The Convention Blog

Transcript: Business Gets Personal

Below is a transcript of the Business Gets Personal  session. It is loosely edited.
Jim Killock: So, our session today is looking at how businesses are using personal data, and how different sorts of business practices, good and bad, if you like, could affect the way our identities are stored and how our privacy may be affected in [...]

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Time for Magna Carta 2.0

You want to know where we go from here? We need a new Magna Carta. Sunny Hundal of Liberal Conspiracy recently said he wanted “an insurgency to take our rights back from the state”. This now includes our right to honest government, though I think we always knew that. The emphasis needs to be on [...]

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All videos now up!

The videos of all the London sessions are now up. To watch them simply go to the Programme and click through to the Session you want to see. Many thanks to our fantastic team of volunteers who did the filming and editing, especially Ellen Vellacott and Robin Lough. There are also sessions and speeches to watch [...]

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Xenophobia – report

Natasa Mavronicola (The UCL Student Human Rights Programme): Tufyal Choudhury focused on the debates around integration and social cohesion. For Choudhury, the danger is that the debate on integration, which has taken the spotlight in the counter-terrorism discussions of the day, has pathologised perceptions of communities, especially the Muslim community. Much of the focus has [...]

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Transcript – Steve Powell (The Police session)

Below is a transcript of Steve Powell’s talk at the Police session
Madam chair, ladies and gentleman, it’s a privilege and a pleasure for the Football Supporters Federation to have been invited to speak to the Convention today and I hope that at the end of my remarks you’ll see that what we have to report [...]

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The first European Civil Liberties Day on April 15th

A new civil liberties campaign is being launched in the European Parliament tomorrow by the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in Europe (ALDE). Graham Watson, the Lib Dem MEP who leads the ALDE grouping, will open the first Civil Liberties Day which will feature contributions from organisations across Member States. This from their website:
The Alliance [...]

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Transcript: The Conservatives and civil liberties

Below is a transcript of the Conservatives and civil liberties session
Iain Dale: Good morning ladies and gentlemen. In the style of Alcoholics Anonymous let me start off by saying that my name is Iain Dale and I am a conservative. At least I thought I was, but being a conservative can mean different things to different people. [...]

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New videos from the Cardiff Convention

You can see video recordings of each of the speakers in Cardiff (listed below) here.
Christopher Rees, Jenny Willott MP, Simon Hoare, Dr Peter Sutch, Jill Evans MEP, Nick Ramsay AM, Evan Price, Kirsty Williams AM, Dr Peri Roberts, Robert Buckland, Dr Urfan Khaliq, Chris Myant, John Osmond (IWA) and Professor Bertrand G Ramcharan.

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Democracy and liberty – Report

Amalia Kontesi (The UCL Student Human Rights Programme): Many would expect a display of pessimism by the members of the panel discussing the crisis of democracy at the dawn of the 21st century and its impact on modern liberty. The matter was indeed approached with scepticism but the proposals on how we could act to [...]

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Britain’s Policing Problem

Guy Aitchison and I were among the protesters outside the Bank of England on Wednesday. You can read his excellent account of his experience, including a summary of other opinions and reports, at OurKingdom. Guy takes us through the entire day picking up the debate on the police’s technique of ‘kettling’ along the way and placing [...]

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