The Young Fabians are looking to ensure we are a truly nationwide organisation with the establishment of regional groups and are fortunate to have received a proposal from a member to start a North East Young Fabians with the proposal presented below. 

With this in mind if you're from the North East of England or have an interest in regional policy and you are a member of the Young Fabians - or thinking about it - then please join us.

Date: Wednesday, May 20th at 5.30pm

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YOUNG FABIANS NORTH EAST – proposal

Grahame Anderson – 5.5.2020

Employment and Equalities Barrister; Littleton Chambers and North East Law Centre

If there is to be a Labour government in 2024 or 2029, constituencies in the North East of England will be a key battleground. I told myself I wouldn’t cry if the Tories won, as long as no urban North East seats went blue. Then I saw the Blyth Valley result… I believe that a North East YF sub-group will assist to galvanise intellectually progressive young talent on Tyneside and in its hinterland. For these purposes, the “North East” is Northumberland, Tyne and Wear and County Durham.

Activities: the main activities I foresee the sub-group pursuing are:

Speaker Events: I anticipate that in conjunction with local universities (my main connections are with the law schools at Northumbria and Newcastle) or, for example, the Lit and Phil in Newcastle, YFNE would organise quarterly (say) speaker events around a given topic (which might well dovetail with topics we write about). These would be a way of engaging with progressive thought across different sectors and would, no doubt, have a social element too.

YFNE pamphlet: once a year I would hope to produce a pamphlet on a given topic which, as flagged above, may dovetail with the speaker topics. Ideally, invited speakers would allow us to publish their speech as the first pamphlet item, with other contributions on the same or similar theme. I would like the pamphlet to then be made available across the Fabians.

Blog output: there are plenty of opportunities for blogging in the YF and broader Fabian spheres. I would hope that we can produce an output of North East focussed blog pieces.

Councillor recruitment: we would take steps to engage with young Labour Councillors in the North East as the “front line” in progressive politics.

Initial steps: subject to the YF committee’s input, I suspect initial stages would include (1) an exploratory Zoom call with interested people to see if we can get an initial steering committee together (2) formalising the structure of the sub-group (I daresay there is precedent) and (3) initial approaches towards a first speaker event (perhaps remotely or in-person towards the end of the year if possible).