So, yesterday was my thirty-tooth birthday and didn’t at all go to plan.

On paper, the diary (( well actually, not on paper at all, but electronically )) my diary said I was free most of the day. In my head I knew that I simply had to get to grips with the leafleting backlog. But all that was thrown out of the water by a phonecall on Monday that changed the course of the day.

A local reporter at the BBC had found the speech I didn’t give to Pride as a result of a google alert, and having scanned through the 3,000 or so words, characterised the speech as being mainly about the gay blood ban. Would I be prepared to talk about that on the radio?

I would indeed. So we had a good few minutes in preparatory talks over the phone on Monday afternoon. Am I allowed to say “sperm donor” and “men who have sex with men” on the radio at 8am? Apparently I can!

Then the producer gets wind of the plans and phones back. This is important, she says, so can we put it in the “more prominent” slot of 0708? Urk. I agree, but with misgivings. I’m not at all good at getting up in the mornings, full stop, let alone significantly before 6, which is what will be necessary to ablute and get into the studio in enough time before going on air to be sure I’m not out of breath.

So, I jot a few thoughts down in preparation, and set my alarm for 5.15, and get a very early night. For me, that meant being in bed by about 11pm.

At midnight, after an hour fretting that I hadn’t in fact set my alarm, I got up and checked it, only to find a nice flurry of good-luck messages on my phone.

I barely slept a wink all night. I certainly remember seeing the clock after 4am, and lots of turning, and turning pillows, and dislodging cats.

At 5.15, I got up, showered, drank a litre of coffee, drove to the studio, thumbed through the day’s papers in the newsroom and had friendly chats with studio staff. I eventually got on air and was asked essentially the same question repeatedly. YOu can hear the interview here for a few more days at this link – my bit is about 1h 7min into the programme.

I staggered out of the radio studio by about 0720 and thought I would spook my council colleagues out by turning up at the office before breakfast, so I went in there, dealt with emails, tried to progress my casework, greeted the staff as they came in and then left for my 1030 meeting, via a bacon cob emporium and Argos. The new office doesn’t yet have any clocks in it; worse, neither do any of the computers. So I needed an alarm clock to sit on my desk at work.

The council’s daily media monitoring email comes in at some point, and they have characterised my interview as “Cllr Alex Foster encourages gay men to give blood.” Erk. No, I don’t. Stick to the rules, people, if you’re gay, don’t give blood until or unless the rules change to say you can. That sentence should have been “Cllr Alex Foster encourages the blood service to change the rules to allow gay men to give blood.”

While I was wandering around the city centre, my phone went, and it was a reporter from East Midlands Today. Would I be prepared to rehearse some of the same arguments from the radio that morning on telly that evening?

I’ve never actually made it as far as the local news before, although I’ve been on BBC Radio Nottingham about five times now in the seven years I’ve held public office.

So naturally, I leapt at the chance.

A few hours later, still dressed in my radio clothes and with my usual scant effort at grooming, I’m meeting a camera crew at the Council House, where they get me to a series of daft things, like walk across the room and point at the map, wander around Market Square, and walk up and down in deep conversation with a journalist. (although what he’s actually saying is “be careful, the audience can lipread”)

We do 5-6 different setups – in my office, at my desk, pointing at the map; in the square, by the fountains (can’t use that – too many naked children) walking on the street; and then over the blood donation HQ, which today wasn’t open to the public. In the hour or so I was with the journalist, cameraman and (I think) work experience guy who teaches media studies, we managed 5-10 minutes of actual interview.

Lots of off camera chatting with the journalist, too, including, at one point, me asking if each story on East Mids Today takes this long to put together. His response is that each of the packages on the programme take around a day of staff time to put together. There’s a big team of journos and camera crews around the counties trying to find stuff to talk about – and ultimately, if you aggregate all the different local news programmes in the country together, more people are watching local news than any other news programme.

Hours later, I settled down at home to watch the programme they put together including my interview. My bit is trailed from the outset as “gay rights campaigner” – and when, later, P gets in and watches the clip on the internet, his immediate reaction is “Oh, that’s nice – they got a gay rights campaigner to comment as well as you!”

Ultimately, I’m pretty happy with the piece that went out. I get barely a minute of screen time, and as far as I know, everything that I say and that the reporter says, is factually accurate.

They didn’t make me look stupid, which I suppose is the main thing. They easily could have done, with the footage they took from me. For every article like mine that they film footage for, there must be 10 different ways of presenting the information they get. You could go back through the archive of unused footage and make dozens of different news bulletins every day.

Unfortunately, East Midlands Today seems to one of only a handful of programmes made by the BBC that are not on the iPlayer, so no weeklong linkie for this.

Lessons out of all this? It’s bizarre that after all this time, it’s now that the BBC are interested in this story. The gay blood ban has been in place for decades. Even I’ve spoken about it before, and they weren’t interested in it then. I dread to think what their post bag has been like in response to this issue. And ultimately, I got on telly because a google alert showed a journalist what I’d written in a blog post.

Social media FTW.

Here’s the speech I wrote to deliver to Speakers Corner at Nottingham Pride yesterday. However, my sleep-deprived brain let me stay up all night writing it only to leave the text behind on my desk when I left late to set up the Lib Dem stall at the Forest Rec.

The speech I gave was based on this A4 page of notes I scribbled down to give myself structure. Somehow from that, I managed to speak for about 30 minutes – much longer than I am ever usually allowed to speak anywhere. (Full Council meetings have strict time limits; committees are never usually a place for speechifying).

As last year, I began with inappropriate jokes – one of them stolen shamelessly from Iain Dale. This year, there was a sign interpreter. I didn’t get to look sideways and see whether she used the BSL for male or female orgasm.

Without further ado, here’s the text of the speech I would have delivered, if I had remembered the text.

CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY

Hello, my name is Alex Foster and I am one of Nottingham City’s Lib Dem councillors.  If you live near the Beechdale Baths, it could well be that I represent you.  I’m also gay.

In fact, I’m in politics BECAUSE  I’m gay, not in spite of it.  Let me explain.

HISTORY

The first political thing I ever did was write to my MP about the age of consent.  I’m 32 next week, so when I was in school, Parliament was having its great debate about whether the age of consent for gay men should be lowered from 21 to 18.  I had found out all about this in the pages of Gay Times, and read about the Stonewall campaign, and it was because of them that I wrote to my MP.

I got a nice letter back – my Tory MP then was Peter Temple Morris – and although he didn’t agree with me he told me he respected my position.

There was a great debate going on at this time about this issue, and I got quite involved.  I saw that the Lib Dems were arguing in favour not just of lowering the age of consent to 18, but of equalizing it with heterosexual people at 16.  It was there in black and white in their 1992 manifesto:

Guarantee equal rights for gay men and lesbians through changes to criminal law, anti-discrimination legislation and police practices. We will repeal Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act. We will create a common age of consent regardless of gender or sexual orientation.

It was also in the 1987 manifesto – we wanted to create a single Human Rights Commission that ensured people were not discriminated against, including on grounds of sexuality. Over twenty years later, this has finally happened.

Gay rights first appeared in the Lib Dem policy programme in 1975 – three years before I was even born and long before I discovered I was gay.

So it was issues of sexuality that first got me involved in politics. After that, I looked a little further into the Lib Dems to see what else they believed in. I found I agreed with them on student finance, just as I started my degree in Nottingham. I’m old enough to have got a grant, and I think we need to return to that state of affairs.
I also agreed with the Lib Dems on Europe. I was doing a modern languages degree, and I saw the need to work closely with our European neighbours. (Incidentally, have you ever been to Paris Pride? It’s great! And now you can get there directly by train with only one change!)

So in 1997, when I voted for the first time, I made up my mind to support the Lib Dems. Eventually I joined the party. I volunteered in Nick Clegg’s office when he was Nottingham’s MEP. And it was from there that I was asked if I would stand for council. They told me I’d never win, that I’d just be helping them out by being a candidate. And… I won.

MY FORTUNATE GAY LIFE

So I got the age of consent reduction just in time.

Under a Labour government, I got all sorts of new rights.  I could now, if I wasn’t fat, unfit, asthmatic, and very short-sighted serve in the armed forces. I have the right not to be discriminated against at work. I can adopt children.
Hopefully later this year, I’ll be getting married.

Half of me is grateful and appreciative to Labour for getting things done for gay people.

But my more political half remembers that they didn’t do it all willingly.

One of Labour’s first acts in 1997 was to fight in the European Court of Human Rights against gay servicemen who wanted to continue in the armed forces. It wasn’t until the Labour government lost the case there that the rules were changed. Even after that, it took some time before the armed forces were happy with personnel marching at London Pride in their uniforms. Now, that’s routine. Just five years ago it seemed revolutionary.

Labour didn’t change the age of consent straight away. That too took a court case in the European courts before they finally changed the law. My facebook friend Chris Morris was the brave young man, then under 18, who was prepared to be the person who stood up in court to argue for fairness.

Civil partnerships started life as a bill written by a Lib Dem member of the house of Lords, Lord Lester – and was only withdrawn when the Labour Government promised to introduce a similar bill and give it the parliamentary time it needed.

And although civil partnerships brings gay people many benefits, they’re not perfect. Labour were so in thrall to the faith lobby that they made it completely impossible to celebrate a civil partnership in a religious way – even if you belong to a religion that does recognise gay relationships, like Reform Judaism or some of the more liberal parts of the Anglican communion or the Quakers.

I’m very proud that the leader of the Lib Dems Nick Clegg has been clear that he supports full marriage for gay couples, and that he endorses gay parenting.

So far, I’ve only spoken of Labour and the Lib Dems, but perhaps I need to spend a few minutes talking about the Conservatives as well.

The Tories have a truly terrible history when it comes to the story of gay rights. It was their horrible policy to ban schools from even mentioning homosexuality in the infamous Section 28.

All through recent years it has been Tory MPs and members of the House of Lords who have vigorously opposed equality across so many issues. Lesbian parenting. Equality of the age of consent. They made several attempts at introducing wrecking amendments to change civil partnerships.

Just a few years ago, David Cameron himself voted in the debate about the abolition of that same Section 28. In 2001, he voted to keep it.

The new Tory MPs elected in 2005 have been some of the most reactionary, right-wing, Thatcherite parliamentarians that this country has ever seen. They voted against gay rights, they voted against rights for women and they vote against abortion.

It was certainly the case that some of the newest Tory MPs were the most resistant to David Cameron’s attempts at moving his party on the centre ground.

Come the 2010 General Election, there are more new Tory MPs. The Lib Dems gain 1% of the vote in the country and as a result, lose a net 6 seats. It becomes clearer than ever that voting reform is needed.

And after a week of frantic negotiation, the coalition is born. And we all have mixed feelings about this, I am sure.

Theresa May becomes the Home Secretary, and as part of her remit becomes the Equalities minister. Her personal record in the field of gay rights is far from stellar. In 1998 she voted against an equal age of consent. In 2000 she voted against the repeal of Section 28. In 2001 and 2002, she voted against gays and lesbians being able to adopt. And in 2008 she voted against legislation which removed the need for a father in lesbians undergoing IVF treatment.

She has said subsequently she has changed her mind. We need to watch her closely to see how true this is.

Perhaps in a genius, move, though, the coalition representative in Theresa May’s department is the lovely Lib Dem MP Lynne Featherstone, who gets the rather unlovely title PUSS – Parliamentary Under Secretary of State – and is given the equalities brief.

Now Lynne I know well, and I know she takes equalities extremely seriously. A few weeks ago, the Lib Dems held a Special Conference to ratify the coalition. Lib Dem members went to a big shed in Birmingham to hold our parliamentary party to account and have our say on the new government. I was there (( and you can read my tweets from the day )) and I was listening when Lynne was talking about issues like this.

Three things from her speech then struck me as important. Firstly, she did a lot of the ground work in the recent Gender Recognition Act, which has been enormously important in setting up a legal framework recognising the changes transgendered people live with. It’s a very complex and sensitive area of law and there are all sorts of complications to take account of. And yet gender is at the very heart of our identity, and there has to be some sort of relationship between government and gender. And so Lynne spoke about this quite a lot and had to make rather nuanced points about a difficult area of social policy – and she had to do that in the rather unhelpful atmosphere of the House of Commons, where some MPs can get away with behaving badly. Her experience, she said, was that the Tory front bench were sensitive and engaged with the issues. But the Tory back bench were the rowdies and the idiots. And it was the Tory back bench who were cat-calling and shouting “pervert” at her.

Lynne’s second point was that in the coalition, it is not these bad-mannered backbenchers who are holding the Conservatives hostage, but the the Lib Dems. And that has got to be a good thing in the field of equalities.

Lynne’s third point was a battle cry that I was glad to hear: “Roll back equalities? Not on my watch!”

And indeed there have already been some positive signs that her views prevail. Our courts and our government have accepted that gay asylum-seekers from parts of the world where gay people cannot be expected to return home and “act straight” but can have a safe haven here in the UK.

Secondly this government has ended a historic injustice that means some men who had consensual sex 30 years ago have been on the sex offenders register and had to disclose their criminal convictions when applying for jobs. Their crime? Having consensual sex with someone under 21, but over 16 – something that was a crime but wouldn’t be today. This government will take action to end this injustice.

The Government is also going to take action against homophobic bullying. Last year, this was a Lib Dem campaign. This year it will be in the government’s programme for action. Some 6 in 10 children suffer homophobic bullying at school, so addressing this should improve the lives of not only gay children, but those caught in the much wider net of bullys.

CAMPAIGNS FOR THE FUTURE

It’s tempting to think that all the gay community’s needs are met and that there are no more political campaigns needed, no more things to do to change our lives for the better.

That’s a complacent view. There are still issues out there that need resolving.
The blood campaign is a key one. Not to put too fine a point on it, people out there are dying because gay men can’t give blood. It’s ludicrous that we are all barred, regardless of how we live our lives. The rules on blood donation must be changed to reflect the real risks. It’s promiscuous people who don’t take precautions who are at greatest risk from HIV. It’s offensive to assume that all gay men and no straight people fit that category. The rules need to reflect behaviour better and not identity. I would give blood if I were allowed. I’ve even considered giving blood anyway – as my friends in medical professions have urged. But I don’t want to have to lie about who I am or who I am getting married to.

And incidentally, did you know? Although gay men are banned from giving blood, it’s still perfectly fine for us to go on the register of organ donors. I phoned their helpline to ask last year, and they categorically told me that it’s OK. So I’ve carried a donor card ever since, and I’ve let my next of kin know my wishes. I would encourage you to do that too.

In just the same way, the NHS might not take our blood, but they are still happy to try and get hold our bone marrow and our sperm.

Recently I joined the Anthony Nolan Trust’s register of bone marrow donors, after a recruitment drive in the Council House, where I took what they call a “ten minute spit test.” It’s actually not as unpleasant as it sounds. Hopefully, I’ve been registered properly and should anyone in the future who is a match to me need bone marrow, I could get called to London to have a medical procedure done to harvest my cells.

Whilst talking about the gay blood ban, though, I must just mention the recent council debate on the subject. June 14th was both a Full Council meeting and World Blood Day – an international celebration of people who donate blood. The date is the birthday of Karl Landsteiner, who discovered the ABO system of blood types, which paved the way to making blood donation safe. I tabled a motion to council to celebrate this, to highlight the work of everyone in the blood service, to encourage all those who can give blood to do so, and one paragraph at the end saying that it is regrettable and discriminatory that no man who has ever had sex with another man is allowed to donate blood.

Under the current rules, a hypothetical straight man who has slept his way unprotected around Africa is barred from giving blood for a year, whilst a gay man who has had protected sex once in 1982 and subsequently joined a monastery and taken a vow of chastity can never donate blood again. It reminds me of that old suffragette poster “what a man may be and not lose the vote / what a woman may be and yet not have the vote.”

When I tabled the motion, I didn’t think it would be terribly contraversial. I thought all parties would agree. Indeed, the Tories did agree with the Lib Dems. Unfortunately, when it came to the debate, Nottingham’s Labour party didn’t agree. Two of their councillors tabled an amendment that removed all references to discrimination and urged us to wait for the outcome of the review that is currently in progress.

I have to say I was quite disappointed with this. As were, I know, a number of Labour councillors. Five of them could not bring themselves to vote with their party and abstained at the vote. This may not sound like much, but it is unheard of in the Nottingham Labour group. The Evening Post called it “the largest rebellion in 15 years.”

The blood debate is not over. SaBTO, the body responsible for setting policy for the NHS Blood Service, is still conducting a review into the issue – a review that has been underway for nearly two years already.

Other campaigns

Isn’t it concerning how few out gay people there are in some lines of work? We hear of openly gay politicians, but do we ever hear of openly gay newsreaders or broadcasters? Over a decade after Justin Fashanu’s death he is still the only footballer ever to have come out. He was joined this year by Gareth Thomas, who plays rugby, and whose Wikipedia page says “Thomas is notable as the world’s only current professional male athlete in a team sport who is openly gay.” There are gay people in every walk of life. We need to create the sort of society where everyone can feel comfortable with being out.

Thirdly it’s great that we in Britain have civil partnerships. It’s great that in France you can get a PACS and in Germany Eingetragene Lebenspartnerschaft. Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, New Hampshire, Washington DC and Vermont are the only places in the States where gay people can get married, but there are many more US states where civil partnerships can be entered into. Because understandings of these relationships varies across jurisdictions there are anomalies about how these separate states recognise each others’ partnerships. Visa recognition for spouses is complicated. I think we need international work to look at how this will work better in the future.
I will end by quoting our party leader Nick Clegg again:

I am determined that the Liberal Democrats will remain outspoken and steadfast in our defence of gay rights, from backing same sex marriage to stopping the deportation of gay asylum seekers to countries were homosexuality is punishable by death. There has been much progress in recent years, and much to celebrate. But as long as homophobia still rears its ugly head in workplaces, in classrooms, and even in the home – politicians must continue to speak out in favour of the values of gay rights. For me, it is quite simply one of the touchstones of what a liberal society should be: open, tolerant and free of prejudice.

You can come and have a chat with the Lib Dems each month at “Liberal Drinks” at the Fellows Morton & Clayton – we’re there on the second Thursday from 7.30pm.

I have been Alex Foster. You can find me very easily on the internet or on twitter by googling “alex foster”

Thank you very much.

Some web addresses that were helpful in writing all this:

Lynne Featherstone’s speech to the LGB and T Conference on Gay Pride

Slightly OTT PC ways of referring to marriage

Fascinating graph about gay marriage

Gay refugees must get asylum, rule judges

Lynne Featherstone’s parliamentary work on the gay blood ban

Some of Lynne’s work on trans idenity (with a fascinating debate in the comments of the differences and values of transgender and transsexual people)

Last week, when we got the papers and the advance copy of the tabled questions, it looked like Full Council was going to be a relatively low key affair finished by 4pm.

It didn’t go like that at all.

Questions didn’t go as planned because a number of people were missing – if either questionner or questionee is missing, the question is deferred and answered in writing, and that happened to two interesting ones. The Conservative chair of the Wilford and Clifton area committee wasn’t present to talk about his views of the A453 widening scheme threatened by government cuts; and a Labour councillor wasn’t present to ask a question that was essentially “Could the Labour leader please expand at length on how awful the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are?”

Cllr Collins’s material on that last topic wasn’t wasted, because at the last minute, we got an emergency report on cuts. The government has taken the extraordinary step of making in-year cuts to the council’s grant. Three quarters of local government finance comes from central government. Normally we get told good and early in the year how much to expect so we know how much to budget for, and what council tax to set to raise the remaining quarter. Once the figures have been set, they don’t change; normally government would tell us what to expect the following year. Telling us halfway through a year that we will not be getting as much as previously thought is an extremely unfriendly thing to do, and will have more serious consequences than letting us know that we will lose money for the next year’s budget.

The report we were sent sets out that we will lose about 1% of our budget – which doesn’t sound like much. It translates to about £4million pounds, which suddenly sounds a lot more.

So we debated that. The report itself has been drafted in neutral factual terms detailing what has been cut. The debate… well the debate was a good mix of factual explanation of the consequences, and political theatre making extreme points. I’m sure you will have heard pro-cuts / anti-cuts arguments in the public arena elsewhere so I shan’t rehearse them here again.

Then we moved onto petitions. Councils up and down the country have been told by the government how they should handle petitions in future. It’s a bit of a cheek that central government should tell local government how to represent local people, and Julia Goldsworthy once made a good joke about the irony of a government department that doesn’t accept petitions telling councils how to, um accept petitions. Anyway, the last Labour government made new rules on petitions that the Council just accepted, that generally will be a Good Thing. Now any petition in Nottingham getting over 5,000 signatures from people who live, work or study in Nottingham, will have to be debated by councillors in Full Council.

Finally, we moved onto my motion about blood donation. Happy coincidence meant that Full Council fell on World Blood Donor Day, so I tabled a motion celebrating that, urging as many people as possible to donate blood, and regretting that gay men can’t give blood.

Now I assumed that would be fairly uncontroversial within the Council. Perhaps I didn’t spend as long finessing the words of the motion. I assumed most people would be with me. The first few speeches went fine. Mine; then one from a Labour portfolio holder; then one from the Conservative leader, all making good points, all being supportive. So I settled back, took a few notes and got ready to make a summing up speech.

One of my group’s little habits with motions is it’s not enough to just have a motion saying X is a good thing – it has to get someone to do something. So we included in the final bullet point, an action that the Labour portfolio holder for Adult Services and Health ((Adult Services is not as risqué as it sounds – the Government insisted that all councils that run social services make sure that education and schools are in the same department as child social services. That leaves adult social services separate in most places, and that becomes a department in itself)) write a letter to the Blood Service saying the discrimination should end.

So I was expecting the Portfolio Holder to get to her feet, and talk to the motion. I was half expecting an amendment, as the Labour group are slightly control-freakie, and don’t like opposition motions to pass unamended.

But I wasn’t expecting the Labour party to delete the reference to discrimination against gay men. That came as a bit of a shock.

The Labour Portfolio Holder even used the infelicitous phrase “some of my friends are gay, but…”

The seconder of the Labour amendment carried on in the same theme. She drew heavily on this advice from Terrence Higgins Trust, who, in my view, are not on the side of the angels in this matter.

A third Labour speaker spoke to endorse their approach, saying our motion was flawed because of all the groups who are unfairly prevented from giving blood, we didn’t mention women who used to be sex workers but who had subsequently been given a clean bill of health.

My group leader got up to back me up and had an interesting extra nugget of information to add to the debate I didn’t know before we started – that his dad had once caught hepatitis from an infected blood donation. He underlined the importance of safety and screening of blood, and how our views about gay men should not undermine that.

Then it came back to me for my right of reply, and I had to give a speech I hadn’t prepared for one bit. It’s always a bit of a weakness that I don’t prepare for summing up speeches in the same way I get ready for introductory speeches. (And it was my weakness 20 years ago at school debate club, too). But even if I had prepared, I wouldn’t have had material for this.

Some of the points I made were these: my main point in putting the motion down was to celebrate blood donation generally. Getting into the gay debate was only one part of my plan. The main message to take away was that those who can give blood should do so, as often as they are asked to.

Then I picked up on a point made by the Conservative leader: that the health service discriminating in this way sent a signal to people with old fashioned views that it is OK still to discriminate. It reminded me of this post I read at JoeMyGod (adult ads and swearwords in the comments) where a lobbying group drew on the gay blood ban as “evidence” that it isn’t safe to let gay people serve in the military, which is presently a big hot topic in the US.

Then I drew a bit on personal experience. I’ve been tested. I can be more sure than many people that I am HIV negative. I take precautions. I also think that the aforementioned former sex workers are also more likely to have been tested for STIs and know they are clean, so they too should be able to draw on their personal experience and their personal knowledge when it comes to deciding whether they are safe to donate blood.

I also mentioned the thing that several NHS workers from doctors to have said to me – just lie. THT’s advice is that this is not a good idea, and I do agree with them on that.

The mood changed in the room, and it got a bit uncomfortable. This was perhaps a bit more personal than it usually is at Full Council.

Ultimately we got to the vote. One gay Labour councillor absented himself from the room shortly before the actual vote. And why is this? The Labour group in Nottingham is almost stalinist in the way they observe their whip. Labour councillors always vote together, en bloc. They discuss things privately in group, decide on a common line, and then stick to it rigidly. Things are different in the Liberal Democrats. We discuss things, come to a common line, and then normally vote that way. But if there are personal concerns, so long as they are raised in the group in advance, it’s not often a problem if people decide to vote their own way. This is to some extent a luxury of being in a small opposition group that may have to go by the wayside as and when we grow in numbers. But the point is, in Nottingham, the Labour whip is always rock solid.

But not this time. At the vote for the Labour amendment, at least five Labour councillors sat on their hands, and looked uncomfortable. Including three frontbenchers and a civic.

Good for them. Thanks.

The rest of them voted for the amendment, and it was enough to get it through.

The final motion as amended still encourages as many people as are able to donate blood. And that is still a good thing, and still something we were able to support. But it is a shame that our lines about discrimination against gay men did not make the final version.

MOTION IN THE NAME OF COUNCILLOR FOSTER:

“This Council…

1.Celebrates today’s World Blood Donor Day, which highlights the importance of blood donation.

2.Celebrates the work of phlebotomists across the UK, and everyone who keeps this vital life-saving service running.

3.Urges all those who are able to donate blood to do so regularly.

4.Regrets that the blood service in the UK discriminates unfairly against different groups in our society including gay men and bisexual men.

5.Pledges that the Portfolio Holder for Adult Support and Health will write to and lobby central government and the National Blood Service, urging them to scrap their discriminatory and outdated policy towards gay and bisexual men.”

Labour amendment:

“Points 4 and 5 to be amended to read:

4.Welcomes the Review started under the previous Government, to review criteria for the donation of blood through the Advisory Committee, SaBTO, which will ensure the criteria are clearly linked to the most current scientific evidence and international Best Practice.

5.Recommends the Portfolio Holder liaise with City MPs when the Review is published in the autumn, to ensure Recommendations are implemented, which will address concerns about discrimination in the current criteria.”

1 …

2 …

3 Erm…

That’s it.

I’ve resisted writing this because I don’t particularly have anything new to say, but this my personal view. It specifically does not represent Nottingham Liberal Democrats with whom I have not discussed this.

The Liberal Democrats are a substantial party in our own right, and we are not simply numbers the other parties can call on if they fall short of the finishing post. We set out our priorities in detail months before the General Election. There are many things we think are important. The Lib Dems are not looking for personal glory, ministerial cars or cabinet positions – we want to deliver our priorities to make our country fairer and better for all.

Labour have lost. They cannot govern on their own.

Labour have lost so badly, they also cannot form a workable coalition. It’s just mad to think it would be possible to lump together every MP who wasn’t a Tory and expect that to win. Labour know they need that, and still can’t manage to be courteous to other parties. And even if they lump everyone together, they could still be voted down by the Conservatives.

And with all that, it’s a bit rich for the Labour party to start talking about electoral reform after having governed for 13 years without doing anything about it. And even richer still to think that AV is proportional representation.

So I simply do not think there can be any mileage in thinking about alliance with the Labour party.

Which leaves the Conservatives.

David Cameron has said he is prepared to talk to us. But in his speech on Friday afternoon, which was the last thing I have heard from him, the concessions did not go nearly far enough to be worth anything to the Lib Dems.

In order to form a coalition, the Conservatives have to agree to substantial parts of the Lib Dem platform. I agree with Alex Wilcock when he says this:

In one line – all four of our cast-iron priorities: deal. Anything less: no deal.

Lib Dem tax cuts for low and middle earners, with increased taxes on the rich to pay for them.

Breaking up the banks and a green economy.

Solid money to support poorer kids in schools.

Big money out of politics, elected Lords and above all STV.

If the Tories agree to that, I think we can deal.

If they don’t, I think they should try and run the country on their own. And they will have to amend each of their policies until it is acceptable to a majority of all parties in the Commons.

I do not think there is substantial appetite for another election. But the Tories cannot say “These are our policies, vote for them or not” and then blame the other parties if they are voted down. They will need to compromise – either hugely to get a coalition, or slightly less to get try and get a budget and Queen’s speech through a hung parliament.

I’ve been relieved from my duties telling by the Late Nite Knockup Team, so I’ve had time to dash home and try and warm my hands back up from two hours in the gloaming outside Nottingham Prison.

As I might have mentioned, I’ve been booked to go and talk about election results on BBC Radio Nottingham from midnight til 6am, so I’m preparing myself mentally for that.

I’m not convinced it’s a good idea: I do tend to get weepy and morose once things come to an end. University shows always used to end in cast parties, when I didn’t necessarily behave. Past elections have left me tired and grumpy, and even when we win, I struggle to be nice to colleagues. And now they’re taking me when I’m at my weakest and putting me in front of a microphone.

Listen live here!

And what will I say? My experience is that turnout has been high and the competition has been fierce. There have been lots of young and new voters, but I’m not sure anyone knows which way they’ve been voting.

The exit poll is just reading out the results – 307 Con, 259 Lab and 59 LD. Exit polls are often wrong. Let’s hope for at least as many Lib Dem MPs as we had last time. Nottingham’s Prof Phil Cowley has just said he’s very sceptical and that exit polls are not good with the smaller parties.

And let’s not forget that a few months ago naysayers had the Lib Dems on under 40 seats.

(And that typing has not been enough to warm my hands up. Should I take gloves and thermal socks with me to the beeb?)