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The classic quote which sums up this conference is to be found on Laura K's Twitter page...

"Evan Harris tells Lib Dem conference Clegg will only become a 'great leader' when he realises party makes policy not its MP s"

What planet are these people on ?? Can you imagine what the implications would have been for the Democratic Party in the US of A if Hillary Clinton had said 'Barack Obama will only become a great leader when he realises the Democratic Party town halls make policy, not him!' ??

I feel like banging my head against a brick wall !! The whole point of 'great leaders' is that THEY make policy and by force of will bring the party in behind them. One can be sure that if someone in Tony Blair's 'inner circle' had said something similar when TB was trying to abolish Clause 4, then he or she would not have been a member of the inner circle for long.

So we the public now have to divine/guess what the views of thousands of Lib Dems are on various policy issues before we can decide what their manifesto is and whether we would like to support it ?? If they think that is 'change we can believe in' I have news for them. Wake up and smell the coffee - we need to have a crystal clear message of what the Lib Dems are for, which is difficult because I'm not convinced they know themselves. And that clear simple message needs to be repeated again and again ad nauseam until election day.

But not before Evan Harris is sacked, to send out a clear message that it is the leader which runs the party, NOT the other way around.

WOMEN ARE BOUND TO DROP OUT - THE DUTIES ARE ORDUROUS

Politics - Westminster politics - can only appeal to the ambitious, desperate wannabe, willing to sell their soul, several times over, to BE SOMEONE. (Chris Mullin's diaries reveal all.)

Only a non-representative sub-set of 'women' are inclined to such pursuits. Just a glance at the 'stayers' will suffice to confirm . . .

BEST NOT TO WAKE UP - JUST LIVE IN THE LIE.(#1)

I think you will find 'the coffee' is cheap imported muck, LBG, with a fancy label on it. The smell is the only bit worth sampling. A nice analogy for Spin Politics.

Michael:

Well technically yes, the Lib Dems are having a hard time and also, fighting a losing battle....

=Dennis Junior=

Bakc in the old days when there were just Liberals I helped run a strong Liberal constituency organisation. Our problem was that we could never achieve sufficient support for a breakthrough because national politics always interrupted the local campaigning: then along came Peter Hain and Jeremy Thorpe and the whole thing became quite impossible.

What was apparent in the party then was that the closer you got to the national organisation the bigger the egos became. There was never an attempt to sit down with the local party and discuss strategy: all you were in the constituencies was doorstep fodder.

Now and again we would have a candidate foisted onto us from the national party. These people were quite useless. Not long after one ambitious young man was taken in by us, as it were, as a candidate I and an old friend took him canvassing one night around a local area we both knew was predominantly Labour but where we had been working on local issues and had gleaned some potential support. The objective was to measure how far the campaigning had turned into votes. My colleague and I got results which we very much expected; lots of good will, some enhanced support but little significant change in political loyalties. Our candidate had another view; he told us we were going to win the next election as he had gained formal commitments from all the people he had called on. All that had happened was that the locals seeing the Liberal rosettes had been polite to him. Later we quietly binned his canvas returns as he was clearly mad, but first we had to let him lead us to another electoral defeat.

I can go on and on about this topic. I can tell you how the Carshalton By-Election was a disaster but it is all water under the bridge now. It was good fun at the time but in the end you have to ask yourself what are your trying to achieve? This is the problem for any third party in that you need to be able to reach the electorate with the right context at the right time to achieve any sort of breakthrough. Just fancying the breakthrough is just around the corner because someone smiled as they gave you the time of day is an indulgence; not a political judgement.

I am sorry but the Liberal Democrats are just too fuzzy to be seen as a solution. They need to create a context that is noticeably different from the other parties: a task they have consistently run away from. This is not surprising as it is essentially a party of nice middle class people with strong vested interests in things staying the same which is why nice middle class people tend to vote for them as they also want things to remain the same. Unlike the nasty Tories....

At present there is not much difference between Labour and Conservatives on some topics, so where exactly is the Lib-Dem arena ?

I would suggest that Lib-Dem women have the practical and intuitive foresight to realise this. So.......what's the point in carrying on ?

Not a question to put to a died-in-the-wool Lib-Dem old fogey, unless of course you are being deliberately provocative.

Always a sign of impending disaster when party politicals argue about whose navel to gaze into.

Pretty much the opposite of chicken counting, and almost as deadly.

Carry on chaps & chappesses . . .