Politics: Nick Clegg must reform his party for the sake of democracy – and survival

Nick Clegg’s tuition fees nightmare was never going to be over after the Commons vote.

Nick Clegg’s tuition fees nightmare was never going to be over after the Commons vote. Even if every Liberal Democrat MP followed him into the ‘aye’ lobby, it would still not change the party’s policy on the issue. That fight goes on. The Lib Dem Federal Policy Committee has already shown that it plans to make the Deputy Prime Minister go several more rounds. It declared recently that the abolition of fees remains party policy, whatever its leader might say.

At the next Lib Dem spring conference, a motion will almost certainly be tabled (and passed) reaffirming that the party remains committed to the abolition of fees. If this were not embarrassment enough, Clegg could even be forced to go into the next election promising to reverse the policy that he and his ministerial colleagues have expended such political capital to pass.

Clegg finds himself in this bizarre situation because of the internal structures of the Liberal Democrat party, where the activists control the leader, not vice-versa. The Deputy Prime Minister is not supposed to lead his party, but to act as a front man for the policies agreed by the Federal Policy Committee — the last redoubt of the beard-and-sandals brigade.

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As if dealing with protesters burning him in effigy and demonstrating outside his front door were not enough, Clegg is also the target of an internal resistance campaign. When the Lib Dem left saw the direction that the party was heading in under Clegg’s leadership, they decided to take over the committees. They knew that they could use them to wage a policy insurgency against the leadership.

Richard Grayson, who until recently was the vice-chairman of the Federal Policy Committee, says that after the leadership won a vote at the 2008 conference to scrap the party’s commitment to a 50p tax rate for the rich, ‘the social liberal wing of the party realised that it needed to get organised’.