He will do a Q&A session chaired by Simon Kelner editor of The Independent at 3
Posted in General on 28. Sep, 2010
He will do a Q&A session chaired by Simon Kelner, editor of The Independent, at 3.30pm in the BIC on Monday. Look out for the Glee Club, a traditional sing-along session with all the old Liberal anthems, such as The Land (celebrating the dangerously socialist Diggers, who believed we all own it), Gays and Straights Together (to the tune of We Shall Overcome), and The Soggy Democrats (a skit at David Owen and the old SDP).Why do Tony and Gordon bother going to the annual party conference?It can be make-or-break for the politicians – Iain Duncan Smith’s “quiet man” speech last year at Blackpool backfired badly and finished his leadership of the Tories. The Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy, Tim Razzle and the strategists are trying to show they are the serious alternative to Labour before the next election (5 May next year, probably).This year there are no loopy motions, like banning goldfish from fairground stalls (1992), hard porn for 16-year-olds (2001), boycotting France (when the former leader Paddy Ashdown had a house there), or controversial policies such as abolishing the monarchy (2003), and liberalising dope laws (2002).Will it be boring then?Nope. “Giant Haystacks” – the hairy hulk who often sat on the front row at Liberal assemblies – has gone, and beardy Tony Greaves is a member of the Lords.
Yes, the political conference season is upon us.
Blackpool, land of candy floss, promenade illuminations and horizontal rain, is not on the tour circuit this year for the travelling politicians, partners, researchers and rank-and-file party members who give up a week of their annual leave to be beside the seaside with their leaders.The three main political parties are keeping to the south coast. He won his seat on the local council in 2001 by a margin of three votes.. Bournemouth and Brighton are already dusting off the welcome banners Armed police are studying their vantage points The speech-writers are losing sleep Yes, the political conference season is upon us. Lord Rennard, who is pursuing every Tory voter he can find to achieve the 22 per cent swing from Labour he needs, claims his party has more support at this stage than it did in either Brent or Leicester.In the final reckoning, Mr Wright’s most useful attribute might be an experience of close finishes. They are off to Bournemouth in the first week of October with Michael Howard, taking the rostrum in at the BIC (Bournemouth International Centre) for the first time as party leader.Lib Dems are all sandals and woolly jumpers, aren’t they? Not any more. First up, Bournemouth, reinventing itself as the surf centre of Dorset from its previous image as retirement capital, will play host to the Liberal Democrats in the coming week.Next weekend, Labour are off to Brighton, following “the brothers” who went to Brighton last week for the TUC conference and were lashed by gales.The Tories, like good lovers, always finish the conference season last.
“The Liberals certainly got a lot of signs up and that makes a change. Maybe they’ll get in this time.”David Royal, 74, agreed that “the days of your father telling you to put a cross by Labour” were over “It’s down to what they talk about. I’m still undecided,” he said.Labour’s decision to time the election at the end of its party conference on 30 September has handed Ms Dunn a good canvassing weapon – the promise that she can be “kicked out” if she has not performed by the time of the general election.But she has considerable ground to make up, according to the NOP poll, which placed Mr Wright on a comfortable 53 per cent. Besides, if she wants readers to come away with the idea that the Bushes will get ahead at all costs, she drowns out what could have been her epigraph: “I like to win,” the first President Bush told a reporter “Like to succeed. I feel goaded on by competition.” Buy any book reviewed on this site at postage and packing are free in the UK. America, say The Economist journalists Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait, is not only on the right as opposed to the left America is right as opposed to wrong. What’s more, it is time we Europeans stopped thinking those American conservatives are crazy and understood that they are right.The authors have written two books in one.
One is an immensely knowledgeable description of the history and beliefs of modern American conservatism. It is occasionally careless (Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania was not a Democrat; the cartoonist David Low was not an Australian), but the authors do an excellent job of analysing the different streams that have flowed together to make up modern American conservatism. They have understood that its triumph owes much to the conservatives’ success in scaring Clinton Democrats into moving halfway to meet them. They are right in stressing the importance of religious belief, especially evangelical Protestant belief, in recruiting the movement’s foot soldiers.
They are right, if hardly original, that the American centre of gravity has shifted right. However perverse many of the right’s dogmas seem, we should try to understand them. They are right, too, in saying that the new aggressive foreign policy happened, not because a neo-conservative cabal hoodwinked Bush, but because after September 11 the neo-conservative call for war matched the angry mood of the wider movement.The authors have tried to be fair-minded But their book is also a work of advocacy. They have accepted, essentially uncritically, the conservative narrative.