It's not the unpopularity; its the 'fingers-in-the-ears-la-la-la-not-listening' that's getting to me.

For years we’ve been complaining that no one ever pays us enough attention, so I’m not going to grumble about the fact 10000 people are going to Sheffield this weekend to shout at the Lib Dem delegates. At least we’re being talked about, discussed, debated - in short, we’re firmly on the agenda. In many ways we’ve never had it so good. And I say that with no sense of irony.

A few commentators have made similar points and as usual I enjoyed reading Julian Astle’s point of view in the Telegraph.

However there is one area where I do disagree with him. Julian makes the point that more often than not the most effective politicians have got the most things done when they forget about being popular and well liked and just get on with the job regardless. He cites Tony Blair post Iraq war and Mrs. T. from about 1984 onwards. Regardless of whether you approved of what they did, this was when their actions had the biggest effects. And they still went on to win another general election

His argument therefore goes that having accepted unpopularity very early on, having taken over in the midst of a financial crisis, Nick Clegg has got the ‘need for popularity’ out of his system early, and can now crack on with doing the important stuff more effectively.

However, I think this analysis fails to take into account three problem areas for us as Lib Dems.

1. While both Mrs. Thatcher and Tony Blair both went on to win general elections after becoming very unpopular personally, they were faced with very weak political opposition; in 87, Labour was barely off the blocks in reforming itself into what became new Labour, and in 2005, the Tories were still in disarray after the Ian Duncan Smith era and his relatively last minute replacement with Michael Howard. As soon as viable political alternatives presented themselves, the opposition gained enormously in popularity – and regicide of the leaders (Major for Thatcher, Brown for Blair) commenced. Labour under Miliband are already seen as a viable political alternative (see Today’s polls). History shows Nick can’t afford to stay unpopular for too long.

2. Most of the brave, right and proper things that we are doing - taking 800 000 people out of tax altogether, the pupil premium, restoring the pension links to earnings, an extra tax on the banks – are not ‘difficult’ and unpopular actions, they are hugely popular policies. The issue is – we get no credit for them, as the narrative of ‘Lib Dem break their promises’ is still the one that dominates - especially tuition fees. How do we regain popularity if enacting wildly popular Lib Dem policies in so many areas gets us nowhere?

3. As Caron demonstrates on her blog, we’re not ignoring the protestors – in Scotland last week, senior party members tried to engage with them. The issue is that they wouldn’t engage with us. And however unfair we think this may be – if we can’t connect and debate, we won’t change anyone’s minds.

How do we solve this conundrum? Well, of course we need to continue doing the right things policy wise we are already doing – both for the sake of the country, and for our own sanity. And without falling out with our coalition partners we really need to put down markers about what we have inspired, what we’re willing to go along with, and areas of policy we disagree with (Nick’s headline in the Independent is a good start).

But over and above that we need some attention grabbing activity that gets people to start re engaging with the party. Left field creative policy making that really makes people think and that they actively want to engage with. That’s what I’ll be looking to come out of Sheffield.

Addendum

Just seen this Tweet from Armando Iannucci.

“Tomorrow, Lib Dems vote whether to back changes to NHS. Let's see if they're upright and principled or a clump of twats”.

Well: at least he’s willing to give us a hearing…..

Today's post advocates bare faced theft and political chicanery. Sorry

Whether you love or hate the Centre Forum/Stephen Williams plan to give the banks back to the taxpayer, everyone agrees that if nothing else, it’s a great example of creative thinking.

And it’s the sort of thinking that I believe attracts many voters to the Liberal Democrats in the first place. We have a great ability to take left field solutions to real problems and turn them into coherent policies – which are often derided by Labour and the Conservatives as ‘naïve’ or ‘unworkable’, before magically becoming part of their own policy or legislative plan a little later. It’s interesting to take a gander at the 2005 manifesto for example and see how many of the policies have been endorsed by one or other of the other main parties since then.

And I wish we were making more of that thinking-out-of-the-box attitude right now.

Now I know the federal policy groups will be hard at it devising policy initiatives that do that even as I type, as will the various think tanks in and around the party and I’m sure lots of this will emerge from Sheffield in the next few days, and over coming months.

But in the meantime, I think we should be engaging in a bit more public debate about some of the more interesting ideas out there right now.

For example, there’s the Robin Hood tax. We’ve debated this in and around the party for some time, but now we are in government, we seem to have stopped as we pursue our agreed legislative programme. Now I’m not suggesting that our ministers should be actively engaged in that debate – but I wish a few more high profile Lib Dems were involved in putting views forward about the campaign rather than leaving it to others (very good though they are at it). I want us to be actively involved in debates like these (pro or against), not studiously ignoring them from the sidelines. So what if we didn't start the debate - lets get involved please.

Or take this article from George Monbiot. There’s a hatful of great ideas here (and some real stinkers, but I digress). George willingly admits he’s nicked them from all sorts of sources – and although he doesn’t say so, one of those sources appears to be the Lib Dem 2010 manifesto. George is advocating the progressive left (he means Labour) use them as a basis for a policy development programme. I say lets nick our ideas back and some of the others to boot, if they fit both our own policy goals and political philosophy. If David Cameron can describe the Conservative Party as ‘progressive’ and Ed Miliband can claim his political heroes are Beveridge, Keynes and Lloyd George, then we can certainly adopt a policy that advocates reducing tax avoidance to the tune of £25billion a year.

After all, apparently the new banks-back-to-the-people idea wasn’t produced out of thin air. It was inspired by a comment made by Maurice Saatchi…..although we’ve done rather more with it than he probably intended.

I'm leaning towards Stephen Williams....

I rather like Stephen Williams’ plan that all UK shareholders should be given equal shares in the two banks in which the government is majority shareholder. It seems to me an entirely fair way of returning our investment into the hands of the people, and when the shares get sold the government recoups its money (which sits outside of the budget anyway). What’s more, the government may well get a greater return on its investment than a ‘conventional’ privatization as well, and everybody, not just those with capital to invest, owns the banks. The problem with conventional privatisations (alright, one of the problems..) is that even if you can invest, you end up paying for something you already own (which is also why I’ve never paid the admission money for a tour of Buckingham Palace…).

But best of all – and I’m surprised this isn’t the clincher for more people – as shareholders, we would get to vote on bankers pay and bonuses. I think we all know how that would go…

So far I’ve seen four arguments against. I’m not sure any of them hold water. They are:

1. ‘We can’t afford to give the money away’.

But we’re not. When citizens sell their shares, the government gets the investment back. We just keep any profit (in effect, it’s a share option hurdle scheme)

2. ‘Individuals would have too small a shareholding to make a difference’

(Put forward by Liberal Vision).

Afraid I beg to differ. If individuals can be trusted to elect a government, they can certainly be organized enough to decide on some bank governance issues – like do we want the CEO to be paid a multi million pound bonus. It’s generally called the wisdom of the masses.

Just to re emphasis the point, currently the average share in the US is owned for…20 seconds, thanks to High Frequency Trading (hat tip to Liberal Eye for this amazing fact). So much for institutions being the best guardians of shareholder interests. Let the people have a turn.

3. ‘Shares should be divided according to how much tax an individual has paid, not equally’

(as put forward by Liberal Vision)

Nope. Equal share distribution by head would be a progressive and liberal way of divvying up the shares. Let’s not forget everyone – we’re all in this together!!

4. ‘Russian oligarchs will swoop in and buy our shares at knock down prices’

(as put forward by the Adam Smith institute).

But in fact the shares would be traded on a unique platform designed to prevent this sort of abuse. (see penultimate paragraph in linked article).

Now of course I’m not saying the idea is perfect – there are a lot of details to work out yet. But it’s creative, novel, fair, principled, progressive….

Even Andrew Neil seemed for it yesterday

Really – what’s not to like?

Snap

Yes I know its shameless showing off, a bucketload of hubris and not to mention entirely co incidental...

...but The Guardian editorial this morning seems rather like one of my own pieces for Lib Dem Voice.

Immitation, flattery and all that. A smug cup of tea awaits....

Oi, Tristram Hunt. NO NO NO NO NO

The Labour MP – I’ll say that again with emphasis, the Labour MP – Tristram Hunt has proposed that we start charging for the national museums and collections, most of which reside in London. Apparently – and if you can’t be bothered to read the whole article, there’s a précis in the news section of The Observer – it’s unfair that local council cuts mean that provincial museums are forced to start charging entrance fees, while national museums still get a subsidy to allow free entry. And furthermore, to quote Mr Hunt,

‘At New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, there is a de facto $20 entrance fee for adults, so why not a fiver for London's great galleries? Would it really undermine our cultural competitiveness?’

Mr Hunt. You’re wrong.

Firstly you’re looking at this from the wrong end of the telescope. All the museums in the country should be free, not the other way around.

My kids go to London museums all the time. A few weeks ago they went to The British Museum on a Saturday morning with their teacher. It was a voluntary school trip. There was no fee, the teacher gave up her free Saturday off her own bat, and the kids loved it. There was no note home asking for a donation, no need for the kids on free school meals to ask for a subsidy, just a brilliant, educative morning out that the kids got loads out of, paid for by central taxation.

Which is what central taxation is for.

The scandal is, my kids only got to do this because they live in London. Every child in the country should be able to visit their local museum, whenever they want, for free. It should be like a library. This is not where I think the cuts should be falling.

Secondly, the fact that the Uffizi, Prado or Met all charge doesn’t give them the moral high ground over us. It does the opposite. Most of the stuff in the national collections doesn’t hail from these shores. Would I feel good about charging Greek Tourists to see the Elgin marbles, or Italian tourists to see Leonardo’s cartoon? No, I wouldn't.

Mr. Hunt, you should be ashamed of yourself.

I promised myself I wouldn't do this....

When I got up this morning the first thing I saw was the Barnsley by election result. ‘Deep breath, Richard’ I told myself. ‘No knee jerk reactions’.

Then I got a whole series of tweets which all, in one way shape or form, tried to tell me that ‘ it wasn’t as bad as it first looked’ or ‘don’t worry, we’ve been here before’. And that sort of laissez-faire approach does rather trouble me…

So I thought, sod it.

Ten things I think about that result last night.

1. It was a terrible result and we would do ourselves a huge disservice by pretending otherwise. Tim Farron has it right (as so often at the moment ) when he said (straight after the result was announced) ‘At this time of the evening, there's nothing more laughable than a politician who's got a kicking pretending it's all right’

2. It might have happened before (usual sensible piece by Olly Grender on this) but we shouldn’t pretend that this was all to do with no on the ground support – we’d grown our share and come second here in the last general election, with presumably similar resource issues to cope with.

3. Therefore, this has rather more to do with our perception at a national level, rather than a failure of on the ground support to get the vote out.

4. When we have a chance of winning, we might attract Tory support (Oldham); but when there’s no chance of us winning, forget it. We’re on our own.

5. In % terms at least, all our support looks like it basically went to Labour. The Tories lost ground, but their vote mainly went to the right (UKIP, BNP). Labour has spent a lot of time targeting Lib Dem Voters and workers. It’s working.

6. We got hit harder by voters than the Tories. That’s because everyone has lower expectations of how they will behave in government compared to us. When we went back on our pledge on Tuition fees, having run campaigns saying ‘no more broken promises’ we had further to fall and the bump hurts that much more.

7. If we are going to get people to listen to us, we’re going to have to win back a lot of trust that we’ve lost.

8. And because people believed we were different, it’s harder to win the trust back.

9. Does people’s willingness to vote for, ahem, ‘smaller’ parties, herald a new attitude to voting, inspired by the prospect of AV? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, there’s a referendum to win yet – but under AV will the Tories lose significant share to UKIP and others? How will this affect our electoral arithmetic on a constituency by constituency basis?

10. If the next by election is Leicester South, as seems likely – the arithmetic looks very similar to Barnsley central; Labour MP, big majority, but Lib Dems second last time, a seat we won in a fairly recent by election…. We need to start thinking now about how to stop this happening again (come on Lib Dems in Leicester, tell me I’m wrong if I am…).

I’d welcome any opposing views to any of this…

Addendum

As ever, Caron's musings have a perhaps slightly less jaundiced and rounded view of things...

NHS reforms. Lets remember we're free to speak our minds...

When Olly Grender blogged the other day about what does having a mandate to do something in government actually mean, it got me thinking. After all neither ourselves or the Tories actually won the general election in the sense of getting a working majority under FPTP, let alone a 50.1% share of the votes cast, so in that sense do we have a mandate to do anything, other than co-incidental policies which our two manifestos happen to share.

Which would make for a pretty limited amount of governing to do…

That's why I think two things that happened in the past week are really interesting.

Firstly Lord Oakeshott’s renewed, strident criticism of the banks and the governments actions over them – he must be the most agreed with Lib Dem politician in the country just now – reminded me that both the Tory and Lib Dem manifestos promised robust regulation and action over the banks. And while we are making some progress, I don’t think anyone really sees enough being done – how are we cutting the funding of frontline NHS staff for example, while allowing Barclays to get away with paying around 2% corporation tax? And why are we doing this when both our manifestos said we’d deal with the banks?

If any government had a mandate to do something, this must surely be it.

And then I read Shirley Williams piece on the NHS reforms and why she disagreed with them (it’s behind the Times firewall I’m afraid so here’s a report about the report from the ever brilliant virtuallynaked blog…).

She makes the excellent point that not only was it not in the manifesto’s (don’t give me that guff about it being one line of page 46 of the Tory one or whatever – you don’t sneak through a decision to turn the most loved institution in the country through in the small print); but the coalition agreement promised the complete opposite – no top down reform of the NHS.

Shirley says (and I agree) that anything not in the coalition agreement is not covered by collective responsibility – so she’s free to oppose it. I’d go further on the collective responsibility argument of course – I think new politics demands we don’t need to agree 100% on everything, and it makes us look daft when we pretend that we do.

But in this case – if you disagree with the proposals (and the party seems a little split on this...), there’s no mandate for it – so go mount the barricades.

I blogged the other day that cutting frontline NHS staff might be the Tories Tuition fee moment.

Let’s not make it the Lib Dems tuition fee moment all over again please….