The pre-election conference season can herald victory or spell defeat for political parties. Paul Richards examines the lessons of history
The party’s conferences have often been a case study in how to lose votes and alienate voters. Before Labour’s worst-ever defeat in 1983, Labour’s conferences had been horrible spectacles of recrimination and extremism. The party appeared divided, because it was. Former ministers were placed in the dock, and charged with the betrayal of socialism. A small example is the speech by the St Pancras North delegate, which appears on page 143 of the 1980 conference report: ‘many of us in this conference are also angry about much of what the last Labour government did and a great deal of what it failed to do. [applause] And we have the right to be angry, and to do something about our anger.’ That delegate was Patricia Hewitt, later a cabinet minister under Tony Blair. The 1982 conference was a cavalcade of hard-left posturing: agreeing the programme of import controls, nationalisation, withdrawal from the European Economic Community, and nuclear disarmament which would form the following year’s suicide note.s Labour’s delegates congregate in Manchester this autumn for the final get-together before the general election, what can they learn from history?
The 2009 Labour conference in Brighton, before the party’s second-worst drubbing at the polls ever, presented the public with a dying government, led by a struggling leader. Gordon Brown’s speech, introduced by his wife Sarah, contained plenty of lists of achievements for the activists to cheer, but little for the voters. Some tough talk around hostels for pregnant teenagers generated much mirth in the bars (‘Huts for sluts’? ‘Gulags for slags’? ‘Camps for tramps’?). Peter Mandelson’s speech the day before had been a brilliant crowd-pleaser. A theatrical moment came when union boss Tony Woodley tore up a copy of the Sun at the podium. The crowd loved it, but it also served as a metaphor for Labour tearing up its contract with the people.
Pre-election conferences for opposition parties have four jobs. First, they must present a united party, appearing like grown-ups, more concerned with the country’s problems than internal wrangling. Second, they must project the leader as a prime minister-in-waiting, with paradoxical attributes that people like to see in their leaders: strong, yet prepared to compromise; visionary, yet practical; ‘like me’, but not too much. Behind the leader must stand a shadow cabinet which looks and feels balanced, representative of the country, and vaguely competent. Third, they must present the policy ideas which will be put before the electorate at the election. This is a straight sales job. This is not the time for debate or dissent. Last, the conference must be the opportunity to demolish the other party’s claims to govern, by whatever means necessary. The Tories’ conferences have often been particularly effective at this: ruthless killing machines, destroying the images of James Callaghan, Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock or Brown.
So, what does a successful conference look like? Labour’s 1945 conference took place just a fortnight after Germany’s surrender, at Blackpool’s Winter Gardens. The conference decided, with two hands in the air against, to reject Winston Churchill’s plea to delay a general election. Labour’s conference in effect called a general election. Clement Attlee read out the text of his letter to Churchill calling for the people to be allowed to set the future direction of the country.
Herbert Morrison led the debate on Let Us Face the Future, with its policies for full employment, a welfare state, nationalised industries and housebuilding. Morrison also announced that Labour would be going after the votes of the suburban middle classes. ‘Why not?’ he asked conference. ‘Those people work, they are employed people, they are liable to the sack. It is a matter of talking to them in their own language, not a matter of us diluting our principles at all. Let us have a go at those suburban areas. Anyway I am going to have a go at East Lewisham and I hope it will come off.’ Morrison’s gamble paid off: he won in East Lewisham with a majority of 15,219.
No pre-election conference season has matched the high drama of 1963. The Tories’ conference began with the deputy leader, Alec Douglas-Home, reading out a letter from the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, announcing his resignation on health grounds. ‘Super Mac’ believed he was at death’s door. In the end, he lived until 1986, long enough to denounce Margaret Thatcher for selling off the family silver. The Tories’ last conference before the 1964 election was thrown into the chaos of a leadership contest.
A week earlier in Scarborough Harold Wilson had set out his vision for Britain as a technological powerhouse, forged in the ‘white heat’. He had only been elected leader in February that year, beating the alcoholic George Brown by 41 votes. Many Labour members of parliament thought Brown drunk a better bet than Wilson sober. Wilson was a former backroom boy and technocratic junior minister. Today he would be dubbed a ‘geek’.
Wilson’s first speech as Labour leader needed to inspire his party and speak to the nation. He explained how democratic socialist methods of planning would transform Britain’s productive capability, creating millions of jobs in science and technology, in a way the free market or communism could not. Fleet Street’s James Cameron summed it up: ‘the galvanic effect of Harold Wilson’s speech was as near to a miracle as Scarborough is likely to see.’ Yet at the general election a year later, the swing to Labour, after 13 years of Tory rule, was a tiny 0.2 per cent. Wilson owed his majority of four seats to an increase in support for Jo Grimond’s Liberals, at the expense of the Tories.
Labour’s most successful pre-election conference was in 1996. By the time the party met in Blackpool, Blair’s victory over John Major seemed likely, although few predicted the scale of the landslide. The future prime minister’s speech attempted two things: a forensic assault on the Tories’ 18-year record and to set out the New Labour programme. Such was the awesome message discipline of New Labour, the policy themes in the leader’s speech were the same as every candidate (including me) carried to the doorsteps until the polls closed seven months later.
Blair set out 10 vows, which he dubbed his ‘covenant’ with the people: lower class sizes, a reduction in welfare spending, halving the time to get young offenders to court, more cash for education and the NHS, devolution to Scotland and Wales, and prudent borrowing and inflation targets. One promise – to connect every school to ‘the information superhighway’ – seems laughable today. Then, we loyalists were instructed to clap at that line, without really understanding what it meant. It seemed so futuristic and visionary.
There was also a cringe-worthy attempt to co-opt the theme song of the Euro ’96 football championship into a line in the speech: ‘Labour’s coming home! Seventeen years of hurt never stopped us dreaming. Labour’s coming home! As we did in 1945 and 1964, I know that was then, but it could be again – Labour’s coming home. Labour’s coming home.’
Blair also introduced us to a character, who would later morph into ‘Mondeo Man’. This was the voter in the Midlands, polishing his Ford Sierra, who used to vote Labour, but voted Tory now he had got on in life. Blair could not have been clearer in his direct pitch to this kind of aspirational voter. As history shows, it worked.
Ed Miliband will take to the stage a little after 2pm on Tuesday 23 September 2014 with the weight of all of this history on his shoulders. He will be 44 years old, the same age as Blair in 1996, three years younger than Wilson in 1963 and 18 years younger than Attlee in 1945. The party he leads is united, and ahead in the opinion polls, although with wildly fluctuating leads.
Yet no party has made it back into government after only a single term in opposition since Wilson pulled it off in February 1974. Back then, the Labour defeat in 1970 was close, unlike Labour’s collapse in 2010. Miliband, however, has a shadow team filled with youthful talent. He has policies, such as housebuilding, which opinion polls suggest are popular. His opponents have not won a general election for 22 years. The winds in Manchester are set fair. There is more to winning an election than a successful conference, but without one the job is just that little bit harder.
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Paul Richards is author of Labour’s Revival: The Modernisers’ Manifesto