The Bournemouth Carnival of Alternative Politics

From the founders of the Good Funeral Awards , the UK Speechwriters' Guild and the Ideal Death Show...A New Political Conference

There's always been a link between politics and carnival.

Carnival gives us permission to question convention, laugh at pomposity and celebrate creative disruption.

On the Saturday before Lent, we're hosting a day of lively debate, irreverent speech and heretical ideas by the sea.

Think Rocky Horror Show meets the council of Runnymede.

At the spiritual home of Britain's annual political conferences, we'll bring together the mainstream and the marginal, the old and the new, the top and the bottom.

Serious politics will be combined with light entertainment.

We'll mix it all up to create a day that will motivate you to participate rather than standing on the sidelines.

Let's celebrate just some of the joys of living in 2026:

• Losing our jobs to technological innovation
• Confinement to our Netflix caves
• Running out of money
• Navigating a disintegrating political system
• Sharing our homes with adult children
• Being conscripted into a global war
• The medicalisation, atomisation and commercialisation of everything
• The impossibility of imagining a better future
  

And yet..and yet.. somehow we're alive and capable of changing ourselves and the world.

Hear new voices, discover new ideas, meet new people, share Utopian visions, then lose hope and get drunk.

Check your status at the door and join us for the perfect antidote to inhibited political discourse.

Revolution is brewing! You're going to need a new outfit.

Feel free to dress as the political figure you most admire or for the era you'd like to go back to.

Celebrate in Bournemouth's illustrious Freemason's Hall, a venue that screams 'underground cabal' but offers ample parking, gorgeous rooms and a well-stocked bar.

At the end of the day we'll discover there's no political difference that can't be resolved over a few pints of beer, excellent food and some lewd entertainment.

SPEAKERS

Oliver Cromwell

The popular revolutionary will return to deliver his famous speech: Dissolving the Rump Parliament from1653.

Guy Doza

Guy is a professional speechwriter, teacher and the author of two books, How to Apologise for Killing a Cat, and The Language of Evil, How Dictators Manipulate the Masses. He will be giving a humorous talk on how dictators take and hold on to power.

Carnival is something that people create and and generate for themselves.
Mikhail Bakhtin

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