Green Party Conferene

I will be at the party conference in the Arts Depot in Finchley over the next few days. Things kick off this afternoon with the Standing Orders Committee's Report. As the party's Equality and Diversity representative on the Regional Council, I will be attending a workshop on bringing more diversity to the party and looking at equalities issues. It also seems that I am going to be putting an amendment to a motion on economics as the original proposer is ill, so not for the first time I will be an understudy on stage.

And tonight I will be going to a fringe meeting on Migrant Workers and how their remittances to their home countries actually contribute more to their countries GPD than anything which the World Bank does.One of the speakers from the Latin American Workers Association is Alberto Durango, who was recently sacked from UBS Bank in the City for being a trade union organiser. Alberto's union, UNITE, have not even paid his strike pay yet, so we are having a whip around at the conference to help him. This demonstrates the real world that some people live in, unlike the Elysian fields which people like James Purnell of New Labour, author of the appalling Welfare Reform Act, and now posing as the saviour of the progressive movement, dwell in.

In the meanwhile Lambeth Council is not out of the news with its announcement that it is going to be the new model John Lewis type council and the flagship for Labour's new co-operative politics. More on that anon. But funny how it has taken them 4 years to work that out and just before the council elections too.