Dear Colleagues, Dear Friends
It is with a heavy heart that I write to inform you that I will be stepping down as the Secretary General of Liberal International on April 30th 2020.
It has been my deep honour to serve as your Secretary General and I am proud to be the first African to do so.
I wish to extend my warmest thanks to the two LI Presidents that I have worked alongside, Dr Juli Minoves and Dr Hakima el Haité, for their guidance, support and friendship. There are few such intimate professional pairings in the world of work as that of President and their Secretary General and as a result, I am now in the position to count both Juli and Hakima as dear friends.
I am also filled with gratitude to the two Bureaus that have worked with me over the last 2 and half years and I am grateful for their advice, their friendship and at times their criticism. Their active engagement has enabled me to grow, become more focused and to better deliver on our shared desire to see LI do more and do it better
And together we have succeeded in doing just that.
We have built on the intellectual renewal and affirmation of our liberal values in the adoption of the Andorra Liberal Manifesto with an expanded physical presence in the world marked by a massive increase in our programmatic work, which now extends from human rights to climate justice to trade. Accompanying this enlarged focus on committee work, has been renewed attention on our member parties through the launch of 5 member services dedicated broadly to capacity development.
I am particularly proud of our founding of the Liberal International Democratic Training Academy (LIDTA) in partnership with LI member party VVD – which had its first intake last year – and our Political Start-Up Incubator in partnership with FNF Africa – which kicked off this year with 3 African political movements. Both initiatives are transformative and will provide fertile soil for the development of liberal values in these regions.
Let me be clear. No political international does as much as Liberal International.
We are the biggest political international on every conceivable matrix. We run more campaigns, have a bigger social media presence – a title we claimed from the Global Greens earlier this year – and run more activities than all of the other political internationals combined. In this we are supported by our diverse regional networks including ALDE, ALN, CALD and RELIAL – the cornerstones of the global liberal family and critical partners to LI.
We have also strengthened our voice.
In 2018 we reached over 1.2 million eyeballs on social media with our campaign to commemorate the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights – a campaign run in partnership with Radikale Venstre. Today, we reach nearly that number on a monthly basis with our communications interventions across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The debate started last week in the Secretariat (and lead by our student intern) on the merits of taking LI to TikTok. All I can I say is – watch this space!
At the heart of this success has been an ever-closer relationship between the Bureau and the Secretariat.
Based on the vision of our President and the overall direction of the Bureau, the Secretariat has had the freedom to experiment with new ideas and approaches in pursuing LI’s ever permanent objective of strengthening & promoting liberal values globally.
Some of these new approaches have worked and some have not. For what has worked, I extend my absolute thanks to my outstanding team in the Secretariat. For what has not worked, I take full responsibility. I will be so bold as to say that the LI Secretariat has never been so well-staffed, so committed or just so damn capable and smart. Virtually everything we have done in the past 18 months has been conceptualised and executed as a team based on the premise that no one has a monopoly on the best ideas and the best ideas come about through a process of fierce contestation and debate.
In stepping down as Secretary General, I am not stepping away from the liberal family.
Instead, in my new role as the Head of the Multilateral Organisations Practice at Access Partnership – a liberally minded specialist tech policy consultancy; I will be working with governments and business to lead countries to fair technology. In doing this, I will be building on the work I have helped start at LI focused on strengthening human rights in the face of digitalisation.
If the announcement of my departure has been sudden, rest assured that the preparation for my departure has not been.
LI’s work plan and performance matrix was approved by the Bureau in February. The performance matrix has been distilled into individual performance contracts and updated and approved again by the Bureau in March to adjust to the COVID-19 crisis.
Internally, the Secretariat has a strong management structure combined with almost daily oversight and participation of the LI President. The President will make an announcement on an “Acting Secretary General” by Friday this week and detail plans for the months ahead.
LI is strong, stable and capable and will remain so.
In closing, I would like to offer a personal word of thanks to:
Finally, I would like to thank the International Officers and member parties of LI, whose participation and contribution makes everything possible.
With my warmest regards and best wishes for LI’s continued success,
Gordon Mackay | Secretary-General
Liberal International | 1 Whitehall Place, London – SW1A 2HD
