Turmoil at Liberal Democrat spring conference as party leadership fails to win backing of delegates for health bill
Few organisations can debate for three days whether to stage a debate, hold the debate, have a vote and then proceed to have a debate about what they have debated. But that is why the Liberal Democrats hold a special place in the British constitution.
In a marathon of arm-twisting, lobbying and skulduggery in Gateshead, populated by a special cast of characters – Lady Williams, Evan Harris, Polly Toynbee, assorted doctors and activists – the Liberal Democrats ended up voting not to support giving the health bill a third reading.
It had been a rollercoaster weekend in which the party wrestled with the dilemmas of coalition politics and the shape of progressive public service reform. The saga started on Friday afternoon when the federal conference committee voted to allow four emergency motions through to a ballot of delegates for Saturday, including one motion calling for the bill to be killed, and another – dubbed the Shirley Williams motion – endorsing changes to the bill and urging a third reading.
Opponents of the bill expressed horror at the way in which the issue was being transparently manipulated to turn it into a referendum on Williams, regarded as a deity in her party. Critics said she knew little about the motion drafted in the office of Nick Clegg. "I don't mind Shirley being a human shield for Nick, but at least she should be a volunteer," complained a former MP. Another asked why they could not call their kill-the-bill motion the St Francis of Assisi motion.
Williams does indeed have a unique status in her party. It was her rhetoric that persuaded delegates last spring in Sheffield to demand massive changes to the bill, and as a result many delegates this weekend instinctively were willing to subcontract their judgment to her. Clegg framed the choice simply: "Should we have faith in Shirley Williams or Andy Burnham [the Labour shadow health secretary], touring the TV studios denigrating our party?" Delegates received three leaflets from the leadership extolling the bill.
So when delegates came to choose their emergency motion to debate at Saturday lunchtime, the kill-the-bill tendency suffered a serious reverse. In the first round, the kill-the-bill motion won, with 270 votes to Williams's 246. But when the other two motions in the ballot were removed, and second preferences redistributed, the Williams motion won, with 309 to 280. At first, that seemed to be that.
Williams was on the warpath, furious at the way in which the bill was being traduced by its opponents. A mixture of decency, lucidity and ferocity, she is at 81 a remarkable life force. She can be the personification of charm, but she is also schooled in years of 1980s infighting, and knows how to wage political war.
At a fringe meeting she spoke of her anger at the struggle to reveal the truth, termed Twitter "twister", and claimed the Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee had put tribalism ahead of the truth. "Every single penny of profit made in a foundation trust hospital on the back of private patients' fees goes to the NHS. The whole lot. Every penny is invested back in the NHS to pay for those new machines you see in our hospitals today", ," she said. But she was especially infuriated by the opportunistic Labour attack on the bill. Williams said: "I respect many of the Labour people, but not Andy Burnham. He is opposing policies he introduced and damning them in the name of the Liberal Democrats and that really won't do."
The Lib Dem frontbench health team in the Lords – Lady Jolly, Lady Barker and Lord Clement Jones – felt passionately that they had worked successfully behind the scenes with the government over six months to change the bill. "It has been coalition in action – we have not had to call a single vote in the chamber, we have done the whole thing by negotiating with ministers," said Jolly.
Issues such as the role of the secretary of state, more democratically accountable commissioning, a ban on trusts' cherry-picking of private patients, declaration of interests, the accountability of health and wellbeing boards, and the duty of Monitor, the regulator, to promote equal access and not competition, had all been addressed, they argued. But the mood of despond among the anti-bill activists lifted on Saturday afternoon once they heard they could seek to amend the Williams motion. As a former MP explained, it is hard to exaggerate how difficult this issue is for some party activists – it goes to the core of what a Liberal Democrat believes it means to be a progressive.
The anti-bill group started to recover its confidence. John Pugh, the Liberal Democrat MP, spelt out what he felt was at stake for his party and the NHS: "David Cameron says he is prepared to take a hit to get this through, but all the polling shows that we will also take a hit and possibly a bigger hit. I think it would be nice at some point, [if] somebody quite senior in the party would like to apologise to all those people high up in the health service that have been messed around awfully in the last couple of years."
By Sunday morning as the debate started a little after 9.30, it rapidly became clear that the leadership, sitting in a long row at the front of the hall, were not going to have their way. The bulk of the speeches were coming from the opponents of the bill, and one in particular from Martin Tod cleverly swayed delegates by stealing a rhetorical device from Clegg.
He warned: "The enormous complexity and bureaucracy of this system, combined with an unprecedented savings challenge, creates an extremely serious risk of an unavoidable lethal political cocktail of crisis and chaos in frontline services in the run-up to a general election.
"This is worse than tuition fees. We have been told stopping the bill now is an incredibly hard thing to do, but last year Nick talked about 'not doing the easy thing, but doing the right thing'. This debate is not about what you think about the coalition, it is not about what you think about Andy Burnham and Labour, or anything other than the right thing to do for the NHS, and the right thing to do is withdraw the bill." Rachel Coleman Finch said: "The politics of this bill are poisonous. We're screwed if we pass it. And we're screwed if we don't ... We need to get away from a macho fear of U-turns. To change your mind at the last minute because it is the right thing to do is not a sign of weakness, it is a sign of strength."
David Rendel, the former MP, told fellow delegates: "Don't let your goodwill towards Shirley come before your goodwill towards the doctors and nurses in the NHS." And Andrew George, the MP for St Ives, said: "The clear balance of non-partisan opinion has shown the red light to this bill. When faced with a high-speed train crash, it is best to slam on the brakes, and not to go out and say where is the dustbin to make it look less bad. I agree we should stop apologising and look forward, and in looking forward we can see what this bill will do the NHS and I don't want to be apologising in years to come."
By the time Williams came to speak, it was clear her argument was being lost. She drew applause by repudiating all the talk of a Shirley Williams motion: "The one thing you should not allow to happen is that this debate becomes about one person because that is absurd."
She urged the party to have greater confidence in itself. "We must not continually under-rate what we have achieved. There is one piece of false information after another that has been fed into this debate. One of the problems we have had is getting across what has happened in the Lords. Some of the information is so new that nine people out of 10 have not got a clue about it and the press has not helped by consistently peddling such lies, such as 49% privatisation.
"I would not be standing here and I would not have stuck with the bill, if I believed for one moment it would undermine the NHS." A show of hands showed no clear result, but once a card vote was taken the result was overwhelming. The passage calling on Liberal Democrat peers to support the third reading of the bill was deleted by 314 to 270.
The conference spilt out into the corridors of the glorious Sage conference centre to debate what they had decided. Lib Dem health minister Paul Burstow declared the conference had made up its mind when it rejected the kill-the-bill motion on Saturday. There would be no change, of course. Charles West, the leading opponent of the bill, said: "The official policy position now is that we do not support the bill, but we are not saying drop it either, so we are in the position of having withdrawn our support for the bill."
And Simon Hughes, the party's deputy leader, said: "The party is saying we are reversing our judgment on the bill as a whole until we have seen the final shape of it. It is a work in progress."
It is a description that could be given more broadly to the Liberal Democrats as they struggle on a near-weekly basis with the compromises coalition government demands.