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Politics

Number crunching: A Brexit democracy special

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 […]

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Politics

What I said at the Lib Dem Autumn Conference 2015: On Human Rights

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 […]

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Politics Trans

What I said at the Lib Dem Autumn Conference 2015: On Trans Health

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. […]

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Politics

What I said at the Lib Dem Autumn Conference 2015: On Agenda 2020

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 […]

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Politics

A Labour leopard doesn’t change its spots

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. […]