A major bugbear of the Leave Campaign during the recent EU referendum was their view that the EU was an undemocratic behemoth. Gove told us there were five EU presidents, all unelected. Of course, they ranged from the EU’s effective head of state (whilst we have a Queen) to the Speaker of the European Parliament … Read more
The afternoon after the trans motion passed unanimously, I was back on the Conference podium speaking in favour of human rights. This was to propose Calderdale’s amendment to the human rights motion putting party policy in favour of ratifying the Protocols to the European Convention of Human Rights that the UK hasn’t already. The amendment … Read more
The second of four times I spoke at Lib Dem Conference last September was on the issue of the transgender and intersex health charter. As this motion debate happened the morning after news of the Prime Minister’s schoolboy antics regarding porcine necrophilia was broken, everyone in the Conference was dying to make jokes about it. … Read more
Hopefully, after this weekend, I’ll be more punctual in uploading these. At the Liberal Democrat conference last September in Bournemouth, I was rather busy in the Conference Hall, moving one motion, one amendment, and one procedural motion; more on those later. But, before all that, I had the chance to make a contribution to the … Read more
This post was originally published on Lib Dem Voice.
Don’t tell anyone, but George Osborne probably let out a sigh of relief when Baroness Manzoor’s fatal motion failed last night.
Of course, it was inevitable that Labour peers would rather bravely abstain on the cuts to tax credits, as their elected counterparts did in July. And Jeremy Corbyn is probably skating on thin ice, given that the scandal of Labour abstaining in July put him where he is today.
The Women’s Equality Party, the brainchild of Sandi Toksvig, officially launched to luvvie acclaim yesterday. But the cracks in the sheen were showing while the journalists were eating their canapés. Not only does their policy document not talk about trans women’ equality needs at all – a major omission given the two mainstream parties with comprehensive policy, one with developing policy, and one with a Select Committee – their policy on sex work came out with a left-field proposal nobody is seriously considering:
Apologies for the massive delay in this post; I made a second speech at the Lib Dem conference in March, this time on the five green laws that formed one of the key planks of the manifesto. In particular, I spoke about the need for green transport. The speech is, as always, below the cut.
Jeremy Corbyn raised the ire of many twitterati commentators on Monday when announcing his plans to consult women on women-only shelters. I generally agree with Lynne Featherstone on this issue: while his intentions are noble, the answer is not in segregating women, but in actually combatting the men who harass them. Women-only spaces are good only as a stop-gap until we create a society without latent sexism or other sorts of bigotry.
This post was originally written for Lib Dem Voice.
This month, Amnesty International delegates will vote on a proposal to make decriminalisation of sex work a campaigning matter for the human rights organisation. This, understandably, has raised ire from many people, but none so large as parts of the feminist movement.
This post originally appeared on Lib Dem Voice.
“We stand up for the outsider instead of the establishment.”, Tim Farron said during the leadership rally last week. For party members who were rather discouraged by our missteps in coalition, that line gives us hope.
Our failings in the Coalition can be traced to one key fault: after speaking out against the establishment, we were seen to be now a part of it. There are so many bills that we extracted key concessions on, but we were not able to communicate that. How could we, after all? We were bound by Cabinet collective responsibility. But it was never designed to operate the way it did in coalition.