GUEST POST: London, bloody London

Sam Bacon is a Young Fabian member and has helped organise the Young Fabian social which will take place in Spirit bar in Manchester after this year’s Greater Manchester Fabian Society Conference on Saturday. In this guest post, he writes about his frustration at London-centric events.

When I was younger, I LOVED Blue Peter. I mean really. What better to my childish sensibilities then DIY toys and projects, animals, exotic travel and Christmas and holiday specials, all wrapped up with an awesome theme tune and presenters that I either wanted to befriend or have my first kiss with (when I was old enough to understand what that was).

But there was always one bit of the show I completely dreaded. Every time they had a feature on some new museum exhibition opening, or some games expo with the toys of the future they would always end the piece with the same line to camera ‘and that exhibition opens this weekend in London’.

London, bloody London. As a boy growing up in the north of England, unless you were also from as parochial a town as I, (Preston – home of the mighty PNE!) you can not understand how angry and frustrated this made me. ALL the coolest stuff happened in London. It had every band, every gallery, every exhibition, every free event etc etc etc. And there was just no way for me to access it, stuck as I was in my little northern town.

So cut to now, I’m a grown man in a professional job, and appropriately enough I no longer watch Blue Peter. However, working and being active in Politics, I still find myself having similar sentiments to that I had when I was a child; why is everything scheduled to take place in London? Though I have felt this particularly strongly, through talking to other YF members, potential members, and perhaps most importantly ex-members, I know that I’m not the only one.

I now live in Manchester, and proud I am of it. We have an enormous amount of interesting and cutting edge things going on. But the point remains that almost all political activity is in London. All events, talks, conferences revolve around the Westminster bubble, in US terms, our very own ‘beltway’. But unlike myself as a child, I now have the ability to do something about this.

At the Fabian National Conference in January, I challenged the Young Fabian executive as to why they didn’t do more outside of London. I wanted to know why, as a fully paid up member of the Young Fabians, I couldn’t attend events without travelling the length of the country.

To their credit, the Exec responded to this challenge overwhelmingly positively. When I suggested that they might want to consider doing something to coincide with the Greater Manchester Fabian Society Conference which is happening this Saturday, March 13th, they immediately said yes and asked if I would help arrange something. And it’s been my pleasure to do so.

So at 3:30pm-5pm immediately after the Greater Manchester Fabian Society Conference, there will be a Young Fabian Social in Spirit bar on Canal Street in Manchester. And i’d love to see you there!

If you live outside of London, this is your chance to show that demand does exist for events in other areas, and your chance to come and shape what format they could take. We will have a number of Young Fabian exec members there and will be having an informal chat about what YF activity outside the SE might look like. It promises to be a fun and interesting event, and the more people we have there the better it will be.

So I can’t wait for Saturday, and the first tentative steps of national, and not just South East, Young Fabian events.

(note: Blue Peter badge wearers will get a free drink from me….)