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 first of the party’s Agenda 2020 consultation sessions. I took such the option to speak on double discrimination and forging an intersectional approach.
I just want to talk about equality for a minute because I’ve spoken to loads of people and they always saw the Lib Dems as the party of equality – we had Jo, we had Julian, we had Lynne, and they were absolutely amazing and it’s a shame we lost all three of them in the election.
I actually want to see more work done on double discrimination because it’s not good enough to talk about equality like Labour do when they only talk about the equality of white middle class women; black women have more pressing concerns than white women, LBT women, and so forth.
As we saw in Liverpool back in March, during the mental health paper debate, we had about half the LGBT+ Lib Dem executive speak on that, so we need to talk about health inequalities are compounded by being LGBT, BME, or a woman, so we need to talk about not just discrimination on one axis, but discrimination on others or even all. That’s basically what I want to say there.