To recap, four ancillary lessons I think the Liberal Democrats need to learn from are:
- Don’t judge Presidential candidates by their TV appeal: “voting in the current circumstances for a new President that you’re not sure can do the internal administration part of the job really well is asking for deep trouble for us all”.
- The party needs to recognise three levels of misbehaviour: “a sensible post-Rennard review of the party’s expected standards of its members and disciplinary rules should include expanding that range of ‘not serious enough for expulsion but serious enough for other sanction’ offences”.
- The English Party needs reform: “at the very least, stripping how the indirect method of election for the English Party Executive, replacing it instead with direct elections, along with a review of its functions to see what really needs to be done at an English level rather than devolved up or down”.
- Who gets the party whip is a matter for the whole party: “in a modern democracy, political parties are the collective property of all their members, not just a select few”.
I fear what will happen instead is that there will correctly be much effort to implement the recommendations of the Morrissey Report and ancillary reviews, but that it will then stop there – rather than the party also learning these four other lessons too.
Do take a read of the full posts and let me know your views.