6 Comments

• Liberal Neil 13th Nov '10 - 4:11pm

  Looks like quite a few fairly ‘robust’ characters have been elected there. Not a bad thing in the current circumstances. Federal Policy Committee, in particular, is going to be interesting.

• Niklas Smith 13th Nov '10 - 6:34pm

  I’m quite surprised at the number of spoiled ballot papers – over 10% of the total for one committee election.

• Tim13 14th Nov '10 - 8:58am

  Sorry, Neil, isn’t it rather similar to pre-the elections? I think there had been a big push to elect “robust characters” as you call them previously, and some have been re-elected. One of the issues is we get all the name recognition vibe going (as in most elections), so the “great and the good” are returned time after time!

• tim leunig 14th Nov '10 - 9:51am

  Isn’t it a bit odd that we have an election system whereby you only need 97 votes to get on the peers panel? [declaration of interest: I have *never* stood for this or any other party ctte]

• Liberal Neil 14th Nov '10 - 12:46pm

  Tim13 – looking at thes eresults I would say there are more such flk than previously.

  tim – 97 is an improvement on the 1 vote that was needed before!

• Rebekah Gronowski 24th Jan '11 - 8:28am

  I think that it is now time for every Party Member to have voting rights at Federal level – this includes Federal Conference and voting for the various Committees at Executive level. This has been done in Scotland where every member of the Scottish liberal Democrats has a vote at the Scottish Conferences. A particular example of this was the fact that ONLY Federal Conference Representatives were allowed to go to the Special Conference immediately following the General Election. The rest of us, ordinary Party Members, were not allowed to go which, effectively, gave us no voice at all. Our opinions and preferences were neither sought nor represented at this Special Conference by our so-called Local Party Federal Representatives. This is totally wrong and these elections to the various committees at Federal Executive level are another case in point.

  The Lib Dems constantly trumpets about the fact that it is a “Party where Policies and decisions are made by Party Members” – not true. They are made by the same people over and over again and, in many instances, the same people (many of whom have plenty of money to go around doing these things) are elected over and over again. The ordinary “grass-roots” Members, especially poor ones, never get a look in. Presumably we are only fit for the “behind the scenes jobs” like delivering leaflets, door-knocking and office work. Many of the grass-roots activists are the real heroes and heroines of our Party.

  Every Party Member should have a vote – now!