Can I just make a very polite suggestion to those who are briefing the press about potential changes to the way we elect leaders and who can stand in those elections to make sure that they understand our party’s processes for doing these things?

Because some things that the journalists are writing are just wrong.

Over the last week, we’ve seen a number of stories in the press which seem to be drip-feeding out some sort of process to change the rules for the election of a leader. There’s an article in Buzzfeed today which says that the rules for all this will be changed by a membership vote in November.

Lib Dem members will get the chance to debate a “supporters’ scheme” during a lunchtime session at the party conference in Brighton in September. The rule change allowing non-MPs to stand as leader, which was first revealed in The Mirror last week, is expected to be formally announced to the press in early September and put to a vote of the membership in November.

This actually conflates two very different ideas.

We already know that Vince is keen to have a registered supporters scheme. There is a debate going on at the moment about what rights those registered supporters would have. Federal People Development Committee Chair Miranda Roberts looked at some of the issues in her latest report.

Would they, for example, be able to vote in leadership elections? That’s what happened in the Labour party and that didn’t exactly work out well for them.

It would be really ironic if those people displaced by Corbyn’s election by registered supporters’ Momentum takeover of Labour then came to us and used our registered supporters scheme to turn our party into New Labour mark 2. While they are a million times better than the irresponsibly destructive government we have now, they are no respecters of individual and civil liberty. There is a big danger that the Liberal Democrats as we know it would end up as the smile on the face of the tiger of some new flaccid centrist affair which won’t change much and we need to think very carefully before we take such a move. This country is in such a dire state that radical change is vital to heal divisions and make it a kinder and fairer place.

There will be a consultation on all of this at the Brighton conference, with provision for those who can’t go to Conference to take part.

The other piece of the jigsaw is that there may or may not be a plan to allow a non-Parliamentarian to stand for leader. That may or may not have its merits but, as I said the other day, is all this process stuff where we really want to be as we approach the most intense time in the anti-Brexit campaign?

There are really important issues about the way our party is run that will be carefully considered, but I thought that it might be useful to run through the relevant items in our constitution and how that process of change would work.

First of all, let’s look at what the constitution says about how we elect the leader and who can stand.

Article 17 has the details. Here’s Article 17.1 defining the electorate:

The Leader of the Party shall be elected by the members of the Party in accordance with election rules made pursuant to Article 6.6.

Article 17.5 makes it clear who can stand – and at the moment there are only 12 possibilities:

Nominations must be of a Member of the Parliamentary Party in the House of Commons,

So, to change any of these things, the constitution would have to change. Here, article 2.10 is your friend.

2.10 This Constitution may only be altered: (a) by a two-thirds majority of members present and voting at the FederalConference; (b) where any such alteration has been submitted in accordance with theStanding Orders of that Conference by the Federal Board or any other persons or bodies entitled to submit motions or amendments under Article 8.6 and notified to Local Parties at least six weeks in advance; and (c) in the case of any alteration to the relative powers and functions of the Federal Party and the State Parties or to this paragraph (c), it is passed by the internal procedures of each State Party.



The Buzzfeed article alludes to a vote of members in November. Given that 2.10 specifies that the constitution can only change by members present and voting at a Federal Conference, this doesn’t seem to be the answer, so there would have to be a special conference. There are two circumstances in which a members’ ballot could be triggered, though. Article 6.8 allows the Federal Board to do it:

The Federal Board may, at the request of the Federal Policy Committee or of its own accord, and having considered the financial and administrative implications, resolve to conduct a consultative ballot of all members of the Party on any fundamental question where, in its judgment, the values and objectives of the Party are in issue or it is otherwise in the essential interests of the Party. Such a consultative ballot shall be in a bilingual form for all members of the Welsh Liberal Democrats.

Or Conference can decide to do it under Article 8.16:

The Conference may resolve to conduct a ballot of all members of the Party on any fundamental question where, in its judgement, the values and objectives of the Party are in issue or it is otherwise in the essential interests of the Party, and shall at the same time as considering the related resolution consider also a statement from the Federal Board as to the financial and administrative implications of such a ballot. Such a ballot shall be in a bilingual form for all members of the Welsh Liberal Democrats.

We can’t change the constitution in Brighton because we would have had to have been notified of a constitutional amendment by now. Are we seriously going to do it in Spring or at any time between Autumn and Spring as the Brexit stuff reaches its climax? You’d have trouble setting a date that wasn’t likely to be consumed by a referendum or an election.

And are we really going to spend our Spring Conference, two weeks before we leave the EU, on internal constitutional matters? I would question the wisdom of that one because it really would not look good. For me the sensible time to do all this would be September 2019.

So I hope that this is helpful in setting out how it is possible to change things in this party to check against anything you might read in the press. And it also outlines how members of the Liberal Democrats have real power to change things, unlike members of other parties.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings