Bournemouth is going to be a landmark conference for young people in the Liberal Democrats. This is the biggest opportunity in years for the party to answer the question on every young person’s mind as the general election approaches:
Is the party going to leave us behind?
With three key items on the agenda for young people, Conference will have three votes to decide what message it wants to send to the future generation of the party.
The first comes in the form of Federal Policy Committee’s (FPC) F31: Tackling the Housing Crisis policy paper. As James Bliss writes in Betrayal of a Generation, the Party’s sneaky attempt to abolish the national housing target, only two years after Conference committed to it, is a ‘signal and a big red flag to young people that the Liberal Democrats still aren’t for them’.
The Party could be choosing to send a strong message to young professionals that the Liberal Democrats are the party for them. Instead, the Parliamentary Party is insistent on subjecting the wider Party to the NIMBY policies that they hope will get them re-elected in their hyper-localist campaigns to be super-councillors. They are turning their backs on even pretending to be interested in championing liberal solutions to the nation’s biggest problems, in exchange for shoring up support in areas that are already orange.