Originally published @ 11:47 am, Tue 21st Sep 2010
A Lib Dem recently proclaimed in a local energy debate "blue and yellow makes green".
Well it's only true if you're dealing with paint. But not with light (you get cyan). Nor with Con Dem coalition policy (funding pulled for the Sustainable Development Commission, budgets cut for electric cars and backtracking on support for offshore wind and clean coal technology).
Nor with the conference staging, where their off-blue background with yellow lettering just comes across as off-blue.
The free schools and new academies debate overwhelmingly saw the conference vote the idea down. The mover said the policy was shot through with flaws but he'd concentrate on just 5 particular problems.
It is odd how the coalition government has moved fastest on this and yet the mover said it wasn't in the coalition agreement. Explanation - a TV journalist said that this kind of initiative is the kind of thing Nick Clegg has always supported. It what's the party chose when they went orange.
And Danny Alexander, being interviewed as the vote was cast, soon dismissed the potential of the vote to have any impact.
So an opportunity to bewail the shallowness and uselessness of the Lib Dem conference as a policy maker. Well, maybe. But only so far as to say the Lib Dems can no longer crow about their conference being different.
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I'm not a fast reader and I've only reached page 102 of Tony Blair's "A Journey", but page 101 talks about the problems the Labour Party conference posed in terms of effective policy making and the sense of permanent betrayal the machinery created. So the party embraced "Party into Power" and created policy forums to give policy more consideration.
"Party into Power" has solved problems for the party and some of the negotiations of policy and analysis have become sophisticated and served the party better than the chaos of adopting composites put together on the afternoon before full conference. (I once oversaw the creation of a composite on low pay and it was an utter disaster. (It was not my fault!))
But "Party into Power" has left us other problems; some of which Andy Burnham in particular has been highlighting. Top-down, not easily or generally understood and non-participatory; flat conference debates.
My memories from the seventies watching both Labour and TUC conferences on TV with my Dad was that the speeches were good and the debates were cracking. They were things to be proud of and you were proud of people from across the country conveying common cause and conviction.
Now the reading from delegates, some picked out to help local press releases, has deadened the conference. Delegates at the conference are less inclined to attend the debates, never mind viewers choosing to watch BBC Parliament.
Contrast that with a trade union delegate in the mid-eighties describing his discovery of great thinkers from attending adult education. Terrific. I remember that 25 years on.
And contrast that too with Denis Healey, a Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the middle of a financial markets crisis only getting 3 minutes to convey his conviction and passion to a charged conference hall and millions of TV news viewers. I remember that 35 years on. Not so terrific.
We've lost the easy line that you could move a motion at the branch and get it adopted as national policy; and of course that will have been a rare event. We've lost the ability to explain how policy gets made and with it a sense that a party member is part of the process.
Triangulation may be out of political fashion, but maybe for policy making there is a genuine middle way.
On any policy area, there are usually 2 or 3 definable areas that could be developed into coherent statements of policy that could be the basis of proper debate.
In a National Policy Forum, we have the ability for such statements to be thrashed out. And the process would be sophisticated enough for Forum members to try to work out what would carry the vote at conference, or make the point that they wanted to see made.
Then the party could have some months to debate considered motions and mandate delegates to the conference. And quite possibly vote for some motions that were against the leadership's wishes.
Now this is of course tricky on grounds of a leader's authority, the overall coherence of the offer and a higher degree of conflict (which has some attractions, but only some).
This would have to be counter-balanced against a better debate of policy in the branch and constituency parties a stronger feeling of belonging, less of the "top-down" mentality and a more vital conference and party.
I was part of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy in the early eighties. It was of course really about developing a campaign for more radical change in the country and was worthwhile for that. It still goes on, but seems like an echo of the early eighties rather than embracing the modern part of John Prescott's "traditional values in a modern setting".
But if "Campaign for Labour Party Democracy" is taken, perhaps what we need if a Campaign for Labour Party Vitality.