Tag Archives: party presidency

I joined this party because I believe in the power of every individual to take power and use it – use it to shape their own lives and communities and to help change the world.

I joined this party because I’ve seen brave people face down threats from large powerful corporations, from their own governments, and from conformity – everything for which we stand.

And I joined this party because ours is the only political philosophy that believes in trusting, enabling and freeing people. We want to lift people out of poverty and ignorance. We want them to have a safety net so they have the confidence to take risks, to innovate and make bold decisions. And we want to create a system of governance that serves people and communities, from the grass-roots up.

We were right to adopt community politics as an ideology of social transformation in the 1970s, and we were right to re-state our commitment to it in 2011. But as I said then – to the nodding heads of Paddy Ashdown and Tim Farron – it must once again become the foundation of our identify and our approach. In 2011, Conference agreed “A renewed strategic emphasis on ‘community politics’: our role as political activists is to help organise people in communities to take and use power, to use our political skills to redress grievances, and to represent people at all levels of the political structure.”