A Tale of Two Conferences

By Cllr John Milne

It’s Conference season once again. Ed and Rishi have both taken their day in the sun. So who came away with a nice tan, and who got badly burned?

Bournemouth was the first Conference I’ve attended in person and I picked a good one. Unfortunately I also picked a terrible hotel, but that’s another matter.

Positive energy filled the air.  Arguably, the real action takes place in Fringe events rather than the main auditorium. I certainly heard lots of interesting ideas, including the notion of a community land trust for every village.

A particularly crowded session on climate change was made all the more impactful because the venue kept all the doors and windows closed. (Thanks guys for giving us a convincing demo of the effects of global warming.)

But of course, above all Conference is a chance to network and get inspiration from Lib Dems everywhere. Half a dozen Horshamites were joined by contingents from Mid Sussex and Chichester among others. Some of us perhaps networked a little too hard and peaked early on Saturday night, but hey - it’s only once a year.

For Rishi, the Conservative Conference was not so pleasant. Attendees were down on a normal year such an extent that they had to move the main debates into a smaller chamber, to avoid broadcasting banks of empty seats to the world.

Worse still for Rishi, the speeches that did manage to pull the crowds all came from the wrong people. The ever-disloyal Suella Braverman was as expected in full leadership campaigning mode. But most extraordinary of all was the sight of Liz Truss selling her unfunded tax cut policy yet again, barely a year after she crashed the economy with her last attempt. She has no shame.

Rishi’s desire to keep all his policy announcements to his final address backfired badly. For days he could not move past the ‘what’s happening to HS2?’ question, no matter how hard he tried.

So now we know. Another levelling up promise bites the dust, and it’s the daddy of them all. HS2 is cancelled. Astonishingly, Rishi contrived to announce his betrayal of the North in Manchester in a converted train station. You couldn’t make it up.

Just like other recent Tory leaders, Rishi has discovered it’s more fun to keep announcing new stuff than it is to actually complete any of the promises already made. Embarrassingly it’s already emerged that most his allegedly ‘new’ projects have been repeatedly announced before and cancelled before.

So in the Battle of the Conferences, I declare a Lib Dem victory. Let’s hope we get another one in the General Election next year!