Green conference fun & games in Hove

Hove town hallA couple of days in Hove at the Green Party Autumn ticked all the usual boxes, though this year jokes about beards were given a fun edge by Sue‘s buzzword bingo game. Thankfully a lot of the unfortunate posturing around Green Party Executive (GPEX) elections died down as it became clear that most members couldn’t be bothered with it, leaving space for some good policy debates.

Science and technology finally got its day, with two fringe events giving the nerd core a chance to work out how we can avoid this kind of (quite valid) coverage. I’ve high hopes that we can begin to overhaul some fairly ancient and shaky policy, not least because we got such strong and wide agreement that policy should be – golly – based on scientific evidence, as should decisions about NHS treatments. But never mind that “on the back foot” stuff, I’m most excited about the possibility of putting out some really strong messages around science and technology that should resonate strongly with scientists, technologists and the general public.

Keeping the NHS public, in the face of money-wasting PFI schemes; reforming the national curriculum to improve teaching of basic scientific and statistical methods, in the face of popular public science scares and hoaxes; using public funds to promote and expand the place of open access publishing, in the face of threats to public-interest research.

Just some random ideas there… we seem to have a great team working on this now so I’m feeling a good deal less embarassed than I was when the science bloggers pulled some of our policy apart back in May.

On another positive note the Campaign in a Box resources I’ve put together with help from Kate Hand, Sam Smith and Hannah Goudge went down a storm. All the copies that Jon Nott and I managed to bring were picked off the stall within a couple of hours, leaving some slightly sad black & white display copies. Members can grab them from the soon-to-be-overhauled members’ web site, but I am pondering putting them somewhere more public and making a bit of a splash. All rather depends on what the new Campaigns Coordinator and his Campaigns Committee want to do with them, as I might end up making this a solo effort whilst they stick to the “man the barricades” stuff.

I’m now left waiting on the internal elections results with some trepidation, hoping (with some confidence) that the Party pulls together around our 09/10 aim of returning the first Green MP to Parliament!

4 Comments

  1. Mum said:

    what was the bingo game Tom?

    14th September 2009
  2. Tom Chance said:

    You have a table with words and phrases you always hear at conference, like “the man with the beard”, “I want to refer this motion back” and “is this [microphone] on?”. Every time you hear a phrase you cross it off, like bingo, and when you’re done you have to leap up mid-discussion and shout “Greenhouse!”

    Silly but fun 🙂

    14th September 2009
  3. […] Green conference fun & games in Hove « tom's blog tom.acrewoods.net/2009/09/05/gp-autumn-conf – view page – cached 10:10 Brighton09 Climate change Conference Elections Food Free culture Free data Free software GPEX gpex09 Green New Deal Green Party Green politics Growing Southwark Hove Labour Liberal Democrats Living wage Open access Open standards OpenStreetMap Peckham People & Planet Personal RBS Science Software patents Southwark Sustainability Sustainable Communities Act * My recent tweets + Spread around, get Brown to the Copenhagen UN climate talks in December http://www.pm2un.co.uk #pm2un 4 hours ago + New blog post – what to say about climate change in 25 mins to school students: http://bit.ly/18f2ti #1010 #greenparty 18 hours ago + Moving Acrewoods.net to Google Apps and WordPress.com, very boring work copying over old blog posts and doing mail filters! 23 hours ago * Flickr Photos — From the page […]

    16th September 2009
  4. This is for my 18th birthday in early september, but about half of my friends are 17 and clubs won’t let us all in. My Parents will be there and don’t want to spend more than $1000 (food, Dj, Drinks). Any good places in in my area (williamstown)?.

    24th August 2011

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