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.

9 We lost because we lost trust. We don’t need to revisit the arguments about the pledge on student fees to realise that it massively undermined us. But the bottom line is that we broke people’s trust. Once you are defined for hav- ing done that, people stop listening to you and they stop hearing. If they hear you at all, it is through a miasma of cynicism. The seeds of that loss of trust were probably sown right at the very start of the coalition with the image of the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister in the Downing Street rose garden. I recognise that it was important to demonstrate to the public that coalitions work. The whole narrative in the 2010 election was that it would all be a disaster. Even so, ultimately, it looked too cosy. And so many of our voters concluded that they had been misled. They had voted against the Tories and had ended up getting the Tories. It is, of course, easy to say this with the benefit of hindsight but we should have made more of an effort to demonstrate that this was a professional, business rela- tionship, pursued for the sole reason of the national interest. We should have said that there were things that we would try to do, and promised to fight for them all the way through this parlia- ment. We should have explained that we would sometimes have to make compromises, but promise to say where we were making them - and why - and where we were achieving Liberal objectives. We should have explained the trade-offs we were making, and said why we might have compromised on something to achieve something more im- portant.

10 Perhaps we were guilty of treating the coalition as a prize in itself. And perhaps we didn't demand enough and conceded too much. The truth, of course, is that the whole experience of going into Gov- ernment for the first time in the entire post war period placed an enor- mous strain on a relatively small party. The civil service machine took time to adjust. For too long we had inadequate support. But the true bottom line is that we made mistakes. If we had developed a consistency of approach all the way through, then I think we might have stood the chance of a better out- come. But, even so, it was always going to be a massive risk for the Liberal Democrats. In our first-past-the-post system, which encour- ages lots of tactical voting for all parties, a coalition with either of the other parties is likely to fracture our vote. My conclusion is that no small party - having witnessed what happened to the Liberal Dem- ocrats - is now going to risk coalition under a first-past-the-post elec- toral system. That, in itself, is disturbing. Coalitions provide political stability in circumstances where no one party has an overall majority. This is another reason why our voting system must change. It is com- pletely discredited - one in four of those who voted opted for UKIP, the Liberal Democrats or the Greens. Those voters got just 10 seats. Meanwhile, the SNP, with 4.7% of the vote got 56 seats. So the intro- duction of proportional representation would have to be a condition of any future coalition. The fascinating question for this Parliament is whether the La- bour Party will now conclude that it is in their self-interest to join the growing calls for electoral reform.

11 But even if we could reach an agreement for a progressive co- alition we would still need to have a clearer strategy to explain to the electorate what we are agreeing, and why and where we are compro- mising – and what the objective needs to be.

We lost because we didn’t reach out beyond the party. Greater trust will help us to be more effective in other ways, too. Lib- eralism is instinctively outward-looking, not tribal. It wants to engage with others, and to learn wherever it can. And, as we re-build our party, we will have the enormous advantage that our values are, in truth, widely shared throughout our society. In many ways, they fit the spirit of our age, Increasingly in 21st century Britain, our fellow citizens believe that they have a right to be who and what they are and to be able to reach their highest potential - individually, in their family, and with their close communities. They don't want the state interfering with their lives. That doesn't mean that Liberalism is about relativism. I don't believe that it means there are no values, or nothing to believe in. Quite the reverse. Nor does it mean that we escape tough choices or difficult decisions, Politics is often about trade-offs or balancing competing rights or demands. But it does mean we can take heart from the fact that, in their gut understanding, many more people - and perhaps most young people - have Liberal instincts. Nor is it to say that those who rule us, even in the democratic West, are gut Liberals either. There are emerging tyrannies even here – in the way people are employed, in the way the global economy

12 pushes aside the small and powerless, in the intrusive controlling sys- tems used by organisations that manage our lives. The challenges are certainly there for Liberals, but the ideas are not alien to people. In- deed, people are disturbed by these threats and need a party that will consistently challenge them and fight for the principle of powerful cit- izens. For a long time we have failed to connect consistently with people’s innate Liberalism. This goes back long before we were in Government. London is probably the most Liberal city in the world, yet we lost all our seats there but one, partly at least because we have failed to reach out to people – to the causes and campaigns and to the innovators and entrepreneurs and those delivering brilliant change in social enterprises who are putting Liberalism into practice. We need to reach out, because we can’t win if we behave like an exclusive sect. We also need to build political alliances, even with people we don’t agree with. That includes groups of people who we oppose for a range of very good reasons, even perhaps UKIP. UKIP are pretty an- gry that they have been cheated by the electoral system, and they have been cheated. It would be ridiculous of us to say: “Well, they’re UKIP, we disagree with them on most things very strongly so we can't possibly work with them”. Actually, we have a common cause in breaking a corrupt system, so we should work with them on this specific cause. And if we should work with them, we can certainly work with the Greens and indeed Labour people who share our view. And I think we should explore the idea of a constitutional con- vention, I don't know whether there is a sufficient, broad consensus

13 that change is needed amongst civic society, because at the moment it is the minor parties that are complaining most loudly about unfairness. But there is clearly an opportunity to build a board alliance for reform if we can take it.

The same will be true of the European debate over the next few years, where Liberal Democrats must be determined to play a leading and inspiring role in securing the best future for Britain. And I can think of plenty of other big issues where we will want to lead, but also learn and co-operate with others. But we don't do that if we hide away or just talk with ourselves.

We lost because we identified too closely with Whitehall. This sounds like a criticism, and it is one. As a health minister I was travelling around the country the whole time, up and down from hospitals the mental health units to health centres to care homes. I talked to huge numbers of people. I tried to do things differently, and I know many Lib Dem colleagues tried to do the same. But, despite this frenetic effort, we were perceived by the pub- lic as locked in our Whitehall offices, seeing the world through White- hall eyes, using Whitehall language, meeting the people that White- hall wanted us to meet. It meant we were seen as part of the establish- ment, rather than a radical force trying to battle our way in on behalf of the people we represented. From inside the government, it felt like

14 we were outsiders battling away on behalf of people – but, from the outside, it didn’t seem like that at all. Paddy Ashdown spent six months as leader out in the country on fishing boats, or rubbish collection vans, in hospitals and schools, to write his book Beyond Westminster. I would like to gain a similar perspective. Because it is only when you get beyond Westminster that you realise the gap between the way the big institutions ought to be- have and they way they actually feel like to deal with. That is the great gap between the political class and everyone else. This gap is obvious dealing with privatised services as well as big centralised bureaucracy. Perhaps the symbol of this gap is the Child Support Agency, the institution that dominates MP postbags, a nightmare organisation that leaves people feeling completely power- less. Lives are put on hold interminably as they battle a remote bureau- cracy. The familiar tone of voice from the CSA has a kind of hector- ing lack of concern. This is the faceless system that dominates peo- ple’s lives more, the more dependent and the more disadvantaged they are. You only discover these things by getting out of Whitehall – the benefits glitches which nobody can sort out, the tax credit help- lines that go unanswered, the curt note saying that no school places are available. We all know these matter to people – the vast quangos with expensive mission statements but which never answer the phone, the mental health trust which sends someone hundreds of miles away from home right in the middle of a crisis, the huge privatised corporations where decisions are taken in secret, often in other countries, with the interests of the consumer completely ignored.

15 These are not conventional political issues, or the kind that Westminster correspondents chew over. But outside Westminster, they colour everyone’s life. They are what gets talked about, by eve- ryone – I sometimes think – except politicians.

**

Why did we do so badly? Because too many of our voters had no real idea what our values are, what we stand for – and against – so it should come as no surprise that they turned away and stopped listening to us. So it matters that someone who aspires to lead the party should set out how they see those values. That is what I do in the next section.

16 3/Giving power to people

Let me tell the story of Josh Wills. Josh is a boy with autism from Cornwall who was put into an institution in Birmingham. He was 260 miles away from home. This put enormous pressure on his family, who couldn’t see him in the week and had to travel every weekend, just to maintain contact, a round trip of five to six hours. Nobody was listening to his parents. It was incredibly frustrating for them, as they told me. I remember the conversation. Josh had been in this institution for over two years. His dad expressed his desperation and his anger that they were being treated as second class citizens. I can't stand by when I hear of this sort of failure, when you think about the impact on a family and on a very vulnerable child. So I got the commissioners in Cornwall to come up to the Department of Health and I put them in front of Josh’s parents, and I told the officials to listen. Finally, things started to happen. Josh is due home in the next few weeks. His father has joined the Lib Dems because someone had finally listened to him. I was obviously pleased that, together, we had achieved a shift, but my conclusion was that we can’t fight every battle like that. Our job as politicians is certainly to intervene in those kind of cases, but it can’t possibly be to do everything on behalf of people. And you can never make a difference for the vast numbers of people let down by the system if you try to pick them off one by one. So we have to take

17 a clear view about what is wrong with the system, and to work to change it accordingly. In that case and others where I intervened directly to challenge the system, we looked more closely at the way things worked – or didn’t work. We produced a green paper with proposals to give people new rights to challenge decisions made about them and to give them control over the money available for their care. We worked to change the system as a whole. And the system does have to change. Our public services (see next section) needs to shift so that they become much less centralised, much more flexible and much more able to support people to be inde- pendent. The system of government urgently needs to change. This country is more centralised than any other country in Europe - apart from Malta - in terms of where taxes are raised. And that determines where power lies. People feel power is remote, that they have no sense of control over crucial decisions which affect their lives. In some ways the rise of UKIP has been a response to that – not from the racists, but from people who were tempted to vote UKIP because they felt so al- ienated from government, ignored, taken for granted. We have ended up with a dependency culture in our system of government. Local communities make their plea to Government for more resources - and Government normally says no. No wonder peo- ple feel powerless. We need to reach out to them. This is at the heart of our Liberalism – the reason the party exists – which is to challenge unaccountable quangos or corporate monopolies and to take power away and give it to people. This is the same whether it is the tiny band

18 of big banks and big power companies that dominate our lives, or it is government departments or unaccountable quangos clinging to inflex- ible policies and not listening. We know the party is about taking power away from the centre and giving it to communities, neighbour- hoods and individuals. But many people don’t.

**

I said earlier that we live in a liberal age and so there are many people who will be receptive to a clear articulation of what we stand for. But we have to explain that Liberalism means something much more spe- cific to people. So we must champion those ideas – and we must show, in very practical ways how they are relevant to everyone’s lives. We need to show that we aspire to set people free in vital and important new ways. That means we have to be very precise about what we mean. What I mean by Liberalism is this: that power belongs to people. Because there is another way in which politicians need to work, as well as looking broadly and critically at the system and changing it: it is to use the power they win to hand back to people so that they can change the system themselves.

Giving power to people We Lib Dems are not old-fashioned politicians that get our excitement for the praise we receive for what we achieve for people. We have to judge ourselves by how successful we are at enabling people to achieve change for themselves. That is not a view you hear expressed

19 much in Westminster, but it has to be ours. Powerful citizens taking control of their lives. I say more about community politics in the next section, but it means we have to work to set people free, including by using the power they already have, to shape their own destiny. By people, I don’t mean the amorphous masses, in whose name tyrannical leaders claim their powers. I don’t mean a commitment to the common good – to coin a phrase used by the Green Party – that might over-ride the liberty of individuals. I mean individual people, each one of whom has an importance and a destiny of their own. That is the Liberal vision and that is mine. It means that no- body should be held back by poverty, ignorance, conformity or fear – or by the arbitrary behaviour of public and private authority, or by unaccountable bureaucracies. Everyone should be treated equally - no second class citizens. Every person has an equal right of self-determi- nation. Our opportunity is that those values are shared by millions of our fellow citizens. Our challenge is partly that they don’t yet see the Liberal Democrats as a party they can commit to - that actually repre- sents the values they hold dear. But also, in part, we haven’t always thought through what this self-determination means in the twenty-first century. We haven't made the case that pollution and climate change is a terrifying threat to liberty; that increasingly tyrannical welfare bu- reaucracies can challenge liberty; that the economic system, if it only allows the wealthiest to thrive and earn and do business, can also be a threat to liberty; that the public services we receive don't always em- power people. Too often they are paternalistic. 'We know what's best

20 for you'. Take health, for example. I've witnessed, so often, people feeling done to. Not listened to. But instead, you can give people a personal health budget. You can give people who need care a personal budget. You can combine the two, ideally, for people who are receiv- ing both. In this way you give people control. I remember the man in the wheel chair who took part in the trials of personal health budgets. He described to me how the revolving door of endless admissions to A and E came to an end. He was able to take control of his life. It made all the difference to his sense of wellbeing and control. This is power- ful. You also need to make sure that the way these are administered remains flexible and supportive. If you look at different public services you can apply similar approaches. In the workplace, you can give people a stake in the or- ganisation where they work, and you can do so in both public and pri- vate sectors. You can do it in housing, by giving tenants control of their housing block or their street.You can do it in communities, whereby the council can choose to just dictate what happens in a com- munity or you can give people in that community the right to decide things for themselves. We can use the power of the Internet to crowd source ideas from people for their communities. We can devolve budg- ets to enable those ideas to be realised.

Giving rights of self-determination. I used to work as an employment lawyer in private practice, a job that lent itself to someone with campaigning zeal. My proudest achieve- ment was taking on the Ministry of Defence on behalf of thousands of servicewomen, who had been dismissed for becoming pregnant. The

21 outrage of women who had served their country being forced to choose between having a baby and their job, between an abortion and a P45, struck a chord with many people. As chairman of the Armed Forces Pregnancy Dismissal Group, I got our voice heard across the media here and abroad. I believe in the importance of legal rights and the rule of law. It is at the heart of everything liberals stand for. It applies in many areas of life – and death. So when it comes to that moment when you say to yourself that you want to bring an end to your life, because you are terminally ill, or because you face some impossible condition, should it be you or the state that decides what to do? The answer is that I want the power to decide that myself. I am hostile to drugs – legal and illegal – because of the impact that they can have on individuals and families. But should it be me that decides whether to smoke a joint, even if there are risks attached – as there are, of course – or should it be the state that criminalises me? My answer is that it should be me that decides. The state has a very important role to educate but not always to decide on our behalf, any more than it decided whether I should smoke a cigarette because of the risks to my health, or whether I should drink alcohol because other people abuse it. And where someone suffers from an addiction - whether to alcohol, tobacco, or to cannabis, we should recognise this as a health problem, and treat people accordingly.

Trusting people.

22 “Liberalism means trust in people, tempered by prudence,” said the great Victorian Liberal William Ewart Gladstone. He went on to dis- tinguish it from Toryism, which is “distrust in people, tempered by fear”. Those ideas still apply today, and the Liberal view is that we should be trusting people, giving power to people, in every aspect of their lives. The other side of that is that each of us also has a responsibility. With freedom goes responsibility, and I don’t think the party has talked enough about that. We protect our freedoms partly by imposing responsibilities on ourselves, recognising that we usually work better together in communities, whether they are physical communities, so- cial or political communities, or sometimes cyber-communities. The principle applies to the stewardship of our planet and our responsibility to future generations. It also implies the need to protect and empower globally. It is our responsibility to do that; in fact, our own liberties depend on it. We can’t be an island of liberty, surrounded by an impoverished, struggling, desperate world, surrounded by des- perate people, risking everything on their barges and tiny boats to reach our shores. We can’t be Liberals in isolation.

23 4/A plan of action, a promise of more

After I graduated, I spent a year working as a researcher for a Labour MP, at a time when parliamentary staff weren’t expected automati- cally to share the politics of their employer. For part of that time, I was moonlighting as the chair of Tottenham Liberals. I even sneaked off to Liverpool Edge Hill for a weekend to meet its new Liberal MP, David Alton, and learn about the model of community politics that had been so successful in Merseyside and to find out about radical Liberal ideas like housing cooperatives. The idea of local campaigners making a concerted effort to un- derstand the concerns of their community, and lend power and cam- paigning force to people in that area – to help them understand and use the power they already have – really excited me. That was 1981, and it was only eleven years since the most disastrous election the party had endured, at least since the low point of 1950. The 1970 election gave us only six MPs, and it should have been a nadir for the party. In fact, that autumn at the Liberal Assembly, the party debated and passed a Young Liberal resolution that first en- capsulated the community politics approach. It was designed not just to win elections – though it did – but to bring about meaningful change. It was a technique which went a long way beyond politics – allowing people to “take and use power”, and to take charge of their

24 own lives, fulfil themselves as individuals and improve their quality of life. Electoral success may come as a by-product of that, as it has done for us in North Norfolk, but giving people power is the goal we should seek above all. That is the purpose and, if it stops being the purpose, the electoral success eludes us too. Here is the paradox. Community politics was a powerful idea. It still is. We need to understand that true community politics is not simply about Focus leaflets, resident surveys and street petitions. These are important, but they can’t be everything – especially now that residents are bombarded by leaflets of all colours, demanding attention from all parties. The Lib Dems don’t exist simply to deliver millions of leaflets, but to change millions of lives. The world has changed since 1970. Community is not neces- sarily the same as locality. Environmentalists, the gay community, ad- vocates of women’s rights, are all communities that span the globe. Modern technology has meant that leaflets are just one end of a ca- cophony that chatters away all the time, on Facebook, Twitter, in a range of media outlets. We have to master the technology for elections, but for more than just broadcasting propaganda, to engage and em- power, to inspire communities. People will listen to us and trust us to the extent to which our community politics is real. The challenge is that political parties are not geared up to this world. Their structures have barely changed for a century. They are organised in an increasingly desperate attempt to impose party lines on their diverse members. Their communications are organised to nar- row debate, to avoid controversy, to manage rather than to inspire.

25 We have to reinvent our party to make it fit for a world where far fewer people are interested in joining political parties – to learn from Avaaz or 38 Degrees that people want to do more than just pay a subscription and deliver bits of paper. They want to be involved, as directly as possible, in the business of changing the world.

**

This is my plan to get us back in power. It isn’t simple or easy. But it will be exciting, if we can get it right.

We need to get ahead in election techniques The election result has left the liberal voice in our political system sadly diminished. We will have to fight harder than ever to be heard. In the 1990s, we led the field with our campaigning. Our rivals copied us and moved ahead, and we have been left too often using the old techniques with decreasing levels of success. Sometimes we have even found ourselves repeating the mistakes of our rivals, trading meaningless slogans with them. We need to ask, as honestly as we can, whether those messages really get under the skin of communities. Is it meaningful to people? Does it shift people’s votes? Does it give people a reason to vote for us? We need to be once again a formidable campaigning machine at every level, and in all elections. We once prided ourselves on being the best, but now this is a myth we need to explode. We were once, we are no longer, but we can be so again. We will learn from others – at home, through reaching out to successful campaigning organisations,

26 through adopting successful ideas no matter where they come from, empowering and training our volunteers. We must also look abroad, to Europe, but also to Canada, where our sister Liberal Party fights in first-past-the-post elections against Conservative, Socialist, Nationalist and Green Parties. Having taken the worst electoral beating in their history, they are now resur- gent. We can learn from the best to be our best and I believe we will.

We need to open up party structures. Let’s explode the old myth “where we work, we win.” This is an insult to those who dedicated years of their lives to their communities who lost, and through no fault of their own. It is based on the idea that we can be confident about our campaigning techniques and, as I said ear- lier, we can’t be. Without that confidence, the phrase “where we work, we win”, turns people into cannon fodder. I know just how hard campaigners worked during the election. I left my own seat to try to help others win. It was a risk, but I decided that it was the right thing to do. In the run up to the election, I visited forty key seats – more than a dozen of them in the final weeks of the campaign. I saw for myself that - up and down the country - our com- mitted teams of activists simply could not have worked any harder. I also spoke to many committed activists frustrated that their contribu- tion to our campaign had been limited to delivering leaflets and stuff- ing envelopes. Our party has such talented and knowledgeable mem- bers, and all too often that experience and energy is wasted because our party structures lock them out when decisions are made.

27 But beyond our activists, there is another group of people who our structures and habits exclude, but who represent enormous re- sources for Liberalism – the broader membership and the millions of Liberal-minded people beyond the party. We need a major reform of party structures to bring them in. This will also provide a counter-bal- ance to the party’s failure to build diversity inside. There are good rea- sons for this, but it still needs to be tackled. We can’t aspire to power as a liberal party which believes fundamentally in diversity, and yet remain the least diverse political party in the country. For example, we have a highly complex committee system, which I don’t fully understand myself. This means that the people who attend party conferences as voting representatives are elected by local parties, and they become in turn the electorate for a range of other structures. It means that people who get very few votes are given a mandate for a range of other elements, and are given huge influence about which way the party swings. We have to question the democratic legitimacy of this. There are plans to open up voting at conference so every member who attends is able to vote. But this isn’t enough. It must be possible now to allow every member access to the conference online, and I see no reason why they shouldn’t be able to vote online as well. Because if we don’t give our new members a sense of engagement, they will drift away, and their attendance at con- ference anyway depends on a range of things like wealth, disability, work and family commitments. Let’s lead the way again in opening up party democracy. We may also need to rethink the way the party thinks along such Westminster tramlines. There is a strong liberal case for positive

28 action when our culture holds people back, but we must also tackle the root causes of the problem. Why not support the provision of childcare services for candidates and bursaries for those from disadvantaged backgrounds? Selecting diverse people is not enough: we must support them properly, and end the attitude that candidates should be grateful simply for the chance to stand. We also need to open up in other ways to bring in the Liberal voices and thinkers from outside, as I explain below. But the key is that our members and activists – even our occasional supporters – all have a role to play in the emerging new politics. We need to behave like a business start-up, taking on the cor- porate dinosaurs, disrupting the market, growing quickly on the back of a great idea whose time has come – and using the power of brilliant young minds to drive us forward. But it needs to be an internet start- up, using a big idea that their external stakeholders – millions of peo- ple involved because they want to be – are part of the energy which is giving them success.

We need to be an intellectual powerhouse Michael Portillo wasn’t right about everything, heaven knows. But he was right about this: parties of opposition become governments only when they become the heart of a swirling focus of new thinking. The Liberal Democrats have been living on our intellectual capital for too long, and the world has moved on – we need practical ideas but we also need to develop our philosophy to apply it to the new century. As I said before, the failure of our party in government, and for some years before, was in defining, communicating and showing these

29 clear, consistent and courageous values in action. So we need to be- come an intellectual powerhouse, building on the legacy of great Lib- eral visionaries – Mill, Beveridge, Keynes, and so many others. We need to show the foresight of Jo Grimond, leading a tiny parliamentary force in the 1960s, when we stood alone in favour of Britain’s place in Europe, supporting worker co-operatives, at the cutting edge of envi- ronmental thinking, gay rights, travellers rights, a women’s right to choose – and of course fighting apartheid. That is the party of courage and commitment that inspired my parents, and led to me to put on my first Liberal rosette while still at primary school. Campaigning attracts people’s votes at specific elec- tions, but it is ideas that attract lifelong committed supporters and ac- tivists. We need both. We do have advantages today over the party that Grimond led a generation ago. Technology enables us to share ideas and bring peo- ple together wherever they are and whenever they choose to partici- pate. People can take part in debate as Liberals from the other side of the world, if they want to. We can have special ideas conferences, spe- cial events to focus on specific problems. We can use the whole gamut of online reports, commissions, essays and thinking, from people deeply committed to the party and those who are not. But we do have to define the problem more clearly. Lib Dem conferences have always been havens of open-minded debate. Lib Dem members have always been a more open-minded conduit for new thinking to enter mainstream politics. We have often failed to take full advantage of the new approaches that come up through this route, partly because politicians can stuck in the ferocious minute-by-minute

30 insanity of the Westminster village. Or more recently because those who lead the party have been stuck in Whitehall – rather than outside in the country, witnessing for themselves how ordinary people strug- gle with the institutions they have created. We need to find a way that the leadership of the party can de- velop its role in the far-sighted promotion of new thinking, based on Liberal values. We need to re-connect the party’s leaders – and the Party’s campaigning structures – with the world of ideas. Because no amount of special ideas conferences will solve the problem if the party’s leaders are not there, or – if they do come – only sweep in to make a speech before they sweep out again. Again, Jo Grimond was the model of a politician who regarded himself as a thought leader, and was able to carve out a political space for thinking. That is the kind of leader I aspire to be – leading a think- ing party, which regards it as the central purpose, not just to win power but to solve problems, point to new directions, rethink big ideas and provide an intellectual leadership for the nation. If we can win the battle of ideas and combine that with really effective election cam- paigning, we can become an unstoppable force. Grimond managed to attract key opinion-formers into the party because they were inspired by the ferment of ideas – people like Lu- dovic Kennedy, and all the young people who are now senior members of our party. They came because they were drawn in by the intellectual energy. We need a leadership again that is receptive to new ideas, that isn’t afraid of them. Which welcomes challenging debate, rather than fearing it will rock the boat.

31 That’s why the party needs to decide to open up to the outside world, and to let them challenge us to think afresh. The world faces the most enormous challenges - the impact of mass migration or cli- mate change, the challenges of an ageing society, generational fair- ness, and growing inequality. We will be completely irrelevant if we’re not radically distinctive. If we are just a pale shadow of other parties, then really, what’s the point – but you can’t build this kind of openness with closed party structures. My message to the millions who share our values is: we appre- ciate you, we want to learn from your successes – in science, in the arts, in technology, in business, in social enterprise, in voluntary or- ganisations that transform and empower the lives of vulnerable people. That’s how we will not just rebuild a Liberal party, but will build a Liberal movement.

**

We have prescriptions for the nation and we need to apply them to ourselves. That means realising that people are a resource. Our mem- bers are a resource. The wider Liberal world is a resource for Liberal- ism, just as patients and their families are a potential resource for the NHS. I don’t want to pretend that the task of rebuilding the party is simple or easy, or that these reforms are somehow so obvious that our predecessors failed us. But, like any small start-up taking on establish- ment giants, we can only win by outsmarting the competition. Our next leader must be willing to ask tough questions, challenge orthodoxy

32 and drive innovation. What new technologies can we deploy to level an unfair playing field and how can our activists make best use of them? Should we continue to rent a large Westminster HQ when we need to focus on winning on the ground? How can we accurately iden- tify our supporters without wasting a fortune on flawed polling? These are all questions we must answer. As leader, I would start with the basic principle that we should return to what community politics is about: giving people the power they need to bring about meaningful change, and having the expertise, strategy and resources to bring that about. Making sure we lead the way on these techniques – including devolving resources to commu- nities to crowdsource ideas for their area. That’s what I offer. Becoming an effective campaigning force again. Bringing in big thinkers from outside the party. Working with people outside the party so that we become the fulcrum of an outward- looking movement – not the heart of an inward-looking sect. But I believe that, if we do this – and if we wrestle transpar- ently with the huge issues we face as a nation – then I believe we will attract those young people who share our values, who are seeking a cause beyond self, and have not always seen us as the focus for their energies until now.

**

It will be clear if you have read this far that I believe that, while we must confront some of the mistakes we have made, there are also huge opportunities for us if we can organise to grasp them.

33 The most immediate of these is the looming European referen- dum. The Conservative Party is in danger of tearing itself apart over this issue. David Cameron is due for a return of John Major’s ‘bas- tards’. We are critical of many aspects of the way the European Union is managed and held to account, but we are the only party that is wholeheartedly in favour of European co-operation. We must speak for the Liberal majority that doesn’t want us to withdraw behind our borders, frightened of the world. But there are other opportunities and I have chosen three of them to set out here.

Opportunity 1. Young people are Liberals too. During last spring conference, the Daily Mirror called me and told me someone was making allegations about our son and drug use. We have two sons, and together we have been through something of an emo- tional roller-coaster. We have spoken about this very publicly since. So when I took up the issue of the legalisation of cannabis, it wasn’t because I wanted to encourage people to use drugs. Quite the reverse, in fact. What I’ve been campaigning for, in both drugs policy and mental health, hasn’t been about me pontificating over some kind of theory. It is based on our direct experience. My instincts are pretty hostile to drugs, because of their health and social impacts, but I am now convinced that it is ridiculous to criminalise someone for using cannabis. It is particularly ridiculous given that another drug that kills 100,000 people a year is endorsed by the government as a source of

34 tax revenue - that government drags its feet on plain packaging to dis- courage the young from smoking tobacco, while still insisting that we prosecute people for smoking cannabis. The double standards are par- ticularly sharp when you think that many of those in government had youthful indiscretions along similar lines, and got away with it, while other less privileged members of their generation were taken to court and had their lives and careers blighted. Even David Cameron voted for the UN to explore international legalisation when he was a backbencher, but turned his back on the idea when he came to power. Young people understand this in a way that the establishment doesn’t, and they tend to be instinctively liberal. They believe the state shouldn’t restrict their freedoms without a very good reason. We need to speak to those values because they are what we are about, and we need to be prepared to be quite radical. If the state of Colorado can shift drugs policy in this way, and the world hasn’t caved in – and as a result young people aren’t buying this dangerous sub- stance from criminals – then we can do the same.

Young people tend to be Liberal My reason for making this case here is that young people often have a clarity about these issues that is lacking elsewhere. They believe in the same dynamic, entrepreneurial society, the same open, problem-solv- ing society that we do. That is why they are both a challenge and an opportunity for us. They look to us, it seems to me, to pioneer these ideas as prac- tical politics. Because the Lib Dems and their predecessors have done

35 that repeatedly – over Europe, home rule for Scotland and Wales, abortion and divorce law reform and, most recently, freeing the low- paid from income tax. The script usually runs as follows: first Labour and Conservatives profess themselves appalled; then they set up com- missions to give themselves cover for adopting Lib Dem policies. Then they legislate and, finally they take all the credit. We have seen this cycle so often we have almost come to take for granted the Lib Dem role as the catalyst in our politics. But our relationship with young people as a party has to be two-way. I want to listen to and be inspired by young people and, in turn, strive to inspire them. Liberal Youth, whose membership I’m de- lighted to say has doubled since the election, reflects a diverse twenty- first century Britain. They are the core of the future of our movement. It is a two-way relationship just as our relationship with the 18,000 new members is two-way. It isn’t about how we choose to in- volve all that influx of people in the party. It is rather how they will choose to reshape our party for us. That doesn’t mean that what we believe needs to be fluid. Our future lies in clarity – making it clear what it is that motivates and drives us. So that when people ask what the Liberal Democrats stand for, the answer lies in our values, and the policy proposals and action plans that at all times reflect them. Those values explain to people – and not just young people- why we pressed for equal marriage, why we defend the Human Rights Act, why we believe our country is better united, and at the heart of the EU, why we want to lift the lower paid out of tax, why we are obsessed with investment in education, particularly for those from

36 poorer backgrounds, why we stand for opportunity and want to see a dynamic economy where young people can succeed as entrepreneurs. It explains why I, as a minister, stood up for those facing the chal- lenges of mental ill-health and drug addiction – and against the abom- ination of so-called gay conversion therapy. Once people understand our motivations to set them free, we are ourselves set free to be radical. This is how a recent editorial put it in the Independent:

“The Lib Dems have made mistakes, and been punished by the voters accordingly. They need not, though, be placed in eternal purgatory for the tuition fees fiasco. Mr Lamb has reminded us that his party still exists and, after a fashion, matters. The pro- cess of redemption begins.”

I believe this is true, but the way back is by inspiring young people, and being inspired by them at the same time.

Opportunity 2. We are overdue an answer to entrenched poverty and ineffective public services. Poverty is passed down generation to generation in our country. You can see in Norfolk, watching the unemployed youngsters hanging around in the centres of some of our market towns. You know that each one of them actually has loads to offer, and has the potential for a better life, but their education has failed them. This country is scarred by the long tail of under-achievement, very closely linked to disadvantage.

37 This is an economic failure. We are under-using our human capital, and we are bound to under-perform globally if we haven’t made the most of our people. But it is also a human failure, because people can’t flourish when people are held back in this way. It is a political and administrative failure too. It means that the state institutions charged with welfare are not nearly effective enough. They can and do trap people in poverty and, the poorer they are, the more that institutional support changes to frustration, even bullying.

The prison scandal Let’s look at that problem at its sharpest. The prison population in England and Wales has almost doubled since 1993 (a 91% increase), which costs the taxpayer £1.2 billion every year. Too many politicians have supported policies to send people to prison unnecessarily, and for longer, out of political expediency. England and Wales now has an incarceration rate of 149 per 100,000 people, while Germany’s stands at just half that level: 76 per 100,000 - and this hasn’t led to Germany degenerating into lawlessness. Our policies ruin lives, increase de- pendency and encourage crime. It is a scandalous waste. It is the job of the justice system and our prisons to protect innocent people and deter crime. They aren’t doing a good job at ei- ther. More than half of all people serving prison sentences of 12 months or less reoffend within just one year. The evidence suggests that this is because prison is an ineffective means of dealing with the root causes of offending behaviour. We should introduce a presump- tion against short sentences, and require sentencers to explain their

38 justification whenever they use a short sentence, because sentencers too often opt to send someone to prison unnecessarily. Then the savings realised through reducing the prison popula- tion could be invested in better resourced and more robust community sentences, including drug and alcohol treatment, support for people with mental ill-health, beneficial work and restorative justice. We must also review the excessive use of remand for people who have not committed serious violent crimes: as many as 70 per cent of those re- manded in custody never receive a prison sentence. Then there is the expensive scandal of incarcerating children. Children and young people under the age of 21 who commit crime often face a complex mix of problems, and have often themselves been victims of mistreatment. We should deal with them as people first. Two thirds of under-18s released from incarceration reoffend within a year, as do three fifths of 18- to 20-year-olds. Again, it is pretty clear that our out-dated model of mass incarceration of children and young people, through Young Offenders Institutions and Secure Training Centres, has failed. Rather than repeating their error with the Conservatives’ pro- posals for a vast Secure College, we must look again at welfare-based approaches, like small secure homes for children and young people, for the very small number who actually require incarceration. This will lead to fewer children and young people going on to live lives of crime. Overall, our objective should be to halve the prison population in ten years, and get it down to the German level. Bear in mind that the Finnish model, which cut its prison population almost three-fold

39 since 1960, reducing crime and saving taxpayers’ money. It can be done.

The mental health campaign When I became a health minister, I realised I had to be on a mission. For example, I found the scandal of thousands of people ending up in police cells as a result of a mental health crisis intolerable in a civilised society. So I was totally driven to get the numbers down everywhere. We did it by way of a Crisis Care Concordat. We got all the key national organisations to commit to it. It sets standards in mental health crisis care for the first time. We got every area to draw up their own plans for how they were going to achieve it. But we were very clear that we must cut the number of people who ended up in police cells by 50% over a two years period. The difficulty is that, since it was a crisis, it was tempting to become something of a Stalinist. I was so driven by the moral imperative of ending this scandal that I wanted to say: “Just do it!” On the other hand, I wanted to make the system work in such a way that it would carry on working after I had gone. By dynamic local action - and a new focus, driven by the Concordat - we achieved that 50% reduction. And I wanted to tackle the broader scandal of poor mental health services. How could it be right, I felt, that you get standards and rights when you get cancer, but in so many cases – when your health difficulties are mental – you get treated like a second class citizen - no rights of access, with people shunted around the country looking for a bed.

40 I was determined to make sure we imposed access standards in mental health services, especially in early intervention for psychosis and in access to psychological therapies. The first ones came into ef- fect in April. They are probably what I’m proudest of in my time as a minister. Within the confines of the job, I did absolutely everything I could to mark out an agenda which could achieve real equality for mental health. But, at the same time, I was acutely aware that mental health services would always be at a disadvantage under the current system. The way that the NHS works means that physical health has a range of maximum waiting times, standards and targets. I also know from my time at the Department of Health that they drive where the resources go. The Department, and NHS England, are obsessive about meeting those standards and Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) are under enormous pressure to meet them. They suck money from the system and into the acute hospitals through what is known as “Pay- ment by Results” – but which is, in reality, payment for activity. Mental health, on the other hand has no access standards and their payments are based in practice on block contracts, so the CCGs just trim some money from the block contracts every year and the men- tal health services deteriorate further. It was vital that mental health should have its own standards to achieve an equilibrium of rights in mental and physical health. It is a start that we introduced the first mental health access and waiting time standards in April, but we need comprehensive standards for all those experiencing mental ill health. It is essential that these are rolled out in full over the next 5 years.

41 The real challenge of high quality services. Let me explain this a little further. We face the most extraordinary challenge – and it is the same across the developed world – about how to maintain good quality public services, particularly for vulnerable people in our society who depend on what the state might either pro- vide or facilitate. These people have no other option. But the model that we are used to is under extraordinary pres- sure. If we look at the challenges ahead of us, demographic change for example, you have to ask: how does the model survive? How do we continue to provide excellent quality services for people who need them, given the extraordinary demographic change? For example, be- tween now and 2030, we will see a doubling of the number of people who live to 85 or above – a doubling. We have a system already under strain. We see health costs rising across the developed world at about 4% a year in part because of an ageing population, and in part because people are living with a mix of chronic conditions for many years: in 2009 1.9 million people were living with three or more chronic condi- tions. That number is going to grow to 2.9 million by 2019 - an in- crease of more than 50%. This imposes massive cost increases across the system. So how can the existing traditional model of public service provision continue to work? It either needs bucket loads more money – and there is no great appetite amongst the public to pay a vast amount of extra tax – or we have to find other ways of improving productivity and quality of service, because we know what is available doesn’t al- ways meet the expectations of a modern society.

42 So we have no alternative but to think about how we can main- tain quality services. We have to be prepared to innovate and look at different approaches across the public sector. The traditional approach first pioneered by the Labour Government was a simple contracting out of services. But there are more answers than Serco, like the role of mutuals in public service delivery. For me, the remarkable workforce in the NHS is part of the solution, not the problem. Giving a stake to all staff, ensuring that they have a voice, ending what is too often a top-down bullying model - this is the way to get the most out of people. Give them their head and they will fly. We need to push those questions more sharply. Can we have a mutual foundation trust hospital? How do we extract more productiv- ity from traditional public service delivery? What can we do to strip away those barriers to make sure there is real innovation? Are there there any regulatory barriers that focus attention on a single model of business form? What can we do to strip away those barriers to make sue there is real innovation and real diversity to match the diversity of the population.

Where governments should spend I don’t agree with George Osborne about legislating for a balanced budget. It’s ridiculous. It is showy politics, and also somewhat irra- tional. We were right to try to get the public finances sorted out, but this is an era of historically low interest rates, and the Tories now have an obsession with clearing the deficit and creating a surplus, poten- tially at the expense of highly vulnerable people and public services.

43 There is a tension in our country about this. We seem to want, as they say, Scandinavian standards of public services but US levels of taxation. But I know only too well that the UK health and care sys- tem is absolutely operating at its limit. Germany and France — sensi- ble, rational democracies, on the whole — spend about a third more on their health systems than we do. So we need to accept the case for sustained increased investment in the NHS and in social care. I learned from my efforts on mental health how strong the temptation is, once you are in government, to assume that total central control is the most effective way forward. But I also learned that these structural problems – and the injustices that follow from them – are also partly a result of central control. So, yes, I want to change the way the NHS works, in terms of transferring power to people, but I’m not convinced that there’s any overwhelming argument for shifting to a different system. The Commonwealth Fund was quite clear, for exam- ple, the NHS compares favourably with most other systems. I absolutely don’t believe in taxing for the sake of it, but I do believe in having good, effective public services. I would invest heav- ily in education, and in the early years — that’s the critical thing that dictates or determines disadvantage. I would also address some big infrastructure issues. I would, for example, use government power, be- cause Government is probably the only means by which we can achieve this, to insulate every home in our country. We have the worst- insulated housing stock in Europe and it is extraordinarily inefficient. That would provide the equivalent of a tax cut for every family, because they would be spending less on their energy, and we would also be achieving a massive saving on carbon. It is what government

44 can and should do. I would make every town and city cycle-friendly. Again, it would be a massive public health gain, again a big saving on carbon and also on pollution. We are still miles behind Denmark, Hol- land, Germany, France. And then broadband – and so on. There are big infrastructure projects we should be spending money on. The state also needs to intervene on housing. It could directly commission construction on vacant public land and either do or facil- itate the renting out of homes at a market rent which would provide more resources for social housing and significantly increase supply. There has been a serious market failure here. I would also impose a punitive tax rate on properties in London where people buy them for investment only and just leave them empty. They have done this in New York. We should act here. In London, in particular, the housing strain is intolerable.

Beyond privatisation The Liberal vision seems to me to see beyond the transfer of services to the private sector, although the private sector will sometimes have a role to play and we shouldn’t dogmatically oppose it when it makes sense. Our priority should be to improve transparency and accounta- bility. The emergence of social enterprises and mutualism provides the potential big prize in enhancing productivity, in improving quality of life, and the well-being of people who work in our public services. This is important in the NHS, where many people feel put- upon from on high. You would think it was a good, paternalistic em- ployer, but often it isn’t. There are already many examples of success- ful community services and social enterprises, especially in social

45 care, which give people a stake in the organisation. They are more fleet of foot than the traditional public sector, yet preserve the public ser- vice ethos. You have Labour on the one hand, conservative in just defend- ing the status quo. You have the Conservatives on the other, many of whom do not recognise the value of social purpose and public service ethos. The Liberal alternative, increasing the number of community- owned or mutual services, can liberate staff by giving them more con- trol. We also need to find ways of giving consumers, which means citizens, a stake in the organisation too. Often that will be in very simple ways, so that we benefit from the huge resources that are represented by service users, their families and neighbours - in other words, people -to help deliver services and provide mutual support. When I was health minister, I proposed that neighbourhood watch groups might also get involved with checking whether older neighbours were in difficulties, We have a national movement that looks out for whether our houses are being burgled, and I suggested it should also be thinking about whether there are peo- ple on our streets who have care needs, or who might just be very lonely and could do with a bit of companionship. Not to replace help from professionals, but to supplement it as the eyes and ears, and to offer friendship, kindness, and companionship. The problem with conventional privatisation is that it has failed to provide the revolution in flexibility and responsiveness that was promised. The various attempts to inject entrepreneurial, problem- solving energy into UK administration or public services have not re- ally worked as intended. Privatised utilities often look and feel much

46 like state-run utilities. In many ways, the way our public sector oper- ates is instinctively opposed to entrepreneurialism. We don’t seem to value any of those qualities that make start-ups successful in business - imagination, dynamism, flexibility, and - crucially - trust in people. Successful entrepreneurs have a huge amount to contribute to political thinking, administration, services and vision for the future. But they are not really being heard, or – where they are being heard – it tends to be for those aspects of business that are least energetic and responsive.

Devolving power closer to people We are the most centralised country in Western Europe, and that is partly because of where taxes are raised, which determines where the power lies, and – by doing so – gives rise to a kind of administrative dependency culture. In fact, I believe that because power lies very much in the centre it has generated support for nationalism. It has fuelled the demand for self-determination. But because power resides where the money is raised, devolv- ing responsibility for running services isn’t enough. The dependency culture would still remain. If my county of Norfolk wants to do some- thing innovative, perhaps to make a big investment in education — and something big is needed in Norfolk to turn the dial, to make Nor- folk a leading county in education – can we do it? The answer is that we can’t, because we make our bid to gov- ernment and they say no. We could do it at the margins, through coun- cil tax. We could have a referendum to marginally increase council

47 tax. But as a Liberal, I believe we should be enabling people in their communities to have control over their destiny. In Sweden, far more tax income goes straight to local govern- ment than it does in the UK. So I would want quite a radical decentral- isation of tax-raising powers, not only to Scotland, and not to England, because the difficulty we have in the United Kingdom is that England dominates so substantially that it unbalances everything. There would still be a feeling of remote and unaccountable power if you only de- volved responsibilities to England, and went no further. You have to devolve to the counties across England responsibility for so much more of our day-to-day lives. That implies a much more devolved, federal type of state.

Going back to Beveridge As everyone knows, the father of the welfare state was a Liberal. Wil- liam Beveridge was briefly one of Alan Beith’s predecessors as the Liberal MP for Berwick. But the principles he set out in his famous 1942 report were not always followed when his ideas were imple- mented. In particular, he warned that the state should not “stifle incen- tive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his fam- ily.” The gendered language wouldn’t be acceptable now, but the warning is important. By centralising the details of our public services, and managing them from Whitehall like a vast assembly line, we have

48 made them inflexible and unresponsive and almost certainly less ef- fective than they need to be. It is a vast and disempowering system of control, which does not really control, but it removes local responsi- bility and flair, and undermines our responsibilities within our own communities. It has also meant that our public services so often collude with inequality, at best failing to tackle underlying causes, at worst actively promoting dependence by bullying and inflexible disdain. This is not an argument for the withdrawal or privatisation of services. It is an argument to make them considerably more effective, more flexible and to reach out ahead of social problems to prevent them. It is an argument to look clearly and dispassionately at why we succeeded in slaying Beveridge’s Five Giants (squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease), yet we still allow them to come back to life again every generation. I dislike the sanctions regime in particular, where claimants are punished – often simply for mental ill-health – but it is just one way in which our services fail to live up to Beveridge’s vision. As they stand, they don’t help people to escape from that entrenched poverty. We have to reach outside to link up with those who are thinking fresh thoughts about how to make Beveridge’s ideals into practice. I don’t have all the answers. I hope that rethinking a more ef- fective welfare state will be part of our intellectual challenge in a re- vitalised party. But I do think we need to put social mobility at the heart of our design. You only have to read Alan Milburn’s two recent reports, Elitist Britain and Bridging the Social Divide, to see how so much influence is wielded in our country by those with privileged

49 backgrounds. It is a pretty unattractive situation and a sign of how much our welfare state has failed. We have put up with this situation for too long and we must be much more impatient to change it. We need a new Beveridge Report of the 21st Century. As the Tories plan massive further welfare cuts, the progressives should not simply oppose. We should come up with a progressive and liberal response, an alternative way forward which can inspire people to be- lieve that the progressive forces have better answers to the challenges of today - that entrenching the divide between rich and poor is not the only way forward.

Opportunity 3. The nation lacks a new approach to prosperity I first came across Andy Wood when he was the chair of the local enterprise partnership that covers my area. I got to know him better over the years (he is now supporting my campaign) and I have learned a great deal from him. As Chief Executive of Adnams’ brewery and leisure company, based in Suffolk, he is an enlightened industrialist, leading a company that has been growing rapidly every year, where employees have a share in the company, and customers when making purchases can round up the money and give the difference to charity. It is a company that is both a force for good and is extremely successful. There are others like it, and they present us with models of the future which can provide us with the kind of socially-responsible and high-skill econ- omy that encourages the imagination and ambition that we need as a nation.

50 The question is how much the government should shift the rules of the game to promote that kind of enterprise. My sense is that we need to clear away the frustrations, the bureaucracy, the monopo- lies, that prevent entrepreneurs with ideas from putting them into prac- tice. A number of studies have shown that companies where the staff have a stake can be more successful and more resilient. There are over 6,000 mutuals operating in the UK, with a com- bined membership of over 15 million. Their advantage is not just their resilience, but also that they make sure that the staff get a fair slice of the wealth they create, and have a continuing source of income through ownership of the companies they work for. It is quite unac- ceptable that the state has to subsidise the income of staff in big com- panies where the directors are drawing salaries of hundreds of times their employees’ basic pay. It is not a recipe for a successful economy. When I was a business minister, I commissioned Graeme Nut- tall to see where the pinch points were that were preventing new mu- tuals to emerge or successful ones to expand. The Nuttall Report’s rec- ommendations were important and far-reaching. But there is still a long way to go, especially promoting mutu- als in public services. There are, for example, now a huge number of co-operative schools, but there are regulatory barriers which make it difficult to start co-operative nursery provision on any major scale, though this has had a major impact on reducing the cost of childcare in North America and Scandinavia. Nor has the Lib Dem commitment to mutuals been widely un- derstood, and it needs to be articulated as a major political objective in a way that can be grasped by voters. But it does present us with a

51 fascinating Liberal alternative to how public services are delivered (see last section). Conservatives are prepared to let companies run public services which have little or no interest in public service, and Labour are still committed to the centralised state. For us, mutuals can retain that public service ethos while giv- ing employees an ownership stake in the organisation. As far as public services are concerned, the research suggests that the workforce of mutual suppliers don’t even need to profit from that stake. Simply having a legal stake in the organisation makes you feel you are part of the enterprise and can be a motivating factor, im- proving well-being at work and giving a sense of purpose and a feeling of control. Critically, it also improves the quality of the service. If you are looking for an economic constituency to build sup- port for our party, then this is the movement of change we need to ally with. The people who are running this kind of innovative social enter- prise, or working for them, are natural allies. But we have yet to con- vince them of that.

Business is beginning to look to us The politics of business is changing pretty rapidly. For the past cen- tury, business has been a voice for conservatism. Businesspeople have dressed conservatively and they have tended to believe in the status quo. They have yearned for stability, and they believed that would come primarily from a Conservative government. But these things are not set in stone. Throughout the Victorian age, business looked to the Liberal Party, and it is worth thinking about

52 why that was, and looking forward to why it might be happening again, if we rise to the challenge. I don’t mean that UK businesses are ready to fall out of love with the Conservative Party, thought some clearly are. But many busi- nesspeople are dismayed by the attitude of mainstream Conservatives towards foreign workers in general. They find it hard to get the key people they need into the country. They are looking for a political voice in favour of openness, hospitality, cross-border ideas and enter- prise. They are not getting these from the Conservative Party now, but these things may pass. There are more fundamental reasons why busi- ness may start to look elsewhere. For one thing, they find the way the Westminster establishment lumps all business together infuriating – as if you are somehow ‘anti- business’ when you criticise the big banks or you are somehow ‘pro- business’ when you support the monopolistic behaviour of the few. They are furious that governments have failed over a generation to tackle the structural problems about lending in the UK, especially now that the banks have decided they can no longer serve many small busi- ness customers. For another thing, they are irritated with the extreme conserv- atism of the UK establishment and its administrative machinery. Many in the business community reject a low-wage, insecure, out-sourced model of prosperity, closed to the outside world. They are increasingly outward-looking, internationalist, advocates of open borders, free travel and exchange and fresh ideas. Nor are they supporting the status quo in quite the same way. Quite the reverse, they are backing long-term thinking against short-

53 termism, vocational skills not just academic ones, and new institutions which can achieve what the old ones have failed to do. They are over- whelmingly in favour of a new skills agenda which puts confidence, resilience and creativity at the heart of a new relationship between schools and business, when the UK establishment has so often failed to look beyond academic elitism. All these reasons are Liberal ones. It doesn’t mean that all busi- nesspeople see things this way, but my experience of talking to them, and as a business minister, is that they increasingly do. I find many businesspeople I talk to want the UK to move faster in the direction of radical change – to build a green business sector that can tackle climate change. To find ways of providing support and credit to small enter- prise. To turn the broader education system upside down so that it shapes innovative, creative people, rather than academics and machine minders – a vision that was pioneered by Vince Cable as Business Secretary. There is also frustration with the narrow assumptions that the establishment persists with about business: that education has to be narrowly concerned with the 3Rs or that all business wants is a few tax breaks. There is also a growing awareness that Conservatives don’t un- derstand the driving force behind entrepreneurs. They assume it is just about money. In fact, my experience of entrepreneurs is that they enjoy the money not so much for its own sake but because it proves them right. What really motivates them, above everything else, is what Anita Roddick used to call the ability to see the world differently.

54 What drives entrepreneurs is sheer irritation with the way the world is, and the opportunity that presents itself to change it.

The ideological divide on business There is a political argument here. Do you believe business just sup- ports the status quo, as Labour and the Conservatives do? Or do you believe that they thrive and produce wealth by challenging the status quo? The Liberal philosopher Karl Popper used to say that open soci- eties – where people are free to challenge conventional wisdom, or conventional ways of doing things – were more successful, more flex- ible, and more tolerant than closed societies. That is modern Liberal- ism in a nutshell. If Conservatism wants business to support stability, Liberalism wants business to be resilient and adaptable, aware that change comes from everywhere and is rarely predictable. Business nurtures people, provides them with what they need and want. It also pays people, though not everyone, the money they need to live. But it isn’t static. It doesn’t keep still, and it is that entrepreneurial energy which makes all the difference to a radical business view of politics. Liberal business needs potential employees who are creative problem-solvers, and who are encouraged to think for themselves by the education system.

Towards a more Liberal route to prosperity This implies a Liberal interpretation of open markets. As developed by Liberals, ‘free trade’ was a doctrine that should allow the small and powerless to challenge the big and powerful. It is not, and should never have become, a system to defend the powerful against the rest of us –

55 to defend their business privileges and their monopolies. That isn’t good for the nation, it isn’t good for consumers, and it certainly isn’t good for business. Monopoly, as the our Liberal forefathers saw it, keeps people poor – and monopoly, as Cobden said, “is slavery in another form”. I believe that one of the main ways in which the non-Con- servative forces failed to make much headway in the 2015 election, just as the Left is on the back foot across most of Europe, is that it has failed to put forward a more convincing prescription for creating pros- perity than the Right. The Left talks about redistributing that prosper- ity, and that is important too, but it means that the Conservative eco- nomic case gets a clear ride – and does so just when the foundations of the economic consensus since 1979 are unravelling. It is all too obvious that finance-led growth has unbalanced the economy and left many of our communities and regions as supplicants to Whitehall. In government, Vince Cable started to make real pro- gress in securing business growth through a positive industrial strat- egy. But it is clear that banks find supporting the real economy in- creasingly difficult, and - increasingly - are barely equipped with the skills and experience to do so. It is even clear, according to new re- search by the London School of Economics, that the rate of UK growth has been lower in the decades since 1979 than it was before. None of this suggests that open markets are somehow the wrong approach. But it does suggest that the kind of market funda- mentalism which allows the richest enormous privileges and wealth, has served us badly. It manufactures billionaires and leaves too many on the edge of prosperity, here and abroad. It doesn’t create as much

56 wealth as it could. It holds us back by failing to use the skills we have available to their utmost. I feel strongly about this. It also means that three key areas need rethinking. First, the duties of company directors need to be broader. Second, we urgently need to tackle the problem of monopoly, especially the concentration of power in banking. The supermarket ombudsman, one of our achievements in government, isn’t a final so- lution to the problems of monopoly or oligopoly power but it is an important start, and it is making a difference to the way suppliers are treated. Third, we need to change the way that entrepreneurship and creativity is taught in schools, so that it is absolutely central to educa- tion. People need to be able to learn, whoever they are, how to make thing happen – whether that is personally, in politics or in business. If Westminster could grasp what it means to be an entrepre- neur, and began to model government around the idea of fast-moving, creative and strategic thinking, they might come to value the entrepre- neurial abilities in their own staff – as creative, enterprising, capable and fast. Perhaps, instead of modelling themselves on the old business hierarchies or military command structures of the past, the great de- partments of state might begin to learn the lessons of social and busi- ness entrepreneurs – determined to make a difference.

57 5/My journey

I started off at Leicester University in the autumn of 1976, studying social sciences, before switching to law. I never really got involved in student political scene there – it always seemed so far removed from reality, from the issues people had raised on the doorstep in Norfolk. I still got involved with issues I cared about. I focussed in my final year on the law on single homeless people - and got my first article pub- lished in the Guardian on this issue. And my first date with a new girlfriend was to a protest outside National Front headquarters. Ever the romantic. After a year in Westminster, and then law finals, I went back to Norwich to begin working as a trainee solicitor for the city council. It wasn’t exactly Kavanagh QC – I was prosecuting cases in environ- mental health, noise nuisance and health and safety – small things, but things that really matter to workers and consumers. You came across all kinds of absurd situations, like the guy who was using a cricket bat to stir curry in his restaurant. It was always important to me that we give people the chance to correct their mistakes and make sure it didn't happen again rather than simply throwing the book at them. But you must never be a soft touch. If you warned someone and they ignored it you had to take action to drive up standards. That’s been my ap- proach.

58 But my real passion was, as it still is, for grassroots campaign- ing. Mary and I began to work our local ward in Norwich, where we had been in third place in the previous election. In 1986 I quit my job with the city council so I could run for a seat in my ward. I won. Mary followed winning the county seat - and then our lodger also won - in a by election. I was subsequently elected as the leader of the opposition to Norwich’s Labour regime. It became apparent to me quite how con- servative Labour’s application of socialism was on a local level. When our group pioneered green politics in Norwich, at a time before such ideas were fashionable, Labour condemned us – but eventually took on board many of my ideas to make City Hall more energy efficient. In everything I did as a councillor and group leader, I worked to open up the council to the public, make it more accountable and spend pub- lic money better – radicalism, empowerment and responsibility going hand in hand. I began to think about Parliament as the best place I could fight for what I believe in. Of course, there weren’t any seats in the area regarded as winnable. So I agreed to stand as a paper candidate in North Norfolk, where we had hardly any councillors and were 15,500 votes behind the Conservative Ralph Howell. Straight after my selec- tion, we had a local by-election, which we won using the kind of pave- ment politics I had practiced in Norwich. We continued to take the fight to the Conservatives in North Norfolk. I reduced their majority to 12,545 in 1992 and then to just 1,293 in 1997 – when, despite theoretically being a target seat, we re-

59 ceived almost no support from party headquarters. Though the close- ness of the result was obviously an achievement, I wondered whether it was now time to pack up and do something else, especially now the Conservatives were in opposition and less vulnerable electorally. It was then that Shirley Williams wrote to me, pointing out that it took her three attempts to win – and that I must give it a third go. I could hardly say no. And, magically, after four more years of perseverance and untold thousands of leaflets, I won my seat with a majority of just 483 votes, unseating Conservative Party Chief Exec- utive David Prior and becoming North Norfolk’s first Liberal MP since 1918. With such a slender majority, some people suggested I should just focus on constituency business. But my view of politics has al- ways been that, when you get power, you have to work flat out to do as much as you can to change things for the better – because you might not get that chance again. So I joined our frontbench team as Junior International Devel- opment spokesperson. I worked hard to stop an export licence for an eye-wateringly expensive military grade BAE Systems air traffic con- trol system to Tanzania, an extremely poor country with no air force to speak of. I even worked to try and uncover the murky relationship between defence contractors and the Government. I was convinced that the deal was tainted. It made no sense. Eventually the Serious Fraud Office launched an investigation. I had to hand my files over to a major Serious Fraud Office investigation.

60 I took on Tony Blair over freedom of information, establishing the right for citizens to know who ministers - and the Prime Minister - are meeting. When I became a minister myself, and was told to list everyone I had met with, I thought rather ruefully that “I was responsible for this”. On the Treasury Select Committee, I found myself able to speak up for those whose rights were being undermined by powerful inter- ests, whether in highlighting the lack of transparency in credit card charges or fighting to expose the Equitable Life scandal. Re-elected in 2005 with a twenty-fold increase in my majority, I soon became the party’s Shadow Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. During that time I made the case for private investment in Royal Mail and giving all employees a stake in the business. Ater a period working as Chief of Staff to Ming Campbell, I then became Shadow Health Secretary. This was a chance to defend the NHS, to improve it, making it less bureaucratic, and to make it more accountable to the people it served. One of my top priorities was always to build support for mental health services and give them true parity with physical health. I also worked to take the politics out of it: I worked with people in all parties and outside of Westminster to develop solutions based on the evidence before us. Ahead of the 2010 election, I came close to building a consen- sus on the future funding of adult social care, before the Conservatives undermined the process with an attack on Labour’s so-called "death tax”. But more opportunities were to come.

61 Going into government Liberal Democrats don’t usually go into politics expecting to become ministers, but when Nick Clegg offered me the chance to become a business minister, I seized the opportunity to put my campaigns into practice and bring about meaningful, lasting change for the better. I tried to bring the some kind of campaigning energy from out- side government with me into government. I worked hard to force oil, gas and mining companies to reveal the secretive payments they pass to governments in the developing world in exchange for the rights to their resources. I worked to promote employee ownership, out of a belief, drawn from community politics, that businesses function best if all their workers have a stake in them. But it was at the Department of Health that I felt truly able to make a difference to people’s lives. I was finally able to implement the policy that I believe will make the most fundamental difference in improving our health as a society: to make sure that people with men- tal ill-health get exactly the same quality and urgency of care as those with an equally serious physical health problems. How can it be right that someone with suspected cancer gets to see a specialist within two weeks, but a teenager experiencing psycho- sis for the first time had no such right. I tried to be a minister who was on the side of people with mental ill-health, and other people who had been let down by the system, from autistic children given treatment hundreds of miles from their family to young LGBT people, who are some of the most likely to experience mental ill-health.

62 I am proud of what we achieved in Government. I want to be very clear about this: I will never shy away from these achievements or pretend they didn’t happen.

Why I want to be leader Some in the Westminster bubble say it will take us generations for the Lib Dems to recover. I reject that. My ambition is not to take us from a small handful of MPs to a larger handful, clutching a precarious bal- ance of power, but for us to aspire to Government. I agree that’s an ambitious target. But that’s what we exist for: to change the world. And those who say it’s impossible should look at Scotland where the electoral earthquake just happened. And their idea – nationalism – divides people, and claims we are better on our own. That idea has nothing to the power of our idea: Liberalism. I don’t think of myself as an ideologue, but I do have a set of principles which I consider self-evident. That no matter who you are, where you come from or what has happened to you, you deserve to be heard by the powerful. That through compassion and reason, our Lib- eral movement fights to help people use power to change their lives and their communities for the better. I believe in powerful citizens. Whether as a lawyer, in my constituency or as a minister, this is what I have fought for. I am running for leader of the party because I believe in our values and I want to see them put into practice. I always have done. I also know what this job entails and the pressure it brings. I was honoured to be asked by our last three Leaders: Charles Kennedy,

63 Ming Campbell and Nick Clegg to work closely with them in Parlia- ment. I could see the pressures they were under, and I know exactly the challenges leaders face, but I’m still up for it. Liberal leaders need the courage of their convictions. The courage Charles showed when we stood up against overwhelming odds and the establishment to oppose the Iraq War, as Tory and Labour MPs howled at him. It wasn’t clear then that the war would cost so many lives and unleash the evil forces that are bringing civilisation in the Middle East to its knees, but Charles warned about it. It’s a tragedy that it has taken Charles’ death for many of his opponents to finally admit that he was right. But I don’t just want us to protest and oppose. I don’t want us to seek out votes no matter what. I don’t want us to jump on every bandwagon that goes by. If you want this, then please don’t vote for me. But if, like me, you want to build a Liberal movement, to shape a Liberal government for a Liberal age, and put those principles into ac- tion, then I ask for your support.

**

As leader of the Liberal Democrats, I will make sure our party exists, above all else, to give a voice to the voiceless and to give power to people. And to attract to the party the many hundreds of thousands who share these Liberal concerns, but have not thought yet about join- ing with us. This is the cause to which I have dedicated my life, and I’m hoping the party will give me the chance to take it forward.

64 That is what I have done as a lawyer, taking on the armed forces to get compensation for servicewomen dismissed for becoming pregnant. I did so as an MP, taking on multi-national arms dealers and the Blair government over corrupt deals in the developing world. And I did so as a minister, fighting for equality for people suffering from mental ill-health. I have taken on the powerful on behalf of the pow- erless and I have won. I believe we can build a radical, powerful Liberal movement, anchored in – but not limited to – the Liberal Democrats, to deliver real and lasting change locally, nationally and in Europe. If you be- lieve that too, then I ask for your commitment, support and vote. This is a Liberal age. Through passion and principle, con- sistency and courage, we will rebuild our party and make it fit for the age – and, together, we will win again.

**

Let me go back to where I started, the watchtowers that I saw as a child keeping the Russians locked behind the iron curtain on the East German border – the symbol of tyranny that drove my own Liberal convictions. Because, although we are a Liberal society, and in many ways live in a Liberal age, those watchtowers are still there. In the modern world there are new watchtowers which don’t manifest as clearly as the old ones. The rising tyranny of finance and debt, the way some people are treated at work, the dependence of pov- erty, the struggle to get a roof over your head which a dwindling num- ber of young people can afford – they are all vigilant and tyrannical

65 watchtowers in their own way. The faceless corporations and state agencies which pry into our lives, the huge organisations which dom- inate so many of the poorest, these are the new watchtowers. We may be a Liberal age but the watchtowers are, in some ways, as tyrannical as ever. Then there are the watchtowers of the mind. The invisible ones, which hold back so many in our society, by poverty, ignorance and conformity, as the preamble to the party’s constitution says. The challenge is as huge as it ever was and the Liberal insights are as ur- gent as ever too. I want to put the skills and experience I have gained in a life- time in Liberal politics at the disposal of the party, to confront those watchtowers and to tear them down. www.backnorman.co.uk

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