Of the nineteen Labour party annual conferences I’ve attended – as a delegate, candidate, staffer, and general hanger-on – I think this must be the most important. It is clear that many people have written Labour off for the next election. The battle for blame has begun. Seamus Milne blames defeat on New Labour. Martin Kettle blames it on Brown.
But I can’t help but notice that the election hasn’t actually taken place yet. Who wins it is up to the voters, not the commentariat. This week in Brighton we have a chance to project an image of a party united, hungry for power, fizzing with new ideas for a fourth term. That means we need to avoid the easy temptations for positioning, posturing and pontificating. As the Labour First pre-conference briefing says we must avoid ‘leadership speculation, navel-gazing and self-criticism’.
Getting the Labour First emails is like getting regular memos from Jiminy Cricket. For those unfamiliar with either Labour party membership groupings, or the works of Walt Disney, the former is a network of loyalist Labour MPs and activists, which some would call on the ‘right’ of the Labour party, and which I would place in the moderate mainstream. It grew from the remnants of Labour Solidarity, the group established to stop the Labour Party going bonkers in the early 1980s. Today its leading light is John Spellar MP, and its current membership owes much to the diaspora created when the AEEU merged with MSF, and Ken Jackson lost to Derek Simpson.
The latter, of course, is the animated cricket who gives voice to Pinocchio’s conscience.
If you missed it, the highlights of the latest Labour First newsletter are:
- A denunciation of the ‘Bennite hard left’ and ‘Compass soft left’ for creating a pernicious myth of leadership betrayal of the grassroots which is calculated to depress and alienate Labour’s core vote and our activists.
- Rejection of the ‘proposal to tinker with conference procedures to reintroduce the divisive Contemporary Resolutions abolished in 2007.’
- A call for ‘more focus is needed from our top team on the General Election and communicating with the electorate, and a lot less on refighting the last leadership election or positioning for the next one for the benefit of an internal party audience.’
- Finally the admonishment that ‘If instead Labour retreats into leadership speculation, navel-gazing and self-criticism, we will have only ourselves to blame if the voters decide we are not addressing their concerns.’
It’s hard to argue with any of this. Like the voice of your conscience, you know it’s right. And it is equally hard to see it happening. There are too many people who have an agenda for this conference, and it’s not the one printed in the glossy brochure: those who want Brown out, those ‘on manoeuvers’ who want his job, those who want to make the Labour party more left-wing, or more feminist, or more in tune with union thinking, or greener. Perhaps the loudest voice belongs to the hundreds of people who won’t be in Brighton at all. I doubt we’ll be needing the overspill hall with the video screen for over-subscribed speeches this year. Indeed if you look closely, I suspect many of the seats for the big debates will be filled by people in the direct employ of the Labour party.
The reasons for people staying away this year range from saving the money for the election campaign, to a general sense of ‘what’s the point.’ Many simply don’t want to witness the moment of death.
Parties that are about to win elections have conferences which make it obvious. In 1986, the Tories’ conference was a Kinnock killing machine. Speech after speech hammered home the messages: Labour in the pocket of the unions, weak on defence, liberal on law ‘n’ order, unfit for office. Read Margaret Thatcher’s speech (you can see it here). It takes her about 20 seconds before she starts taking Labour to pieces on defence, the economy and Kinnock’s leadership, and she doesn’t pause for breath until she’s done. By the end, Labour’s red rose is a pile of mush trampled into the carpet.
That’s what we need this week: a Cameron killing machine. Speech after speech taking him to pieces for endangering the recovery, risking jobs and businesses, and being in the pocket of right-wing financiers. It’s not too late for all those SPADs drafting speeches this weekend to take out the ‘lists of achievements’, and put in lists of dangers if the Tories win.
If we’re going down, let’s go down fighting.
Paul Richards will be regularly blogging from Brighton for Progress.