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Amongst all the American political networking, a significant number of British Parliamentarians have come over to Denver. The Tories have sent 2 MPs (including former Party Chairman, Francis Maude), Labour have sent at least 3 (Michael Gapes, Hugh Bayley, and a Labour peer), and the Lib Dems have sent a delegation of around 5 - including Sir Menzies Campbell, Lord Steel, Lord Rennard, and Ed Davey. I asked if the Lib Dems were planning to send anyone to the Republican Convention in Minneapolis-St Paul next week, and was told that there were no plans to do so.

The following is a transcript of my interview with Lord Rennard (Chief Executive of the Liberal Democrats) and Ed Davey MP (Shadow Spokesman for Foreign Affairs). I have cleaned up some of my long and rambling questions, but have transcribed their answers verbatim, largely thanks to the genuine fluency of their answers.

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MORUS: This is Morus reporting for PoliticalBetting.com from the Big Tent in Denver Colorado. I’m delighted to be joined by Lord Christopher Rennard, Lib Dem by-election maestro, and by Ed Davey MP, shadow spokesman for Foreign Affairs. We’ve had a couple of questions from readers of PoliticalBetting.com, and I’d like to start with a general question as to what you think UK political parties can learn from the netroots- and blogosphere-inspired campaign that we’ve seen from Barack Obama this season?

RENNARD: I would say you’re always on the look out for technological and organisational innovation, new ideas about how to organise your party and get your message across. But still, the most important thing that you should never forget at a political convention is that it is the messages that matter the most.

DAVEY: Yeah, I agree – you’re looking at everything from fundraising to mobilising activists, all those sort of techniques that Obama, and frankly Howard Dean, had before. But it’s also a question of whether it translates across the Atlantic. Different types of elections, different types of messages – what’s interesting when we talk to Howard Dean’s people, or those of Barack Obama, it’s often the quality of the message in a given election that determines your ability to raise money or to go on and win. The challenge for British political parties is to ensure that we don’t lose things in translation across the pond.

MORUS: Another question from a reader, a Lib Dem staffer in fact. With the Lib Dem conference coming shortly, what provisions are being made for bloggers and other non-mainstream activists, and is there a danger that what is currently a deliberative body could become more like this, or like the Labour or Tory conferences, which are seen as more of a showcase for political ideas?

RENNARD: Well you look at things like our current website, and we’ve used that in many ways to be consultative, and in our deliberative policy-making process. We’re innovative in the way we’ve done that and in our approach to policy-making. I think that’s good, because many people can’t make it to a seaside town, for a few days in the third week of September, and the web is the way in which they participate in the party.

DAVEY: Yeah, I’d agree, and we’ve changed the meeting times of the conference after consulting conference delegates - an idea that I worked on with Chris [Rennard] thinking “Hold on a minute – we’re missing a number of party members.” Actually, the change we’re making, both on the internet, and the timing of the party conferences, are designed to get more participation from members, not less.

MORUS: How about fundraising? All the major parties have had problems with major fundraisers – either being ineligible, or not reporting donations correctly. Do you think Britain will ever see campaigns run, as Obama’s has been, primarily off ten and twenty pound donations?

RENNARD: Well in a couple of respects, I don’t think we will. One is actually the culture is completely different. The culture of giving in the United States – from tipping your waiters, to giving to various causes – people might be richer in the US than in many other places, but they want to give of their own volition. Perhaps that culture is not really there in Great Britain, for political parties. And secondly, obstacles like data protection don’t really seem to exist in the United States. You can bombard people, inundate them with e-mails without their consent, asking them to give money, and you can’t do that in Great Britain, and I don’t think the people in Great Britain would allow the law to be changed to allow political parties to do that. So I don’t think we’ll go quite that way, but all political parties are trying to use the web to build a base, and in particular to make sure that their members, and their supporters and donors, are more informed on a regular basis about the party.

DAVEY: I wouldn’t add much to that except to say that when we were in the early stages of redesigning the Lib Dem website, and I went on lots of the American websites with the people who are the brains behind it, it was very interesting that on American political websites the ‘Donate’ button was very big, very prominent, and you can’t miss it.

MORUS: One of the most exciting thing about the primary season between Clinton and Obama was the caucus system. Do you think that the notion of local open primaries, to allow local parties to choose their candidates will catch on in the UK?

RENNARD: We effectively do that already, even in electing the party leader, since the Liberal days in 1976, when David Steel was elected by members of the Liberal party, and when Labour and the Conservatives left the choice almost entirely to their MPs, the Liberal Party decided it should be a membership vote. I think what Howard Dean did four years ago, and what Barack Obama has done now, is reach out to new audiences, who don’t watch conventional news bulletins, and don’t read a daily newspaper, but who do use the internet for various things, and they’ve therefore met a large number of people, whom they have excited and enthused and got involved. They’ve used the power of the net, and of e-mail, for meeting points, for activities, for mobilising: and they have huge numbers of Obama supporters who you simply would have seen getting involved in previous years. A Democratic candidate, encouraging voter-registration, Get Out The Vote, even with three months to go.

DAVEY: Again, I agree with Chris. I’m not sure it’ s about getting everyone to have a say in the democratic process, and saying who the Liberal Democratic candidate is for the next election. What the issue is, is how to get people involved, and learning to participate, and get to know you as a political party. And what we need to remember, and we often forget this when we’ve been in the party a long time, or in the Westminster Village, is that for many people a political party is a weird animal, and quite abstract and quite different from their daily lives. So I think we have to find ways for people to be involved and to participate, but without compelling them to join a political party, which is a step that might just be a little bit too much, so we have to reach out more. There are problems that the Tories have experienced, trying to mimic the American Primary – one might look at constituencies like Watford to find out where their primaries have come unstuck.

MORUS: On the Lib Dems, Nick Clegg announced that he would be chasing 50 Labour seats, which will be music to the ears of many bloggers who have been suggesting that chasing Labour seats in the North (with a view to becoming the main party of the centre left) was more sensible than defending the irresistible Tory tide in the South. How do you think the idea of spending resources in the North will go down with sitting Lib Dem MPs in the South?

RENNARD: Well let me say firstly that I don’t agree with your primary supposition, that it’s proving difficult for the Lib Dems to resist the Tories. If you actually look in detail, constituency by constituency, in 2007 and 2008 when the Conservatives were doing very well nationally, you look at the seats the Liberal Democrats have won in the last four elections, and the big gains the Lib Dems have made from the Tories then. We’re, by and large, ahead in those seats in the local elections, even before you look at the very popular personal vote of Ed Davey, or factors like tactical voting applying in a General Election. So the evidence on the ground at the moment is that we are more than holding our own. Then if you look at the places that Lib Dems have been ahead of the Conservatives in Conservative-held seats in local elections – in ’07 in places like Eastbourne, in ’08 in places like St Albans, or at the last General Election when we were winning seats like Taunton and Westmorland and Lonsdale, I think that indicates we can get seats from the Conservatives next time. But we also have to recognise that Labour will be much much weaker at the next Election than they were at the last one, and it’s like Newton’s Laws of Gravity that a Labour Government that a Labour Government at the end of their third term will be much weaker than they were at the end of their first two terms. A year ago, Gordon Brown was perhaps in the high thirties, and at the moment he’s around 25%. There’s at least fifty seats you can see where the Lib Dems are the only alternative to Labour- now I’m not saying we’re going to win all those seats, but we are at least established as the clear alternative to Labour. Some of the London seats, seats like Hampstead & Kilburn near Camden, some of the Midlands towns like Northampton and Derby, some of the big Northern Cities (Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield), or cities in Scotland like Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen – Lib Dems are the alternative to Labour. Look at ’97, where we won a large tranche of seats from the Conservatives – 28, including Ed Davey’s Kingston Seat – and we were gaining then as we were the strong alternative to the Conservatives who were dropping, and there are large swathes of Great Britain now in which the Lib Dems are the alternative to Labour, and the Conservatives are nowhere in some of the places I just mentioned, and the Lib Dems can win there next time around.

MORUS: A Slight variation on that question: Chris Huhne claimed that the Lib Dems were the only party that could speak to both the North and South of England. Assuming you accept that as a statement, is this claim offset by the fact that the party might struggle in Scotland and Wales, where there is already a successful alternative to Labour and the Conservatives?

DAVEY: I don’t think the evidence supports that either, though I think we saw a small squeeze in the Scottish elections, I think our share of the vote went up marginally, and in Wales it went up as well. In terms of votes, in no way are we feeling under pressure in Scotland and Wales – far from it. We think there are seats to be won in both Scotland and Wales at the next General Election, and I completely agree with what Chris [Rennard] said about England. I see us holding our own against the Conservatives, maybe gaining some, and then taking a hatful of seats from Labour, and I think the significance of that has perhaps been lost on many commentators. If people want to get rid of the Labour Government, in many parts of the country it’s a Liberal Democratic vote that will get rid of the Labour government, and that will put the Liberal Democrats in a really powerful position after the next Election.

MORUS: Something of a truism in American politics is that elections can be decided, not so much the answers on policy that are give to the electorate, but the questions that are asked. It is claimed that, irrespective of policy, an election about National Security and Foreign Relations by its very nature favours the Republicans, whereas the Democrats prefer to fight on Medicare or Education. If you had a choice, what would be the two battleground issues at the next election that would favour the Liberal Democrats?

RENNARD: I don’t think it’s going to be about specific issues at the next election. The unique appeal of the Liberal Democrats will be our ability to reduce the stresses that there are on many ordinary families in Britain right now. And those stresses are everything from the financial pressures that families are feeling, to the fact that they see the rising prices of fuel and bread, at the same time they feel the tax burden is too much and that Brown has gone too far, the cost of childcare and student tuition fees. These are causing great stress for them, and they are concerned about things like the environment in the long run, and what sort of condition their kids will grow up in. I would say that the major issue for the Liberal Democrats the next time around is how we reduce those stresses for people and gone perhaps are the days when you say Crime or Defence or the Economy or the Environment is the issue that dominates – it will be a question of the overall package aimed at reducing the burdens on people.

DAVEY: I wouldn’t disagree with that, but when I’m drafting my leaflets in Kingston & Surbiton, in a more specific way it’s some of the financial pressures that we need to relieve for ordinary families. Chris [Rennard] said tuition fees, but I would say council tax. I’m delighted that Nick Clegg and our wider party at conference will be advocating tax cuts. That’s not a radical change in position, but rather one that’s been coming over a series of elections, and what Liberal Democrats are saying is that people on low incomes, and people on middle incomes, aren’t paying more in tax, and I’d think that’s the right message. It’s not that the richest and the wealthiest won’t pay more under the Liberal Democrats, because they will, but we’ll make sure that the vast majority of taxpayers, particularly those on low incomes who are struggling, will pay less – and I think that’s a fundamental distinction between ourselves and even the Conservatives interestingly. The Environment was in Chris’ answer – that’s still fundamental, I think, to the Liberal Democrat approach, and I think you see it in councils emphasising the environment more, and you see it in Parliament and the European Parliament. I think the thing that we have to get across at the next election is that the Conservative attitude to the environment is not just hypocritical, but they would take us back…the idea that the Conservatives have changed their spots on the environment is just shown not to be true when you look at their voting record on councils, in the Westminster Parliament and in the European Parliament. They are Europe’s dirtiest party, and we will make the environment (in the European elections, but in the national elections beyond that) a key differentiator between ourselves and David Cameron, and indeed Gordon Brown, because they have nothing to offer. They have no record on the environment and I think anyone who cares about the environment needs to look very carefully at what Cameron’s saying. Look through the spin, because there ain’t any substance the other side.

MORUS: How might a new US President change the relationship between the US and the UK, especially in the light of the Lisbon Treaty, and a raised media profile being given to Britain’s European relationship?

DAVEY: Well I think it really depends upon who the next President is, but I think whether it’s Obama or McCain, both of them have argued for European unity, for the Europeans to get their act together, particularly on issues like security and defence. I mean McCain has been very clear, and you compare that to what the Conservative Party has said – William Hague, Liam Fox, and of course, David Cameron – they foam at the mouth at the idea that Europe should be working more closely together on these issues, and I think Britain and the other European countries should look at ways that we can procure goods and services better, burden-share their costs better, real practical issues in terms of what a European security and defence policy should be in the years ahead. And therefore, you have the absurd position of a potential…of the Conservative Party being out of step even with the Republican Presidential contender.

MORUS: Talking of McCain, earlier this year, he proposed a League of Democracies to run parallel to the UN, that would be able to act where the UN chooses not to act. If we accept that Moscow and Beijing don’t have the moral legitimacy to tie the hands of the democratic powers, is maybe a league of Democracies a sensible idea?

DAVEY: Well I’d like to see what John McCain, or anyone else punting this idea like Kagan and others, what they really mean by it. I think there are some serious dangers to it – the minute that you say that China and Russia have no validity in making international law, is a very dangerous one, and you lose the ability to persuade them and to influence them because they’re not around the same table. The minute that you exclude and isolate countries as powerful as China and Russia – they’re not exactly going to sit there and do nothing, they’re not exactly going to like it, and they’re not exactly going to have a very friendly response. It does seem to me to be a slightly self-defeatist approach. What we need to do is to see if the UN can start to work better, if we can have better diplomacy in the UN. What I find astonishing is how dreadful the diplomacy has been from the Bush White House for so long, and the concern we have with McCain’s foreign policy (as much as we know about it – there’s not a huge amount of detail there) it does seem to want to continue a lot of the Bush-Cheney approach, and I think this proposal for a League of Democracies seems to be along that line. That you’re trying to tear up the existing world order, and go a separate path. You should put the challenge back to people like John McCain and say “Well is American going to sign up to the International Criminal Court? – this is international law which maybe Beijing and Moscow have problems with themselves, are you going to show leadership? What are you going to do about Kyoto II?” that’s coming down the track – we’ve only got Copenhagen ahead of us. These are the issues that we need to see leadership on, and I think the idea of a League of Democracies would enable the world to tackle those issues is fanciful in my view.

MORUS: Finally, Mike Smithson got 50/1 on Obama becoming the next President back in May 2005 – who are the rising young talents in the UK and the US?

DAVEY: Well the easy one to think about is the Labour party – they’re likely to have the next leadership election in the UK. I actually think the Labour Party have a paucity of potential leaders which is a part of their weakness. I think they’ve been overdominated by Brown and Blair, and haven’t allowed other people to have their day. So I don’t know if I would necessarily be an outsider on PoliticalBetting.com in suggesting that I think David Milliband would be the next leader of the Labour Party.

RENNARD: Well first let me say that Mike Smithson is an incredibly clever bloke. You say he made this bet in 2005? I was in Boston in 2004, and saw Barack Obama give his electrifying speech in 2004, and I turned around to all the Americans around me and I said “That man will be the first black President or Vice-President of the United States” and I’ve been backing Obama ever since. AS a candidate in this election, I’m not totally convinced he’s going to win – I think it will be close. Other people to watch? It’s maybe too early in the Convention to pick out another rising star

MORUS: Are there any Lib Dem PPCs or junior MPs we should keep our eyes out for?

RENNARD: There are a lot, but I think I’d be in a lot of trouble if I started naming some of them, and not the others, so I’m not going to fall into that trap thank you very much indeed!!

DAVEY: Ditto, and can I just say I think Nick Clegg is going to be leading our party for many years to come.

MORUS: Lord Rennard and Ed Davey MP – thank you very much indeed.