We hope this autumn federal party conference, our third online one, will have plenty of interesting topics to debate, and FPC is certainly planning to play its part in that by bringing what we hope will be some interesting and important policy papers and motions.
What this means practically for us now is that over the next month or so, before the motions deadline on 30 June, we have an intense burst of meetings to discuss all the work on our proposals, and finalise them. Towards the end of this period, after the hoped-for lifting of restrictions, we hope to have an in-person awayday meeting, our first physical meeting since February last year.
This week saw the first of these meetings. We started by remembering two long-standing servants of Liberal Democracy, Tony Greaves and Jonathan Fryer, both of whom had been active members of FPC at the times of their deaths in March and April. In their very different ways they contributed a huge amount to our work, and we hope to continue to remember their perspectives in our future work.
We welcomed Phil Bennion, the new chair of the Federal International Relations Committee (FIRC) back to FPC, and also Martin Dickson, the chair of the working group on the “Nature of Public Debate”. Since re-starting work in February, and drawing on their previous consultation at conference, this group has developed some really strong, and powerfully Liberal Democrat, responses to some of the quite inchoate challenges here. We had a good and full discussion of their analysis and proposals to promote good and effective public discourse, on aspects such as tackling ‘fake news’, the competitive and regulatory perspective on social media, supporting journalism, and information during elections. We will come back to this again to finalise the paper and motion.