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Yes, that is exactly where donpaskini is coming from and why I can’t agree with him when the best examples he can provide come from another era.

I think there is some confusion floating around about where exactly to draw the line of the role of a conference between policy formation and policy approval.

A conference should really be the practical and formal culmination of the policy-making process which avoids both accusations of it rubber-stamping pre-approved top-down diktats and of last-minute spur-of-the-moment compromises or coups from the floor. It needs to be the summation of an on-going and continual year-round engagement between members, leaders and the public. It needs to be carried out as a matter of course as a basic duty of party constitution. Confering ought to be the greatest ambition and activity undertaken by all as a basic manifestation of our equality – one which feeds into any combined campaigning efforts. It is what we practise on these threads.

Currently it seems LC is in a perpetual state of confering, producing voluntary motions to agree and carry forward or dismiss (with varying degrees of vehemence and ferocity). This is both a strength and a weakness. In some areas this has produced a concert of opinion, in others it has degraded into chat. Sometimes debate has risen the level of discourse to purposeful intent, elsetimes it just drifts.

Now I’m not a believer in the noble pipedream that LC can turn into either an online think-tank or a well-spring for a new political movement, but nor should it remain a hub of commentary and debate. I think there are new niches to be carved out where LC can find itself at the vanguard of directing realignments through collborative campaigning.

So how we learn to apply the conclusions advanced here is something which does need further discussion – could it mean editors drawing up a central LC manifesto of issues and positions, or perhaps is this best avoided? My feeling is that a form of conscious consensus-building is helpful, if not necessary, but this raises the question of how to go about doing so. So understanding the differing roles, purposes and functions of each of the party conferences is absolutely fundamental to deciding which are the best parts of each model and how to apply them for ourselves if LC is to continue to grow in influence.

(22 Jeenie Rigg:” I still don’t get why anyone would bother to go to Labour conference,
though. If you can’t affect anything, what’s the point?”-how sweet of you not to
understand how corruption and influence peddling works)

will listen to Labour again until after they have been removed from power and the current placemen and mediocrities have been well and truly purged. Sad but true.

In those days the leading lights of the left were people like Patricia Hewitt, Harriet Harman, Margaret Beckett, Clare Short, Chris Mullin, David Blunkett, Chris Smith, Jack Straw, etc – while David Aaronovitch and Peter Mandelson were still in the Communist party.

OK people change their minds as they get older and there is no shame in that, but the in-fighting of the 1980s – for which all sides bear some responsibility – kept Labour out of power for 18 years. I think that the iron-discipline of New Labour in the 1990s was partlly a reaction to that experience.

On who should have the final say on government policy, well, obviously that has to be parliament. That is the basis of the British democratic system. People vote for individual members of parliament and they hold the executive to account.

I strongly agree with mandatory reselection of MPs, and that is a way of ensuring that they remain accountable to their local party, but the idea that a government should be automatically be bound by a vote of its party conference is deeply problematic. If the Tories win the next election would you say the same rule should apply? (think capital punishment, immigration, Europe, repeal of the HRA, etc.)

But anyway the idea that activists attending a conference should be able to mandate a government on what it should do is rather dubious. It is accountable to to the electorate as a whole and, anyway, I do not think that certain detailed economic policies can actually be decided in this way.

Jenny, without wanting to dismiss the Lib Dems you can only afford to be so democratic because you are nowehere near being in government.

By contrast Labour let a load of out of touch desk clerks do their policy making and we’ve all seen how that works out, so I hardly describe that extreme as any better than letting the membership have a say, less so because the likelihood of a lackey coming up with something meaningful rather than “buzz-wordy” is slim as far as I’m concerned.

The only thing I’ve heard in recent times that’s made sense is the citizens forum, or whatever they’re calling it. And it’s a Tory headed idea in this instance. It means people get their say on where they want direction, it also means those that know what to do with direction (supposedly) run with it and realise the potential. I’m guessing it will get talked out of Parliament by some back bencher, but at least it’s an example of showing how there can be active listening and participation…rather than just an oaf sitting in a chair continuously restating how much he and his administration are listening, honest.

Frankly I don’t think Labour is doing too badly. A quick piece of micro-surgery to get rid of David Miliband will either kill the patient or set it on the course to recovery.

All this talk about the Labour bubble is because there is a cancer eating at the heart of it. But cancer is treatable. Brown must force a confrontation to demonstrate his control over his position and because Miliband is identified as the treacherous individual, one of them must walk.

Brown should sack Miliband before the next cabinet.

At its best, there are examples from the past of conferences successfully challenging and changing the leadership’s ‘line’. Two examples, both from quite a long time ago:

In 1945, delegates at Labour Party conference voted to end the national government and make sure there was an election – which led to Labour’s landslide election victory (the leadership wanted to keep the national government going until the end of the war).

In 1948, at the Democratic Party convention in the USA, delegates voted for a policy platform which committed the party to a much stronger policy in favour of civil rights (the leadership opposed this because it didn’t want to antagonise conservative Southern Democrats). This policy helped Truman win the 1948 election.

Sometimes activists are better at sensing when the time is right for new, bold measures than the leadership of a party, and any party which wants to be successful would do well to have some way for that to happen. Other times, however, the activists are well out of step with public opinion and a party’s supporters in particular and letting them make the policies is a recipe for disaster.

Add to this the fact that lots of local parties will subsidise places for their members (although this is not something I have personal experience of).

I still don’t get why anyone would bother to go to Labour conference, though. If you can’t affect anything, what’s the point?

i spent over a hundred bucks going to Manc off my own back, and thats after staying at a hostel. And eating all the food at the Fabian events. Heh. And getting my alcohol at the evening parties.
Its still not cheap!

I went for free as a steward. There were a fair few of us who did this. Sunny could have gone for free on a media pass, if he’d have thought on. There are lots of ways of doing conference without paying for conference.

My ‘assumptions’ are that there are many people who can’t afford to go to a five day conference in Bournemouth – I don’t imagine that you would disagree with that. There are some advantages to making policy by having members decide them at a conference, but one of the disadvantages is that some people are more likely to be able to have their say than others, depending on their economic status, and this has an effect on the policies that get decided. It’s not a problem unique to the Lib Dems, but it is a big weakness in the way they make policy.

I’ve already said that I don’t think the way Labour decides policy is very good. It’s actually a really difficult and important question – how can left of centre political parties decide (for example) their housing policy in a way which gives an equal voice to people in housing need as to anti-housing development campaigners? Neither Labour, the Lib Dems nor the Greens have managed to achieve this.

I’m supporting a family on less than £10,000 a year in a back to back. My other half, also of this parish, is currently seeking employment. Although I consider myself relatively well off, I don’t suspect that I am who you had in mind. And I repeat, any delegate attending conference can shape policy. You want to take your assumptions elsewhere?

Also, are you saying that the Labour party DO take into account the views of homeless people? In which case I humbly submit that you are talking complete bollocks. The labour party takes into account the views of those who pay for it – i.e. big business and (less often these days) the unions.

Possibly the Party would have been better off, if the Conference had had more influence, but anything is possible. Is there any reason to believe this possibility to be true?

And if Conference really did influence policy, the media would almost certainly pay more attention to it – because people would be more interested in it. Whether people would like what they saw is another matter.

In the meantime, the only thing that everyone in the Party can agree on is that Something Must Be Done. But what the Party needs is an answer to the question: What Should Be Done?

The Lib Dems, according to their own analysis, suffered at the last election from having lots of policies which some members cared passionately about but which lacked a certain kind of wider appeal – from extending animal rights to goldfish to relaxing rules on who could buy pornography.

But it is not just that it is electorally essential to take into consideration views from people other than party members.

The debate on housing and eco towns is a good example. Lib Dem members, and Lib Dem members able to attend and speak at or help shape policy at Lib Dem conference in particular, tend to be relatively well off, and the debate and policy which was passed reflected this – lots of anti-housing development campaigners spoke, but not a single person who is trapped in overcrowded accommodation or who is homeless. Fine if you want policies to appeal to property owners rather than those in the greatest need, but not so good for social justice.

I have read The Unfinished Revolution by Philip Gould, and whilst I can see where you draw your analysis from, I think it was an unwise strategy to “squelch” internal party democracy in response to the more radical voices within Labour holding sway. Yes, in the long run it yielded electoral victory (albeit many many years after Kinnock first started his squelching) but it led to a loss of identity. Political parties should of course meet the electorate on their own terms, and strive to represent their concerns at all times, but they must also summon the courage from time to time to say that which may be initially unpopular, or outside the box, or (dare I say it) radical.

Labour owes its existence to such outside the box thinking as was displayed by the post-WWII Attlee governments. “These are the times that try men’s souls” – and it’s time we saw someone willing to lead public debate rather than cower behind it.

The way the media acts these days is largely due to parties pandering to it, without realising that with a bit of courage, they could instead take control of the news cycle.

It is all very easy to “realise that something must be done”, but quite another thing to work out what that something should be.

I might point out that the reason Labour Party internal democracy was squelched in the first place, was that what the Party grassroots wanted done, and what the electorate wanted done, were so often wildly different.