Party President Josh Babarinde wrote to all members and on this site this week inviting us to share our views on the development of the party strategy which will be debated at our Brighton Conference in September.

The consultation process involves a Typeform which has to be completed by this Thursday and 3 online consultation sessions over this weekend. The final one is tomorrow night at 5:30pm and I can promise you that if you go to it, you will retain your will to live and will feel that your time has been well spent.

This is not usually the case with party consultations, I’ll be honest. I have come out of many before wanting to pull off my own toenails because they involved some party luminary talking at you and power-pointing you within an inch of your life.

I went to this morning’s one tired and hungover after the football and not expecting much. In fact, I was cursing Josh for organising it 5.5 hours after the match ended. However, it was actually very good. Even some of our grumpier members thought so, too.

Josh set the scene for 20 minutes or so and then there were two breakout sessions on what our party is for and organisational priorities.  We were put in breakout rooms of 4-5 people with a series of questions to answer and feed back. There were some really useful discussions with a lot of common themes, particularly about developing an emotional message which connects with people.  “Stop the word salad” was my contribution to that – we need to show our sincere  trust in people, our ambition for everyone to be able to live the best life they choose and show a hopeful vision where we fix things together not do nothing and turn on each other like Farage wants.

What was really good was that there were people on the call from most parts of the country. I’m not sure if anyone was there from Wales today, but I came across people from London, Merseyside, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, the West Midlands and a few more bleary eyed Scots.

In the plenary sessions, there was a chance for people to answer some more questions using Slido – a kind of instant message board which was easy to use.

So if you have avoided these sessions because you think it’s going to be dire, please do think again. Sign up for tomorrow’s – you’ll have an email from Josh entitled Invitation: A Summer of strategy that has all the information you need.

And if that time doesn’t work for you, there will be more over the Summer once the draft motion is out. And definitely fill out the typeform.

The Federal Board has given itself the opportunity to hear the views of party members in a meaningful way. We will see over the next few months whether they listen and act accordingly.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social