Liberal Democrats
19th- 21st September

This was a great opportunity to speak to education spokes people about education. The Lib Dems are currently reforming their education policy and at a fringe event at Blackpool Winter Gardens I asked the Education Spokesman, Ed Davey if he would support us in our campaign to keep the cap on education fees.

The thing is that we need to keep the pressure up, and I will be meeting with the party representatives in late October to speak more about their policy and their priorities.

Labour
26th – 29th September

This was a weird one for me. As a party member I often feel that people lump all Labour Party members together as “New Labour” sellouts. I personally joined because I identified with other members who are true to their socialist principles and really want to take the Labour party back to its roots…within the trade union movement and to the workers where it belongs.

So it’s hard to swallow when you go and listen to the PM’s speech about essentially socialist principles. I found myself agreeing with what he had to say…which was very strange. He spoke out about good education and healthcare not being the privilege of the rich. If I didn’t know better I would have thought that Labour were going to ban private healthcare and schools and make the rich pay higher taxes in order to provide an equal state healthcare and education system.

I will remain in the party until we win it back. I’m going to stick by my principles of free education and health care provision. I just wish others had stuck by theirs!

Then I listened to Ruth Kelly’s speech. She focused a great deal on provision for schools. She left out a great deal of important FE focus and kept schtum about the multitude of issues in HE currently. She was trying to be a crowd pleaser. She spoke about healthy products from the vending machines in schools, which is great. But said pretty much nothing else ground breaking.

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