‘Labour conference’s influence has never lived up to its founders’ ideals’

While its delegates basked in by-election glory, few believed that this year’s Labour conference would shape Labour policy. And, sure enough, conference again proved to be a place that simply ratified decisions taken elsewhere. Debate was narrow, dissent discouraged and leaders lauded. It was not meant to be like this.

When Labour was founded in the early 20th century, Tory conferences had been around for decades. But the Tories always made it clear that their conferences were purely advisory and that parliamentary leaders should have free rein with party policy. Grassroots members would have to settle for bread and circuses.

Such arrangements were not for the founders of the Labour Party. Inspired by their vision of a new Jerusalem, they aimed for a very different kind of party conference – one that would reflect, highlight and further their egalitarian aims. This ideal was duly embodied by the Labour Party constitution of 1918, written largely by Sidney Webb – a Fabian socialist for whom politics was a quasi-religious experience.

For Webb and many others, Labour’s constitution would assume sacred importance and accord party conference an altar-like status. “The work of the party,” Webb intoned, “shall be under the direction and control of the annual conference”, adding that this solemn gathering would be “the font of all power, authority and policy within the party”.

Conference has long been sidelined in the policymaking process

In the decades that followed, Labour worthies dutifully echoed the gospel according to Webb. In 1937, Clement Attlee recorded that “conference is the final authority of the party… its socialist policies must be carried out by its representatives in parliament”. This was humbug, of course, as Attlee himself would have known given the calamities of Ramsay MacDonald’s governments (the second of which was so socialist it eventually merged with the Tories). But friends of Labour continued to peddle the myth of conference sovereignty.

Among political scientists, it took an outsider to expose the hypocrisy of Labour’s organisation. Robert McKenzie was a Canadian scholar who, with the help of his celebrated ‘swingometer’, later achieved fame on BBC election programmes. But, before then, he wrote a seminal account of UK party organisation (British Political Parties, 1955), arguing that the structure of both main parties was ultimately oligarchic – albeit covertly in the case of Labour. Put another way, when it came to making policy, neither Tory nor Labour conferences really mattered.

According to McKenzie, the main difference between Labour and Tory conferences was that Labour’s activists, and a few useful idiots in academe, persisted in thinking that Labour’s were crucially important and a glowing example of intra-party democracy. For this reason, McKenzie found many Labour activists “delusional” and most Labour conferences “a source of ennui… a deflating, dispiriting contrast between theory and reality”.

Attempts to re-empower conference have been thwarted

For McKenzie, it was inevitable and desirable that Labour conferences should be less significant than participants assumed – inevitable in that governments (Labour or otherwise) could not be hidebound by pretentious and rigid conference resolutions and desirable in that the supremacy of Labour’s conference was at odds with parliamentary democracy, the essence of which was that MPs were representatives accountable to voters, rather than delegates parroting the autumnal demands of party activists.

In the 1960s and 1970s, McKenzie’s thesis was regularly vindicated. Following the decision of the 1960 Labour conference to back unilateral nuclear disarmament, leader Hugh Gaitskell instantly responded: “What sort of people do you think we are? Do you honestly think we can simply accept a decision like this?”

Likewise, in 1968, after conference voted against the incomes policy of Harold Wilson’s government, Wilson told delegates that conference decisions were “warnings not instructions”. Again, not quite what Webb had in mind.

Between 1976 and 1979, while conference was voting for the nationalisation of banks, an ‘alternative economic strategy’ and withdrawal from the EEC, Jim Callaghan’s government was slashing public spending, appeasing the IMF and introducing European elections. As Tony Benn later lamented: “When conference passed critical motions, the upshot was 24 hours of embarrassment, followed by a continuation of old policies as if nothing had happened.”

Following Labour’s election defeat in 1979, Benn hoped conference would take steps to re-empower itself and thus ensure leftist policies. Yet, thanks to the conservatism of union block votes at conference, Benn and his ‘Campaign for Labour Party Democracy’ were routinely frustrated.

An attempt to give the final word on the party manifesto to Labour’s national executive committee (elected largely by conference) was rejected at the conference of 1980. Benn’s attempts to become deputy party leader or leader, supposedly to promote more effectively the notion of conference power, ran aground at the conferences of 1981 and 1988 respectively.

More recent reforms have left conference formally marginalised

But it was during the 1990s and early 2000s that the futility of Labour’s conference became obvious. This had much to do with a series of procedural reforms that left conference officially marginalised.

Its formal emasculation began in 1990, when Neil Kinnock’s allies persuaded conference to explore the possibility of transferring its policymaking role to a plethora of ‘policy forums’: low-key party meetings, where debates would be ‘decentralised’, ‘ongoing’, ‘more informal’ and devoid of any power to enforce anything. Diane Abbott, at least, was aware of the danger, warning in 1996 that such arrangements would prove a smokescreen for further, elitist party management.

Following Tony Blair’s march to power, the 1997 conference confirmed this process (and thus further eroded its own influence) by supporting Blair’s plan for a Partnership in Power. Since then, conference-goers have spent much of their time endorsing Labour’s National Policy Forum and assorted policy commissions, rather than even pretending to instigate policy.

If delegates do manage to make a splash at conference – as they did last year by voting for proportional representation – there is no guarantee anything will change. PR is unlikely to be in Labour’s next manifesto, and whatever was said on the subject at this year’s conference will make little impact given the leadership’s growing indifference.

At the height of the Blair era, Benn said of Labour conferences: “Once, we at least had arguments. Now, we just let off balloons, sing pop songs and throw roses in the air.” Two decades later, on the banks of the Mersey, even the balloons were cancelled. After the madness of Manchester, where the Tories continued to self-destruct, we were subject instead to an awful lot of predictability. Webb might have been puzzled, though most Labour leaders since Attlee would have probably been reassured.