The conference season is the showcase for thinktanks, and this year did not disappoint. For the Labour party conference particularly, the fringe is becoming the place for lively debate, new ideas, and entertaining rhetoric, and the ‘official’ conference is becoming merely a platform for cabinet ministers’ speeches. Labour party conference may become like the Edinburgh festival – where the fringe is more important and vibrant than the festival itself.
At the Labour party conference, thinktanks were in competition with one another for audiences, media attention, and sponsorship. This year, Demos seemed to be boycotting Bournemouth. Apart from a free Demos CD-Rom placed in the foyer of my hotel, I didn’t see them. For the second year running ippr had booked their own hotel as the base for what they branded ‘Illuminations’.
The joke worked for Blackpool, but didn’t make much sense in sedate Bournemouth. With a new acting director, Nick Pearce, to replace Matthew Taylor, who has gone to Downing Street, we will wait to see if ippr can maintain its success. Good luck, too, to Liz Kendall, who has left ippr to be director of the Maternity Alliance, the charity for pregnant women, mothers, and their families.
The Fabians have a new director too – but in the traditional parlance of the Labour movement, Sunder Katwala is known as the general secretary. Sunder’s first conference in the job was marked by a successful series of events for the Fabians. The highlight was the reception hosted by Billy Bragg, where the socialist songster led a spirited rendition of the Red Flag. Bragg’s appearance was like an Elvis sighting for the 30-somethings who remembered their radical youth.
The Social Market Foundation had a frenetic conference programme. On most days they ran more than one fringe meeting at the same time, thus competing with themselves for audiences. Because of their ‘independent’ status they were also busy at the Lib Dem and Conservative conferences. Their Labour conference reception was the hit of the week, with live band Three’s a Crowd belting out tunes you could dance to, and yet another appearance by Billy Bragg.
The SMF’s first main debate was between Hazel Blears and Douglas Alexander on one side and Roy Hattersley and Mark Seddon on the other, discussing ‘Is New Labour run by heretics?’ It was the fringe at its best: quality speakers, intellectual debate, and a packed audience of party delegates (not just lobbyists and journalists). There was even plenty of time for contributions from the floor.
There is a dilemma for thinktanks about their role at conferences. Thinktanks can attract a great deal of sponsorship for fringe meetings; the more they organise, the more money they can trouser. But there must be some quality control too. I chaired a Fabian fringe meeting sponsored by Wessex Water on business ethics. It seemed to have been created only as a platform for the sponsor, not to address any burning issues.
The Labour party delegates are not fools; they can spot a corporate interest at 100 paces. So whilst corporate cash is necessary for thinktanks to survive, there must be a rigorous approach to the quality of speakers and the appropriateness of subjects for debate.
As we enter the pre-pre-pre election period, the thinktanks of left, right and no fixed abode will have a job to do. Policy will start to matter more than ever. There is a genuine battle of ideas starting to shape up between libertarians and authoritarians, centralisers and localists, proponents of small or active government.
Labour needs to show that it can renew itself in government, and that it still has a radical edge. Labour must prove it is the ‘party of government, but not the party of the establishment’, as Hazel Blears has put it.
In this task, thinktanks will be the pathfinders for the new politics.