Lib Dems must stay 'radical' says party's new president - The Guardian

• Deborah Summers, politics editor
• guardian.co.uk, Monday November 10 2008 16.25 GMT

The Liberal Democrats must remain a "radical" campaign group and shout out for the things they believe in, the party's president-elect said today.

Lady (Ros) Scott, who will take up the post of Lib Dem party president in January, said that was the message from the thousands of grassroots supporters she met during her two-year campaign for the job. She won an overwhelming victory over Lembit Öpik, the high-profile MP for Montgomeryshire, to take the post.

Admitting there was a "fine line between being radical and being daft", Scott insisted one of her key roles would be to ensure activists' views were heard by the party leadership.

"The immediate task is to make sure that members and activists are plugged in to what is going on centrally, and vice versa," she said.

"In the last two years I have been all over the country, from Orkney to Newquay. What they all feel is that we are best when we are a radical campaigning party, there is no doubt about that.

"They want us to make our voice heard more clearly and more loudly."

Asked whether her message to the leadership would be to be as radical as possible, she replied: "Not as radical as possible - there is a fine line between being radical and being daft - but we have got to shout out for things we believe in: small scale government, locally delivered services, protecting the environment and no to a third runway at Heathrow."

Ross insisted activists supported the leadership's call for tax cuts and said more should be done to highlight the party's differences to Labour and the Tories.

"There is an argument for tax cuts and giving people their own money back, particularly people on lower incomes," she said.

"There are lots of areas where there is so little to chose between Labour and the Conservatives. On the economy, for example, had the Conservatives been in power, the situation we are in now would have been exactly the same.

"The same is true of Iraq, where Labour and the Tories have been saying much the same thing.

"We have got to be shouting loudly about a different way of doing things.

"Too much money is spent chasing centrally determined targets and bureaucracy, she said, insisting the Labour government was still spending a huge amount on management and systems.

"We need less centralisation from government and we need a government that is more supportive of international institutions," she said.

Scott said her focus would soon be turning to next year's local and European elections and the general election "whenever that may be".

The baroness is vice-chairman of the Local Government Association and a former audit commissioner and Suffolk councillor. She beat rivals Lembit Öpik MP and Chandila Fernando in a postal ballot of all Lib Dem members to become the party's president when Simon Hughes steps down at the end of two two-year terms - the maximum allowed under party rules.