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.