Sunny, when you are party leader and the party votes against you, how are you going to explain it?

You accept the views of the members?

I thought the Libdems said they liked being democratic? What’s the point of this democracy lark if the only response by the leadership is to insult the membership and say they don’t get things for not going the way of the leadership?

This all getting pretty desperate, Sunny.

Maybe you should leave the smear campaigning to your new comrades in BNPlite.

@1

“Sunny, when you are party leader and the party votes against you, how are you going to explain it?”

Do you really think that’s likely?

“Barack Obama would never have been elected prime minister in this country because of “institutional racism” in the Labour Party, the head of Britain’s equality watchdog has told The Times.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5110811.ece

Maybe you should leave the smear campaigning to your new comrades in BNPlite.

Gosh. Do you ever find anything new to say?

Sunny

yes, and whilst as a good democrat you accept the view of the majority, how would you explain instances when the majority disagrees with you?

it’s very common, and not very insulting, to explain a disagreement by claiming to have been misunderstood.

Since the only way to determine if Mr Clegg is right would be to watch the debate itself so we know what was being presented (and then to compare this with the actual policy as presented by the government) it might be better to reserve judgement.

Or, if anyone wants to do this (or was just there), they could let us know if Mr Clegg is correct that what was being debated and voted against was not the same understanding of the policy as that of the government and Mr Clegg’s interview. But I won’t hold my breath waiting for that.

Clegg is another Blair, but with a yellolw tie.

Mad as a hatter.

How is your millinery business coming along, Sally?

The LibDems are Marxists. Remember, “These are my principles. If you don’t like them, well, I have others.”

Groucho Marxists.

Nothing like a bit of banker bashing to deflect attention. Isn’t that, um, old politics?

Maybe it’s the same misunderstanding that lib deems encountered when Clegg was advocating slow cuts but actually meant Tory cuts but forgot to tell the rest of the party?

@PDF

Yawn, why bother posting your snotty jibes? Why not go over to ConHome and join the tory/crypto-tory circle wank?

Oh for god’s sake, Sunny. You voted for them. You put them in power. Now you’re trying to smear them as much as possible as a kind of weird Labourite penance… just say some hail maries, then STFU please.

@14

LOL, how is trying to smear the LibDems? Reporting actually what has happened is smearing? How does that work? Do you think he made the story up?

If Clegg actually stuck around at conference, rather than jetting off to NY, maybe he could explain to the LD delinquents where the error in their thinking is.

Leaving conference early seems to be quite popular this year.

@14

Cast your mind back to before the election. It was really Hobson’s Choice as we were desperate not to have a proper Tory majority. There are a lot of us who voted LibDem who regret at our leisure, but Labour were hardly a good choice either. I did not want to endorse years’ more Brownism.

I think this situation says a lot about our politics, which surely deserves to be called “Broken” more than our country as a whole.

@16

Yeah.

Fancy jetting off to the UN to launch a campaign against malaria in the third world.

He should have followed the comrades statesmanlike example of whining about immigrants, demonising muslims and squabbling over millibands.

I’m not clear on where in that report Clegg uses the words “they don’t get policy” as quoted in the headline. I have listened to it twice. Is that a direct quote?

So far as I can see from the motion, by the way, the main achievement of conference here was to secure the right of Lib Dems on the ground to campaign against free schools locally. That’s why Baronness Walmesley’s amendment tried to take out those lines about urging people not to use free schools. I suspect that’s where the most important battle was fought. Most of the “why we oppose free schools” stuff is actually under this heading – that is to say, it is offered as reasons why individual Lib Dems should campaign against free schools.

The bits that could be said to be binding on the leadership in terms of the policy they pursue in government are slightly shorter and more limited:

“Conference re-asserts its commitment to the key principles agreed at the spring 2009 conference in Harrogate in policy paper 89, Equity and Excellence, and specifically that:

i) Local Authorities should retain strategic oversight of the provision of school places funded by the use of public money.
ii) Local Authorities should continue to exercise their arms-length support for all state schools funded wholly or partially with public funds with particular emphasis on their work with disadvantaged pupils.

Conference calls on government to ensure that schools remaining within the Local Authority family are not financially penalised by the creation of academies and specifically:

a) That academies should be required to pay the full cost including administrative overheads for any services they buy back from the Local Authority.
b) That academies should have only observer status on the Schools Forum as they have placed themselves outside the democratic system for the funding of education.”

I don’t know enough about the free schools schtick to know whether any of this conflicts with it. Clegg certainly seems to be saying that the objection about financially penalising existing schools is not valid but he’s remaining silent on the precise role of local authorities (which I take to be fairly limited. Will it still extend to “strategic oversight”, does anyone know?)

Full motion text here: http://is.gd/fnbCS

That’s pretty typical of the old Blair & Brown style of government: when they foist a policy nobody wants on us, and we protest, they used to just say we didn’t understand or the message didn’t get through – as if the British public are a bunch of dimwits & if they speak slowly enough or use pictures or something eventually it’ll sink in. It never occurred to them that maybe they were *wrong* or we Just Didn’t Want what they were selling, and this is one of the many reasons, but perhaps the root of all the other reasons, why they lost the election. If Nick doesn’t start listening to people he’ll lose the next one.