The media circus followed the party conferences to Bournemouth, Brighton and then Manchester before the SNP staged the last one of the season. It is worth pondering whether there is any point to any of this. Indeed, it is questionable whether any of the parties achieved anything at their glorified rallies.
We know that a general election will be held before June next year, so the parties should be subject to a greater degree of scrutiny than usual – at least in theory. Yet it’s unlikely that the majority of the electorate will have pored over the leaders’ speeches or the conference minutiae in great detail. Even if someone is enough of a political anorak to have done that, they are unlikely to be any the wiser now than they were before the conference season got underway.
We know David Cameron has a lovely wife and that Gordon Brown’s other half loves her hero the Prime Minister dearly. But didn’t we know that before? Aside from party conferences serving as rousing-the-faithful jamborees, they have little purpose these days.
Anyone who has attended a party conference before will know that things in the flesh are very different from what you see on television. Any meaningful debate takes place at fringe events, not in the auditorium under the scrutiny of the media.
Moreover, the space allocated to corporate stalls is almost as vast as the main hall. A few years ago, Cherie Blair was criticised for accepting a mug from an exhibitor. This was unfair, since it’s often difficult to avoid people thrusting their promotional tat at you in a setting somewhat akin to a freshers’ fair.
Following the collapse of the Western banking system as we used to know it and the MPs’ expenses scandal that sparked widespread revulsion, it has become commonplace to assert that the whole political model needs changing and we need a new way of doing things. The tired old format of the party conference could also do with a shake up. It seems increasingly anachronistic in the age of Twitter.
For a start, four days is much too long. As far as delegates are concerned, for anyone who has a proper job (and life), this a substantial chunk of time off to subtract from the 24 days’ leave a year that most employees have.
Commentators claimed that attendance at Labour’s conference shrank after Brown’s speech on Tuesday, but that could be because some delegates had to rush off to try to save jobs – their own jobs.
Second, the leaders’ speeches are invariably far too long. Brown started off strongly by listing Labour’s achievements in power, but a sense of drift had crept in before he had finished speaking. Cameron managed an entirely policy-free (if not content-free) speech for the best (or worst) part of an hour.
Therein lies the problem. To paraphrase Harold Wilson, an hour is a long time in modern politics. People seem to have ever-decreasing attention spans, so why should anyone think it’s a good idea for a politician to stand and emote for 60 minutes and then be hailed by planted supporters – often from a mix of differing ethnic hues – who clap like seals? Surely, it would be twice the challenge to distil their arguments into half an hour or less? I don’t like to use the word “soundbite”, but there is some merit in coming to the point relatively quickly.
At least conferences in the past were more accommodating of dissent. Black-and-white footage of previous Labour gatherings features literally smoke-filled rooms where there were knife-edged votes to determine party policy. Even Neil Kinnock’s war with Militant had dramatic tension to it.
Sadly, today’s anodyne, stage-managed events, with their self-conscious “down with the kids” soundtracks from the likes of Coldplay and M People, are all-too predictable. Labour is right to have banned smoke-filled rooms, but internal party democracy should not be a casualty, too.
While the Liberal Democrats can be derided as an irrelevance, with their hopeless dreams of going back to their constituencies to prepare for power, their conference did differ from the “big two” in one way. The only thing approaching a proper political punch-up happened at the Lib Dem conference, because it still has something approaching a function. Since these are the Lib Dems we are talking about, it was only a vague disagreement. Still, they are now so many Lib Dems that they need something bigger than a telephone box for their conference venue– which may be progress of a sort.
Everywhere I went for the brief time I was in Brighton for Labour’s gathering, proceedings were being liveblogged and tweeted ad nauseam. Away from the televised set-piece speeches, many of the fringe events also formed Facebook groups, which is no bad thing. Much of the stuff around the conferences seems to have joined the 21st century. It’s time for the main events to catch up.
