Alex has been touring the exhibition stands.
Alex meets DELGA (LGBT organisation), the Local Government Assocation, the Parliamentary Candidates Association, the Lib Dem Christian Forum, EARS (election software), Alter (Land Taxation and Economic Reform), LDDA (disabilities), and Lib Dem Image (perveyors of all sorts of Lib Dem branded goodies).
The exhibition is great this year – more stands than ever before I believe, and lots to see, do, and take home for free…
Alex: “Are those LDYS condoms?”
LDYS: “They weren’t my idea”
Alex: “So. Describe those to me”
Alex attended the reception for first-time conference attendees, the so-called “conference virgins”. His latest Podcast is a vox-pop-orama.
This Podcast just goes to show that Lib Dem members come from all backgrounds, viewpoints (so long as they’re against the 50p amendment in the tax debate).
In this post you’ll hear Alex ask the ultimate Lib Dem geek question – “what number does your membership number start with?” (you can tell from someone’s membership number how long they’ve been a member).
*blink* *blink* what day is it?
Here’s today’s morning Podcast looking back at yesterday, and ahead to today.
You can find the Channel 4 Morning Report Podcast, which is mentioned towards the end, here.
We’re still running a day behind with Alex’s Podcasts – he’s churning them out faster than I can post them up.
Conference isn’t all about policy debates and procedural motions. In this Podcast Alex Foster encounters a gaggle of Liberal Democrats surrounding the poor Salvation Army.
It’s starting to annoy me that Alex is having forty times more fun at conference than I am.
Speaking of gaggles of Liberal Democrats surrounding you – when I arrived on Saturday I discovered a wedding and wedding reception taking place at the conference hotel. Can you imagine what it must be like to book your special …
Stephen Tall is the first Liberal Democrat blogger of the year: http://www.libdems.org.uk/news/stephen-tall-wins.html
Well done Stephen! As the room was packed with both bloggers, the press (and Iain Dale!), I’m pretty sure we will repeat this in future – though possibly with air conditioning. (Personally, I think it is a sign of our green credentials that we passed up on air conditioning of course).
Alex recorded this Podcast yesterday, on the train on the way to Brighton.
Alex Foster and Chris Le Breton discuss the green agenda, and how our party’s already green credentials can be given a boost.
The challenge of the Greens has been on the minds of campaigners at conference this year – in too many council and Parliamentary seats, the Greens have taken just enough votes away from the Lib Dems to deprive us of a win. There is a debate going on about how we can better underline our own green credentials to prevent that happening.
If …
Conference seems to have started very calmly and efficiently this weekend – no long queues at registration this year! – but we’ve already started our conference webcasts. First up is Lynne Featherstone, who will be presenting the Lib Dem blog of the year award this evening. Later today Ming Campbell and conference committee chair Duncan Brack will also appear. All their webcasts will be on www.libdems.org.uk/conference/webcasts.html
Oscars, here we come!
PS Nick Clegg has also done a webcast on his first six months as Shadow Home Secretary: http://www.libdems.org.uk/justice/issues/clegg-webcast.html
Alex‘s Podcast, recorded yesterday, uploaded today (sorry, getting ahold of wi-fi Internet access before the conference centre opens is a bit tough).
Enjoy this one, because pretty soon we get to the Podcast where Alex has gone out and recorded the Salvation Army.
Given how late I went to sleep, I can’t quite believe I’m
a) awake
b) have recorded a Podcast
c) Have walked somewhere with wi-fi to upload it
d) awake
e) apparently sober
Here is the first of today’s Podcasts, from me (looking back at yesterday and ahead to today), with a few more, from Alex, to follow later today.
One quick piece of good news – Ming has said what everyone at conference has been thinking, and saying. There is no-one I’ve met here who thinks the tax vote is in any way the be all and end all of Ming.
I am apparently fairly alone in thinking Simon should continue as President. He is very popular with rank and file members as President (though not as a potential leader apparently!).
The move to find someone else may be a blogging thing. In the leadership campaign, it was quite rare to find many bloggers for Ming. Bloggers mostly seemed to be Huhne or Hughes fanatics. Then it came as a bit of a surprise when Ming walked it. The ordinary non-blog members liked him in preference to the others.
The following seats have recently announced they are seeking Prospective Parliamentary Candidates (people to run as the Lib Dem candidate for MP at the next General Election).
We list the constituency name, application closing date, and the contact details of the Returning Officer, whom you should contact for an application form.
Cardiff Liberal Democrat campaigner Alison Goldsworthy gives us her insight in to Welsh politics, and looks ahead to next year’s Assembly elections.
It’s 100 years since the Liberal Landslide and 40 years since the Welsh Liberals were made distinct from the UK party. History hits everyone’s g spot once in a while, but mine? I get more excited by the idea of enacting the present and making the future better. In Wales, it is hard not to tingle a little at the thought of next years Welsh Assembly elections.
Paul Trollope has been slaving over a hot Risograph to deliver some fliers for Lib Dem Voice – no glossy corporate stuff here – if you’d be willing to give half an hour to stand outside the conference centre and push them in to the willing hands of delegates in the last couple of days, please do contact me.
Also, I think the thread on the 50p tax rate and the Meeting the Challenge post have both been helpful ‘warm runs’ of the debate that will occur in Brighton. If the web site has informed your thinking, …
Compared to the other two parties, the Liberal Democrats are remarkably united in our philosophy. Even if most members cast it vaguely in terms of ‘Freedom’ and ‘Fairness’ rather than paying attention to deep philosophical debate, there aren’t yawning chasms in the party. Perhaps because of this, perhaps because Liberalism doesn’t provide set solutions in the form of any particular social or (despite Meeting the Challenge) economic analysis, and perhaps because Liberals just like that sort of thing, we’re also much more likely to have open debates. It’s just that, when we do, they tend not to be characterised by the sort of mudslinging, vitriol and acrimony seen when rows break out of the pressure-cookers that are the other two parties.
It’s pretty common for the polling companies at the moment to ask how people would vote with a Brown/Cameron/Campbell match-up, and the result typically is the Lib Dems dropping a few points compared with Blair/Cameron/Campbell.
But what do these figures really tell us? Take the latest Populus poll (full details here). It uses the question:
Q.5 Now I’d like you to think ahead to the next election, expected in 3 or 4 years time. Imagine that the Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown takes over from Tony Blair as Labour leader and the Conservatives are led by David Cameron and the Liberal Democrats by Ming Campbell. Which party would you vote for – or would you vote for another party or not vote at all?
The son of Orange Book has been launched, and is previewed by the Times.
(Yes, I’m a day late, but hell, no-one else blogged about it and I was waiting to see what reception it would get out there)
The run-up to party conference always helps focus people’s minds on finishing off projects and it’s often a mad dash to have things ready in time for conference. One of the many new things we’ve been getting ready for conference is our new policy consultation website that has been unveiled today – http://consult.libdems.org.uk
It is being used at first to support the four policy consultations the policy team are running in Brighton, but we are intending to make it a permanent fixture of the internet with new consultations using it too rather than just running the site down when the …
Lib Dem voice was launched last Sunday, and thanks to you the site hits have far exceeded my expectations for the first week:
We’ve even generated our first ‘story’ in the press, and (somewhat sickeningly!) it’s in the Daily Express diary column.
In full, it reads:
He stood down as Lib Dem Leader in 1999 but it seems party members still pine for the days of Paddy Ashdown. A new poll by party website, Lib Dem Voice, shows Paddy, now Lord Ashdown, as by far the most popular choice to be the party’s president, the post occupied by …
The party has a tie-up deal with Amazon which means that if you are buying a book (such as a certain book from a certain journalist on The Times, which of course no-one is reading), the party earns commission – without you having to pay anything extra. Any of the links in this posting will earn that commission, or you can use the Amazon link at the bottom of all the pages on www.libdems.org.uk
Iain Dale has seen the Tory logo future, and it’s… scribbled.
Some months ago I was sat in a pub in Bath, with a friend who was hovering on the brink of becoming a Liberal Democrat party member. He’s on board with our policies, believes in personal liberty, cherishes civil rights. A natural Lib Dem. “There is just one thing I wish you guys would change, though”, “what’s that?”, “your stupid logo – what’s that all about, then? it’s been around for ages.”
Libby. The Bird of Liberty. In her day she was young, thin, and beautiful, then time passed and she put on weight, and there were even rumours she had passed on.
The Guardian reports that Evan Harris MP has tabled an amendment to the Tax Commission motion at conference – he is apparently seeking to retain the 50p top rate of tax.
Evan appeared on the Today programme a couple of weeks ago to call for the retention of the 50p top rate as an easily understandable, symbolic gesture. The opening editorial of the August edition of Liberator magazine also seemed uneasy at the idea of dropping the big five-oh.
It always looked likely there’d be a feisty debate over this particular aspect of our tax policy, though in …
It’s here. The moment you’ve all been waiting for and more glamorous than the Oscars in a totally non-glamorous sort of way. It’s the shortlist for Lib Dem blogger of the year.
This is the first time we’ve run such a competition. The idea is to encourage more Lib Dem blogging and also to give some extra profile (and traffic) to those in the running for the prize. We’ll see how it goes … though I’m sure it will go better now that I’ve decided we won’t be giving
…
A blog thus far unknown to me, The Daily, claims Short will not run again, and will use her new found independence to urge a coalition government with the aim of delivering Proportional Representation.
I haven’t seen this picked up by any of the conventional media, and it strikes me she’s not the sort to announce her retirement quietly, but still – food for thought.
With friends like Clare Short…
UPDATE 14/09/06: Short confirms she is stepping down
Faced with the problem of an historically low turnout, Gavin Whenman asks what we can do about it. Is compulsory voting the answer? And / or an extra bank holiday?
Turnout in the 2005 UK General Election was 61.4% of the electorate, up on the 2001 figure (by 2%) but still historically speaking very low. Such a low turnout undermines the legitimacy of our elected politicians and disconnects them from the concerns of their constituents. If they know that certain demographic groups are more likely to vote, for example the elderly and the middle class, they will listen to that group more than they will listen to the other groups, for example young people and the working class.
Alex Cole-Hamilton recently topped the mid Scotland and Fife regional list for next year’s Scottish Parliament elections – giving him a very good chance of being a Lib Dem MSP from next May. For Lib Dem Voice he tells us how he reached the top of the list, and what the future looks like for the Liberal Democrats in Scotland.
It hasn’t really sunk in yet, but as top of the mid Scotland and Fife regional list I could well be the youngest of what is expected to be a significantly larger Liberal Democrat contingent elected to Holyrood next year. Indeed, polling carried out both by professional pollsters and other political parties show the Scottish Liberal Democrats well in contention to become the largest party in the Scottish Parliament next May, winning in seats and regions across Scotland and I could actually be part of that. For myself and many others like me, there has never been a better time to be a Scottish Liberal Democrat. There is a real belief that our star is rising.
“What are you doing in here? are you bored?” – the words of a friend of mine as he slumped in to the adjacent chair at the back of the conference hall in the Blackpool Winter Gardens in September last year.
My friend had been on one of his annual conference rituals – the exhibition freebie run. The star prize of an Electoral Commission anorak had eluded him, but he was content enough with his Local Government Association biro and mints, and his BBC keyring.
He’d done better than me – my trawl of the exhibition had turned up only a copy of the latest DELGA newsletter and a cold stare from someone I’d chatted up the night before, tempted back to my hotel room (for a stimulating discussion of the General Election manifesto, obviously), and promptly fallen asleep on.
It’s everything from “monstrously idiotic” and “insultingly tokenistic” to “well-argued and full of practical steps built on clear principle.” Why then, asks former Federal Policy Committee Member Alex Wilcock, is more attention not being paid to the paper produced by the Meeting the Challenge debate?
This September, the Liberal Democrats debate their two most crucial policy papers between the last General Election and the next one. So why is all the debate about a 50p rate of tax? You’d think it was either a holy relic or the last wicked bastion of socialism, depending on which overexcited commentator you read last. Yes, tax is an important battleground, but when our whole political direction is up for grabs, it’s bizarre to focus on one detail in one policy area and to ignore the rest. Besides, while everyone’s arguing about the tax paper being ‘a shift to the right’ – which it isn’t – the other key paper is lurching in a quite different direction.
Hi and welcome to Liberal Democrat Voice.
I’m Rob Fenwick – I’m a Lib Dem activist and supporter, and I was the party’s Internet Campaigns Officer during the last general election.
I’ve set this site up under the caption ‘our place to talk’ – it’s a place for activists and party members to have a conversation. Now I’ve got it up and running I hope you, my fellow activists, will bring the place to life.
The following seats have recently announced they are seeking Prospective Parliamentary Candidates (people to run as the Lib Dem candidate for MP at the next General Election).
We list the constituency name, application closing date, and the contact details of the Returning Officer, whom you should contact for an application form.
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