This is the last part of my report on the WEP Conference, and it covers the actual policy debates. I’m not going to go through all 20 items of business in detail. What I want to do is concentrate on areas where the debate got interesting. Please note that these are not official minutes. I believe that the actual text of the motions is being kept private to WEP members for now. Doubtless official positions will appear on the website in due course.

The first piece of business to generate actual debate was the Constitution, and in particular the issue of regionalism. The Scots made the very reasonable point that their country is governed by different laws to the rest of the UK and that policy therefore cannot be universally applied. The party executive responded that they were sympathetic to the issue but the Scottish proposals were in conflict with other parts of the Constitution and could not be accepted as written.

At this point I was expecting the Scots to get up and say that they had tried to reach a compromise but party leaders had been unhelpful. Had they done so I would have voted for them. Instead they got up and repeated their demand for special treatment, and I switched my vote. In debate you need to convince people of your cause, and if the opposition raises objections you need to counter them.

Anyway, the Scottish motion was defeated. However, thanks in part to my new pals in the Cardiff branch there was a Celtic Fringe meeting later in the day involving Scottish, Welsh and Irish delegates. Hopefully we can get this sorted next year.

The first actual policy motion was about Brexit. This turned out to be fairly controversial because the motion assumed that the UK would be leaving the EU. Many members felt that we should be fighting to stay in Europe. That was certainly the position of my friend Rebecca from the Bath branch who thereby became the first ever party member to make a speech from the floor on a policy motion.

Sophie’s position, which I agree with, is that WEP members will have a variety of opinions on Europe, which is fine. What we need to be united on is that the rights that UK citizens currently have as members of the EU need to be protected, whether we are in or out of the community. The motion, therefore, calls on the Government to maintain all of the human rights legislation that we currently have. For most practical purposes that means that WEP has set itself against Brexit, because one of the major reasons for people voting to leave was to junk those rights.

One of the motions I had attached my name to was the one on so-called “revenge porn”. British law is lagging behind some other countries and more can be done, in particular to tackle those websites that pick up on images from “revenge porn” postings and use them on for-profit sites. One member made the very fair point that the motion should be more specifically targeting profiteers rather than foolish, and often very poor, young men. From the courts’ point of view it probably does, because no one is going to waste time trying to extract a massive fine from someone who has no money — they’ll give a community service order instead. However, there is a real issue here in that, given a law to uphold, the police will generally go after the easiest targets, and they might not be the people who were the intended targets. Drafting public policy is hard.

In a similar vein, Conference also passed a motion calling on the police nationwide to follow Nottingham’s lead and class misogynistic attacks as hate crimes.

The next controversial motion was the one on menstruation awareness policy. To my surprise there was quite a bit of opposition to this. To my annoyance some of this was couched as being on behalf of trans people. Now it is true that trans women don’t menstruate, and many trans men do. However, older women don’t menstruate either. I’d looked through the motion earlier and couldn’t see anything in it that was specifically erasing trans people. It seemed to me that we were being used as an excuse to drop the motion. The speaker who said that she didn’t want to be known as a member of the “Period Party” was, I thought, rather more honest. Talking about menstruation is clearly still taboo for some women. The motion ended up being referred back for re-writing, and I expect to be involved in that process. Hopefully we can do better next year, because this is a really important topic.

Also referred back was a motion asking schools to do a “gender audit” to make sure that they weren’t encouraging gender stereotypes. Some teachers spoke against this, feeling that their professional was already too heavily regulated. Others made the valid point that the motion only covered a part of the education sector, and that colleges and universities should be included too. Again this is a really important policy area, so I hope we get a better motion next year.

Some of the motions highlighted areas of public policy that most people know nothing about. For example, I had no idea that self-employed people have nowhere near the same parental leave rights as employed people. Currently the number of people who are registered as self-employed is going up rapidly, and the vast majority of newly self-employed people are women. I was also unaware that fashion companies require models to starve themselves to well below medically safe levels. We all know about people like coal miners needing protection from unsafe working conditions, but it turns out that fashion models need such protections too.

The other motion that had my name on it was the one about making equality in health care a core goal of the party. When WEP was first set up it adopted six core objectives (see them here). Health care was not among them, but it clearly belongs there. Currently women’s health needs are widely viewed as less important than men. Apparently most medicines are only ever tested on males, because menstrual cycles play havoc with testing protocols. That’s as true of rats as it is of humans. I backed the motion in part because equality for all in health care should also mean equality in health care for trans people, and we surely need that.

There were several great motions on things like child maintenance, services for disabled children, sexual and reproductive health services, and workplace provision for carers. All of these are things that scarcely get a mention from the major political parties. There were also motions on various aspects of economic inequality, including pensions and the methods companies use for selection and promotion of staff. Sophie wrote about the motion on child maintenance here.

The big controversy came with the debate on abortion. It is inevitable that in a large gathering of women you will find some who are ardent pro-lifers. Most of the debate centered on the fact that the motion said nothing about time limits. Some people felt this meant it was trying to do away with them altogether. Of course if it didn’t explicitly say it was doing so, then it wasn’t. The makers of the motion made it clear that they had nothing to say on the subject of time limits. What the motion was all about was the fact that abortion is still technically illegal in the UK, because you have to get approval from two doctors, and is pretty much impossible in Northern Ireland. Once all of that was made clear the motion was passed by a fairly substantial majority.

Close to the end Sophie brought up a motion on women in the workforce. Splendidly, she arranged for the motion to be led by a group of girls from the Mulberry School in London. They were all Muslims, and they did a great job.

Very embarrassingly I found myself having to ask to speak against this one. The vast majority of the motion was great, but buried in it was a clause calling for 50:50 representation on company boards between men and women. I got up and explained to Conference that large numbers of people in the world (more than 10% of the human population) already live in countries that recognize three legal genders, and that there is a strong push for the UK to join that group. That means that as a party we cannot go around passing motions that assume that everyone in the world is either male or female. The wording changes are not difficult, but they do need to be done.

Apologies to non-binary people, but I didn’t think that one sentence was worth referring the motion back. Also I wanted those Muslim schoolgirls to have a successful visit to Conference. My objective for this year was education. The good turnout for the workshops, and the opportunity to make this intervention, achieved that. Next year I want to see an audit to make sure that we are not accidentally erasing a whole group of humans from our policies.

Finally there was a motion backing a move to proportional representation for the UK’s parliamentary elections. There’s a very clear link between the use of PR and gender balance in national legislatures. Depending on the system, PR is also very good for getting people from minority groups elected. Of course that does also mean that we’ll have a few more UKIP members in Parliament, but I think it has become quite clear over the past year that there’s very little difference between some Tory backbenchers and UKIP. I’d rather have them elected under their own colors.