Green Liberal Democrat "Chair`s Report"

2021 - GLD Chair`s Report

In the interests of developing synergy, I thought I would write an article for the Green Liberal Democrat website that would also function as my Chair`s Report to the GLD AGM to be held on Saturday 29th January. So, it would be good to see as many of you there as we can manage to get along.

I think we can all agree that 2021 has been, shall we say, an unusual year! For everyone, not just Green Liberal Democrats! Despite the negatives of the pandemic, there have been a number of positives for GLD through the year and, more generally for Lib Dems, too, with really good wins in two stunning byelections of course. As most of you will know, the North Shropshire byelection win featured Helen Morgan, who is a member of GLD.

Global Conference on Climate Change - COP26 Glasgow

As I wrote in my piece on `Reflections of 2021`, the most significant factor in the year for us was the impact of COP26 Conference in Glasgow…

"We spent much effort as a group leading up to, and participating in, the Glasgow Climate Change Summit, COP26. We ran fringe meetings about it, we wrote articles about it, we took a team up to Glasgow for it and we prepared posters for the marches associated with it. Several of our members - Sir Ed Davey, Baroness Kate Parminter and Councillor Pippa Heylings - all made it into the Blue Zone. Between them they made an impact upon the various negotiations going on and Pippa took the prize for getting an important sentence into the final declaration - the Glasgow Climate Pact - on behalf of Local Governance at a Global level. Fabulous. The rest of us enjoyed the Green Zone meetings and the networking."

It is worth reminding ourselves that the UK Government remains as President of COP26 throughout the year until the time of COP27, to be held in Sharm el Sheikh in Egypt. This means we need to keep the pressure up on the Government to implement the fine words in the Glasgow Climate Pact - and I shall have more to say in the section below on "Looking Forward".

Political impact

Staying with the political theme for the moment, Green Lib Dems have `punched far above our weight` within the Party over the last twelve months too. As you will know we are, at Lib Dem Conferences, always one of the busiest of the Associated Organisations (AOs will become Affiliated Organisations from 2022 onwards!) in terms of running fringe meetings. We ran three at the 2021 Spring Conference and four at the Autumn Conference and all were well-attended. This is part of our offering` to our membership as well as our `Outreach` to the rest of the Party and the wider world.

We also participated fully in many of the conference debates, with many members speaking on many topics, as well as contributing to the Conference Agenda by submitting and proposing motions and amendments to motions, signed in many cases by a significant portion of our membership base. The highest ever number of signatures collected was for the Constitutional Amendment submitted to the 2021 Autumn Conference with 215 signatures in support.

I am delighted to report that the Constitutional Amendment which `promoted` the care for the environment sentence from the second sentence of the second paragraph to become the second sentence of the FIRST paragraph of the Preamble to the Lib Dem Constitution was passed with very few objections of votes against.

To the uninitiated, this may sound a little like `moving the deckchairs on the Titanic`, but it was a move of real political substance which will become more appreciated as time goes by. I am particularly proud of this sentence, having written the original back in 1988 - but now it has been `promoted` it is clear that care for the environment is now the equal of "Liberty, Equality and Community" as one of the key values of the Party. It is, indeed, a sentence that has been referred to many times in many conference motions over the years.

Also, under `Political Impact`, I should mention the development throughout the year of our Special Interest Groups (SIGs). They were established in 2020 but have come into their own during 2021 and are continuing to develop policy ideas which we hope to introduce to the mainstream in due course. Perhaps the one with the greatest overall potential to change the world is the one looking at "Developing a Wellbeing Economy" as that has the potency to overturn our current approach to economic development as a society.

More immediately the SIG on "Sustainable Development" is significant in terms of its impact upon Planning and how we view Building Back Better; or the SIG on "Carbon Tax", which has the capacity to change the way we view responsibility for Carbon Emissions and how we get the `Polluters to Pay`.

There is a Special Interest Group on "Doubling Nature", which is now running in parallel with the Party`s Working Group on the Natural Environment. We also have SIGs on "Renewable Neighbourhood Energy" and "Food from Farm to Table", both of which have barely started. If you are interested in participating and would like to contribute your thoughts to any of these SIGs please write to info@greenlibdems.org.uk and let us know.

Organisational Impact

The biggest change in Organisational terms has been the recent appointment of a professional Political Assistant for the first time. It is something we have been contemplating for a while but with COP26 upcoming, we agreed to put the project into place as swiftly as we could and managed to get things organised so that we could appoint someone into post in time to help in the run-up to COP26 and at the event itself and take us forward, particularly in relation to membership development and engagement.

Our new Political Assistant is Francis Thomas, and he has managed to 'hit the ground running'. He is based in Salford Quays with ALDC, which promises to build synergy with our local campaigning in the run-up to local elections in 2022, alongside ALDC's contacts with activists, councillors and Council Candidates. He has recently taken on the administration for the Climate Change Cluster under the auspices of Wera Hobhouse MP.

On a personal note, I have now joined the Federal Conference Committee. You may recall I was `last man standing but not elected` in the 2019 FCC elections. During 2021, the FCC Chair, Geoff Payne resigned to take up a role as a Circuit Judge, so there was a recount of the 2019 votes, and I was declared `elected` in May 2021 as the additional member. I intend to stand again in the next round of Federal Elections later in 2022.

Regional Groups

The effect of the pandemic has partly been to blame for the slowness in getting a set of Regional Groups up and running, but we are still pursuing this goal. We have had a number of meetings - in Wales, the East Midlands, Eastern Region and the London Region - which have counted in a way as pilot meetings for establishing Regional Groups of GLD members in these areas. I have not given up on the idea of spreading the organisational load by making the Regions into active groups of members and Graham Neale has agreed to take the initiative onto the `next level` over the forthcoming 12 months, as part of our planning for the local elections of 2022 and 2023, but also as our contribution to the impending General Election whenever that may be called. If YOU wish to help in this task, please contact Graham via the info@greenlibdems.org.uk email address.

Looking Forward

Since I intend to stand for election to the Chair again at the AGM at the end of January, I thought my `Report` should have a section devoted to `Next Steps` and looking forwards. As I mentioned above the UK is still President of COP26, so one of our tasks will be to keep up the pressure for political action at the international level of Climate Justice as well as upgrading our Nationally Determined Contributions for the UK.

GLD was successful in getting one of our two submitted motions approved for discussion at the LD Spring Conference. All being well this will also be the focus of one of our proposed three fringe meetings. The intention is to use this motion and the fringe to apply continued publicity pressure on the COP issues for this incompetent Government.

We will be putting at least some of these meetings on as part of the Live section of the Spring Conference developed by ALDC to complement the LD virtual online conference. If you would like to join us in York it would be good to see some GLD members there. You should register through ALDC ( https://www.aldc.org/2021/12/conference-live/ ). Also, for any GLD members who have never been to conference, it is worth recalling that there is a £5 special registration rate for First-Time delegates to the virtual conference for which you need to register through HQ - https://www.libdems.org.uk/conference .

We should not forget the Local Elections in May of 2022 and many of you may be standing as candidates at the Ballot Box. If you would like to develop a specifically environmental approach to your campaigning, you may wish to become an "Accredited GLD" candidate. For further information, please see here.

I hope to see you at the Green Lib Dem AGM on 29^th January at 4pm on Zoom, and/or at the LD Spring Conference in March. We hope to have our newest MP, our own Green Lib Dem member, Helen Morgan as our Guest Speaker at the AGM - to be confirmed.

Keith Melton