OPINION

Following a successful recruitment drive at the recent regional conference, the Social Liberal Forum's branch in the North East will be holding their first meeting on Thursday 1st December 2011. Dr David Hall-Matthews, the Chair of the Social Liberal Forum, will be the guest speaker.

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Report by Prateek Buch As detailed in a letter to the Observer, the campaigns group Compass has helped piece together a Plan B to boost the stalling economy, having declared the Government's Plan A to have failed. I was at the event that marked the launch of the Plan B document, and would suggest that whilst it marks a welcome addition to the emerging discourse on how to

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By James Graham I am delighted to announce that, as of this week, I am coming back to the fold of the Social Liberal Forum as its Head of Political Strategy. For those who don't know, alongside Richard Grayson and Matthew Sowemimo, I was part of the original troika which set up the SLF and served on its executive until September last year when I resigned to focus on my day job. If I've been a little hesitant to come back, it has been because I've been so impressed with what t

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Paul Hindley writes: Neoliberalism is a right-wing form of economics that promotes expansive free markets, deregulation, and unfettered privatisation. It has been the prevailing economic outlook of the global economy for over thirty years. It is disputable the extent to which neoliberalism could be described as being either new or liberal. In Britain, the term neoliberalism is often replaced with the term Thatcherism after the Prime Minister who most ardently supported neoliberal polic

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Below are reports from many of our fringe meetings at the recent Lib Dem conference in Birmingham - more to follow!

The SLF's fringe programme at this year's Lib Dem conference got off to an excellent start, with the panel exploring the Open Public Services White Paper from several angles. Prateek Buch began by introducing the White Paper as having much within it that the party would likely find uncontroversial, such as the insistence on open access to d

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Mark Pack writes: The new (and in fact only) biography of Nick Clegg is very much a book of two halves. The first – a fascinating tale of Nick’s multinational family; the second – a fairly standard recount of some of the political events of the last few years, with little in the way of revelations. If you do not follow political news closely, you will still find in the

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'The Lib Dem Conference is a recognisably democratic event in a sense that the other conferences can no longer claim to be. Policies are proposed, amended, debated and voted on in an impeccable manner'. (Martin Kettle, 'The Guardian', 18/09/09)

Conference notes

Policy forms a vital role within the Liberal Democrats, not only enshrining values as the party evolves but also forming part of the fundamental democratic process that centres on pluralistic beliefs.

However, confe

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