Griffins Land in Manchester

On Sunday 19th April, the North West branch of the Libertarian Party (which has members in Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Cheshire, Lancashire and Cumbria) held its first meeting at the Kro2 Bar on Oxford Road, Manchester. This was intended as a relatively informal "getting to know you" session, a chance to discuss the organisation of the branch and election of officers (including confirmation of myself as Regional Co-ordinator, county reps and a Campaign Manager), and possibly most importantly it was our first opportunity to get together to plan the election campaign which we will be fighting soon.

The meeting went pretty well, there were a lot of good ideas discussed, as well as a definite plan of action for the imminent campaign. We now have at least the bare bones of an organisation set up - it's still a bit ad hoc, but adequate for our needs at the moment - and the North West branch should be able to develop organically over time without any major problems. I'm not going to try to kid anyone that we're going to be a major political force overnight, but we've laid the foundations and with the range of skills and experience we've got, I think we'll at least be able to make our prsence felt in this year's and next year's elections. I'm especially impressed by the experience of our new Campaign Manager. As to which particular elections we'll be fighting, watch this space - there's no point giving the opposition advance warning.

So a lot of useful planning was done and a good time was had by the whole posse - the Kro Bar sells pretty good beer, I was certainly pretty well tranquilised by the end of the meeting. The food wasn't bad either, it's a nice boozer generally and not too crowded (we were able to find a free table big enough for the whole group). We'll probably use that venue again, although the feeling among the assembled Party members was that we should move the meetings around a bit, the North West being such a large and diverse place. We didn't set a firm date for the next meeting, but it will almost certainly be in the next couple of months. We'll certainly be holding regular meetings as soon as this campaign is out of the way, so I'll canvass the membership for suggestions as to future venues. First we've got a campaign to fight - our first election campaign - something else to look forward to!