Tag Archives: merton

What are you doing to celebrate International Women’s Day?

By Mary Reid | Sat 23rd February 2019 - 10:50 am

International Women’s Day will be on Friday 8th March. Please share your plans to celebrate it in the comments below.

Here in Southwest London the local parties in the boroughs of Kingston, Sutton, Merton and Richmond have developed several projects, both political and non-political.

First, we are jointly running a conference with Liberal Democrat Women titled “WOMEN: Shaping the future, making a difference!“. A number of influential women have been invited to share their stories with us including Floella Benjamin, Sam Smethers (Fawcett Society), Siobhan Benita (candidate for London Mayor) and Lorely Burt.

There will be workshops led by practitioners on Women in Business, Tech, Political Activism, Community Activism, Creative Industries and Public Life. Christine Cheng will reprieve her TEDx talk on strategies for encouraging women to participate, and Sal Brinton will give a summary speech at the end of the day which should send us out energised and enthused.

The conference is open to anyone, of any gender, sympathetic to the Liberal Democrats.

In addition, councillors in the boroughs have worked with their Councils to develop some public events.

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged international women's day, kingston, Liberal Democrat Women, richmond and sutton | Leave a comment

Working to build a liberal core vote in Merton

By Anthony Fairclough | Mon 20th June 2016 - 5:30 pm

Merton Liberal Democrats were very pleased and somewhat surprised to be among the first winners of the Party’s “referendum pledge challenge”.

The vast majority of the winning groups are areas of (often recent) historic strength for the party with an organisation to match – so it was a real boost to us to see the local group’s name up there.

Last summer, bolstered by our newbies, we agreed a selection of campaign themes that articulated who we were and what we wanted to achieve as a group. This included the EU referendum/staying in the EU. A co-ordinator was appointed for each theme, to keep a watchful eye on developments in the area, and make sure we never forgot the themes in the heat of campaigns.

On the prompting of the EU campaign co-ordinator, all our street stalls during the London elections were about the referendum from an early stage. We’d also agreed that we would ask about the referendum as a secondary question when doing voter ID, but in many places we found it an easier conversation starter to go with the EU, before moving into asking for support for the London team.

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged eu referendum | 1 Comment