Author Archives: Caron Lindsay

Federal Conference is probably the best fun that you will ever have in your life. You will thoroughly enjoy every exhausting moment. If you’re new, it can be a bit overwhelming until you get used to the sensory overload. I had a long break from going to them and when I returned, in 2011, I spent the first day wandering round in a state of wide-eyed amazement,  like a child in a toy shop. Spring Conference is smaller than Autumn, but a look at the agenda tells me that there are at least two things going on that I want to go to at all times.

So, with that in mind, I thought I’d throw together a fairly random list of tips and hints for getting the best out of the annual cornucopia of Liberal Democracy. If you have any other Conference survival tips, let me know.

1. Plan your days

The Conference day has a huge variety of things to do. As well as the debates in the hall,  there’s a comprehensive training programme.  There are spokespeople Q & As. There are competing fringe choices to be made, even though the overall selection has reduced in recent years.  You can guarantee that you will never be bored and that several things you want to see will be on at the same time.

Be aware as well that you can eat quite well for free by choosing the right fringe meetings – look for the refreshments symbol in the directory.

Believe me, it’s much easier if you sort out your diary in advance. The best laid plans will always be subject to a better offer or meeting someone you haven’t seen for years randomly in a corridor, but it’s best to at least try to get some order into the proceedings. The Conference App is a real help for this. You can download it from whichever App store you use on your phone (search for Lib Dem Conf). It allows you to add events to your schedule and is pretty flexible. 

One of the things I really wanted to say on this International Women’s Day is that it’s a day to celebrate all women, to think about the various barriers that women face across the world. Women have all sorts of different experiences and it’s important that they are listened to because it’s by understanding what needs to change that we make the world a better place. Quite a simple concept. It’s also, for me, a simple concept that International Women’s Day is for everyone who identifies as a woman. No exceptions.

I say that because Women’s Hour presenter Jenni Murray wrote one of those “I’m not transphobic but” articles in the Sunday Times this week. She questioned the right of transgender women to identify as “real women.” She justified her argument by talking about transgender women saying things she didn’t agree with. One was a vicar who had talked about clothes and the other had said that women should wear high heels and shave their body hair. Apparently they were “playing into the stereotype – a man’s idea of what a woman should be.”

I would suggest that this was nothing to do with being transgender. I’ve heard cis women express similar views.  It was only in the last decade of her working life that my mother felt able to wear trousers to work. I might utterly disagree with their opinion, but I’m not going to question anyone’s identity.