Thursday, 16 August 2012
North West Libertarians September Meet Up
An informal meeting of libertarians in the North West will take place at the famous Lass O'Gowrie pub in Manchester: http://www.qype.co.uk/ place/ 153967-Lass-O-Gowrie-Manche ster
Expected topics of conversation will include discussion of the new
Independent Libertarian Network, as well as bidding fairwell to one of
our brethren who is relocating to the dreaded South. Everyone's welcome
- unlike the squalid gang of con men and conspiracy theorists who
seized control of the old Libertarian Party, we don't do closed
meetings. Come along if you feel like it, have a beer, have a chat,
make friends and set the world to rights. See you there.
Friday, 20 July 2012
North West Libertarians Meetup 28 July
Libertarian Meetup (North West)
The Dee Hotel, 44 Grange Road, West Kirby, Merseyside, CH48 4EF
Saturday, 28 July 2012 - 13:00 - 16:00
Libertarians in the North West are meeting to discuss the Independent Libertarian Network and other issues of current interest to libertarians.
For more information or advice on car parking, contact Malcolm Saunders on malpoet@hotmail.co.uk.
The Dee Hotel, 44 Grange Road, West Kirby, Merseyside, CH48 4EF
Saturday, 28 July 2012 - 13:00 - 16:00
Libertarians in the North West are meeting to discuss the Independent Libertarian Network and other issues of current interest to libertarians.
For more information or advice on car parking, contact Malcolm Saunders on malpoet@hotmail.co.uk.
Tuesday, 17 July 2012
The Independent Libertarian Network
Gavin Webb's efforts over the last few months have started to come to
fruition and he has a new Libertarian political party formally
registered with the Electoral Commission. The emphasis is very much on
supporting local activism. It's early days yet, but I think it has
potential. Visit the website, have a look at the constitution and see
if it's the kind of setup you might be interested in getting involved
with:
http:// www.independentlibertarians.com /
Sunday, 8 July 2012
Some Things Never Seem To Change
So there I was at an
antiques fair in Stockport, looking for potential stock for my
fledgling business when this bit of ephemera caught my eye and I just
had to have it for my own interest. I admit that I collect some odd
things, and I've been in the habit of accumulating political
literature since my days as an activist with the former Libertarian
Party – this may be the oldest example of an election leaflet that
I've ever seen though:
It seems even in the
1880s local politicians were screwing the citizenry into the ground
with excessive taxes!
Sunday, 6 May 2012
THOUGHTS ON A FUTURE LIBERTARIAN PARTY
INTRODUCTION
As far as I know, there
have been two explicitly Libertarian parties formed in the UK in
recent history. The first one was the Independent Libertarian Party,
formed by Antoine Clarke and Paul Marks in 1998, and since disbanded
(follow this link for a little bit of background:
http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/tactn/tactn025.pdf
). I know very little about the history of this organisation, and
nothing about why it no longer exists. My experience was with the
Libertarian Party (often wrongly described as the Libertarian Party
UK, or LPUK for short). That party was founded with high hopes in
September 2007 but never got properly organised and was taken over in
a coup mounted by former members of the National Co-ordinating
Committee (NCC) last year. Although the Party still exists as a
registered entity, the membership list and bank account are not under
the control of the legitimate NCC and has failed to put up any
candidates in this year's local elections. The gang that hijacked
the Libertarian Party run a website and take people's money – your
guess is as good as mine as to what that money is used for.
Since some of us do
actually want an effective Libertarian Party to exist in this
country, there's been some discussion recently about starting up a
Mark 3 version – hopefully learning from the mistakes of the past
with the benefit of recent experience. This initiative is being
headed up by Gavin Webb, the only councillor the Libertarian Party
ever had – if you'd like to register your interest in a new party,
please visit his website http://gavinwebb.com/libertarians/ (no
obligation). There's also discussion going on at Libertarian Home as
to what shape it should take: http://libertarianhome.co.uk/
What follows are my
thoughts on what a new Libertarian Party (whatever name we adopt for
it) should be trying to achieve, and how it should be organised.
I'd better tell you a
bit about myself first, so you can decide for yourself how
well-qualified I am to pontificate on this subject:
My name is Stuart Heal
and I live in Manchester. I joined the Libertarian Party as soon as
it started recruiting members, early in 2008 (Membership Number 12).
This was my first experience of being a member of a political party.
I co-wrote the weapons policy and became the Regional Co-ordinator in
the North West (only because no-one else wanted the job). A couple
of weekends in 2009, I travelled to Wisbech in East Anglia to help
deliver leaflets as part of our first election campaign, when Andrew
Hunt stood for the local council. The following year, in 2010 I
stood in the local elections in Manchester. I was due to stand again
the following year, but changed my mind, partly due to being too busy
to take time off from my job and partly due to the lack of support
for local candidates from the NCC.
THE MISSION
The objective of a
functioning libertarian party should be to promote the ideals of
small government and personal and economic freedom, and to make sure
that libertarian-minded people are elected to positions of power.
Note the last part of
that statement: “make sure that libertarian-minded people are
elected to positions of power”. Some fools maintain that
libertarians seeking power is a contradiction. The reality is that
governments exist and will continue to do so as long as homo sapiens
exists – possibly humanity may evolve beyond the need and desire
for governments one day, but that day may not dawn for a million
years. In the here and now, we have governments and will continue to
do so – so they should be staffed by people who understand the
legitimate limits of government power and who mean to increase the
freedom of the individual at any opportunity. Opting out of the
political system just means handing power over to people who don't
think like us.
ORGANISATION
One of the reasons the
Mark 2 Libertarian Party (hereinafter referred to as LPUK) failed is
that it didn't have an effective organisation – by that I mean an
organisation suited to a small political party, and one that ensured
adequate oversight and internal communication. It also failed to
utilise our greatest resource – individual members.
The organisation of the
new party (hereinafter referred to as the Party) has to be suited to
our likely size (likely to be in the low hundreds for the first few
years) and geographical spread (all over Great Britain and possibly
beyond). So it needs to be as simple as possible, and every member
has to be able to do something useful, even if they're the only
libertarian in their neighbourhood.
I envisage three levels
of organisation – national, local and individual.
NATIONAL ORGANISATION
There needs to be a
governing committee of some kind. The bare minimum would consist of
the Party Leader, Chairman (possibly combining those jobs?), a
Treasurer, a Membership Secretary and a Communications Director.
Call it five bods in total – a large enough group to have a
sensible division of labour and small enough to make it easy to make
decisions quickly. All officers should be democratically elected by
the membership at the Annual General Meeting, and their job will be
to do the day to day admin work, establish the organisation, approve
and support candidates, administer the website (including a members'
forum), produce and distribute a members' newsletter, make
propaganda/campaign material available to members, put together a
Party manifesto and approve the formation of local branches. They
would also have the power to suspend or expel members under certain
circumstances.
Some will mistakenly
describe the list of powers and responsibilities described above as
authoritarian or unlibertarian – it isn't. A political party is a
voluntary organisation – if you're not happy with the way it's run
you're free to stand for election to the governing committee, to
resign from the Party or not to join it in the first place. And to
have a chance to achieve anything, the Party also has to have an
organisation, enforceable
rules and discipline.
Most importantly,
proper attention has to be paid to the internal workings of the
national committee itself, in order to avoid the mistakes of last
time, so I'm going to go into more detail about this:
Trust no-one
It
shouldn't be necessary to tell Libertarians no to trust leaders, but
for some reason most of us who were in LPUK let our guards down in
this respect – and ended up having the party stolen from us. The
new Party should be organised on the assumption that even the most
respected people are going to make mistakes or go off the rails from
time to time – and that's not counting outright criminality. So we
need safeguards. I have four ideas about this:
First,
I think that anyone who is elected to the governing committee should
be required to sign a legal contract agreeing to them to comply with
the Party constitution and to hand over any records, access to bank
accounts etc to their successors on leaving office.
Second,
no-one should have sole access to either the financial records and
bank accounts or to the membership records. There should be a
Treasurer and Deputy Treasurer, and a Membership Secretary and Deputy
Membership Secretary (or whatever titles are agreed on). That's the
best protection I can think of against a repetition of what happened
last year, when the coup plotters managed to monopolise control of
both the financial records and membership list.
Third,
I don't believe that any money should be released from the Party bank
accounts unless the expenditure is approved by a majority of the
committee.
Fourth,
I believe the committee should have regular face-to-face meetings –
at least once every couple of months – it's hard to gauge someone's
character when your main means of communication is by email.
LOCAL ORGANISATION
In most areas, for the
first few years, I would expect local organisation to be
non-existent, but developing organically as geographical membership
clusters emerge. The way I see local organisations emerging would go
something like this: a member wants to get in touch with others in
his area, so puts a message on the online forum and/or the newsletter
asking people to contact him to arrange informal pub meetups. When
there are enough members in a defined area that comes under the same
local authority (ie at least 10 members in a particular town or city)
they can apply to the central committee to set up a local Branch.
This would have it's own local committee running it, it's own budget,
authorisation to produce it's own leaflets using Party templates but
covering local issues, the ability to select their own candidates for
local elections and write their own local manifestos, contact the
media as official Party representatives etc. This is going to be a
vital development, because the Party will never make any headway in
national politics until it has a good track record at the local
level. The national committee should do whatever it can to support
local branches once they're formed, including providing leaflet
templates, instructions on how to mount a local campaign and stand
for election, support on the Party website with contact details, and
financial support within reason. I absolutely believe that LPUK
would have had more local candidates if more support from the centre
had been forthcoming.
THE INDIVIDUAL
LPUK had such a small
membership (never more than a few hundred) that there must have been
people who were literally the only members in their county. You
might think that with no organisation in the area, there'd be
nothing an individual member can do – but I don't believe a small
party can afford to waste a single potential activist, and
libertarians are supposed to believe in the potential of the
individual. So I see part of the national committee's job as being
to support these isolated members and give them something to do. Not
long before last year's coup, during the run up to the local
elections, I developed an idea for an ongoing series of leaflets
called “The Libertarian”, which I tried to get the NCC interested
in. The idea was to produce a monthly two-page bulletin in a
populist style that could be downloaded as a PDF file from the party
website by any party member or supporter who wanted to print a few
off and distribute them in his area. Each issue would have covered
two or three national news stories, but from a libertarian
perspective, and including contact details for the party. I'd
already designed and distributed a local version of this the previous
year, as a warm-up leaflet for my aborted second local election
campaign in Manchester. The advantage of this is that it would cost
the Party nothing in money - just a day or two's work for whoever
edits the monthly bulletin. Contributions to it could even be
solicited via the Party members' forum (assuming we have one, which I
think we should). So any individual member can print (say) 100
copies off once a month and deliver them round his area. If a 100
members do that, that's 10,000 leaflets delivered nationwide per
month – the publicity equivalent to an election campaign without
any money being spent by the Party. It seems to me that this could
be particularly useful to people wanting to set up libertarian
societies in universities, or members of more general political
societies who want to promote a libertarian point of view – thus
hopefully lining up the next generation of Party members.
So that's my idea for
what the Party organisation should look like – it needs fleshing
out of course, preferably by people with more experience of running
political organisations than me. Getting the organisation right this
time is vitally important in my view. But once it's set up, what
sort of strategy should the new organisation adopt? How is it to
achieve its goals?
ELECTORAL STRATEGY
When LPUK was set up,
there was a lot of grandiose talk about putting up multiple
candidates for Parliament – one fool on the forum even said we'd
form a government in 15-20 years. There was very little discussion
about local politics. We were trying to run before we'd even learned
to walk.
START SMALL, THINK BIG
Let's say you wanted to
become a millionaire – you dream of being the owner of a big
concern, sitting in your office in a skyscraper full of loyal
employees all doing your bidding, getting on the phone and making
million pound deals, inspecting your factories and warehouses.
But you haven't got any
money – you're struggling to pay your rent, utilities and council
tax.
So what do you do?
Do you max out all your
credit cards and gamble all your money on one big, extremely dodgy
deal that will either net you your first million or wipe you out
completely?
Do you give up and
resign yourself to a life of poverty?
Or do you concentrate
on what you can do? Do you use your decrepit second-hand computer in
your spare room to set up a little micro-business which will only
bring in £10-£20 a week at first? That £10-£20 a week may not be
much, but it's money you wouldn't have had otherwise, it's money you
can put to one side to build up a stake for when you feel ready to
try something more ambitious – and in the meantime you're building
up experience and a reputation. Starting off small, you're at least
making some kind of progress and giving yourself a chance – and
maybe one day you will be that millionaire.
Politics works the same
way. New political parties don't just sweep into power – that
takes a lot of money, and even more importantly, name recognition.
In my opinion putting up Parliamentary candidates is totally futile,
except under exceptional circumstances – no LPUK Parliamentary
candidate ever got as much as 1% of the vote, whereas Andrew Hunt got
nearly 8% in our first local election campaign. It seems to me quite
clear that the main effort should be at the local level – people
are much more willing to give minority parties a chance in local
elections, especially if the candidates focus on local issues –
this is why UKIP, the Green Party and even those losers in the BNP
have local councillors. And the idea of us ever having an MP before
we have a strong local presence is so ludicrous it's hardly worth
thinking about.
Apart from the near
impossibility of getting anyone elected to Parliament in the near
future (say the next 20 years) there are excellent reasons for
Libertarians to try to get elected to their local councils. Councils
very often have more of an effect on people's daily lives than the
national government. It's your local council that will steal your
house using a Compulsory Purchase Order and knock it down to make way
for a supermarket. It's your local council that will deny you
planning permission to improve your house – or if they do grant
permission, they will then use the improvements to reclassify your
house in a higher Council Tax band. And if you can't afford to pay
your Council Tax – or even if you're just a few weeks late paying –
it's your local council that will take you to court and send the
bailiffs to your door (and I can tell you from personal experience
that a visit from the bailiffs is no fun at all). People who find
local politics boring aren't paying enough attention to what goes on
in their neighbourhood – you should do, it's where you live. I bet
if you bought a copy of your local paper tomorrow and read right
through it, you could find at least one local issue that can be
attacked from a libertarian angle.
Local election
campaigns can also be quite cheap to run. I only spent about £90 on
mine, not counting petrol and shoe leather. To stand for Parliament
you have to pay a deposit of £500 just to get on the ballot. Even
better, some local councils – away from the urban centres – are
under-staffed. Andrew Withers walked into his parish council seat
uncontested last year, and didn't have to spend a penny on
campaigning. A friend of mine who lives in a smallish town once
joked that if I moved to his town we could take over the local
council between us.
So local politics is
cheap to get into and important enough to bother with. It can also
be a stepping stone to bigger things. Let's say we do get some
councillors elected in the next few years. One of them serves a term
or two as a councillor and gets a reputation among the voters for
being good at his job – as he's popular with the people in his
ward, he might decide to have a go at standing for Parliament, and
the Party might think it's worthwhile supporting him. Who knows what
could happen? But we won't get anywhere without having some “form”
at local level first. All politics is local politics.
OTHER CAMPAIGNING
ACTIVITIES
There's no reason we
can't attach ourselves to any political demonstrations that support
causes that we're in sympathy with – No2ID, any campaigns against
future gun bans, drug legalisation etc. In those circumstances we
should do what groups like the Socialist Workers Party do – print
up our own banners, leaflets etc. It doesn't have to be expensive,
it's cheap publicity and can attract new members.
When there's a
demonstration that we're opposed to, we can also stand on the
sidelines and hand out leaflets giving our point of view to members
of the general public. In those situations, a slightly lower profile
and a good pair of running shoes might be advisable, but I personally
do get sick of seeing the same old gangs of socialists demonstrating
for the same old discredited causes with no-one opposing them.
JOINT MEMBERSHIPS
I'm coming towards the
end of this article, you'll be glad to know, but there's one last
area I want to mention. LPUK had a policy against members also being
members of other political parties. This was a policy I supported at
the time, but in the last few months I've had second thoughts and I
believe the new Party should allow joint memberships. The reason
LPUK didn't allow joint memberships was that this was thought to
create a conflict of interest – if someone's a member of (say) LPUK
and the Lib Dems, who should he campaign for at election time? It
seemed to me at the time that you should just commit to one party –
but this forced people to make a choice, and we definitely lost
members because of this policy. Apart from anything else, it was
practically unenforceable. One guy stood as a local candidate for
UKIP and the election was over before we found out and expelled him.
To his credit, he accepted his expulsion with good grace. His reason
for standing as a UKIP candidate and not an LPUK candidate was that
they had an organisation in the area to support him – I can
understand this, having stood as a candidate myself. I think the
benefits of allowing joint memberships outweigh any potential
drawbacks, and include the following:
The potential to have a
larger membership base. We know there are libertarians in UKIP, the
Liberal Democrats and the Conservative Party. By excluding them,
we'd be depriving ourselves of potentially useful members.
In a lot of areas there
will be no Party organisation – we just won't have enough members.
So if isolated members want to join a larger party in order to have
some kind of influence over the local political scene, I see no
reason to stop them, especially if the candidate they're supporting
is libertarianish anyway.
Gaining experience.
LPUK had a lot of members with no previous political experience –
probably the majority. The new Party will probably have the same
problem. By joining more established parties, members can
potentially learn a lot about how to run campaigns properly. And a
guy who spends time leafleting for (say) UKIP in one election might
develop the self-confidence to stand as a Party candidate next time,
who knows?
Influencing other
parties. If we're ever to change the political landscape of this
country in a more libertarian direction – and I think we can – we
need to influence members of more established parties and try to get
them to adopt more liberal ideas. So joining these parties, going to
meetings, talking to members and maybe circulating leaflets seems to
me to be worthwhile.
Reality check:
Associating with people who have different political opinions can
have the beneficial effect of forcing us to double check our own
beliefs to make sure they're still in line with common sense.
There's a danger that probably all radical political parties face –
when activists are only associating with other activists of the same
stripe, they can lose their common sense to theory. I've been in
libertarian meetups where people have argued for or against a
particular policy idea based not on whether it's morally correct, or
practical, but on how “libertarian” or “unlibertarian” they
think it is. One ex-leader of LPUK even commented in a blog post
that it would be “unlibertarian” to intervene in a mugging unless
the victim asked you for help! That's how far off the rails theory
can take you – so yes, I think associating with people who aren't
quite on the same wavelength as you can help you stay anchored to
reality, as well as honing the debating skills.
CONCLUSION: CAN WE
SUCCEED?
I think we can. The
present might look fairly bleak and statist, but there's no reason
for the future to go on in the same vein. It's important to remember
that what we now call libertarianism would have been called
liberalism in the 19th Century – and the Classical
Liberals did OK. The 20th Century was dominated by
statist ideologies, especially the twin evils of socialism and
racism. It's time for the pendulum to swing back, and I think
current social and technological trends are pulling society in a more
individualist direction – the rise of the internet has meant that
not only can people promote their political views more easily, and
network more easily, it's also made it possible for practically
anyone to have a go at setting up a business from home – look at
people who make a living through eBay for instance. That's going to
give rise to a more entrepreneurial small-business culture than has
existed in the past – just the type of people who are our most
natural constituency. It's also made it easier to raise money for
charity, lend money to small entrepreneurs (or get a loan if you need
one), do research etc. I think the 21st Century will be
dominated by individualist philosophies just as much as the 20th
was dominated by collectivist ideas. We can be part of that.
Can we ever form a
government. Maybe, I don't know. Not in the short term, but longer
term, who can say? Do we need to? If we can take control of some
councils and show how to apply libertarian ideas to improve our
communities, if we can influence other parties by sharing members
with them – will we even need to get into Parliament? Not
necessarily, as long as people with the right ideas are getting
elected, whatever flag they fly under. If a future Prime Minister
stands up in Parliament and introduces a raft of legislation
including the abolition of Income Tax, re-legalisation of pistols and
concealed carry, the scrapping of most of the red tape that gets in
the way of small businesses functioning, re-introduction of trial by
jury in all criminal cases – he's getting a round of applause from
me even if he's a member of the Labour Party!
We can win. Victory
means getting the government off our backs, whether we're actually in
government or not. As long as we've got a clear idea what we want,
as long as we're willing to put the work in, and as long as we're
properly organised, we can do it.
So those are my
thoughts on how a new libertarian party should be organised and how
it should operate. It's not a complete blueprint, just an outline –
better-qualified people than me would need to flesh it out. But I
think it's workable.
Of course there are
other options...
Wednesday, 25 April 2012
NEW LIBERTARIAN PARTY - URGENT UPDATE
I've received the following message from Gavin Webb, who is heading up the current initiative to set up a new part that's fit for Libertarians to join:
Today my hosting provider suspended my account for alleged copyright violations. Upon contacting them it transpires that Ian Parker-Joseph on behalf of the Libertarian Party UK had made the complaint on the basis that by using the url libertarianparty.org.uk I was in fact passing off and trading as the Libertarian Party UK. Please can you now direct anyone interest in seeing a new registered libertarian political organisation on the scene to visit www.gavinwebb.com/libertarians. Thanks.
......................................................
Note from Stuart: Gavin Webb is one of the more useful members the Libertarian Party has ever had, having been our only sitting councillor and one-time Communications Director. Unlike the sleazy little gang that siezed control of the Party's assets last year, he has actually done a lot to promote Libertarianism through the democratic political process. He's got the backing of what's left of the active membership of the Libertian Party, and if the lying conspiracy theorist Ian Parker-Joseph thinks that a cheap trick like this is going to stop the loyalist faction from establishing the new and more effective libertarian party that this country needs, he's even crazier than I think he is.
Today my hosting provider suspended my account for alleged copyright violations. Upon contacting them it transpires that Ian Parker-Joseph on behalf of the Libertarian Party UK had made the complaint on the basis that by using the url libertarianparty.org.uk I was in fact passing off and trading as the Libertarian Party UK. Please can you now direct anyone interest in seeing a new registered libertarian political organisation on the scene to visit www.gavinwebb.com/libertarians. Thanks.
......................................................
Note from Stuart: Gavin Webb is one of the more useful members the Libertarian Party has ever had, having been our only sitting councillor and one-time Communications Director. Unlike the sleazy little gang that siezed control of the Party's assets last year, he has actually done a lot to promote Libertarianism through the democratic political process. He's got the backing of what's left of the active membership of the Libertian Party, and if the lying conspiracy theorist Ian Parker-Joseph thinks that a cheap trick like this is going to stop the loyalist faction from establishing the new and more effective libertarian party that this country needs, he's even crazier than I think he is.
Tuesday, 17 April 2012
A NEW POLITICAL PARTY FOR LIBERTARIANS?
With the assets of the Libertarian Party still in the hands of an unelected gang of liars, conspiracy theorists and conmen, some of us who have been active in promoting Libertarian values via the electoral process in the past and don't intend seeing that effort going to waste are now interested in starting a new Libertian political party so that we can move forwards and do some actual politics. At the moment, the initiative is just at the level of finding out how many people would be interested in supporting such a venture. Gavin Webb - former Communications Director and the only councillor the Libertarian Party ever had - has set up a website where people can register their interest:
http://libertarianparty.org.uk/
If you understand that libertarians have to be involved with the political process in order for this country to progress in the right direction, please register your interest - you won't be committing yourself to anything.
http://libertarianparty.org.uk/
If you understand that libertarians have to be involved with the political process in order for this country to progress in the right direction, please register your interest - you won't be committing yourself to anything.
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