Norman Book Draft V4
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Published in 2015 by Lamb for Leader, 95 New Cavendish Street, London, W1W 6XF © Norman Lamb 1 Contents 1/The watchtowers 4 2/Coming to terms with a tragedy 7 We lost because we lost trust. 10 We lost because we didn’t reach out beyond the party. 12 We lost because we identified too closely with Whitehall. 14 3/Giving power to people 17 Giving power to people 19 Giving rights of self-determination. 21 Trusting people. 22 4/A plan of action, a promise of more 24 We need to get ahead in election techniques 26 We need to open up party structures. 27 We need to be an intellectual powerhouse 29 Opportunity 1. Young people are Liberals too 34 Opportunity 2. We need an answer to entrenched poverty 37 Opportunity 3. We need a new approach to prosperity 50 5/My journey 58 2 “The Liberal Democrat leadership contender Norman Lamb has made the perfect case for the continued existence of his party...” Editorial in the Independent, June 2015 3 1/The watchtowers My dad was a climate scientist, a Quaker and a pacifist. He believed in seeking out the evidence for the research he was doing, and as au- thentically as possible. That meant, while other families might have gone to Torremolinos or Brittany, we would go to the Faroe Islands and Finland – north of the Arctic Circle – in pursuit of weather records. I remember in particular one trip to West Germany. One day we drove out into the countryside, and the country lane we were on just came to an end. In front of me I saw barbed wire and a wide strip of mined land along the border. To this day, I remember the watch- towers that marked the border between East and West. All along the border, on the other side of the wire, the watch- towers stood - armed soldiers with machine guns. But the guards were looking inwards, guarding the border not from an invading force but from their own citizens trying to escape. That watchtower image, a symbol of tyranny if ever there was one, had a profound effect on me and has stayed with me ever since. ** In a sense, I had Liberalism in my genes. My mum and dad were Liberals back in the day when almost no-one else was – in the 4 days when having eight MPs would have seemed like an exciting breakthrough. Mum, a scot, the daughter of a Church of Scotland minister, was a nurse. She believed very strongly in the NHS. Mum was also heavily involved in the Campaign for State Education, which fought for the introduction of comprehensive schools, because they were non- selective and mixed ability. She knew it was wrong to throw children on the scrapheap aged just eleven. Despite the fact she was then La- bour, the visionary Education Secretary Shirley Williams was a hero in our house. It is an enormous privilege to think that, decades later, Shirley would end up endorsing me to be the party leader. There is a picture of me at the tender age of seven, sporting a Liberal rosette in support of our candidate in Guildford at the 1964 election. I must have been a Jo Grimond man even then (Jo was leader until 1967). When we moved to Norfolk when I was a teenager – and where my Dad - a world-leader in his field - set up the Climatic Re- search Unit at the University of East Anglia – I first went out canvass- ing for Malcolm Scott our candidate in South Norfolk, who had been Clement Freud’s agent in Ely. After several discussions with friends over a beer or two, I even started a Young Liberals branch in Wy- mondham. Since then, I’ve been a councillor, an MP and a health minister. I’m now standing to be leader of the party. This short book is designed as a way of diagnosing our difficulties, proposing ways forward and setting out where I want to take the party if I have the chance. I don’t expect everyone to agree with me in all respects – I want to propose major changes to the way that we run the party and how we rebuild. 5 This is just beginning. It is not exhaustive, nor is it definitive. But you will recognise in this short book that a number of themes come up again and again: • We need to involve young people. • We need to reach outside and open up our structures, to build a movement not just a party. • We need to get thinking again, and to wrestle – from a Liberal position – with the huge issues that lie ahead. But whether you agree with me or not, I hope it will demon- strate what drives me, what my ambition is, and how I believe we can achieve it. 6 2/Coming to terms with a tragedy I remember the moment in the 2015 general election cam- paign when my heart sank. It was when we were all told we must re- peat the mantra that we would cut less than the Tories and borrow less than Labour. It sank again when I heard the slogan about being the head of one side and the heart of the other. There are a number of problems with those slogans, but the most important one is that we were defining ourselves only in relation- ship to the others. We were saying nothing about what we were, what our purpose was - our values - and why we existed. Nick Clegg de- fined those things so beautifully in his speech after the election that 18,000 people joined the party in the following few weeks. But, during the election, we were silent on the most important message of all. You reach people, not just with statistics and warnings, but with emotion. People need to know what you are about, what drives you. Sometimes, of course, the prevailing political passion is fear. The Conservatives ruthlessly exploited fear of the Miliband-Sturgeon axis. It was very powerful and it certainly had a massive impact, as I dis- covered on people’s doorsteps. Sometimes people are inspired by more positive messages; sometimes not. Our job is to make sure the politics of hope triumphs over the politics of fear. 7 Lib Dems have an enviable reputation for putting a brave face on things. As a Liberal you are, almost by definition, an eternal opti- mist. But there is no doubt that the election results for the Lib Dems in May 2015 were a tragedy. They were a tragedy for the country and a tragedy for the philosophy I believe is so badly needed by the world, the nation, and the communities that make it up. They were also a tragedy for the party and the people who give so much of their lives to the cause – for those who had devoted them- selves to supporting constituents at local level, and who lost their seats or their jobs, through absolutely no fault of their own. Also for those who had put their heart and soul into standing for Parliament, or help- ing somebody to stand, and had put their lives on hold to do it. Even if there was no other reason to do so, we owe it to them to rebuild the party. We also owe it to them to see as clearly and fearlessly as possi- ble why our support fell back, and what we can do about it. Before I say where I think we went wrong, let me flag up two diagnoses which I believe are mistaken. We may have faced a backlash because of our involvement in government, but our involvement in the coalition wasn’t a mis- take. Nick Clegg was right to lead the party back into government for the first time in over eighty years. We did the right thing when our country was in danger of financial meltdown and political chaos. We could not aspire to government and then dodge the opportunity, and responsibility, to take part in government – even knowing the electoral risks – and then look the electorate in the face again. We could not be offered the chance of improving people’s lives and then say that, frankly, we didn’t feel like it or we didn't want to take the risk. 8 Of course we made mistakes, some of them big ones, but if you are expecting me to apologise for putting the country first – and seiz- ing the opportunity, after so long on the sidelines, to change people’s lives for the better – then you will be disappointed. The other false diagnosis is that we should have behaved like a pressure group rather than a political party – sitting on the sidelines and just trying to stop things. If that is what you believe, I can’t help you either. Both these are caricatures, of course. Not many people in our party believe either of them, but there are outside commentators who imply them. But there is also a risk that we fail to understand where we may have been the architects of our own downfall and instead con- clude that maybe the fault lies with the voters, or with the media or the behaviour of other parties. It can be painful to face up to our own mis- takes. I don’t want to under-estimate that. But I want to suggest three fundamental problems that we have to solve, and which explain why we fell back so badly.