{"id":1600,"date":"2009-10-09T09:46:56","date_gmt":"2009-10-09T08:46:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=1600"},"modified":"2009-10-09T09:46:56","modified_gmt":"2009-10-09T08:46:56","slug":"my-visit-to-toryland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=1600","title":{"rendered":"My visit to Toryland"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been a member of the Labour Party for 40 years and, in my younger days, between 1972-1983 I attended 12 consecutive Labour Party Conferences at various seaside venues. But this week was my first visit to a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.conservatives.com\/Get_involved\/Conference.aspx\">Conservative Party Conference<\/a> and the venue was Manchester (actually my home town).<br \/>\nI was a speaker for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.consumerfocus.org.uk\/en\/content\/cms\/home\/home.aspx\">Consumer Focus<\/a> at a fringe meeting sponsored by T-Mobile and the CBI to discuss the Digital Economy. The meeting was well-attended and lively, so I enjoyed it.<br \/>\nBut politically it was a strange place for me to be. There was a palpable sense among delegates and visitors that, in a matter of months, there will be a Conservative Government running Britain, but still a lack of clarity over what they would do in office &#8211; not least on the digital agenda &#8211; as opposed to what they object to about Labour Government policies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been a member of the Labour Party for 40 years and, in my younger days, between 1972-1983 I attended 12 consecutive Labour Party Conferences at various seaside venues. But this week was my first visit to a Conservative Party Conference and the venue was Manchester (actually my home town). I was a speaker for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-life-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1600\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}