2 posts tagged “accountability”

In response to  Lynne Featherstone's piece at libdemvoice and the comments there.

From what I’ve seen of the comments everybody responding is a lib dem. (I’ve voted lib dem, paid my membership, contributed towards leadership campaigns, set up mailing lists, and tried to kickstart technical stuff, membership no 82***91 FYI)

I think it’s fair to say that there is nowhere internal to discuss these things.

Conferences are once a year, expensive to get to, expensive to get into, and policies are watered down before they are even discussed there.

The manifesto discussion website resulted in 0, Nil, Zilch impact on the manifesto, and is now not even working.

In my (admittedly limited) experience local parties are frequently only interested in either very local issues (speedbumps in feock parish, somebody building 6 flats in perranwell), or the pure party politics of council elections and squabbles.

The mailing list servers are a great idea - but like many grassroots good ideas the great and good are almost entirely absent - a few MPs are on the local community party lists, but don’t expect any debate or interest regarding actual policies onthem with anybody who has any say.

The lib dem members website is next to useless - the only useful working feature is the mailing lists, and websites - but those don’t ammount to much if you’re only talking to yourself, or preaching to the choir and ignored by relevent party officials. I can’t get budgets, funding, upcoming manifesto ideas, policies, etc through it. I can’t get much information from the public website either - try finding the LD policy on drug liberalisation (no wonder Nick Clegg seems to ignore/forget it) - it’s not linked from anywhere (not even the news stories on drugs), its in the equivilent of Douglas Adam’s “locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying beware of the leopard”.

*sigh*

I feel that these blogs are the only way to shame party officials into listening or responding, what’s more, as a Voter (and I really wish more party campaigners and officials would think like a voter rather than a politico), I want a transparent and accountable party, the same as I want a transparent and accountable government. If we set the standards within the party, people can expect us to set standards in local and national government - a very positive thing.

Anyway, despite it’s many faults, I still support the party (in my voting, donations, time, opinion and blogging) - it’s the best party we have in the UK, and we have better parties here than in the US and much of europe - it’s just that like Oliver - I want more.

Write to your MP, sign the petition, blog about, join the Facebook group, write to the press.