SusanGaszczak

Here it is in case you have missed it :-)

Lembit has sent out a press release asking people to stop a possible conspiracy against him. Lib Dem Voice reports it here.

It is a shame he has felt the need to press release this as this is an internal election. Many of us have been torn in who to support. Linda Jack blogged about this, my parents agonised over who to give their first preference to and many others I have spoken to have felt the same.

So far nearly 900 people have signed up to the ‘I'm 4 Ros' site declaring their support. They have to do it themselves or ask for it to be done centrally. I cannot see getting 900 Lib Dems to all ever agree on one strategy!

The parliamentarians have come out individually and one by one in recent months after they have watched Ros campaign for this for 18 months.

Internal elections always have two or three sides to them, and normally, because of our love of democracy we all rub along nicely laughing that we are on different sides. I remember one moment during the last leadership battle, after I had publicly declared for Clegg, helping team Huhne set up their stall because there was a mix up at the St Albans hustings.

So, can we put the ‘conspiracy' theory to one side and get on with what we do best - being democratic?

Yesterday I attended the East of England Regional Conference with my youngest daughter Rachel, age 4. I was worried about the reaction she would get and really I need not have. She really enjoyed the day.

Many people wanted to talk to her, but of course she was incredibly shy, even with the people she sees on a weekly basis. That was until Steve Webb impressed her, and me, with his knowledge of High School Musical and his ability to miscount up to four. Thanks Steve!

After that she really started interacting with many of the adults and had the confidence to go out into the school grounds and run around in the sunshine.

She did however get some strange looks when I took her into the main conference hall rather than just the fringe. I was summating on Rural Poverty motion and really needed to hear the speeches I was about to comment on.

She was very well behaved, apart from kicking the empty seat in front of her and enjoyed playing with her Libby bear (Paul Clark, regional chair bought her a Lib Dem teddy J ). She did not shout out ‘That's my mummy' when I got up to speak but took some of the best photos I have seen using a colleague's camera.

My question is though - should we be bringing our children more often to these events? Allowing them to build up a network of friends within the party? Often one parent stays home with the children or they get farmed out to friends and relatives.

See here :-)

Government are currently in the process of setting up a register of all children in the country that will be able to track children, they are calling it Contact Point, I call it an

Identity register. It will contain their name, address, date of birth and gender. It will also store any information of any contact, not details, that they have with any agency.

The data from each of the varying agencies, ranging from schools to the youth service, doctors, hospitals and sexual health clinics to the third (voluntary) sector. It will also link to the DWP (Department of Work and Pensions), NHS (National Health Service), DCSF (Department of Children, Schools and Families) and ONS (Office of National Statistics) databases nationally. It will be fed by varying systems, as each council has a different system to store data.

It will be able to track children as they move from one county or local authority area to another. Authorised people will be able to access this system to see what involvement children have had with a variety of services.

Details will be available to the age of 18, and archived until the adult is 24, then securely destroyed.

No child can escape being on this register and you to know what the register says about you, you have to apply to your local authority under the Data Protection Act.

Linked to the children will be the parents of carers and their details.

Users of this system will be eCRB (extended criminal records bureau) checked. This however will not stop anyone who wishes to hack the system. They tell me it will be secure but looking at the number of agencies and computer systems feeding into this does not leave me with confidence.

It is unclear as to who will get what level of access, will a teacher be able to see if a child has visited a sexual health clinic, will a parent applying under Data Protection be able to see similar.

This whole system leaves you with a feeling of filling in the gap that the National Identity Register misses, children under 16 that legally do not need to be on this.

The Sun claimed Lembit was to star on Celebrity Big Brother this morning. Peter Black tells us that Lembit has assured the Welsh Assembly group that it is not true.

Outrage was the initial reaction from many I spoke to. The problem of course is that we all know Lembit and have woken up to news that has made us say 'Oh no, what this time?'

But the question still stands. Is this really the look for us? At a time of economic crisis do we need rumours and gossip like this?