The Liberal Democrat Campaign for Racial Equality will be holding a very important fringe meeting  on Sunday 15th September at 7:45 pm in room 1D in the Brighton Centre.

We will be discussing progress on implementing the Alderdice Review, six years after it was published.

The event is being held in association with Liberator and the Social Liberal Forum.

The speakers are:

Dr Mark Pack, Party President

Meral Hussein Ece, Lib Dem member of the House of Lords

Rt Hon Sir Vincent Cable , former Lib Dem Leader

Janice Turner

Victoria Collins MP

As a young black man born and raised in the London Borough of Southwark. I came to the Liberal Democrats via Jonathon & Veronica Hunt and Sir Simon Hughes. I had issues around my business. My company was a a victim of alleged fraud. My company the third largest employer in my borough behind Southwark council and Kings College Health Care Trust  employing 800 people and completing 10,000 trips for disabled people every day across 26 London Boroughs.

Those remarkable Lib Dem MPs councillors and activist took up my case and I won back my contract that my company had won in a bonafide OJEU tender process which had been illegally removed.

I was hooked, those Lib Dem people I came in to contact with I believed spoke for me. I joined the Lib Dems in Southwark over 22 years ago.

As time went on I got involved in an  equality SAO / AO because our local party  did not look like the people the party wished to represent.

I was determined to do something about it. I spoke with former Lib Dem Leader Nick Clegg in 2009. He told me that we will do something about the lack of race equality in this party. We need to be quick as we could be seen to be “worse than the Tories.”

Well we have seen the Cameron A list in all their glory at dizzying heights in the Conservative Party and in government.

In 2018 I had my arm twisted by Merlene Toh Emerson to do something on race equality within the party. I became the founding Chair of LDCRE along with Vice Chairs Janice Turner and Dr Mohsin Khan.

We welcomed a review that was being carried out Lord John Alderdice. A lot of my colleagues did not have any faith in the process whatsoever. I persuaded my then colleagues to give the man a chance.

Lord Alderdice produced a report that was factually accurate.  At LDCRE we welcomed the recommendations.

Progress was glacially slow. We were told at every juncture that there was not the funding to carry out some of the recommendations. Unbowed Janice Turner and myself went to a Federal Board meeting where we threatened resignation and approaching donors directly. One ethnic minority former chair and distinguished businessman / donor  stepped in. We were on our way.

Then came the Vice President BAME position and later we managed to get the Racial Diversity Campaign formed.

In that year I managed to win the Harriet Smith Award following in the footsteps of the great Tilly McAuliffe for my work.

The race equality juggernaut was and is stuck in the middle of the road hard to turn around. We still have a lot of work to do.

In order for the party to speak for and represent all communities, it needs to have its roots in all communities and have proper ethnic minority representation at every level of the party.

Former Lib Dem Leader Vince Cable held a meeting for all members at conference and he said something at that meeting which has stayed with me and my colleagues at LDCR until this day.

You will be saying we have just won an election with 72 new MPs. Why should we be bothered?

We are now the third political party in the country with the largest group of MPs we have ever had.

Poll after poll says we are in 4th or 5th place in voting intentions of Black Asian and culturally diverse minority communities, after the Greens and Reform.

In 2029 we could be badly squeezed. We need to be in a position to take seats from Labour. We need the minority communities in the equation.

Those communities are increasingly influential in major cities such as London, Manchester Liverpool & Birmingham

Has Alderdice been implemented 6 years on? You decide.

Book your (free) place here.

* Roderick Lynch is Chair of the Liberal Democrat Campaign for Race Equality.