An update from conference

Thank you to everyone who came to one of our Liberal Reform events in Gateshead and signed up there.It was great to see such a big crowd, including parliamentarians and many from the leadership programme. For those of you who didn’t make it this time, don’t worry, we’re hoping we’ll become a conference fixture!

We talked about our plans for the rest of Spring and Summer, leading up to Autumn conference. Our main aim is to build a platform of policies, both to write motions for the hall and to encourage a wider debate in the party about the issues we find important.

Simon McGrath’s amendments to conference motions, the first to make online businesses pay tax on revenue gained in the UK, and the second to ensure a members ballot would be the final ‘lock’ on any controversial coalition agreement, were both accepted for debate. The first passed easily but the second was narrowly defeated. We also wished to help push an amendment on civil liberties, reaffirming our commitment to stand against unnecessary and overreaching data retention and personal privacy violations. While it wasn’t chosen, we plan to be ardent supporters of civil liberties in the future.

Once we have established a system of holding elections, we plan to bring more people into a committee to help shape LR. However, the best thing about our new membership is that we have individuals with dozens of different policy interests and varied expertise. This means we can create working groups, and allow people who usually wouldn’t have time to write and organise policy motions themselves to have input, especially where they have professional or personal experience.

If you do have a particular area which you would like to see Liberal Reform work on, even if you have little time yourself, please do get in touch and let us know.

Thank you very much again to everyone for getting involved. You’ll be hearing from us again soon about our exciting plans for the coming months.