The £1m

A million pound donation from a mystery donor was announced at the SDP-->[redacted, Ed.] 2023 party Conference but has not been received. This raises numerous questions:

• Announced but still not delivered months later
• Not clear who the donor is
• Not even announced to the NCC. Shouldn’t they be trusted to keep it confidential?
• Not to tell the NCC prevents democratic scrutiny
• Is this due to a concern about the political risk and exposure for the donor or us?
• If it’s the donor what’s their concern – can we address it?
If it’s us – should we be be taking their money? (i.e. no Russian billionaires, thanks)
• No clarity over the conditions of the payment
• Can’t hold the donor accountable
• Can’t hold us accountable – has it not materialised because we are currently failing to meet some prior commitment?
• Rod [Surname redacted — Ed.]
• I’ve now heard two stories
• Story one – William agreed to the announcement – in which case William needs to explain himself about why he’d announced something that clearly wasn’t certain. Especially allowing an ordinary member to make that announcement. He should have made it if he was keen.
• Story two – Rod went in off his own bat to announce it without authorisation. In which case that’s a second strike against him and he should have hard questions to answer. Ken [That’s me – Ed.] got some unkind treatment online for raising issues against him when clearly there was more there to discuss

Strategy

• No single clear message
• If you ask 10 people what we stand for, you’d get 10 different vague answers
• Matt Goodwin gave us the 3 policies we need
• We should add housing as William is an expert on the matter and could argue anyone else into the ground
• No Media Strategy outside of William
• We get some decent YouTube views on our podcast considering it’s a niche political show
• But we could do much better
• Social media is still a place where you can get very decent bang for buck
• I used to run the finances for digital marketing for several luxury brands so I know about this stuff and what it would take to get us there
• Trying to get national TV exposure frankly says a lot about the age and attitude of the leadership
• The average age of those watching the BBC is 65
• I think the retired and elderly are a massively important part of our society who deserve a party that speaks their language
• But so is the young – and they don’t watch the TV
• Ironically even the elderly are now on social media so we’re missing them there
• Brexit, the 2017 and 2019 elections show the power of social media
• The Russians wouldn’t waste so much time and energy on it if it weren’t an effective strategy
• It allows us to have multiple lines of comms across multiple platforms
• Build a social media team
• Single head with a team dedicated to working these accounts and monitoring content
• The ownership and management must be vested in a neutral party structure
• Monthly calls with all Regional Heads to invest wider party participation
• It should be the focus of where we spend our advertising £ to drive membership upwards – we should take people where we have content to already show them
• Advertising in the real world is proportionately more expensive and less engaging
• We can drive engagement through certain magazines or feature articles written by a broad spectrum of key members
• GE [General Election – Ed.] is only months away – why am I having to raise this!?
• We had a party conference that was a long speech about how bad wokeness is
• Where was the preparation for a GE?
• Homecoming – I know when I feel at home – I’m feeling like a stranger here because of the absence of anything familiar – like a plan
• Correct the Website
• NCC not named
• No more pacts with Reform thanks
• People join us precisely because we are not Reform
• We lost members from the last pact
• If the Tory party does implode Reform will explode
• To get anywhere we will need to differentiate, not ingratiate ourselves

Cabinet

• We need to spread the responsibilities around to make the volunteering more sustainable
• Doesn’t need to be 100 members like the real cabinet– keep it to the traditional 20 odd major ministries + a Head of Operations and Head of Media?
• If you appoint cabinet members they can do the policy making by chairing their own policy forums
• Those policy forums must be staffed with experts – no unqualified people
• I’m not mad keen on ‘experts’ running the country but there’s also a reason we no longer let butchers do surgery
• Members obviously need a say, but they need to be heard not directly consulted in every policy discussion – especially if they have no background / qualifications / experience

Policy Making

• Process has been unclear and poorly communicated
• No more arbitrary deadlines – “must be done by conference”
• Needs to be coherent
• Cannot put all the policies to a vote to remove them if they make no sense anymore
• Example – “We shall maintain public expenditure at the affordable level of approximately 41% of GDP, investing strategically across the cycle in frontline public services. We shall avoid unsustainable increases above this level, which would result in, yet another cycle of unaffordable spending followed by austerity” https://sdp.org.uk/policies/economic-policy/
• Currently 41% of GDP would be £1.02trn for 2022
• Spending in 2022 was at 45% or £1.17trn
• So we have a policy to cut public expenditure by £115 billion pounds.
• That’s approximately what all education funding from primary to university costs us
• Leader can editorialise the manifesto but should not be writing it
• Policy secretariat is a good idea but needs some clearer written process around it
• Too often the process is: “which bit of policy next” not “how do we organise this?”
• Trying to do 8 areas of policy at once including overlapping and invented areas: “Policy on Governance of Nationalised Industries” – what does that even mean?

Education about the REAL problems

• Most people in this party are concerned about government debt without knowing how it works or what it’s also used for
• Examples
• UK government securities are a vital part of keeping major overnight money markets liquid
• A large proportion of the ’government debt’ which is often quoted is just owed right back to the BoE – it’s a circle jerk.
• We could look at writing this down over 50 years WITH the express involvement of the finance sector.
• Provided they are aware it could help with bond prices and offer them arbitrage opportunities whilst relieving the government of a pointless burden?
• HS2 is often quoted as costing £120bn – but if you look at spending each year we would only save £50m by cancelling it – so the £120bn is a whole life contract value – which is A LOT different as a value than the cash we spend on it
• So before we engage in changing everything an important job the party could do is help to educate people about what the real problems are
• When was the last time you heard someone from the MoD, OFSTED, Dept of Energy talk honestly about the issues they face and what it will take to make real change?

Financial Controls or Process

• We need the basics
• How do I request money?
• From whom?
• What do I need to supply?
• What should I send back after to prove the spend was managed appropriately?
• How should I prepare my members and candidates for an election and for electoral returns?

Cashflow

• Where are we in terms of monthly income from member donations?
• Of course this is confidential and shouldn’t be shared with the wider membership but I’m a party secretary
• If you have the Regional Co-ordinating Committees, Regional Party Secretaries and centre then you’re talking about 20 people knowing what’s going on
• That allows us to organise ourselves to do simple things like
• Target everyone paying £1 and see if we can get them to pay £2 = 100&perc; increase
• What would that be worth to us?
• If we can tell them what we’d do with the money they might well agree to it
• Knowing the cashflow gives us a sense of our limits and our potential
• How far away are we from being able to fund the 100 PPC candidates?
• Should we really be pushing for a huge set of signups that requires c.£50k we might not have…
• What is our budget for an election?
• We get varying limits on spending per constituency due to varying populations
• But it’s all the same varieties of vanilla + we must know from our educated sources what rough spending we’d want to aim at

PEPs and Bank Accounts

• How are we organising the finances to make it easy to deliver campaigns swiftly and effectively?
• Example – if every region has a subsidiary bank account then the main bank account can feed it chunks of money at specific times.
• All spending for electoral services should go through those – Party secretaries/treasurers become responsible for marshalling those resources and managing the cashflows
• This keeps it local and simple but also controlled.
• If we want to know what’s going on then, local party heads should have all the receipts/documentation.
• Anyone paid out of any other bank account must go through a longer set of checks / is more likely not to get repaid.
• If local party officials are concerned (not very financial / hate maths etc) then they can reach out to appointed people in the organisation for support or training. I know I’m not the only accountant in the party. I’m sure having a bunch of financial pros on call for a brief zoom chat to explain basic procedures and budgeting is not an issue
• What are the rules governing PEPs and do we have anyone in that position other than William (that’s if he even is)?
• What are the risks for other members becoming PEPs?
• I’ve tried to find out but it’s not 100% clear
• The legislation is from the money laundering sections and its vague talking about “managing risk” and “identifying the person responsible”.
• Clearly Nigel Farage had a bad time, but I’m not even convinced he is a PEP based on my reading as he simply sits to one side of an organisation.
• He’s 50% a journalist at this point so I’ve no idea what NatWest was playing at.
• If there is no risk that’s good news – but then we should be able to stand behind that statement to protect members and party officials. Has anyone had any good quality legal advice on this?

General organisation

• Need a clear structure
• Example – what specifically is the job of the party secretary?
• There are general principles in the constitution and rulebook
• But there should ideally be daily/weekly/monthly tasks to make the commitment and responsibilities clear
• Common sense is not as common or as sensible as we’d all like to think and even with common sense it can be overwhelming to take on a role like this – especially if there is no clear strategy
• We’re all volunteers
• Precisely why we need clear structure. Volunteers don’t have the time or energy to keep making things up to provide the structure the ordinary members are asking for
• Example – With no strategy it’s not clear what we should be campaigning about, so it’s not clear what to make the leaflets about, or who/how to get paid for the leaflets or how best to target delivering them
• People can be smart and make great efforts – but relying on this erodes goodwill as it becomes obvious that person is doing all of this under their own steam
• If we have one message – leaflet printing can be made easier and clearer
• If we have a single electoral strategy we know where to focus our energy
• Need a safeguarding policy
• Identifying an offender should not be left to luck and every political party attracts the bad, mad, and the dangerous
• We can’t check every member
• But for example the Labour Party accept people from the age of 14. The only people who can engage directly with those young people are already fully DBS checked.
• I’m not suggesting we follow Labour’s example, but you can see how simple and obvious the right kind of structure can be.
• IT strategy
• How and why were the tools (eg basecamp and onemail) chosen for internal administration? They seem to perform poorly compared with other services – is this just down to cost?
• We need more control over social media logins – there are rules to prevent the party losing control but members seem not always to follow them (not aware of them)? The SW Region was locked out of its local Facebook page for months after a dispute with the person who set it up!
• No social media of the party should exist without following the clear login policy that makes it impossible to lose the page / or to take it over if someone starts being offensive/difficult
• The social media companies then offer us a way to protect our brand and reputation.
• If we have the only genuine pages then, any other page can be requested to be delisted from the feed/shutdown on a copyright/fake news infringement basis.
• Yes I know we are all about “no cancel culture”, but we have to face the reality that the world is full of nasty little people who will gladly spend their time breaking what we are working hard to build.
• We need clearer and more explicit policies on membership
• There have been a couple of controversies recently over what organisations we would ban or not permit people to have been prior members of
• Shouldn’t be making that up on the fly

I’m quite sure that the organisation has come a long way in the last 5 years. That much is obvious from the membership growth, the podcast, and the exposure on GB news. However, getting the above issues done right first time is a matter of leadership. We could spread the accusation out further than the Leader to encompass the Chair and Secretary and the whole NCC. But every decision I have seen which required some action on it had to go past the Leader. It is also clear that if the accusation were to be dispersed this would only be to dilute the finger being pointed at the Leader. I do not doubt for a second his commitment, energy, or the time he has personally sacrificed and invested. But a man who digs a deep hole enthusiastically can only be congratulated if that hole is in the right place. To get the party to the next level we need a clear structure to make organising hundreds and potentially thousands of people easier. That job will never be easy, nor neat, but currently I’m not even sure what I’m doing as a secretary, nevermind what I’m doing wrong.

Many thanks for reading – any suggestions welcome!

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