The Rock Blog

The new executive are working hard on our plans for the year and one of our first priorities is to fill all the vacancies for Area Chairman roles. This position is going to become the most important role in our organisation.

In future, the Area Chairman will take the lead on: organising National Days, organising regional meetings, supporting branches and providing feedback to the NME and CCHQ. The Area Chairman will spearhead CF, not the NME who are going to act as a support service and as facilitators.

For more information on standing to become an Area Chairman please visit the Conservative Future website.

www.conservativefuture.com

This also ties in with my plans to make the CF website the main information point for the organisation - this blog will give information relating to my role and how my plans & jobs progress through the year.

David Coleman is the new Area Chairman for Surrey.

I have recently been elected as CF Area Chairman for Surrey and I am really enjoying it and look forward to the many months ahead. But before I start about my view of this role, I will quickly talk about my history with CF.

I first joined the branch in my local area of Spelthorne and the membership was pretty small and the first impression I got was that Conservative Future were minor groups that meet in pubs every so often. However this view changed when I started to campaign to help elect members of Conservative Future as County Councillors in Spelthorne who helped me learn more about what CF does nationally and it was not long before I was invited to a event at CCHQ were I meet Mark Clarke while he was standing for the national chairman and was introduced to the Surrey CF chairman and I started to help out by setting up a Facebook group and working on the website.

After a while doing this I believed that I had learnt enough and had gained enough confidence to move upwards in Conservative Future and decided to stand as Surrey chairman after Andy Mountney decided to step down. I was given a lot of support from Andy alongside others like Michael Rock, Richard Jackson and members from across the country which I had met from campaigns and socials. I found this support very helpful during my campaign and I believe that this kind of support and communication between members will do a lot of good to keep CF as a positive organization that will help to get David Cameron into Number 10.

Okay so that is basically a short history of how I got started with Conservative Future and now I would like to talk about my views of the role. I believe that my role as area chairman is essentially to win and keep parliament/council seats and to increase our membership, as I found it more difficult to get involved and learn about CF then it should be. I believe that local chairmen need to give talks in schools and colleges about the benefits of getting involved with a political young movement and to advertise CF on the street and at fairs etc, like Anastasia Beaumont-Bott recently did in Horsham with Francis Maude. So I really want to get out and find the young conservatives who want to get involved with CF but not sure how to go about it, because they are out there.

Finally I believe Conservative Future will continue to develop with more members and there will always be the active members who will give up their time to help campaign, and I believe that if their dedication is always recognised then they will keep campaigning.

Click here for information about “CF members that Rock!”

We need to be much savvier in promoting the Conservative cause: just pushing leaflets through doors is not enough to convince many people. We need to deliver a public, social conscience. Elections are won on a local basis: by showing that the Conservatives are involved in local issues means we can genuinely show our best, most progressive side. Conservatism promotes influence at a local level; social action shows how it can be done.

As an organisation we have made good ground this year for social action; examples include the social action project at Party Conference, leg-waxing in Keele, Poppy selling in London, and the ‘Surpise Supplies’ initiative that I am doing with UCL CF (above picture).

On the ‘National Days’ we will also get CF members involved with social action projects:

• The Area Chairman will work to find local projects for the local members to get involved with on the National Day.
• This also allows the CF branches to build links with the project enabling them to possibly help or more than one occasion.
• Having the power and choice back with the Area Chairman allows us to make a difference with these projects, and not just a one-off photo op.

CF is not just for delivering leaflets; CF should be about spreading the positive message and image of Conservatism. We should see every project we become involved with as another advert for the positives in politics.