Friday, August 08, 2008

Green Party Conference

It's not long now before Green Party Conference being held from the 5th to the 8th of September at SOAS. For the first time in a long time it's going to be in London which means a) it's going to be a bit more expensive and b) there'll be more people there.

I've organised two fringes, which I hope people will come along to - both of them on the Sunday.

First of all we have a fringe on Hands off Iran with Peter Tatchell and Yasmin Mather at 4 pm. I believe this is the first time that Peter has officially spoken at conference and I think the session, which will explore internationalism, opposition to war and solidarity with those who are oppressed by reactionary regimes, should be extremely engaging.

Then at 6 pm it's to the bloggers fringe where we will be launching Green Home - the new hub for Green bloggers (and fulfilling the last of my new year's blogging resolutions incidentally) and discussing campaigning et al. We'll be ably assisted in this by Sunny Hundal, uber leftist blogger and generally cool dude. Should be good.

Having a quick glance through the draft timetable there are a few other things that catch my eye, although I'm sure others would raise different highlights. I see Ken Livingstone is speaking on day one in the first major plenary and the trade union group has a fringe on migration rights which is an important topic and should be very worthwhile.

Sunday morning sees a Green Christians fringe which is an interesting development. I'm not intending to go you understand but if we've had that before it had passed me by. I'd be curious to know how that develops (ie how it behaves politically). The Palestine Solidarity Campaign also has a fringe and I notice there's a session called "meet the Kurds" which is an odd title but is run by MEP Jean Lambert and should be dealing with a number of very important issues.

It's also of course where the leadership and GPEx election results will be announced which should be exciting! This is the Friday and Monday - thanks to Jon Nott for the clarification (see comments).

4 comments:

Jon said...

Correction as requested:

The Leader/Deputy hustings (2.50pm-4pm) and announcement of result (8pm) are on Friday.

The new Leader's speech to conference will be on Saturday (2pm) with hustings for the rest of the Executive positions from 4pm.

The Deputy Leader's speech is scheduled for Monday (10am) and the results of the Executive and other committee elections will be announced later on Monday.

Anonymous said...

Wow, for once I am pretty excited by conference! It might be the best ever - Green Home, the Leadership election and speeches - see you in London!

Jim Jepps said...

Thanks Jon and yes Rayyan - it could be good - see you there!

Anonymous said...

Green home? And Green Feed going already? Looking forwards to seeing how these projects develop.