SGPConf HLCGB
Impressed by their consistent stand in favour of civil liberties, and concerned worried absolutely frickin' terrified by the way none of the other parties were treating climate change with the seriousness it merits, I joined the Scottish Green Party shortly before the election, and spent a few evenings posting leaflets, hanging up placards and so on. Last weekend was their annual conference. All the reports I'd read about other parties' conferences had led me to think that this would be a tooth-pullingly ghastly affair, but James Mackenzie convinced me that it would be OK, so I went along.
And it was pretty good. Not as much fun as (say) a juggling convention, but a hell of a lot more fun than sitting around in Glasgow doing nothing, and much more likely to change the world for the better than either. I'd like to write up a proper post about what happened, but in the not-totally-unlikely event that I don't get around to it, here's a rec.juggling style HLCGB capsule review. For those not familiar with the format, it goes like this: best thing that happened, worst thing that happened, person who impressed you most, what did you hope to achieve (and did you?), what constant niggle most undermined your enjoyment.
High: It's a tossup between Caroline Lucas MP's anti-cuts speech on Sunday morning, and Andy Wrightman's storming closing address on land reform.
Low: Probably the first debate session on Sunday morning, which went very slowly and kept getting lost in procedure. I think some kind of debate-procedure flowchart would seriously help here - it made a huge difference when we introduced one for JCR meetings at uni. I'll have to try and introduce one next year, but I'm not sure how to go about doing so - anyone familiar with SGP procedure like to suggest an approach?
Crush: I'm gonna have to go with Patrick Harvie MSP; great speaker, seemingly has every issue at his fingertips, and he bought me a pint after the conference. His impromptu speech at the Carbon Capture and Storage fringe event was particularly awesome¹, but every one of the many contributions he made was top-notch.
Goal: vote to remove mention of homeopathy from our policy reference document. This was a major problem for the English and Welsh Greens last year, and judging by some of the remarks on Twitter there was a lot of desire to fix it. Annoyingly, that was right at the end of the policy-debate agenda, and we didn't get to it. Some of the constitutional stuff that pushed it out of the way was genuinely important - procedures to follow for ratifying coalition/confidence-and-supply arrangements, for instance² - but several of the motions were IMHO less important.
Also, catch up with some of the Edinburgh Greens. The packed programme (and consequent lack of a hallway track) made this difficult, but I said hi to a few people, had a brief chat with Susan Guest, and a slightly longer catch-up with Kate Joester.
Putting my personal experience aside, the most important thing we achieved as a party was probably to vote to use the Scottish Parliament's tax-raising powers to offset the worst effects of the public-service cuts, and to pledge not to enter a coalition with a socially-regressive cuts agenda (because the other thing we're all about is social justice). More on this here. The electoral arithmetic is such that with a small swing to the Greens we may find ourselves kingmakers in Holyrood next year, so it's good to have this sorted out now.
Bane: It turns out (and you'll have to excuse my ignorance here, remember that this was my first ever party conference) that most of the important work gets done beforehand, in the form of writing motions and amendments. Any member can do this - party of radical democracy, and all that - but by the time I decided I was coming I'd missed the deadline to contribute to this part of the process. Consequently, a lot of the things I wanted to do - for instance, splitting a proposed amendment into two smaller orthogonal changes so that they could be voted on separately - couldn't be done at the time³.
So, I'm definitely going next year, and next year I'm going to get involved well in advance...
¹ tl;dl: by all means let's research this, but let's not increase our fossil-fuel burning capacity on the promise of a technology that still might turn out to be vapourware.
² C&Ses must be ratified by either Council or an EGM; a full coalition must be ratified by a supermajority of Council and an EGM. As a party of radical democracy it's only fitting that the membership should decide on this sort of thing, but I agreed with the speakers who said we shouldn't introduce a structural bias against entering coalitions - they're a risk, yes, but also an opportunity.
³ I was grimly amused when Caroline Lucas listed the lack of this feature as one of the ways in which Westminster parliamentary procedure is worse than European parliamentary procedure.
And it was pretty good. Not as much fun as (say) a juggling convention, but a hell of a lot more fun than sitting around in Glasgow doing nothing, and much more likely to change the world for the better than either. I'd like to write up a proper post about what happened, but in the not-totally-unlikely event that I don't get around to it, here's a rec.juggling style HLCGB capsule review. For those not familiar with the format, it goes like this: best thing that happened, worst thing that happened, person who impressed you most, what did you hope to achieve (and did you?), what constant niggle most undermined your enjoyment.
High: It's a tossup between Caroline Lucas MP's anti-cuts speech on Sunday morning, and Andy Wrightman's storming closing address on land reform.
Low: Probably the first debate session on Sunday morning, which went very slowly and kept getting lost in procedure. I think some kind of debate-procedure flowchart would seriously help here - it made a huge difference when we introduced one for JCR meetings at uni. I'll have to try and introduce one next year, but I'm not sure how to go about doing so - anyone familiar with SGP procedure like to suggest an approach?
Crush: I'm gonna have to go with Patrick Harvie MSP; great speaker, seemingly has every issue at his fingertips, and he bought me a pint after the conference. His impromptu speech at the Carbon Capture and Storage fringe event was particularly awesome¹, but every one of the many contributions he made was top-notch.
Goal: vote to remove mention of homeopathy from our policy reference document. This was a major problem for the English and Welsh Greens last year, and judging by some of the remarks on Twitter there was a lot of desire to fix it. Annoyingly, that was right at the end of the policy-debate agenda, and we didn't get to it. Some of the constitutional stuff that pushed it out of the way was genuinely important - procedures to follow for ratifying coalition/confidence-and-supply arrangements, for instance² - but several of the motions were IMHO less important.
Also, catch up with some of the Edinburgh Greens. The packed programme (and consequent lack of a hallway track) made this difficult, but I said hi to a few people, had a brief chat with Susan Guest, and a slightly longer catch-up with Kate Joester.
Putting my personal experience aside, the most important thing we achieved as a party was probably to vote to use the Scottish Parliament's tax-raising powers to offset the worst effects of the public-service cuts, and to pledge not to enter a coalition with a socially-regressive cuts agenda (because the other thing we're all about is social justice). More on this here. The electoral arithmetic is such that with a small swing to the Greens we may find ourselves kingmakers in Holyrood next year, so it's good to have this sorted out now.
Bane: It turns out (and you'll have to excuse my ignorance here, remember that this was my first ever party conference) that most of the important work gets done beforehand, in the form of writing motions and amendments. Any member can do this - party of radical democracy, and all that - but by the time I decided I was coming I'd missed the deadline to contribute to this part of the process. Consequently, a lot of the things I wanted to do - for instance, splitting a proposed amendment into two smaller orthogonal changes so that they could be voted on separately - couldn't be done at the time³.
So, I'm definitely going next year, and next year I'm going to get involved well in advance...
¹ tl;dl: by all means let's research this, but let's not increase our fossil-fuel burning capacity on the promise of a technology that still might turn out to be vapourware.
² C&Ses must be ratified by either Council or an EGM; a full coalition must be ratified by a supermajority of Council and an EGM. As a party of radical democracy it's only fitting that the membership should decide on this sort of thing, but I agreed with the speakers who said we shouldn't introduce a structural bias against entering coalitions - they're a risk, yes, but also an opportunity.
³ I was grimly amused when Caroline Lucas listed the lack of this feature as one of the ways in which Westminster parliamentary procedure is worse than European parliamentary procedure.