Author Archives: Alex Foster

Here’s my absolute, most important top tip for people attending conference – pack sensible shoes. I cannot emphasise this enough. You will be spending much of your time on your feet, and you will be schlepping wearily from venue to venue. Bits of Bournemouth are hilly, so you will also be trekking up a small cliff to switch from conference hall to fringe meetings. If you just pack strappy shoes, or dress shoes, or the ones that look good with your suit but are murder on your toeses, you will spend the week in agony. …

This is the third in a small series of articles with what every delegate needs to know about Conference. See also our posts on how you don’t have to be a registered delegate to attend fringe and training events, and how to be a voting rep at conference even if you weren’t elected to that position at your local party’s AGM.

This is perhaps the area where I am least qualified to speak, since I have never given a speech to Conference in the eight or so years I have been attending.

But I have noticed there’s very clear and …

I apologise from the outset, but this is going to be one of those posts that not everyone understands. If you’re not technical, or if your diary is still entirely paper based, look away now.

Neil McGovern, a Cambridge City councillor, has grepped the conference directory so that you don’t have to. He’s written a program that scrapes the information about the training and fringe events (including LDV’s fringe fiesta) and plugs them into a Google Calendar.

This means that if you use GCal yourself, you can import all those events into your diary – and from there, straight into your …

This is the second in a short series of top tips for conference-goers. Our first, yesterday, told you that you don’t have to register as a delegate to attend fringe and training events at conference.

Today’s tip is for those planning to attend conference, who are not voting members of conference.

Many local parties have not elected as many conference representatives as they are entitled to. Even those local parties that have both a full complement of reps and reserve reps may find themselves in the situation that not all of their representatives are able to make it to conference.

This …

Here’s a handy hint if you live near the conference centre in Bournemouth: you do not need to be a registered delegate to attend many of the fringe and training events.

The “Access” rules as set out in the Conference Directory (available for download here) say:

Access to all areas of the Bournemouth International Centre (BIC) is possible only with a valid, visible conference photo pass worn with the official lanyard. You will be asked to show your pass when you enter the BIC and you are required to wear the pass with the lanyard visible at all times within the

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