Meeting the Challenge aims to make Lib Dem policies hang together, says Duncan Brack

Some people say that the party needs to provide a compelling ‘narrative’. Others that it needs a ‘moral core’ to its individual policies, or ‘themes’, or a set of ‘principles’, or an ‘ideology’. Whatever you call it, the party completely failed to communicate it during the 2005 election.

Which is not to say that it doesn’t exist – you can find versions of it in the preamble to the party constitution, or the 2002 policy paper It’s About Freedom, or in the entries in a book I edited in 1996, Why I Am a Liberal Democrat.

And it’s not to say that we didn’t communicate any policies during the campaign – in fact, 2005 was the first election for generations when the electorate recognised more than one idea as emanating from the Lib Dems. Polling evidence shows that local income tax, the removal of tuition fees and opposition to the Iraq war were all clearly identified with the party.

What we didn’t manage to do was to make it all hang together, to communicate what the party stands for in a way which led to people understanding instinctively what our position would be. For example, if we had succeeded in associating the party with the ‘fairness’ theme used in the pre-manifesto, people might then have understood that local income tax was a Lib Dem policy because it was a fair one (polling evidence showed that they did think it was fair, and they knew it was a Lib Dem policy, but the two facts bore little relation to each other).

This is not easy to do, so a group of us on the Federal Policy Committee came up with the idea, last summer, of organising policy-making in the next parliament so that it built a coherent message right from the beginning, rather than leaving it until the election run-up to pull together a rather disparate bunch of policy papers and motions.

An important part of the same exercise is to test our existing policy platform against what is happening in the real world – in terms of economic, social, environmental and international developments – and specifically against the challenges that anyone in government in the UK is likely to face after the next election. Is our policy on climate change, for example, really adequate to deal with the growing evidence of accelerating global warming and the likelihood of a sudden dramatic shift in climate?

All this ended up as what is known as the Meeting the Challenge exercise. The FPC approved the concept in January, and the working group’s membership in March. Its aim is to produce a final report which will:

•  look at the major trends in the domestic economy and society, and the international situation, over the coming ten to twenty years, and the challenges these will throw up for politics and political parties;
•  examine the concerns, hopes and fears of the electorate and how the trends identified in are likely to interact with them;
•  consider how the application of basic Liberal Democrat principles, as set out in It’s About Freedom, to these issues might begin to present a coherent set of answers to the main challenges in politics;
•  look at how party policy stands up to the likely challenges, both ‘real-world’ and ‘political’ and where it may need development and modification; and
•  using this framework, map out a more detailed programme of policy development for the next four years.

The final paper will be subject to debate at the 2006 autumn conference. The first output from the exercise will be a consultation paper, available in August 2005. This will be discussed at a major consultative session at Blackpool and, we hope, at regional and local party meetings throughout the party, and within party bodies and publications.

Liberator 302 contained much discussion of various proposals put forward after the election to reform the party’s policy-making process, partly to get away from the perceived problem of being attacked on policies agreed by conference but not included in the manifesto.

Let me assure you that this debate has nothing at all to do with the Meeting the Challenge exercise (just as well, given the highly suspect analysis on which it was based). The FPC is thinking about this separately, and will report back to conference on its proposals.

The point of this exercise is to start to build the party’s political narrative. Starting from the ideological framework approved by conference in It’s About Freedom, we want to make sure that the policies and campaigning messages, which the party will derive from that set of core beliefs, together build a coherent and consistent picture of what Liberal Democrats in government will do.

It’s an ambitious task and we’re bound to upset people along the way – indeed, if we don’t, we’ll probably have failed in our aim of being clear about what Liberal Democrats are about.

I look forward to contributions from Liberator readers.

Duncan Brack is vice chair of the ‘Meeting the Challenge’ working group, and also chairs the Federal Conference Committee.