Category Archives: News

My Conference preparation has not been entirely successful so far. The biggest failure was the lamination of my voting pass. Somehow I put the bit with the hole at the wrong end. I am going to ask my work colleague to rescue it with a hole punch this norning. The galling thing is that I took the most care I’ve ever taken doing it.

As I vainly struggled with the approximately 723 million items on my to do list yesterday morning, I started to thinking about all the people who make Conference happen and thought it would be a good …

Photo credit: Freefoto.com
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 puppy not knowing whether to play with the squeaky toys or eat all the biscuits.

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 starts with breakfast fringes as early as 7 and goes on until the small hours. There’s a comprehensive training programme alongside the debates in the hall. 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. If you want to go to the big events ie anything involving Vince, then get there early.

I wouldn’t, of course, be shamelessly abusing my position as editor properly if I didn’t plug the LDV fringes. First of all, on Saturday between 1 and 2 pm in the Sandringham Room in the Hilton Hotel, we’re trying to inject some kindness and light into the toxic environment facing transgender people at the moment. Every time you open the Times, or the Mail, or, most annoyingly, the Guardian, there’s some article suggesting that women’s spaces are somehow at risk if transgender women are allowed in them. Actually, it’s been the law since 2010 and it’s been fine, but a new government consultation on making the process of getting a new birth certificate easier for trans people has been used as a vehicle for the most appalling scaremongering. In Scotland, feminist and trans equality organisations have worked well together on these issues, and we’ll have representatives from Engender and the Scottish Transgender Alliance along with the wonderful Sarah Brown (fresh from her by-election campaign in Cambridge) and Party President Sal Brinton showing that when women work together, all women prosper.

We’ve also co-sponsored a fringe with the Young Liberals on Fake News, with a fantastic panel – Marie Le Conte, freelance journalist, Daniel Pryor from the Adam Smith Institute MP for Edinburgh West and former Journalist, Christine Jardine and our wonderful Paul Walter. That’s in the Edinburgh Suite of the Metropole from 8:15-9:30.

Also in the Edinburgh Suite of the Metropole from 6:15-7:15 on Sunday, we’re co-hosting a fringe with Lib Dems 4 Seekers of Sanctuary asking How should the UK change its family reunification policies for refugees. There will be refreshments….

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 Conference). It allows you to add events to your schedule and is pretty flexible. It also has all the Conference papers on it – but to be honest, I find it way too fiddly for that. I like to have my proper agenda and the paper conference bulletin. 

One of the most useful things you can possibly use to help you prepare for a hectic Conference is the Lib Dem Conference app.

It will help you make sense of the numerous choices available. Its timeline session lists everything you could possibly want to do in the auditorium, on the fringe or in the training rooms. It sets out the Conference timetable and allows you to add things to your schedule. You can view it in one list of everything going on or filter it by auditorium, fringe and training.

Unfortunately, it can’t choose for you which of the four things you might want to do at any one time to go to.

It is really worth going through this stuff well ahead of Conference because you seriously won’t have time to do it when you get there.

It will also have details of all the Conference papers so you can see the motions and amendments and reports at a glance. All the Conference Daily sheets will be added as they are produced.