Labour Conference 2010: another Nurenburg-style rally?

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Since the party leader will not be elected until the day before in a tight race, and their staff will be focused on winning, you might expect September’s Labour conference to be less “managed”, that is more interesting and relevant, than usual. All five candidates say they’re committed to making the party more democratic after all, knowing that there is a relationship between activists campaigning effort and the influence they’re allowed. But party officials seem determined to keep the same old “New” Labour traditions going:

• the same old front-bench faces, even though most of them will have either retired (like Alistair Darling, Jack Straw & Alan Johnson) or been reshuffled within days
• the same old lengthy platform speeches reminiscent of Brezhnev-era Soviet Congresses
• the same old backstage manoeuvres to keep subjects off the agenda,
• the same old staged focus groups of carefully selected on-message delegates

All interspersed with mindless razzmatazz but precious little debate. And no votes. Or, if they have to have votes, no results of those votes until Thursday so journalists won’t report them and they can pretend they never happened.

The Bad News

Most of the week is divided into the usual policy plenaries or workshops. These will be led by the former Ministers (low point – Thursday morning, 5 set pieces before Harriet Harman’s closing speech), but with no policy statements since the last ones from the national policy forum were agreed at Warwick two years ago prior to the Credit Crunch. Indeed, the policy forum hasn’t even met for a year since it was completely by-passed in the manifesto process led by Ed Miliband, good listening exercise though that was.

There will be a session on “Renewing Party Democracy” after the conference opening formalities on the Sunday afternoon, but in a blatant procedural manoeuvre, party officials have ruled out several important rule changes submitted by CLPs and two trade unions. These would have enabled conference to consider such issues as the number of contemporary motions prioritised for debate at conference and the opportunity for constituencies and trade unions to submit amendments to national policy forum reports.

So what was the pretext for ruling these proposals out of order? The party rules stipulate that:

When party conference has made a decision on a constitutional amendment, no resolution to amend that part of the constitution or rules of the party shall appear on the agenda for a period of three years from the time such decision is made.”

In 2007, just after Gordon Brown was elected Leader, after much arm-twisting oby the new Leader, conference reluctantly voted to replace “contemporary motions” at conference with “contemporary issues”. In order to achieve this, the word “motion” was replaced with the word “issue” in a number of places throughout chapter 3 of the rule book that relates to party conference. Although, of course, the word “part” is subject to interpretation, party officials chose an absurdly broad interpretation which would rule out any amendment to this whole chapter for three years even if, like these rule changes, they were on an entirely different subject.

So how did party officials get this through the conference arrangements committee (CAC), you may ask. Cath Speight, chair of the executive’s organisation committee, revealed to the party executive this week that the decision had been reported to her committee on 6 July. Strange then that the meeting of the CAC to discuss it wasn’t until 15 July. Stranger still that the lengthy report explaining this absurd justification “had” to be tabled at the CAC meeting, especially when it had been written prior to the earlier meeting on 6 July and could have been written at any time since the proposals had been submitted in July 2009. But it does, at least, make clear why the CAC allowed the report through without having had time to read it!

But will there be time devoted to a debate on why we lost, still the most pressing issue for the party? Sadly not. The only opportunity, the General Election report, will be sandwiched into the end of Sunday afternoon just before “Beating the Lib Dems”, an important subject but perhaps rather less important than “Beating the Tories”.

The Good News

Fortunately conference will, it seems, be allowed to vote on up to eight contemporary motions for the first time since 2006. Margaret Wheeler, chair of the CAC, confirmed to the party executive will vote on changing the rules back to allow this at the start of conference. Constituency parties and affiliated organisations will still be invited to submit “contemporary issues” for debate,. But if the 250 word “explanation” of the “issue” in the ten word heading is set out as a motion, it can be treated as a motion or composited. The deadline for submission is 16 September, but the rules on what is “contemporary” will not be relaxed even if conference hasn’t debated any new policies since the credit crunch. The motion must relate to something which happened after 1 August.

And the other good news is: don’t expect the ruling out of proposals on absurd grounds to pass without a row. Watch this space!