Political conference season 2011 JULIA LANGDON
Winners and losers at party games
The conference season is well under way, with the Liberal Democrats winding down in Birmingham and the Labour Party gearing up to begin its meeting in Liverpool this weekend. These events have changed out of all recognition in recent years but they remain a fascinating political spectacle
n these straitened times, it is perhaps surprising that the political party con- ference still exists. Despite what they may say in public, all party leaders dislike their annual date with their party members. The conference is a distraction from the nor- mal political process. It is time-consuming, tiring and almost inevitably tiresome. It has the potential for causing political catastrophe and it is ruinously expensive to run. Yet every September, the political caravan continues to roll around the country to the dismay of the political classes and the almost complete indif- ference of the electorate. It would take a fearless party leader to bring an end to this charade and it is difficult to see how this could occur. But what has happened, rather, in the course of the last generation is a change in each of the political conferences as they have adapted to changed circum- stances. In some cases it has been gradual. The Trades Union Congress, for example, used to be important. It used to matter what was said there, and governments of every kind paid attention and ignored it at their peril. Attending the TUC 20 or 30 years ago in the glorious Pavilion in Brighton or the rococo splendour of the Winter Gardens in Blackpool (if one could see the beauty of either building through the smoke-filled haze of those long- gone days) felt like being inside the beating heart of industrial Britain, throbbing with the power that drove governments in – or out – of office. The decline of trade-union mem-
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bership, the end of the closed shop, the grow- ing irrelevance of trade unionism has been reflected in the nature of the TUC conference: this year it was scarcely more than a day’s affair at its own London headquarters. In sharp contrast to this, however, the Liberal Democrat conference which has just ended could not have been more different, nor changed more dramatically, from even last year’s event. This was not the Liberals as we have historically known them. The Liberal conference of old was, among all the parties, the most entertaining. It was anarchic and it was rebellious. The delegates took themselves with enormous seriousness and made pro- found and earnest speeches, pleading with
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www.llysfasi-spirituality-workshop.org.uk 12 | THE TABLET | 24 September 2011
the leadership or the membership to change its policies on this or that issue of seminal sig- nificance: it could be equality for homosexuals, or the teaching of phonetics in primary schools or relations with the government of China. Time and time again, year after year, the con- ference would defy a succession of its leaders in order to assert its democratic right to over- turn platform policy, and it continued to do so because it didn’t matter. Nobody cared what the Liberal Party or then the Liberal Democrats thought about anything for the blindingly sim- ple reason that they were never going to be in a position to do anything about it. It has been exactly a century since the 1911
Parliament Act which George Dangerfield identified as one of the main causes of what he termed in his famous book of that title “The strange death of Liberal England”. At that time there began a polarisation of the electorate between Left and Right that eventually squeezed out the Liberals. Since then the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats have had not a chance of government, not a glance of the black petticoat of power. It has been 30 years since David Steel told the Assembly, thinking that the alliance with the Social Democratic Party would sweep them into office, to go back to their constituencies “and prepare for gov- ernment” but, as the 1983 general election proved, they were deluded. And thus they were able to continue to entertain themselves and amuse the political press by pursuing crackpot politics with a casual indifference to reality. Until now, that is. Last year’s Liberal Democrat conference in Liverpool was still in shock after a general election that propelled them into coalition with the Conservatives. Nick Clegg knew that he could be in for a rough ride from his party members and told them then that he was proud but nervous. The election was too recent and the Government too new for the party member- ship to know what to think, however, apart from how unlikely it was that the party should be in power with the Tories. So the scene was set for a very difficult conference indeed this September. The party’s popularity has plum-
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