Ros looks at the state of the parties post-conference

Liberal Democrat News, October 2006

So the conference season is over for another year. Delegates troop wearily home to find their entrance passes on the doormat, journalists take a breather from the endless stream of commentary and the political parties take stock of the year to come as parliament reassembles.

The sheer tenacity of the Liberal Democrats is breathtaking - those pundits who were eagerly predicting our demise during the dark days of January can only look on in amazement at poll ratings consistently at 20%, backed by real victory in Dunfermline and a heroic performance in Bromley.

We've much to be pleased about and have a challenging period ahead.   Labour will be paralysed until Blair finally goes.  Gordon will almost certainly achieve his long time dream, but does anyone see any substantive way in which Brown’s Britain will be different.

Despite Labour's obvious unfitness to govern, there's no evidence of the sort of massive swing the Conservatives need in order to achieve outright control of Parliament.  It's not enough for Dave to feel our pain - we'd all rather like to know what he intends to do about it. Contrast the vagueness of Osborne's tax plans compared to the detail provided by Cable and Huhne. Cameron’s conference speech was an aspirational wish list and provided no real platform for government.

We've cause for optimism, but only if we dare to be different.  Britain doesn't need another political party which sounds like Oprah and behaves like management consultants. We have to show some anger sometimes and display the passion that the others lack, whether it is talking about the gross inequalities of opportunity which still exist in this country, the disaster of British foreign policy choices or the failure to tackle major environmental threats.  And that sometimes means saying things which challenge conventional thinking and face the realities head on.

Until recently we were the only party to refute the “Westminster knows best” argument which has bedeviled British society for decades.  We talked about local solutions to some of our problems and European solutions to others. Well, in a way we have won half of this argument and there is a growing realization that the answer to the weak delivery of many public services lies in a much more devolved approach.  We're all localists now.

Maybe in time, the European dimension will again become fashionable. This summer I have spent time in both the United States and China.  I get a real sense of frustration amongst the American public with the new world order which puts them in a driving seat they don't always want to inhabit, forced to take the lead, but then vilified when they do. They want to see Europe as a more equal partner driving genuinely multi lateral solutions. China is about the same size as the continental US and undergoing change on a scale almost unimaginable. A new university is opening every two weeks somewhere in China. I travelled over a brand new 32km road bridge, completed in less than 2 years, and one of many major infrastructure projects they regularly complete. They know they have massive problems caused by rural depopulation and urban pollution. Official figures show a staggering 1.3 million children each year are born with a birth defect. The haze of pollution over the cities leaves you gasping for breath - a condition known as the Beijing flu.

In some ways China is where the US was a century ago - a major power which has not yet chosen to exercise the full weight of that power in an international context. There's no reason to imagine the power might become malign, but it will be vast in size, and under little democratic control. So, any assessment of the future global order needs to factor China into the equation, and we need a realistic assessment of whether any individual European country can have a serious dialogue with China.

We shouldn’t be afraid to talk about the challenges we face as a country, as a continent and a planet, neither should we be afraid of talking about solutions which come from the right level, be it local, national, European or through strengthening global institutions.