Well, it’s been an exciting start to Conference, with our pre-conference early-arrivals’ participation in the Climate Strike in Brighton on Friday. Today, in the auditorium, the hum of arriving delegates growing to a buzz almost strong enough to charge your phones!

Our delegation met to decide on which motions to prioritise so that Ann could go and vote for us as our lead delegate. That out of the way with no loss of blood, Conference started with arguments around referencing back aspects of the CAC report. Later on we had our own Kate Laycock, a Conference newbie, raise a rousing protest on the presence of BP, Heathrow and other ‘climate killers’ as sponsors of the Conference.

We listened to the wonderful Dawn Butler refer to Boris Johnson as ‘the Incredible Sulk’ followed by ‘Johnson by name, johnson by nature’ (see me afterwards if you don’t get that one) and witnessed her tears when she spoke about Jo Cox.

We lived through an exhausting and quite confusing round of debates over rule changes proposed by NEC and by CLPs – the latter largely recommended for refusal by the NEC and subsequently withdrawn by the proposing CLPs – they’ll live to fight another day!

We’re still looking for a stall to take our books to sell – hopefully we can sort this out tomorrow. Oh, and a large portion of one of my repaired teeth came out during the afternoon! I managed not to swallow it…
It has been an exhausting day and my brain has stopped working. So cheerio until tomorrow!

Eve Drayton Hill