Sunday, February 21, 2010

Conference catch up

Apologies for lack of blogging - I blame science - but I have been tweeting away and will try to give a very quick round up of a few things before I get to bed.

It was good to hear the London FBU voted last night to financially back the Greens. They donated to Darren Johnson's campaign in previous elections and it's great to see their continued commitment, and I'm sure we'll keep up our commitments to them.

Much of the policy discussion has revolved around science. We're removed the ridiculous science pledge, ordered a complete rewrite of our science and technology chapter and our health policy has now got a far more balanced approach that regulates health treatments so, for example, alternative medicines would have to clearly label their ingredients and prove efficacy to get funding. I don't think we need ask more than that.

Prove it works and we'll use it. Simple.

Then we came to the animal experimentation motions, one of which I moved, which Alisdair blogs about here. Basically we find out tomorrow what the result of that will be. Sigh.

We've passed a really interesting policy on parental leave, and a citizen's pension - firming up our economic equality agenda, which is nice.

My personal triumph is that we've now renamed the Manifesto for a Sustainable Society - our core policy document - to the Policies for a Sustainable Society (PSS), which means we wont be entering into the next election with two manifestos, when in fact one of those is a list of all our policies not a campaigning document written for a specific election.

I have to say I think this makes the whole thing a lot clearer and although it's like chiseling with granite I think our processes, documents and policies are becoming far, far stronger. I think that's because we are taking them more seriously.

I'll try to write some slightly more interesting posts tomorrow about the politics of it all, but I thought you'd appreciate some detail on what we've actually passed. When there are places for me to link to of the passed motions I'll do just that.

3 comments:

weggis said...

Thanks for keeping us absentees updated.
The Max wage is not a Max wage as there is no Maximum! It is a Differential wage.

James Mackenzie said...

Good job on the renaming of MfSS: that'll save a lot of confusion on the doorstep ;-)

Jim Jepps said...

Sadly quite a few journalists have been confused which has led to them writing stories that are less well informed than they might be. That's our fault for not being clear and thankfully we've rectified that.

It's one of those thing that does effect a few voters (I have had someone tell me that our 'election manifesto' was far too detailed and complex) but you're right that the confusion is not normally as direct as that.