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Tag Archives: 2025 spring conference

WATCH: All the fun of the Conference Rally

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 27th March 2025 - 1:41 pm

The quality of my life dramatically improved when I realised i didn’t actually have to sit through the rally. I could go and have a quiet dinner out with friends and then watch it on You Tube later.

Here is Friday night’s event which had a real live member of the Tracy Family from Thunderbirds. Honest. It wasn’t Wokingham MP Clive Jones dressed up, honest.

Enjoy.

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Posted in News | 2 Comments

WATCH: Ed Davey’s speech to Conference

By The Voice | Wed 26th March 2025 - 9:30 am

Enjoy Ed Davey’s speech to Conference in Harrogate:

The text is below:

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Posted in News | Also tagged ed davey and speeches | 1 Comment

Why we must protect non binary identities

By Adrian Hyyrylainen-Trett | Tue 25th March 2025 - 9:13 am

Editor’s Note: This is the speech Adrian would have given had they been called in the heavily over-subscribed debate on the Free to be who you are policy paper in Harrogate

Firstly a big thank you to our mover Christine Jardine MP for spending the time in talking at length with so many of us to bring together a wide-ranging motion which covers many topics which for those of us who are at the core of campaigning for LGBTQ+ rights are extremely pleased to have one concise paper to refer to.

I want to speak particularly to lines 112-113 – about recognising non binary identities.

In our general election manifesto in 2024, we specifically highlighted the neglected legal area of recognising and putting into law through the equality act – explicitly the recognition of non binary identities. I also may add that this didn’t cause us any harm to a record haul of 72 MPS so for those in the room who believe there are only two genders…. I’m sorry but we’ve already stood on and won on a position that is diametrically opposed to that view.

Secondly, Around the world, many nations have already recognised non binary identities – including the likes of Germany, Spain, Malta, New Zealand, Argentina to name just a few etc which is one of the key reasons that the UK has slipped from being 1st in ILGA lgbtq+ rankings in 2015 (after the coalition brought in Same Sex Marriage (led by Baroness Featherstone) to 17th in the most recent 2024 list because we have fallen back and regressed on trans and non binary protections in particular.

As a non binary individual, though staunchly retaining my same-sex attraction the laws are vague, and there have already been cases which have affirmed non binary rights within the gender reassignment protected characteristic – however those are being challenged and we need a much firmer recognition in law to protect my gender position – thankfully here at Conference, I have the option of Mx and they/them pronouns but that as many of you will know in the DEI field is being withdrawn due to excessive interference from governments – particularly in the US.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged LGBT and non binary | 24 Comments

Dorothy Thornhill writes: We need to modernise our approach to candidate selection

By Dorothy Thornhill | Thu 20th March 2025 - 10:07 pm

People who know me well know I always say it as it is. So I won’t mess about.

For me, there is some unfinished business at conference this weekend – and that’s why I’m asking you to support Motion F10 on Saturday.

How many more reports do we need before we modernise the party’s approach to candidates?

The 2015 General Election Review called for serious changes to candidate selection and support. And so did the 2019 General Election Review that I chaired.

And three years ago yet another report by my colleague Alison Suttie spelt out the real changes that needed to happen.

Yet here we are. A decade later, three major reports on – and there are still people arguing we don’t have a problem, and there’s no need for change.

I know that a lack of change is wrong – and so do many members up and down the country.

The need for speed

There has been a lot of information flying around about F10 over recent days, some of it not always completely accurate. We need to face facts. What we’re currently doing on candidates isn’t working. For a start, it’s just not fast enough. In the last parliament we had virtually no candidates selected for two years. In the end, time ran out to run member ballots – with only just over 200 candidates in place.

That meant members in over 400 constituencies didn’t get to choose their candidate. They were all appointed, many right at the very last minute. It also meant that there was no time to train and support those candidates properly after selection, and no time for them to grow their constituencies.

Any campaigner worth their salt knows that having a candidate in place, building a team and showing leadership, drives up campaigning activity. That’s just common sense, and we have clear stats to prove it.

Yet we insist on sticking with a system that delivers too few candidates, and too late on in the election cycle.

Clarity and diversity

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged f10 | 7 Comments

Caron’s Guide to the craziness of Conference – Updated for Harrogate 2025

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 20th March 2025 - 12:43 pm

Conferences in Harrogate have, so far, been very special for me. The first time I went there, in 1992, I saw a message on the Wednesday for me on the noticeboard to contact the main desk. They told me to ring my parents. I had to go across the road to a payphone and feed coins into it – something that some people reading this will probably never have done. Obviously I was very worried, as my Dad had just had surgery. But the news was brilliant. My sister had given birth to her first child, the gorgeous Laura, two whole days before. And I had been too absorbed in Conference to realise. That Wednesday was in fact Black Wednesday too.

Seven years later, I was back in Harrogate with my own baby son. He was then just 3 months old and he came all over Conference with me.

This year, I should get in just in time to go to the Social Liberal Forum lunch at the Crowne Plaza. Last year’s event was fabulous and I met Bobby Dean and Victoria Collins for the first time. I was so impressed with them and I am thrilled that they are both now MPs. This year, they have local MP Tom Gordon, Pippa Heylings and Bobby is back for a repeat performance.

I have revamped my Guide to the Craziness of Conference for this year. Enjoy. And if you have any questions, ask away in the comments.

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 child in a toy shop. Spring Conference is smaller than Autumn, but a look at the agenda tells me that there are at least two things going on that I want to go to at all times.

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.

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Posted in Op-eds | 3 Comments

Conference Extra

By Mary Reid | Thu 20th March 2025 - 10:37 am

Tomorrow Lib Dems will be gathering in Harrogate ready for Spring Conference. Whilst the formal opening will be on Saturday at 9am, there are a couple of events on Friday. There will be a Consultative Session on the Policy Review at 4.45pm and the Conference Rally at 6.30pm.

Conference Extra is a vital document if you want to make sense of the debates, because it includes all the amendments to motions. You can read or download Conference Extra here. It should be read in conjunction with the Agenda and Directory. Conference Extra also lists all the questions submitted on reports, plus proposed emergency motions.

Debates include:

F4: Science, Innovation and Technology. Note that part of the motion was omitted in the Agenda and Directory. The extra lines are in Conference Extra. There are three amendments.

F9: Free to be who you are. There is a drafting amendment, plus three amendments for debate.

F10: Implementing the Lessons of the General Election Review. This is a constitutional amendment which has generated a lot of discussion. It proposes changes to the processes for selecting Parliamentary Candidates. There are two amendments.

F14: The UK’s response to Trump. There is a drafting amendment, plus three amendments for debate.

F22: Emergency Motion. Members attending in person or online will be able to vote to select which motion will fill this slot. The choices are between:

Dropped Targets – A Threat to Care
Local Elections – Democracy Delayed is Democracy Denied
New Hospitals Programme – A Broken Promise
Restoring International Development Assistance
Securing a Path to Citizenship for Refugees

F23: Animal Welfare in the Food System. There are two amendments.

F25: Ending the Crisis; A Fair Deal for Children with SEND. There are two amendments.

The Leader’s speech will be on Sunday at 11.45am.

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Posted in News | 2 Comments

Statement from LGBT+ Lib Dems

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 19th March 2025 - 4:30 pm

LGBT+ Lib Dems co-chairs Charley Hasted and Luke Allan have issued a statement concerning distressing incidents that took place at Federal Conference in Brighton.

At the Liberal Democrat Federal Conference in Autumn 2024, a volunteer for Liberal Voice for Women harassed two members of LGBT+ Liberal Democrats on two separate occasions. The volunteer in question admitted waiting until our members, one of whom was an autistic woman less than half his age, were alone on our exhibition stall to target them. We are pleased that a disciplinary panel recognised his behaviour for what it was and upheld a complaint against him.

We are disappointed, though, that when his behaviour was raised with members of LVfW- including members of their committee, both at the time and after the fact, our concerns about this man’s behaviour towards a vulnerable woman were roundly dismissed by them.

For an organisation that claims to care about women’s safety, it is hypocritical in the extreme for them to dismiss concerns about a man’s behaviour towards a woman being harassing or intimidatory, when the basis for their dismissal seems only to be his age and/or that they agree with the opinions that led to him harassing our members.

LGBT+ Lib Dems stands firmly behind the principle that targeted harassment of the kind our members experienced is unacceptable, regardless of the age or views of the person doing it. Moreover, we have been consistently clear that we expect our volunteers to behave decently towards all attendees at Conference, and have worked productively with Party Leadership at various levels to ensure this is the case, and try and minimise conflict.

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Posted in News | Also tagged LGBT and Trans Rights | Comments Off

Making the cement for the yellow wall – how candidate selection reform will make us stronger

By George Sykes | Wed 19th March 2025 - 1:48 pm

On May 22nd last year, I watched Rishi Sunak announce the general election. Little did I know that a few hectic weeks later, we’d be celebrating having 72 MPs, an enormous achievement that is a testament to the hard work of volunteers and staff across the party.

However, we did not achieve that success by continuing to do what we had always done; we did it by ruthlessly introspecting and improving. Just because we have won does not mean we should stop our self-reflection. By my calculations, if we introspect as hard as we did last time, we should end up with 468 MPs at the next election…

As the chair of a Local Party that covers ten constituencies (with two being shared with other local party’s) in a labour facing area I had a few key aims at the election:

Stand a candidate in every constituency
Campaign in the seats we had existing campaigns in to ensure our voters had their views represented in the general election debate
Win in our designated local target seat

I’m proud to say that with the hard work of a team of volunteers across Leeds and the whole region, we achieved all of those. However, all was not entirely rosy for the following reasons:

Failed to stand a single women candidate across all ten seats
Lost our deposit in all but two seats (costing the party £4,000)

This is far from ideal, and if we are serious about being a diverse, representative, national party, we need to fix it.

Firstly, we need to enable our amazing volunteer teams to focus on what they can do best, identifying the members in their areas who can be recruited as parliamentary candidates. We know that proactively identifying and talking to potential candidates rather than waiting for them to come to us is key to increasing diversity. Who is better placed to do this than volunteers drawn from and embedded in our local parties?

By offloading the administration element of candidate recruitment, we can enable our volunteers to focus on building connections with potential candidates. This will develop a deeper pool of potential candidates more representative of the communities we seek to represent.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged candidate selection and f10 | 6 Comments

F10: the right means to a desirable end?

By Mark Valladares | Mon 17th March 2025 - 12:15 pm

As a veteran of the Party’s candidates process – Returning Officer, candidate assessor, member of Regional and State Candidates Committees – over more than thirty years, you might not be surprised to find that I’ve been following the debate on this ornate, detailed constitution proposal with some interest.

And, whilst the General Election review published in January was, whether inadvertently or by design, somewhat bruising towards those who have been at the heart of running selection and approval processes over past years, what it stated as desirable outcomes had a lot of merit. Getting candidates in place earlier, finding and developing more Returning Officers and candidate assessors, and increasing transparency and consistency across the piece, are all obviously sensible.

The “solution”, however, appears to be to take responsibility from the structures that currently exist and replace them with a new Federal one, in the expectation that it will do a better job.

This may or may not be true. It does rather depend on who takes on the new responsibilities, how well they are resourced and how well they work with a core group of volunteers who will still be relied upon to do the “grunt work”. For very few people act as Returning Officers and candidate assessors “because it’s fun”. They do it predominantly because someone has to do it, and they fit in it around a range of other commitments.

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Posted in Conference, Op-eds and Party policy and internal matters | Also tagged candidate selections and f10 | 6 Comments

Fewer committees, more diversity – why I’m backing F10

By Victoria Collins MP | Sun 16th March 2025 - 10:28 am

I want us – as Liberal Democrats – to select great candidates, improve diversity in the party and empower our local parties to elect the best candidates to represent them. That’s why I’m backing motion F10 at conference – the one that seeks to implement the recommendations of the General Election Review around Westminster candidates.

I am doing so for two reasons:

By reducing three committees to one it makes it easier to address the problems in our current candidates system;
By creating a place on the committee for the Vice President responsible for increasing engagement with ethnic minority communities, candidate diversity finally becomes a keystone in our Westminster candidate system.

Now, I am sure many in the party can give you verbatim – in probably the most intricate of detail – the constitutional intricacies and implications of the motion. However, I wanted to share with you my personal story of my journey to becoming a candidate and how this has led me to strongly support real reform of our candidates system.

From the top, I wish to say that none of this is criticism of individuals involved in the process. This is criticism of the process itself that volunteers spend hours dedicating their time to administer and deliver. I am truly grateful to them for this, but I want the system -those volunteers have to work with -to be better for them and for candidates.

I am in the incredible position of writing this post as the first Liberal Democrat MP of East and South East Asian origin, and the first MP for the newly formed seat of Harpenden and Berkhamsted. When my mother arrived from Malaysia 50 years ago, I don’t think she could have imagined that such a thing was possible. And yet here I am.

Becoming a candidate is not easy. I should quickly add that nor should it be. It is right that we are put through our paces. But becoming a candidate shouldn’t be made harder by the inadequacies of our own systems and processes, inadequacies which frankly stand in the way of us improving our candidate diversity.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged candidates, f10 and party organisation | 19 Comments

Ten years on – it’s time for change

By Chris White | Fri 21st February 2025 - 5:50 pm

Ten years ago I wrote in Lib Dem Voice about the need for a governance review of the English Party. I urged consideration of what functions of the State party could be better delivered at a Federal level, recognising money and time are always in short supply (not much changes there then!).

In that article I highlighted the Westminster candidate approval process as a function that should be coordinated Federally, with key State and Regional volunteers therefore benefiting from a more efficient, joined-up structure. More broadly I pointed out; “The current situation is a mess. Most members think they belong to the Federal Party (impossible in fact) and can vote for the committees which look after campaigning (but the Federal Party has no role over candidate approval).”

Roll forward a decade and last week I was struck by a strong sense of déjà vu.

I read this article from Julian Tandy (Welsh State Chair of Candidates) and Charles Dundas (Campaigns and Candidates Convener of the Scottish Lib Dems) and I see the challenge of doing Federalism properly continues still, and that decade old “mess” I referred to, remains.

I hope all of us who have been active in the English Party will pause and take with humility their unhappiness at feeling dictated to by the English Party. That may be uncomfortable to hear, but the best way to respect their complaint about not being listened to is to listen and act, not to dismiss them as wrong.

As a councillor some problems can be quick to fix, some take a little longer – but ten years? Even in local government terms that would be considered a long wait! But is a growing movement for change gathering steam? And, perhaps the bigger question to ask is: “Will the English Party finally get on board”?

Just like Charles and Julian, I will be backing Tim Farron’s motion (F10) at Harrogate conference which seeks to make our Westminster candidates system a Federal function.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged english party and f10 | 1 Comment

We should be spending 4% of GDP on defence

By Kevin Langford | Fri 21st February 2025 - 9:09 am

As Liberal Democrats our first task is to keep our society as fair, free and open as we can.

This society is threatened by a more aggressive Russia and a less reliable USA. This threat has to be right at the top of our thinking. The external environment has changed a lot and will require us to spend more on defence.

Determining how much more should be based on what it will cost to meet the threats we face. It shouldn’t be based on what Rachel Reeves thinks we can afford in order to balance the books, or on what we spend now plus a little bit, or on what Donald Trump tells us. We need to defend the country, rather than make a spreadsheet add up.

The currency for the debate has been defence spend as a % of GDP. This isn’t a good way of working out what we need, but is a helpful shorthand for the debate. In 2024 this was 2.3%, and our spring conference motion on The UK’s Response to Trump urges the government to set a timetable to get this to 2.5% – a task the government is already committed to. Kemi Badenoch said this week that she would love to be able to get to 3% but that the party couldn’t ‘make the numbers work’ – the spreadsheet again. Reform set a target of 3% within 6 years in their 2024 election manifesto.

None of this sounds enough. There is ample evidence that the current defence budget is not sufficient even to support yesterday’s needs. The threat has increased and the support from across the Atlantic is decreasing. When we last faced an aggressive Russia in the 70’s and 80’s, we were spending just over 4% of GDP on defence. And that was with a supportive USA. It is hard to see why the requirement would be less than this now.

This is a substantial increase – around £45bn a year. But it is likely to be the price of freedom. After allowing for inflation, GDP per head today is roughly twice what it was in 1980, and we were able to afford this level of spend then. There is pressure on public finances but we cannot let this stop us having the right conversation and making the right choices.

Supply chain and other constraints stop an immediate increase to this level of spend. But lead times are long and we need to commit to a plan quickly (and pray for breathing space in the meantime).

Somebody needs to call this out. The government has hemmed itself in to a narrative that is all about balancing the books. The Tories aren’t stepping up to the plate; they are still a shower. And Reform is in hock to Trump and inconsistent on Putin.

Continue reading »

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged defence spending and donald trump | 33 Comments

Giving more support to our regions

By Hannah Kitching | Tue 18th February 2025 - 9:06 am

I wear many hats in our party. From being a councillor in Barnsley through to former Westminster candidate in both Yorkshire and the North West, and now, Regional Chair in Yorkshire and the Humber and the new Vice Chair of the English Party.

In every role I have taken up, I have done so to highlight problems and find solutions. As a Regional Chair, it is clear to me we are long-overdue change.

It is time our English regions were better supported to deliver their vital responsibilities.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged f10 | 3 Comments

Agenda for Spring Conference

By Mary Reid | Thu 13th February 2025 - 2:07 pm

Spring Conference will be in Harrogate from 21st to 23rd March.

You can now see the agenda here. Policy motions cover:

Science, Innovation and Technology
Free to be Who You Are
The UK’s Response to Trump
Animal Welfare in the Food System
Ending the Crisis: A Fair Deal for Children with SEND

Plus a Constitutional Amendment on Implementing the Lessons of the General Election Review.

That means it’s time to start thinking about amendments to motions – the deadline is 10th March.

There is still time to register for conference, either in person on online. You can register here.

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Posted in News | 2 Comments

It’s time to practice what we preach

By Charles Dundas and Julian Tandy | Wed 12th February 2025 - 12:30 pm

It’s not often a motion comes along to Federal conference that is actually about true Federalism. Federalism is a concept synonymous with the Lib Dems. We campaign for it at a national level and we practice what we preach when it comes to the internal organisation of the party. Or do we? There’s a motion coming to Harrogate conference in March which addresses this for candidates – and we are delighted that it points towards a much more progressive and federal approach to how the party operates..

As those responsible for overseeing the approval and selection of Westminster candidates in our respective States – Scotland and Wales – we added our names to support the motion (F10) to implement the lessons of the General Election Review.

You can read the candidates motion here.

For us, this motion is about three key things:

Getting Federalism right for the three States

It gives the three States an equal seat at the table when it comes to setting Westminster candidate selection rules and procedures. Rather than Scotland and Wales being treated as the poor relations expected to follow wherever England goes, all three States will have parity in decision-making, reflecting the views of our respective State committees in Joint State meetings to collectively decide the way forward. This is exactly how Federalism should work – State parity and democratic accountability to members through conference of our processes and procedures.

Diversity and equality

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged candidates, constitutional amendments, f10, featured and party organisation | 16 Comments

FCC report following agenda selection meeting

By Nick Da Costa | Wed 29th January 2025 - 9:55 am

The Federal Conference Committee met on Saturday to run through a number of items leading up to Spring Conference in Harrogate, which is being held from 21 to 23 March 2025. This will be our first return to Harrogate in almost 16 years.

We had a large number of items submitted to Conference, in addition to report backs to the Committee from our Constitutional & Standing Orders Working Group.

We are delighted that so many people have already registered for Conference and we encourage any members who have not yet signed up to Conference to do so via: LINK

We aim to publish the agenda in the next couple of weeks.

The upcoming deadlines are:

Amendments and Emergency motions drafting advice deadline – 13:00 on 24 February 2025

Amendments and Emergency motions deadline – 13:00 on 10 March 2025

We received a large number of motions from across the party, and are extremely grateful for the time and effort that members make in formulating policy motions and ideas for debate at Conference. We really wish that we could select so many more that ended up on the final list, but as always time at conference is at a premium and a large number of motions, although selected in the first round, did not make it through the second round or third rounds when we then started to look at reducing timings.

As regularly mentioned, time is tight at conference, and especially this Spring Conference. There are a number of items that the Federal Conference Committee has very little control over, which we are forced to take at Conference. This signficantly reduces the time available at Conference for Policy Motions. For example, the FCC has to take Constitutional Amendments and Standing Order Amendments if they are ‘in order’ and thus have little leeway on rejecting these in order to allow more time for policy debates. Furthermore, we have a number of items (including one constitutional amendment) which the Committee felt needed a reasonable time to debate at Conference, and thus this also reduces the time available.

Furthermore, I would also like to mention the drafting advice service that the Federal Conference Committee offers. This service is provided by the Committee to offer drafting and language advice on motions submitted to conference and cannot always cover advice on policy matters; I would, in these instances, recommend reaching out to members of the Federal Policy Committee, spokespeople, and party AOs, who may have people within the their groups with specific policy expertise and would be able to assist with formulating policy. If you also want to find out more about how to write policy, the FCC will be undertaking a training session at Conference on how to write a good policy motion, and this information will be published in the Conference Agenda and Directory.

From the motions submitted, we selected: five policy motions and four constitutional amendments. The committee went through various rounds of selection, and it is always a very challenging decision to select which motions should or should not be added to the agenda. I would like to thank the staff who attended the full-day meeting and also the members of the committee for their contributions and hard work.

I have included the list of motions submitted, including the names of the motions and if selected/not selected and the brief reasons for non-selection, please note that some of the names of motions may vary between now and the publishing of the agenda.

We are looking forward seeing you at Conference, and if you have not yet had a chance to register, please do so via https://www.libdems.org.uk/conference

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Posted in News and Op-eds | Also tagged featured, federal conference committee, federal conference committee report and lib dem conference | Leave a comment

Spring Conference registration is now open

By Mary Reid | Fri 6th December 2024 - 3:54 pm

Federal Spring Conference will be held next year from 21st to 23rd March in beautiful Harrogate. and Early Bird registration is now open. The Conference Hotel will be the Crowne Plaza which is very close to the Harrogate Convention Centre where we will be meeting. Full information here.

You can see all the registration options here, but the key points are that the Early Bird registration rate is £85 now, rising to £125 on 10th January. Of course, there are concessions: full-time students and recipients of various benefits pay £15 rising to £30 on 10th January

In addition, first time attendees pay only £35, under 18s pay £5, and those who wish to participate (and vote) online pay £15.

Here are the deadlines for submitting motions and amendments:

Drafting advice: 1pm on 18th December 2024
Motions: 1pm on 15th January 2025
Amendments and Emergency motions drafting advice: 1pm on 24th February 2025
Amendments and Emergency motions: 1pm on 10th March 2025

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Posted in News | Leave a comment

The venue for Spring Conference is …

By The Voice | Fri 9th August 2024 - 3:11 pm

… Harrogate!

The Federal Conference Committee has announced that the Spring Conference 2025 will take place from 21st to 23rd March at Harrogate.

The main venue will be Harrogate Convention Centre, Kings Road, Harrogate HG1 5LA. And the Conference Hotel and Conference HQ will be at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Kings Road, Harrogate HG1 1XX, which is a one minute walk from the Harrogate Convention Centre.

You can book your accommodation by clicking here.

They have also released some preliminary timings:

Friday 21 March: 18.30-19.30 Rally
Saturday 22 March: 09.00-18.00
Sunday 23 March: 09.00-13.00 (Leader’s speech: 11.45-13.00)

Please note that fringe events will happen outside these timings.

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Posted in News | 1 Comment

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