You may have seen various Lib Dems on your social media all getting angry about proposed new changes to the party constitution. I won’t get into those here, except to say that in my view they’re detrimental to the party democracy and will make it easier to just let the leadership bulldoze the party without having to do any of that pesky “being liberal” or “internal democracy”.

This view is not exactly countered by the communication of this from the party. We’ve had a couple of emails “from” Parliamentarians. Here’s a screenshot of the most recent, “from” Jo Swinson:

That’s good, isn’t it? “Get involved with the consultation and tell us what you think”? So you click the “read more” link and it takes you to this site.

And what do you see there? This:

That’s right: nothing requesting your opinion at all, no way to “tell us what you think”. Just options to see a video about the proposals, see headlines saying what those proposals are, or sign up for the supporters’ group that’s *in* the proposals, which you would normally think would happen *after* a “consultation”.

Now, there *is* a way to find out how to share your views — it’s to click “see the proposal”, click “read full proposals”, click through to the PDF (!) of the proposal paper, and find an email address (consultation@libdems.org.uk ) at the end of the paper, which calls itself a proposal paper in the links, but a consultation paper in the PDF itself. It turns out that along with the advertised proposals, this also contains questions for the consultation.

(This is of course the style of “consultation” we saw previously with the immigration motion, and look what a mess that’s turned out to be).

It’s almost as if they want to make it look like they’re having a consultation but actually make it a fait accompli or something…