Political

Could this be my finest moment in the Liberal Democrats?

I present to you point (c) from the Federal Executive report to the Liberal Democrat spring conference in York, courtesy of my submission to the election rules consultation:

Federal Executive report, York Liberal Democrat spring conference

Thank you, and good night.

There is a more serious point to this. Two, in fact. The first is that the misplaced comma in the party’s election rules had been there for years and no-one had done anything about the error until I raised it when the rules were last consulted on. But that’s not because it’s such a minor matter. Similar things happen with more major matters too. There’s a surprisingly large amount you can get changed in the party (and indeed life) by simply noticing the best moments to pitch in with sensibly expressed views that directly relate to a decision someone is about to make.

The second more serious point is the paragraph before the comma – the very sensible change proposed to the party’s election rules to bring them in line with the modern world. On that point, there’s been a larger band of hardy souls who, like me, have argued this and related good fights over many years, with increasing success across different parts of the party’s operation. But again, most of the progress has been down to very few people in total; the lesson about pitching in to get things changed applies again.

In fact, the same point I think applies also to paragraph (e) as this addresses a complaint many people had made after previous electronic elections and once again the number of people raising it when we had the chance to get it changed was slim indeed as far as I know.

That all said, there’s an important caveat. One of the reasons I’m often one of that small number of people is because the party failed to make sure others knew about the opportunity there was.

Which is one of the reasons I so often cover such matters on this blog and in Liberal Democrat Newswire as well as highlighting the efforts to make the party more transparent of people like Anders Hanson. The more who know about such things, the better.

Now, about whether or not the party should use the Oxford comma…

UPDATE: Lib Dem conference voted through the deletion of the comma.

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