Sunday, September 21, 2003
God save the Queen?
The Conference debated a motion today on whether we should promote a referendum on the abolition of the monarchy. The motion was moved very ably by Vivienne Raper, who also writes a Blog and who was speaking at Conference for the first time. Another speaker in favour was 16 year old Judi Bernstein, who did work experience in my Swansea office last year. I was happy to vote for the motion but it was defeated.This saved the party some embarrassment of course, especially as the Parliamentary Party appeared to have been whipped into voting against it. Somebody commented that they thought that the Queen was largely harmless. We used to say this about Lembit Opik and it may well be true but that is no reason not to pursue important democratic principles.
