Monthly Archives: September 2010

Contribute to Lib Dem Voice’s coverage of conference

Just a quick reminder that LDV welcomes contributions from all, and none more so than during conference.

Our team is trying to provide a variety of different perspectives of how the conference works, but it is an enormous endeavour, and we welcome pieces from our readers with your experiences of conferences.

Have you been to an interesting fringe you’d like to review? Do you have a different view of what happened in the main hall from how we recorded it here?

You need no experience to submit a piece to the Voice, and neither do you need to have your own blog. Just write 300-500 words in an email and fire it off to <!–
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sto_user='voice'
document.write('‘ + sto_user + ‘@’ +sto_dom + ‘‘)
//–>voice – voice.hat.libdemvoice.org.spam.com (this is spam bot hidden email address, replace .hat. with @ and remove .spam.com for the real one) – fuller details can be found on our “Write for us!” page.

Liberal Democrats support equal marriage for LGBT community

This morning the Lib Dems voted to extend civil partnerships to heterosexual couples and open the institution of marriage to gay couples.

Conference was addressed by a broad spectrum of those directly affected by the issue and many supporters from the sideline.

Amongst the speakers was former mayoral candidate Brian Paddick who spoke of his own experience of marriage. He was married in the UK to a woman in the early 1980s before his growing realisation of his own sexuality. Since falling in love with a Norwegian man in the 2000s he took advantage of the change of law in Norway in January 2009, and married in front of a Norwegian judge in a courthouse in Oslo.

For several speakers the issue of recognition between nations was an important dimension to the debate. As the world increasingly accepts lasting partnerships between gay men and lesbians, the legal contracts between different countries have got more complicated. A gay American couple I know, one of whom got a job in Scotland, were initially unable to get a spousal visa in the UK because they had chosen to have their union recognised in a state that was not, at the time, included in the UK Civil Partnership Act.

One surprising feature of the debate in the hall was the revelation made by Stonewall at DELGA’s fringe last night. For some months, gay media outlet Pink News has tried to get them to speak on the issue of equal marriage. Stonewall finally nailed their colours to the mast saying that gay marriage was not something they could campaign for, on the grounds that it was too expensive, distracted from campaigns against anti-gay violence around the world and that civil partnerships offered enough parity with heterosexual marriage for us to be getting one with.

A fuller account of last night’s meeting is available on Zoe O’Connell’s blog.

Their world view was strongly rebutted by Stephen Gilbert MP as he summated at the end of the debate:

“This policy underlines, once again, that equality is in the DNA of our party. Today, Liberal Democrat members showed that the Party remains in the vanguard of the progressive movement and won’t settle until everyone enjoys equal status.

“Current legislation degrades same-sex couples to a second-tier partnership and leads to unnecessary pain and trouble for anyone wishing to change their legally recognised gender, forcing them to divorce or dissolve their civil partnership and enter into a different commitment.

“It is time that Britain ends the current unfair legal situation and regains its position as a country leading the fight for full LGBT equality.”

A full recording of the debate will be available on the Voice shortly.

Tweets on 2010-09-21

  • @jamesgraham are you talking about the ranking or the fact the ranking is happened? Do you have a secret pash for Burnham? in reply to jamesgraham #
  • Ooh, a new way to visualise Lib Dem Huddle workspace: http://bit.ly/ajVMh9 (h/t @owenblacker) #

  • There's an odd pair of hooks at neck height in our office. Should've broughta hammock http://flic.kr/p/8CyuVL #
  • Eek – me and @helenduffett are listening to WATO from bbc stand. We're on WATO webcam! #
  • It's the lovely Martha Kearney in the chair today. #

  • Bbc stand live on air from #ldconf http://flic.kr/p/8CvPFT #
  • @helenduffett who, Richard Reeves? in reply to helenduffett #
  • Looking forward to the new @markpack "Boring is Good" tshirts #
  • Zadrozny has gone from "I can be the grassroots candidate" to "I'm withdrawing to back Kramer" in three hours. http://bit.ly/b5eiME #
  • Ooh, how fantastic – Steph Ouzeman has won an award as best political assistant. She's fab, excellent, so it's lovely she's being honoured. #
  • @jamesgraham so where is overflow room? in reply to jamesgraham #
  • @jamesgraham My grandparents are called Pearl & Dean. Or as we called them, Grand and Grand pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa pah! ((c) Milton Jones) in reply to jamesgraham #

  • Buzzing media room on the other side of the curtain. http://flic.kr/p/8CB6SJ #
  • Blimey there's a lot in the speech to digest. More new powers for council, bigging up the green stuff more, Labour's wasted opportunities. #
  • Controversial standing order amendment moves to a counted vote. #ldconf #
  • F28 – Day Visitors – Favour 40 – Against 33. There's a simple majority, but this is a standing order amendment which requires 2/3rds maj. #
  • @alexwilcock hope you're going to blog about this? I can't really get at it from the tiny tweets, what are Stonewall saying? #
  • @alexwilcock that does sound totally barmy! in reply to alexwilcock #
  • Who left a riso manual in the LDV bunker? #
  • Liverpool have one of these giant Ferris wheels, and every time I've seem it, it's been sadly revolving empty. #
  • Dining with @helenduffett. Tapas. And they have a sherry list! (@ Lunya w/ @helenduffett) http://4sq.com/bXguB2 #
  • @CllrTim those olives stuffed with almonds do it for me… is the combination between soft olive and crunchy nut that's just wonderful. in reply to CllrTim #
  • @alanfleming no url as yet, hopefully colleagues writing up. Ben Somerskill defended Stonewall policy of not supporting equal marriage. in reply to alanfleming #
  • @alanfleming see @lgbtld for a flavour of how the meeting went – wasn't there myself. @alexwilcock writing something, I hope. in reply to alanfleming #
  • @alanfleming ooh, here's a link from someone who was there: http://www.complicity.co.uk/blog/2010/09/stonewall-against-equal-marriage/ in reply to alanfleming #
  • *sigh* have been reading West Wing quotes on IMDB for too long. Has anyone ever had that much fun in real politics? 😦 #
  • We're all photogs now. http://bbc.in/aZUyPJ #
  • @dr_nick Dropbox is pretty good, I'm using it a lot. in reply to dr_nick #
  • Starting to get v annoyed with the banging and thumping music from somewhere in the building. Nothing for the last few nights, why Monday?! #
  • Sunny today, and the vertical axis wind turbines near the Arena are not moving at all. (@ base2stay) http://4sq.com/cfvxKL #
  • The hubbub from behind the curtain where the media centre is is distinctly audible from the arena floor. #
  • Simon Hughes saying that this is the first time that some newspapers have sent their senior political reporter to #ldconf #
  • If @Ed_Miliband had been serious about climate change, he wouldn't have let us be the worst in the EU for renewables, save Malta and Lux'bg. #

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Help spread the word about tonight’s #Tweetup!

LibDemVoice are hosting four events at conference – fuller details are available here.

As the week motors on, the evening planned for our Liberal Drinks / Tweetup night approaches.

We’ll be in the Baltic Fleet pub from 7.30pm onwards tonight having a friendly drink in a real ale pub and getting ready for Glee Club.

If you’d like to come along, why not click here to let your twitter friends know.

More on Nick Clegg Q&A

Yesterday saw the first Q&A of the Lib Dem leader since entering government. We covered it on Lib Dem Voice with a live tweeting session, Stephen Tall’s excellent live-blog and we also recorded it for posterity.

Because quite a lot of what was said might be useful for campaigning purposes, and because in the fullness of time we will want to hold Nick Clegg to account for his answers, I asked BOTY-nominee and Total Politics List star Caron Lindsay to mobilise an army of volunteers to transcribe it from our slightly ropey recording.

Caron and her volunteers have done a fabulous job, and their transcription is available here on Google Docs.

Q&As from past conferences

It is of course, not the first time that Nick Clegg has made himself available to delegates to answer questions and reassure conference members that all is well with the parliamentary party. Here are two more occasions from the archive when LDV recorded a Q&A for posterity:

March 2010: defending his remarks to a newspaper about Thatcher. Helen Duffett reports for the Voice.

September 2009: a recording of a Nick Clegg Q&A from conference.

One minor disagreement with Nick

So there was one line in Nick’s speech that raised my hackles a little bit:

We have four years and seven months before the next election. 1690 days.

You might, duckie, but quite a sizeable chunk of the party’s councillors do not. For many elected Liberal Democrat representatives, the goal is next May.

So a chunk of Clegg’s speech was dedicated to the long term. Stick with us. Hold your nerve. By 2015 we will have achieved:

  • restored civil liberties
  • scrapped ID cards
  • got innocent people’s DNA off the police database
  • action to cut reoffending, and cut crime
  • stopped mass incarceration of children
  • withdrawn our combat troops from Afghanistan, our brave servicemen and women having completed the difficult job we asked them to do
  • achieved  a fair tax system where the rich pay their share, and the lowest earners pay no income tax at all
  • raised £10bn from our banking levy
  • home after home made warm and affordable to heat by our Green Deal
  • a new right to sack MPs who do wrong
  • party funding scandals are history.
  • elections for the house of Lords
  • Alternative Vote election with FPTP abolished

Wow! What a list.  I can’t wait for 2015.

This long-term, hold your nerve, stick the distance rhetoric is all very well, but there are vital local elections every year before then, with the largest tranche in a difficult set of clashes.  We’ll be up in 2011 battling at the same time as the AV referendum, uncertain of whether to target our council elections or spread our effort more widely so that people hear about the benefits of voting reform.  Then any Lib Dem councillors that remain after that onslaught will see elections at the same time as the next General Election.  History shows that it’s quite tough for Lib Dems to hold onto their seats and make gains at a council level when we’re also fighting a general election.

There was a paragraph that gave us some crumbs of hope: in the opening part of his speech Clegg was talking about the bits that already been achieved and the timetable for further changes due in the next year:

Just think what we’ve done already.  We’ve ended the injustice of the richest paying less tax on investments than the poorest do on their wages. We’ve guaranteed older people a decent increase in their pension. In November, we will publish a Freedom Bill to roll back a generation of illiberal and intrusive legislation. By Christmas, Identity Card laws will be consigned to the history books. From New Year’s Day, the banks will pay a new levy that will help fill the black hole they helped create. On 1 April, 900,000 low earners will stop paying income tax altogether. In May, the people of Britain will get to choose their own voting system. And this time next year, there will be a pupil premium so the children who need the most help, get the most help.

Will it be enough, in a year when Labour have an easy, but false narrative to sell?

Tweets on 2010-09-20

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Worth a second outing: historical BOTYs

With the success of the most recent Blog of the Year still ringing in our ears, I thought I’d dig through the archive and bring you the tapes from the previous incarnations of the event.

Marvel at our clipped accents and the comical costumes we wore as we take this trip down memory lane.

Firstly, Jonathan Calder unearthed some footage of the very first BOTY ceremony with guest speaker Alex Wilcock. This was way back in 2006 when the world was as a younger, kinder place.

I’m not aware of any recordings from 2007 – if you can help fill the gap in our archives, do please let me know.

So, flying forward to 2008, in March, the Campaign for Gender Balance had their own, never to be repeated CGB Blog awards.

In September that year, the fabled Zoom H2 made its first appearance at conference and captured this piece of historic footage.

2009, and another year of BOTYs can be found here.

And of course last night’s ceremony is still here.

Techie nerdgasm in the Liverpool Arena

So, I’m here in Liverpool in a largely behind-the-scenes role. I am benefitting from a Party Staff pass, which lets me get into all sorts of interesting places.

The LDV office is directly behind the stage, so one of the main routes in is right behind the giant screen. Which looks like this:

Backstage at #Ldconf

Today we held a fringe in a large room in the Arena, and so I got there early to to a bit of setup. They had a giant screen, so I could wangle my way into the tech room at the back so we could choose what we showed – a live screen of our website, in the end.

Is this the biggest screen @libdemvoice has ever been shown on? #ldconf.

And oh my, the room is techie heaven. Part of me is still thrilled by my teenage years spent working both as an actor at school and a stage techie at sixth form college, and I am really stage struck when it comes to the technicalities of theatre. (NB it’s one of many really good reasons to see the Nottingham Playhouse panto every year – they cram the panto with some really interesting coups de théâtre.)

So, the most exciting thing about the room by far is the fact that the entire set of 500 fixed seats are on a giant turntable. The same is true of Hall 1C.

Giant turntable in liverpool arena

So depending on how they want it set up you can either have one large hall with two smaller halls nearby, or you can rotate the two giant drums and add 1,000 seats to the large hall.

This explains why there are emergency exits apparently 4m high in the air. When the drum is rotated, the gap lines up with the stairs.

Not an emergency exit. No kidding. It's 4m off the ground! #Ldconf

Presumably it also makes the site an ideal location for recording “This is your life!”

Up in the tech room, there was lots to look at. The sound boards in professional theatre seem to changed so much since I last set up a sound board, I didn’t even recognise it as a sound board. So much for my geek points 😦

The full array of technical stuff was probably more than I can cope with, so I was very happy to leave it in the capable hands of the tech team who come with the venue.

We tried for a few minutes to work out whether it was possible to get a live feed out of the sound board into my Zoom H2 – but in the short while available before the event kicked off, it proved not possible, so we resorted to the usual of balancing the recorder on seat towards the rear of the room and then amplifying afterwards. (This has the unfortunate side effect of making the applause painful to listen to)

Imagine my surprise and delight when at the end of the fringe, one of the tech guys came down the steps and said, “we made a CD for you of the sound.” That is really helpful.

Unfortunately, none of the LDVers has both a laptop with a CD player, and something to rip the audio to MP3, so it will have to wait until I get home before I can do anything with it. But hopefully we’ll be able to replace the rough and ready version we made at conference with a more professional sound in the fullness of time.

The podcast of the fringe meeting is here.

PODCAST: Fairer? For whom?

"Coalition: Fairer for whom?" Susan Kramer and Will Straw at LDV's conference fringe

This lunchtime, Lib Dem conference representatives gathered in the staggeringly poorly signposted Hall 1B to hear a stellar lineup of Susan Kramer, Evan Harris and interloper Will Straw from Left Foot Forward hold forth on the subject of “Fairer? For whom?” – excellently wrangled by the chairman, our own Stephen Tall.

As with all Lib Dem Voice fringe events, we were there with our trusty recording equipment for posterity, and for the readers of Lib Dem Voice at home who were not able to join us at conference. I’m sure it will also be helpful to those LibDemVoice editors who carelessly agreed to deliver training at the same time as one of our fringes.

Left Foot Forward also have their own write-up of the event.