Choice offered delegates did not reflect real row about how to interpret fiscal mandate and whether to tolerate further cuts
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Lib Dem frontbenchers vote on a policy motion at the party conference in Brighton. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
Much praise is being lavished on the Liberal Democrats' open policy-making, and how the party bravely confronted the big topic in British politics – whether to change economic course to relieve the recession. By a large margin, the conference decided to stick with George Osborne's deficit plans.
That account of Monday's debate is indeed broadly correct, but for students of party democracy in the UK, the truth is also more subtle. It is an everyday story of conference stage management.
A truer account goes as follows – the party's elected conference committee, as it normally does, met a fortnight before the conference to decide the amendments to be selected for debate alongside the main motion on the economy that was supportive of the current economic course.
One amendment tabled by Linda Jack, the leader of Liberal Left, a smallish pressure group that has opposed the coalition from the outset, called for the fiscal mandate to be scrapped. Another amendment tabled by Prateek Buch, from the more centre-left Social Liberal Forum (SLF) opposed "yet more public spending cuts, which will be counterproductive, particularly if capital investment and welfare spending are targeted again".
It also called on the coalition to "prioritise measures to boost demand through public and private investment, using all tools available to government including the flexibility in its fiscal mandate, over further spending cuts beyond those already in place that would suppress confidence and demand yet further".
The first amendment from Jack had the support of only 13 signatories while the other, more subtle but still pointed, motion from SLF had 29 supporters.
The conference committee selected for debate the motion with fewer backers, and decided the SLF motion should not go to conference at all. The committee argued the Jack amendment would lead to a clearer debate. Last-minute efforts to merge the two amendments were rejected.
As a result, the conference faced a polarised choice between maintaining the fiscal mandate or jettisoning it.
The choice offered the conference, albeit stark, hardly reflects the real debate going on in the coalition or in the party about how to interpret the fiscal mandate and whether to tolerate further welfare cuts.
Buch says: "I was very disappointed with the way the conference committee chose to handle the issue, and as a result the debate the conference was allowed to have. We want to put down some clear markers, not have such a polarised choice."
During Monday's debate, five ministers and the party president, Tim Farron, were duly wheeled out to denounce the idea of abandoning the mandate. Figures like Farron were able to present the conference with an apocalyptic warning about the consequences of scrapping the mandate – neither the debate being held in Whitehall nor even the one most in his own party wish to conduct.
He said: "I believe in John Maynard Keynes. I believe in a demand-led recovery. I want to see more investment in social housing, I want ambitious green projects, I want more money for low-paid people who will spend it. But scrapping the fiscal mandate would be absolutely flipping crackers. It is the credible deficit reduction strategy that stands between us and market chaos, interest rate hikes – that means businesses going to the walls, house repossessions and mass unemployment. I am in politics to avoid human misery. Scrapping the fiscal mandate would create avoidable human misery."
If the first part of his remarks were down-the-line Keynesian, the second passage was so orthodox it could have been written by Conservative Central Office in its pomp.
The irony was that when Vince Cable, the business secretary, came to speak after the vote had been taken, he offered a prescription very similar to the one proposed by the SLF but kept from the conference floor.
As an exercise in party democracy, it left a lot to be desired.