Boring internal Green Party business

This is going to mean very little to you if you're not a Green Party member so you may wish to skip over this.

Still here? Cool. As you may know the first agenda for the February conference (members only, sorry) is out and it's time to vote in the prioritisation ballot.

The prioritisation ballot is the open to all members and allows the membership to directly dictate in what order conference business is conducted. This is important because with 27 motions and a health voting paper to discuss in between fringes, training and rallies it's unlikely that everything will get discussed and voted on.

In other words this is your chance to save things from falling off the end of the agenda.

We can vote for up to three policy motions and three organisational motions and I'd like you to consider using two in each section for the following;

D54 joint election lists: annoyingly this fell off the agenda at the last conference (for some reason we had a lot less time to discuss motions last time which is why there are more motions than normal this time round). Currently the Party constitution forbids joint election lists with other parties or independents at proportional representation elections. This motion removes that bar whilst putting in place safeguards against 'unwise' decisions and ensuring the final decision is always with the members of the region concerned.

D56 renaming the MfSS: Currently we have two manifestos. I'd quite like us to enter the general election with only one manifesto, tailored to the election we're fighting, whilst retaining the comprehensive policy document we've spent years building up and refining.

C31 Science pledge removal: At the moment we have a very silly policy that requires scientists, alone of all professions, to take a pledge not to be horrid to the planet. We should not be asking people to take a moral oath or else, but introducing legislation against harmful practices.

C34 Animals and research: This motion drastically strips down our current animal experimentation policy making it far clearer and removing contentious and unnecessary claims about scientific research.

Please don't confuse this with the other animal experimentation motion (C39) which aims to make our policy against animal testing based entirely on problems with the science whilst removing the ethical motivation for a ban, which I'd argue is a strange thing to remove from the policy as all the people I know who oppose animal experimentation do so because they believe its unethical, even when they try to back this up with problems with the science.

You don't have to vote for three in each but you may well want to peruse the rest of the agenda paper for other motions you might like to support as well / instead.