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Brighton
Local Government Chronicle
What ho! Time to pack the buckets and spades and check the B&B bookings and for Heaven’s sake don’t forget the access pass. Yes, the party conference season is upon us: Brighton for the Liberal-Democrats; Manchester for Labour; Bournemouth for the Conservatives.
I have long reproached the parties for their lack of imagination in the choice of conference venues. Why stick to Britain? What’s wrong with Nice, or Bordeaux or Barcelona or Milan or Rome? Just think of the advantages: much cheaper to get there by low-cost airline than a return train fare to Manchester or the South coast; a decent hotel instead of a grotty, overpriced, grubby B&B; good food at a fraction of the cost of a British restaurant meal. Even the hour’s difference in time would be a huge advantage in securing coverage on the British TV. I bet it would be popular with the journalists!
The advantages would be particularly real for the legion of local councillors who probably constitute the single largest group of conference delegates. They could get out and spend half a day looking at waste collection. They could check out the local school meals. They could chat to the local mayor about a bed tax or monitor the cost of the local tramway. They could enquire about progress in integrating ethnic minority groups and tackling social exclusion.
In short, they could have a really useful time. Ah well, dream on. Conferences aren’t intended to be informative: they have become an exercise in collective psychology. What matters is not what they tell the world: what matters is what they make of themselves.
Labour is going to have a torrid conference. The parliamentary party is fractious; the activists seething; the unions stirring; the electorate disaffected. Tony Blair will want to talk about the challenge of terrorism; about achieving a cohesive and inclusive society in the midst of diversity; about the unfinished work of public service modernisation. He might as well be living on a different planet to the rest of the party. It wants to talk about him. Some of the party wants to say “thank you and goodbye.” The rest simply wants to say “goodbye.”
If he announces a date for his departure the Prime Minister’s authority will walk out of the front door of No 10; if he doesn’t it will slip away through the back door. It has been on the ebb since the day he announced that he would not fight the next election. Gordon Brown might speak of renewal. As a parson’s son he will know that renewal comes most naturally after death!
Bournemouth will not be for the faint-hearted. Few things are more insufferable than the Conservative Party in a mood of adulation. Last year in Blackpool David Cameron made that speech. Now he is the absolute master of his party. He has driven it into territory it has barely explored and he has taken new tracks into familiar terrain. There is a deliberate iconoclasm about his leadership – note the sub-text of de-Thatcherisation. Cameron may not actively dislike the Tory Party in the way that Tony Blair does the Labour Party but he certainly makes it clear that he thinks it is not “fit for purpose.”
But the medicine is working. An election victory has moved from fantasy to feasibility. Of course, a political “narrative” designed to overcome a legacy of negatives has to be turned into a policy agenda for government but, for the moment, Cameron is the one making the political weather. Shrewd Labour backbenchers are checking their pension entitlements.
The Liberal Democrat conference will be edgy: earnest but edgy. The leadership anxieties will nag away. A come-back speech by Charlie Kennedy – and he will need to combine I’m sorry I haven’t a clue with Thought for the Day to pull it off – will inevitably keep the focus on the leadership. The party has its unique selling point in its opposition to the Iraq intervention and it will no doubt claim ownership of the civil liberties agenda. It will hail some spectacular by-election performances and defections. And yet…. the shadow of Cameron will inevitably fall across Brighton’s sunny pavements.
For next year it might, after all, by worth scanning the Ryanair and Easyjet schedules!I
© Local Government Chronicle
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