Exciting new blog, exciting year ahead

I feel very privileged to be the first person ever to blog for the Young Fabians. Thanks must go to Sam Strudwick, the YF’s excellent web editor, for bringing our blog into existence. It’s not the only new blog on the left this week, as you may have noticed …

I thought I’d use this first post just to say a bit about what the Young Fabians are up to at the moment. On Sunday, in the slightly cold basement seminar room of the Fabian Society HQ, we held our co-options meeting. I’ll speak on behalf of the whole Executive Committee in saying that we were hugely impressed by the high standard of YF members who put themselves forward and we had some difficult discussions in deciding who to co-opt. We are delighted with the 5 choices we made though, and on a personal level I’m really excited about us now having an Equalities Officer. I’m sure you’ll hear more soon as these 5 new members of the Exec get to work.

We followed this up with our first Exec meeting of 2009. There are exciting plans afoot. After taking 80 YF and Labour Staff Network members over to Ohio for the final few days of Obama’s campaign, I’m now leading on the follow-up work around the lessons we learnt and how we can bring these back into Labour campaigns around the UK. And – you heard it here first – watch out for details soon of our inauguration celebration. There’s a new edition of Anticipations not too far away, a speech from James Purnell and the schools project is going from strength to strength. Vice-Chair, David Chaplin, presented a paper on how we can move forward our excellent policy work from last year.

Exciting stuff. Hopefully this blog will prove a good way for you to let us know your ideas for what you’d like to see the Young Fabians doing in the coming months.