Oliver Cooper for Deputy Chairman

Engage with centre-right organisations

Oliver Cooper — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:00:58 +0000

CF is not the only political youth organisation on the centre-right. The ASI hosts regular events, meetings, and conferences for young people. The IEA has a full-time outreach officer. The TRG have groups for young professionals and students. TFA is involved through its university societies and Free Spirit events. Engagement with these groups strengthens CF and helps our members.

Far from being rivals, these organisations share the same goal of promoting capitalism and freedom amongst young people. Establishing proactive relationships with them that make their events more accessible or attractive to CFers will help CF members, as well as the causes that we jointly espouse.

Engage with centre-right organisations

CF must develop ties to centre-right organisations that share our goals. Work with pressure groups and think tanks that have youth, education, and development outreach programmes. Encourage CF members to become involved with these groups by coordinating and publicising events, and inviting CF members to them: preferably on priority or preferential terms.

Partner universities with marginal seats

Oliver Cooper — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 13:00:02 +0000

Larger than most association branches, university societies can bring extraordinary resources to the table. But they have to be deployed in the right places. If the local seat is safe, for whichever party, it will often be more effective to develop a partnership with a neighbouring seat to bring university branches to bear in the right place.

University branches should partner with seats where their resources are most useful. Working with the university and non-university branch chairmen, as well as regional chairmen, area chairmen should be in charge of deciding where that is. These partnerships should involve campaign days and events with the local MP or PPC, as well as other activities to build permanent connections.

Partner universities with marginal seats

Request that university branches partner with a seat, either their own or nearby. Rely on area chairmen, working with branches and regions, to partner the branches in the most effective way. Publicise successful partnerships online and incentivise the development of long-standing ties with marginal seats and winnable wards.

Building relationships for success

Oliver Cooper — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 13:00:32 +0000

CF doesn’t do enough by itself to promote opportunities for its members. In many respects, this is understandable. Without a budget, CF can’t directly take on staff or interns. But it can foster the right sorts of ties with the right sorts of organisations to harness their resources for CF members’ benefit, as well as their own. That’s at the heart of building a wide network and providing opportunity.

Building personal ties in the leadership, and giving CF the right sort of public image, is key to this. It will encourage organisations to take CF seriously, and give CFers the inside track when getting further opportunities. This extends not just to getting jobs, but to all sorts of organisations, whether they be charities, like-minded parties and youth wings abroad, or think tanks and pressure groups.

Building relationships for success

Building a network will help deliver the right opportunities for CF. Keeping in touch with the vast range of think tanks and pressure groups will promote CFers to get internships and jobs for Conservative values and for liberty. Working with parties overseas will allow CFers moving or travelling abroad to plug into their local structure more easily.

Getting this right will help give CF members the chance to take their commitment to CF to an involvement in a wide range of other organisations. Working with them is the only way to guarantee that being in CF gives members more opportunities. Remember: forward together.

Skills that CFers want

Oliver Cooper — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 18:00:27 +0000

Being part of any organisation teaches you skills. That’s the reason you list your experience on your CV. CFers learn plenty about how to stuff envelopes and post them through letterboxes. But there’s not enough of stuff that would help people advance professionally, politically, and personally.

The main question is: what sort of skills should CF be providing? The ability to write accessibly, concisely, and persuasively for any audience. To perform well in interviews, presentations, and the media. To tailor CVs and covering letters to get the opportunities you want. To write and deliver speeches in front of others, no matter how many or few. To defend Conservative principles by rebutting the most common arguments against them.

Skills that CFers want

CF will organise and publicise training sessions, days, and conferences to promote key skills for members. The core skills are in writing, presentation, debating, getting jobs, and defending Conservative principles. Those skills should help promote CFers professionally, politically, and personally. Where CF owns the rights to the taught materials, they should be available online.

Freedom does not come in pieces

Oliver Cooper — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 16:43:05 +0000

Yesterday, Crispin Blunt became the eleventh Conservative MP to be openly gay. This, by itself, should concern noone except his family. It says a remarkable amount about the Conservative Party – there are, after all, as many gay Conservative MPs as gay Labour and Lib Dem MPs put together. Not that you’d know from the snide commentary from the left-wing press or from Liberal Youth’s obsession with championing nothing but gay rights.

Sadly, it does seem to matter to some people. So much so that a cabinet minister is engaged in a back-to-the-wall legal fight against rumours of his homosexuality. Conservative beliefs are not just compatible with tolerance for homosexuality, but they demand it. I’ll defer to a speech made in defence of gay Republicans by Alexander McCobin (this may unintentionally be a recurring theme).

For a right laugh, see this speech immediately after Alexander’s. Of course, none of this means that we need to legislate on the issue. Indeed, that was the first question on my Formspring page: one that I was happy to answer in defence of freedom. That’s what you’ll always get from me.

Foster new branches

Oliver Cooper — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 15:59:31 +0000

If the foundation of CF is its network of branches, it’s an uneven one. Some branches, particularly at universities, are strong, while others nearby are weak. The Conservative vote varies, so this is to be expected. Sadly, this can create a vicious circle of ever-dwindling support.

Strong branches should be used to share expertise and best practice, while giving the group a critical mass it couldn’t otherwise reach. Federations of constituencies should be encouraged to reach this level, as I’m involved in helping foster in Barnet and in West London.

Flagship branches should network people from surrounding areas so that they know who else can help them set up their own branch. This will allow stronger branches to breathe life into areas without branches, and give young conservatives trapped behind enemy lines a lifeline back to CF.

Foster new branches

The national leadership will give out new instruction on creating multi-constituency federations: until now, tucked away in the constitution. We will encourage strong university branches to partner with local constituencies where they’re campaigning to set up CF branches that can sustain themselves. We will reduce the burden on flagship branch chairs by providing best practice guides.

Building a Eurosceptic youth network

Oliver Cooper — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 13:11:39 +0000

The very first promise David Cameron made as party leader was to create an anti-federalist bloc – later called the European Conservatives and Reformists – to promote Conservative ideas on the continent more effectively.

One of the great strengths that Liberal Youth often tout is its involvement in their pan-European alliance of youth parties. Their alliance builds strong connections, giving their members opportunities to build better contacts, better understanding, and a better experience. There’s no reason that anti-federalists can’t do exactly the same thing.

Building a Eurosceptic youth network

Create a youth wing to the Conservatives and Reformists to match the youth wings to other European parties, and incorporating the youth wings of our allies in ten other countries and beyond. Develop a network that gives CF members better understanding of, experience of, and contacts in countries from Belgium to Bulgaria.

The bloc, despite incorporating governing parties of four countries, has been talked down by all-comers, with repeated statements that the party will fold back into the federalist EPP group. CCHQ is determined to avoid that happening, but to avoid it, we must retrench the project. That means giving it the trappings of a permanent party, and that’s something CF must play a role in.

Arguing and persuading

Oliver Cooper — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 15:36:54 +0000

What motivates everyone into political activism is a deep sense of justice, and a sense of hurt when we encounter injustice. This motivates us, but it makes us accept our basic ideas as given, and often makes us oblivious to the effects that our arguments have on others. The core of my platform for CF is to give members what they need to get ahead and advance freedom.

Students for Liberty is a great organisation in the US that unites free-market students and has spread to 290 campus groups across the US: about as many branches as CF has. Their executive director, Alexander McCobin wrote a great blog post yesterday on how to win over people for the cause of freedom: not by arguing, but by persuading.

When trying to persuade others to believe in liberty, the way we present arguments is as important as the substance of the arguments themselves. Yet this is often forgotten by liberty advocates and expressed by the inability to understand how people just don’t get it through logical reasoning alone.

I’ve taught debating for five years, and that’s a really important distinction. We have the passion and commitment, but we need to know how to take apart an opponent’s argument and take that opponent and the audience with us. A core part of CF skills training must be to turn everyone into not just advocates, but effective advocates for capitalism and the Conservative Party.

Welcome universities into CF

Oliver Cooper — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:00:38 +0000

The CF elections have led to a rush to register university Conservative societies’ members as CF members. It’s understandable for chairman candidates run around signing up members from their societies that support them. That’s not fair on the students whose votes aren’t chased, and whose voices aren’t heard within CF.

The constituency association treated my former university society at UCL as the local CF presence, and avoided creating a separate branch that embraced young professionals. Large numbers of young professionals are deterred from forming a local CF branch by the reliance upon the university branch.

Welcome universities into CF

Complete the addition of members of CF university societies to the CF membership rolls. Invite all CF-affiliated university societies to become autonomous CF branches, become part of their local association, or maintain the status quo.

By treating university branches as either separate from CF or as the whole of CF, we do an injustice to students as well as non-students. CF branches have to be welcomed into the CF structure: not just at CF election time, but all the time.

More Conservative Future councillors

Oliver Cooper — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 13:00:04 +0000

There’s very little about local councils that screams ‘future’. Yet local authorities really are the future. Councils are about to be given greater powers – the more the better – and put back in their place as the first stop for constituents’ issues. Councils, however, are infamous for being depositories of retired party members, rather than the vibrant youthful places they ought to be. CF can strike the first blow in changing that.

The CF website links to the Conservative Councillors’ Association guide to becoming a councillor, with testimonials from leading CF activists who have become councillors. But we can do better than that. Working with our young councillors, we’ll put together a revised guide, building on the CCA’s efforts, but focusing on helping CF members.

Help CFers become councillors

Advocate and advance CFers on local councils. Create our own version of the Conservative Councillors’ Association guide to being a councillor, concentrating on how to become a councillor. Emphasise the advantages that young people have in running for council. Encourage CF members to be involved in other local projects, such as the promotion of free schools.

Our aim is to increase the presence of CF on local councils. By having more CF members selected for, and elected to, local councils – and equipped to sit on them – we can carve a reputation for the party not as the old party, but as the young party. If councils are to be the future, a conservative future depends upon it.