Look it’s Cleggy!

The saddest fact about the damage caused within these elections is that the people that caused it are insignificant when it comes to the entire organisation. It rarely matters who is elected to the executive – youth and student groups across the country will still get on with things and silly little tiffs at the top will be distant at best, more likely invisible.

We here at Warwick have hardly had any involvement with Liberal Youth nationally at all. (OK, perhaps more than some – we hosted Liberal Youth conference no more than 2 months ago.) But essentially, we’d been a Liberal Democrat branch students which draw on support from Liberal Youth when we needed it. Not once had I spoken to Elaine before meeting her at conference. In fact, the only people I had met before were: Martin Shapland (met him at Activate in 2005 and have worked with him in his role as West Midlands convenor), Naomi Smith (from Activate in ‘05), Cara Drury (friend of mine) and have spent years talking to Chris Ward (Chair of Conference Committee) online.

My point is, as president of Warwick Uni Lib Dems for a year, we’ve had no real dealings with anyone on the LY exec, except Shappers, and we didn’t struggle at all.

It would have been excellent if we’d had more help ‘thrust upon us’ from LY, as a more successful exec might have done, but we got all we asked for and have increased the society from 19 members to 73!

That said, we don’t want to stagnate. We do WANT a good exec who all get on, we WANT to have that extra support, the extra ideas and opportunities that we ourselves don’t think of. So PLEASE, exec, work together for the good of the organisation?