19 September 2003
The Liberal Democrats go into their conference at Brighton next week hoping for a boost from having either won or taken second place in the Brent East by-election, which was due to take place on 18 September.
Party leaders will perhaps be glad that the polls will have closed before the conference debates a referendum for an elected head of state and on ending parents' rights to physically punish children.
The conference agenda includes a debate led by health spokesman Evan Harris in which he will call for all 'administrative and bureaucratic' measures in the National Health Service to be subjected to an independent test of whether they offer benefits to patients on either clinical or financial grounds.
Harris will also press for the merger of health and social care and for local NHS services to be freed from central targets.
Edward Davey, who shadows the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, will call for the abolition of council tax and its replacement with a local income tax.
His motion states that this would save £500m in benefit administration costs, and that this sum should be given to councils.
A motion on housing says that government should be neutral on methods of managing the council housing stock between large-scale voluntary transfers, arm's-length management, tenant co-operatives and direct administration by local authorities.
This motion would make the Liberal Democrats the only major party willing to entertain the idea of councils continuing to run housing directly.
Decentralisation of Whitehall departments, unveiled by leader Charles Kennedy as the party's new 'big idea' in the summer, is referred to in a number of motions but is not the subject of a separate debate.
Kennedy is expected to use the conference to try to sharpen his party's attacks on the government in the wake of its opposition to the Iraq war.
This would in effect restore the position of the Liberal Democrats as 'equidistant' between the Conservatives and Labour, a stance abandoned in the mid-1990s when former leader Paddy Ashdown launched a policy of co-operation with Labour.
PFsep2003
