Doncha just love our newspapers

One of the downsides of flying anywhere, apart from climate change, security threats and so on, is the danger that the only thing to read is a free copy of the Daily Mail. This was the sad fate which befell Mark and I on our return from India.

Having so recently tied the knot, we were interested to read the piece excoriating the government for its recent guidance to Registrars that photographs of the signing of the register should be banned, on the grounds that it would be possible to zoom in on the details and use them for nefarious purposes. Nowadays, photos are taken of a dummy register, just to make sure.

Having derided the government for this piece of over zealous regulation, we find that Housing Minister Caroline Flint inadverently revealed details of her briefing to the Cabinet - not by the usual means of leaving it in the photocopier, but by the use of a tabloid photographers zoom lens.
Maybe Flint should have carried a dummy briefing - on the other hand, how would we tell?

Being back

To be honest, I'm still struggling a bit to get back into the swing of things, after a three week break for the wedding and honeymoon. Getting back to Westminster yesterday I found that we had reached Day 4 of Committee Stage on the Lisbon Treaty where the Lib Dem team, led by Hugh Dykes, are dealing with rafts of Tory and UKIP amendments. We even voted last night, unusual at Committee Stage, but probably necessary to prevent deep vein thrombosis setting in on the front benches.

Todays vote will be on the Channel Tunnel Rail Bill which has got as far as Third Reading. Apparently the government is proposing that this piece of infrastructure should be regulated by the Government itself and not by the Rail Regulator which oversees everything else. No-one seems to think that this is a good idea, including the rail industry itself who it seems would rather take its chances with an independent regulator than to be left to whim of whoever happens to be Minister at the time. With cross Party support, a government defeat looks likely.

Later this evening, the Federal Finance and Administration Committee (it is more interesting than it sounds, honestly) will be meeting, and included in a packed agenda is a paper on the vexed question of membership subscriptions, minimum rate and levy. It's always difficult to balance the need to keep membership affordable, to preserve some local and regional party autonomy and the need to fund the various activities which are best done centrally. Tonights decision will go to Federal Executive and then on to Federal Conference in September, so watch this space.

Things have changed radically for me, and I'm not talking about the fact that I am now married. For the first time in years, I am no longer on the front bench, having told Tom McNally some time ago that I would have to resign before the summer. I was happy to wait until Sally Hamwee could take over from me which she can now do. The local government brief currently has two major pieces of legislation to deal with, housing and planning, which would have kept me tied up in Westminster non stop until November. I am keen to spend as much time as possible on the Presidential campaign, and if I am elected, would want to make the job of being President my main focus.

I'm quite looking forward to a period where my work in the Lords can be more generalist and I can pick and choose debates more freely than I could when I was on the front bench. I may appear in some very strange places.....

Thoughts from India

After 16 days away Mark and I have just got back from our honeymoon in India, and we’re feeling that strange disorientation which comes with a really good holiday - a sense that whilst you’re away the rest of the world seems a long way off and that the moment you’re back, the trip seems like a dream.
I hadn’t ever really hankered after a visit to India, but Mark was keen to show me the country of his fathers’ birth, and to introduce his new wife to his family in Mumbai, and I was more than happy with that. What I didn’t expect was to be so captivated by India and utterly fascinated by what I saw there.
It’s not just the natural beauty which you find, although the serene loveliness of the Kerala backwaters will stay with me for a very long time. Its not just the cultural heritage from the astonishingly intricate temples, to the magnificent Maharajah’s palaces, to the rather sad faded remains of a colonial past. Rather, it is to do with the people in South India, who are, for the most part, open and friendly to outsiders. We received such a warm welcome everywhere we travelled and a sort of amused surprise at the notion of a middle aged English couple enjoying a romantic honeymoon in their country. Returning from dinner one evening in Kerala we found that the hotel staff had bedecked our room with flowers, including creating a heart shaped arrangement of jasmine and roses on our bed. Mark's family turned out en masse to meet me and I was touched by the warmth of welcome they gave me and by their clear fondness for Mark.
There’s a real can-do attitude here, and people are ambitious for themselves and for India. When I was growing up, India was a basket-case economy where millions routinely starved. Nowadays, the economy is surging forward, with growth of around 7% a year, and India is a net exporter of food. They are sending aid to Burma right now. There is a growing prosperous middle class, estimated at around 375 million, which is driving change, economically, socially and culturally. You pick up a passionate commitment to democracy regardless of social status, despite a healthy, and often justified, cynicism about politicians themselves; state elections are currently being held in Karnataka and we read that with 40 million voters, there will be 60,000 poll workers. The electoral commission is pretty robust, whilst we were there it compounded cars which were being improperly used for campaigning purposes.
Its cliché to describe India as a country of contrasts, but it is. The extremes of wealth and poverty are shocking, but did not surprise me and are evidence of how far the country still has to go. The millions of people who cannot get access to basic healthcare, education and housing should be a priority for the government and not just for humanitarian reasons. What I found intriguing was the contrast between the old and the new, which is largely an urban/rural divide. We flew into Bangalore and spent a few days there before heading out to Mysore. Bangalore, still so-called by residents despite the governments re-naming the city Bengaluru, is a sprawling city of over 5 million inhabitants, grown rich on modern technology. The crazy traffic crawls along roads covered in hoardings advertising all the paraphernalia of modern life, plasma TVs, mobile phones, cars etc. and road safety warnings go completely unheeded in what is the worse driving I have seen in my life. When you eventually escape the city, you see activities which have gone on for hundred of years; fields of sugar cane and rice are tended by hand, fields are ploughed by oxen, shiny skin taut over their bony frames, women wash clothes ( and their children) in the muddy rivers and occasionally you come across an elephant carrying sugar cane in its trunk. These are the sights I shall carry with me for a long, long time.

It's all gone very quiet.....

It has been a few days since I last posted, and it will be some time before I blog again. I mention this not because I think the world will be waiting with bated breath for my next entry, but so that my nemesis from Taunton Deane doesn't go into overdrive and feel forced to create a new conspiracy theory, this time, about my silence.

Tomorrow, Mark and I are getting married. Having never arranged a big wedding before, we're struck by how much work seems to be involved, but also by how much fun it has all been. It's strange how these big life events push everything else into the background, so that whilst the rest of the world gets on with what it has to do, our world has narrowed down to the few hours of tomorrow afternoon and evening.

My friends divide into two categories, the non political ones who say "how lovely, a spring wedding" and the political ones who say "why on earth are you getting married in the middle of the elections?". We wanted to marry during the spring or summer; May, June and July are always very busy months in Parliament, then the presidential campaign really kicks off in August and lasts through to November. Winter sets in, then the next election campaign and so on until we realised that it is now, or August 2009. Dear reader - we are not getting any younger and don't want to wait. And so, for the first time since I joined the Party, May polling day will pass by with no input from me. I know you'll miss me, but you'll manage perfectly well. I shall miss you too, but confidently expect to be perfectly, blissfully, happy.

What should the Party President do?

In a post published yesterday, Andy Strange returned to the question of the role of the President, a topic to which I have given some considerable thought! Linda Jack has expressed the hope that the potential candidates for the post will talk about their vision for the role.

As is often the case with constitutional debates at conference, the floor was not exactly packed when we discussed the motion put forward by Federal Executive, and moved by Lembit Opik, to split the role of the President so that the person elected by the membership is the figurehead, and that the Chair of FE is someone chosen from amongst their number. I'm glad the motion failed to get the majority required, because it is a topic which needs to be thought through very carefully, and in the context of Party decison making as a whole.

I believe that the post of Chair of the Federal Executive is, and should be, one of the most important in the Party. It's a well established principle that large organisations benefit from having a non-executive body to set the direction and strategy and to scrutinise the way the executive implements them. Councils have elected members, private companies have non-Executive Boards, Quangos have commissioners, board members etc. The key question is, how do these people get into those positions - are they elected or selected?

As a Party, we have always opted for elections for senior positions, and for good reasons. But in all elections, there is a risk that choices are made which are not necessarily relevant to the job or issues being voted on - that is an inherent part of democracy. In the case of the Party Presidency, it has meant that the focus of the campaigns (where we have had them) has tended to be on personality and profile, rather than ability to do the most important part of the job, i.e. party organisation.

As a result, there is a belief in parts of the Party that it is impossible to reconcile the two aspects of the role and that the job should be split. This is a superficially beguiling view which should, in my view, be treated with great caution.

Taking this step would result in the person with a full democratic mandate (the only person in the Party other than the Leader to have one) having a largely figurehead role, whilst the person with the real power, Chair of FE, would be someone chosen by the FE itself, a body of which only half is directly elected, and then only be Conference reps.

This would have two effects. In time, the role of the Chair of FE, and ultimately FE itself, would be undermined by the absence of a mandate. FE needs reform in my view, something I'll talk about in another post, but this isn't it.

But more significantly, we will have established a position where we think that some positions are too important to be left in the hands of the voters. Like most people in this Party, I've spent years arguing for the strengthening of democratic organisations, and for bringing quangos back into the realm of public accountability - and yet we are considering undermining our own internal systems.

In this proposal I truly believe that the cure is worse than the disease.

Catching up

After a week away, there was no choice but to lock myself in the office until the pile of papers had been dealt with and the inbox cleared. All done, I have finally got back home to Suffolk to make the final wedding preparations, as the event is now only 6 days away.

As I posted before, we do have a County Council bye-election right here where I live, and in the absence of scheduled local elections here, polling day is this Thursday. The last Tory Councillor only lasted 6 months, so there is some irritation amongst the voters at having all the expense of a second election. The Tory administration at County Hall has made itself pretty unpopular by recently appointing a Chief Executive at a salary of £220k per annum. This is for an authority which is due to be re-organised out of existence and for a Chief Executive who came from Bedfordshire, one of the most poorly performing councils in the country. They are re-organising our school system to get rid of the middle schools, which are actually pretty well regarded here, and in order to met their election commitment of keeping council tax down, they are closing down day care centres, out sourcing everything that moves and generally making themselves unpopular.

So despite previously being a Tory stronghold, I think we're in with a real chance in Stowmarket North on Thursday, so I was quite happy to make a modest contribution by delivering leaflets in the spring sunshine (warm at last!) yesterday afternoon.

I voted by post ten days ago - I particularly appreciate the chance to participate, given that members of the House of Lords aren't allowed to vote in General Elections. Peers are barred from voting, along with criminals and lunatics. Some are, I fear, barred on all three counts.

Still in England, for the time being, anyway

Heading ever northward, we travelled up to Berwick-upon-Tweed, where we were met by my colleague from the Lords, Diana Maddock, known in these parts as Cllr Mrs Beith.

Diana is not standing for the new unitary Northumberland Council, so our first canvassing session was with her (hopefully) successor, David Wilson. Having dealt with the legislation in Parliament, I was interested to see how the move to the new unitary authority was working out in practice.

In the south of the county, Labour selection has turned into a bit of a bloodbath, with disappointed former councillors running as independents. The chaos has been compounded by the introduction of controversial all-women shortlists and, I am reliably informed, intelligence testing. I'm not clear whether selection depended on passing the tests or the reverse.

We moved on after lunch to do more canvassing in Bamburgh and Alnwick, where we were joined by Alan Beith and Fiona Hall MEP. The rain and cold were, to some extent at least, compensated for by the stunning views of Holy Island and the friendly reception from the majority of the voters.