Tales from Glasgow

Well it was an enjoyable end to party conference season at a rather quiet Glasgow SECC with the Lib Dems. This conference has less of the manic atmosphere of Labour and the Tories. It leaves more time to speak to other charity leaders, politicians and journalists.

Tuesday morning started very early with our third Social Investment Summit, held in partnership with Big Society Capital and the Social Investment Business. I chaired and we got off to a good start with speeches from Nick O’Donohoe (Big Society Capital), Howard Sinclair (St. Mungo's Broadway), Sandra Schembri (House of St Barnabas), Norman Lamb MP and Jemima Bland (PPC for East Worthing and Shoreham).

Later on we launched the third of our hotly-anticipated essay collections, The Yellow Book of the Voluntary Sector - which has a brilliant foreword by Nick Clegg. You can find a PDF of it here. Having been shown the excellent diary story based on my opening speech at last week's Blue Book launch, I opened with a less harvest-festival based speech that did express hope that the Lib Dems would go back to their roots and embrace our sector's potential. Here's a few pictures from the evening, with our speakers Baroness Jolly, Ibrahim Taguri PPC, Jemima Bland PPC, Ben Nicholls PPC and Kelly-Marie Blundell PPC.