the fact that other parts of the economy have become more efficient – and in fact it only takes up such a large part of the economy because these parts of the economy have become more efficient.  Actually this projection is a bit silly.  I think the advance of conventionally measured productivity will slow, as technological change now affects quality rather than quantity.  Also other sectors of the economy will reverse productivity as people value personal content more (think of the return to craft food production).  But it is rather a good way to make the point.

Which means that the challenge with healthcare and education is not that growing costs are unaffordable, as various right-wing types claim, but something much more subtle.  There are three issues in particular:

  1. A lot of healthcare is indeed inefficient, both in the UK and the US, and political pressure must be brought ot bear to address this.  But don’t expect it to halt or reverse the share of health costs in the economy in the long run.  The NHS “Nicholson challenge” in the UK may therefore be a valid policy goal, but it will not solve the long-term funding needs of the health service.
  2. The larger the share of the economy healthcare takes up, the more difficult it will be to fund it entirely from tax.  In the UK this either means that a parallel private sector will flourish and undermine the NHS (as has already happened in dentistry), or that the NHS will need to be a lot less squeamish about co-payments.
  3. There is a temptation for the owners and workers in the highly productive parts of the economy to keep the rewards to themselves, creating inequality and undermining public the public sector.  And yet we still want productivity to advance so that we can all afford a higher standard of service.  Higher taxes are part of the solution, but only part.  Again this points to the fact that a higher proportion of healthcare (and education) services will have to be delivered and paid for privately – allowing the remainder of the public services to pay decent wage rates.

I hope that provides food for thought!

What is the core Liberal Democrat identity?

One thing that most people who take an interest in the Liberal Democrats agree on is that the party needs to develop a clearer identity and, to use the popular marketing speak, a clear “brand”.  This has characterised much of the coverage of the conference, such as this from the Economist, showing not a particularly good understanding of the party, and this from Michael Meadowcroft, who has an excellent understanding, but does less well in explaining what the party actually needs to do.  Unfortunately these articles are all too characteristic of the debate.  On the one side outsiders, including recently recruited party staffers, who simply assume the whole thing is about deciding on a politically convenient position and then moving the party to it, and on the other by insiders who fail to articulate exactly what they mean by the clear liberal (or Liberal) principles they want the party to espouse.  Let me try to pick a way through.

First: does the party really need to worry about this?  Just because all the pundits agree doesn’t make it true.  The answer is yes.  There are two problems with the party’s current standing, or lack of it.  The first is that it struggles with a “core vote” strategy.  This is particularly important for elections fought under proportional representation.  The ones we fought in London earlier this year were a disaster; party campaigning was directed to floating voters who had long since floated away, and bringing out the vote people who supported the party in other elections for largely tactical or local reasons, and who large did not vote for it on this mandate.  Contrast this with Greens, who for much less money and effort got out a similar vote based purely on setting out who they were and what they stood for.  This matters because a disaster beckons for the party in the 2014 Euro elections, fought under PR, unless this changes.

The second reason is that there is the perpetual danger of policy confusion.  This has been clearly on display in the debate on NHS policy.  Do we want to follow the Liberal idea of a service with strong accountability to local communities, but flexibility on who actually delivers it?  Or do we want a Social Democratic service which is pretty much the same throughout the country, provided by a single organisation?  With the help of Lib Dem ministers, the government started off with something that looked a bit like the former, only for activists to reject it for the latter.  This confusion matters when you are an aspiring party of government rather than one simply of protest and opposition, and a party of government is what the party aspires to be.

But a word of warning: you can overdo the clear identity.  Successful political parties are coalitions, combining both a sense of common identity and a high spectrum of disagreement.  The Conservatives, for example, identify with the rich and those who aspire to be rich: but this brings together social conservatives with those who just want to cut taxes.

It is instructive to consider the two attempts to rebrand political parties that have shaped British politics in the last couple of decades.  The first was Tony Blair’s New Labour project, and the second David Cameron’s attempt to de-toxify the Conservative brand.  Both involved challenging some deeply held beliefs, and have left a deep sense of betrayal in their parties.  In Mr Blair’s case the effort has not been unsuccessful.  The party won three elections and even in opposition is cohering much better that the Conservatives have in a similar position.  I think that is for two reasons, one intended by Mr Blair, and the other not.  The intentional part was the illiberal, strong government aspect, clamping down on civil liberties.  This has played well with the working class communities that are the core of the party’s identity – and has also helped forge bonds with paternalistic ethnic minority communities.  When Mr Blair assiduously wooed liberals in the 1990s, he never really meant it.  The unintentional part of Labour’s rebranding is its identification with public sector workers, expanding their numbers and protecting their interests.  A modern economy requires a large state, and appealing to these workers is a powerful political strategy – but one that Mr Blair tried to resist, unlike his successors Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband.

The Conservative rebranding, five years or so on, looks a lot less happy.  What quickens the pulse of most young Tory activists seems to be an entirely different agenda from Mr Cameron’s, reminiscent of US Republicans: lower taxes, smaller state, escape from the EU, climate change scepticism and an outmoded idea of “competitiveness”.  While some of this chimes with public sentiments at large, as a package it it is not a winner.  Combine that with an electoral system that is tilted against them, and the project is likely to be a failure.  The Coalition with the Lib Dems, as Mr Cameron clearly saw, was an opportunity to consolidate this rebranding, but the price stuck in the throat of his party and he was unable to follow through.  The lesson there is don’t try to take a party to a place that it will not stay.

So what of the Lib Dems?  Firstly the party needs a core identity which is able to withstand a large diversity of views.  This is both easy, and tricky.  The easy bit is that the party stands for openness, freedom for individuals to choose the life they want, all underpinned by a sense of social responsibility and compassion.  All Lib Dems, pretty much, will identify with this, and they will think that the other parties do not.  The first difficulty is that this identity is an anti-identity: an identity that rejects, or downplays, the usual identities of class, nationality and race.  That is a difficult trick to pull off.  The second difficulty is that each of the other main parties (and the Greens for that matter) will think that such nice and inoffensive people can be appropriated into their own coalitions with a few warm words.  And indeed, many people with these values work for these other parties.  It is not quite enough.

But it has two important advantages.  First is that it is a natural second choice: not the most liked position, but not the most hated either.  Second is that the forces of history are with it.  The old identities of social class, nationality and the rest are gradually being eroded – and to the extent that the other parties lean on them, it makes them unattractive.

This is enough for one post.  What will count is not this sort of abstract speculation, but the practical steps that follow from them to create a successful political movement.  That, I will return to.

The Liberal Democrat conference: life outside the bubble

The “Westminster bubble” is a useful expression.  It refers to an ecosystem of politicians, journalists, think tankers and numerous hangers on based Westminster who have there own version of reality.  The Liberal Democrat conference in Brighton, which ended yesterday was firmly outside that bubble.  Lib Dem conferences tend to inhabit their own bubble, of course.  But after two years of appalling local election results, the complacency that characterises that bubble world was largely absent.  Liberal Democrats are coming to terms pragmatically with a very uncomfortable reality.

Westminster bubble types expected the party to be obsessed, as they are, with the leadership, and mobilising to ditch Nick Clegg, whose personal ratings with the public at large are miserable.  But that was not so; the party maintained admirable cohesion on the matter.  It’s not that members don’t think that Mr Clegg’s standing is problem, but they recognise that there are no easy solutions and that public agitation would be unhelpful.  The whole issue has in effect been outsourced to the parliamentary party, who were making no attempt to stir things up.

For me that party’s mood is best caught by three debates.  On Tuesday on local pay in the public sector and the Justice and Security Bill, and yesterday on housing.  On local pay (sometimes wrongly referred to as regional pay, which would be a non-starter as we do not have recognisable regional economies) the party resisted attempts by the Chancellor, George Osborne, to abolish national pay agreements and let local bodies, including hospitals, schools and local governments, to set their own pay rates.  The interesting thing about this is that localism, delegating responsibility to local authority level, at least, is supposed to be a key part of the party’s ideology.  But the party’s politicians and activists are acutely aware of the fear felt by many in their communities that this would simply mean lower pay, which would not be compensated for by a private sector revival.  Local pay does not have to mean lower pay, and often doesn’t – but it is an understandable fear, since, after all, that is why Mr Osborne supports it.  For me though, principle trumped pragmatism and I was one of a small number of people who voted for the motion.  I hold the deeply unfashionable view that the purpose of national pay agreements is for the Treasury to hold public sector pay down, not keep it at artificially high levels, and that unions only go along with it because it gives their national leaders a raison d’etre.  And as for national pay being simpler, any idea of that has been shaken by the encyclopedic size and complexity of the national agreement on teachers’ pay that occasionally lands on my desk.  Still, the party’s mood was a reflection of the feelings in their communities, and not the theoretical arguments so characteristic of the Westminster bubble.  The concluding speech by John Pugh, Southport’s MP, was a ruthless and effective hatchet job, in which people like me were characterised as having a fetish for markets against all evidence and reason.  I am trying to work out how to get revenge.

Funnily enough, though, on the Justice and Security Bill it was the pragmatists that were drowned out.  At issue was the possibility of allowing secret evidence in cases of national security, where, for example, intelligence sources might be compromised.  No matter the impressive unity of parliamentarians to support this idea, the party emphatically rejected this attack on natural justice.  There were a number of stirring speeches including many from people like London’s MEP Sarah Ludford, who are usually rather disappointing public speakers.  On an issue that is not widely talked about on doorsteps, the party allowed itself the luxury of the moral high ground.

And then there was housing.  There is a clear feeling in the party that housing should be a top priority.  More homes should be built; developers resisting the supply of affordable homes, while sitting on “land banks” of property with planning permission, should be faced up to; private sector lettings should be regulated more strongly.  Once again the debate was characterised stories from the front line; this was one topic in which the principled and pragmatic converged – but the voice of local communities came through the loudest.   Simon Hughes, deputy leader of the parliamentary party, another speaker who usually disappoints, delivered a barnstormer in favour of the motion.

The strongest set-piece speech that I saw came from Sharon Bowles, an MEP who delivered a powerful attack on critics of the EU and business leaders who were keeping quiet instead of speaking out.  She got a standing ovation.  So did new minister Jo Swinson, though her speech was nothing very special – it was the person they were applauding (mind you she delivered an excellent speech in the conference rally on Saturday night).

I missed Mr Clegg’s speech – though I’m not really a fan of the leader’s speech since Paddy Ashdown.  From reports it sounded as if he struck more or less the right tone.  I don’t think his attempt to portray the party as a natural one of government was all that wise.  There is a tendency for Westminster bubble types to assume that things will carry on as they are – but it is most unlikely that the Lib Dems will be in government after the next general election.  It all gives the impression that he enjoys being in government too much.  Still, he is right that government is what the party should aspire to, rather than being a constant party of protest.  And if the party can survive the next few years, then a return to government is very much on the cards.