Politics
Glastonbury for weirdos, conferences matter
I’m afraid that as a fully paid-up political nerd myself there is an element of truth in that comic description of party conferences from a Labour Party insider.
Twenty years ago I went to my first “season” and was gobsmacked that so many of the clichés I’d grown up with seemed true.
At the Conservative Party conference there really were young men in pin-striped suits or tweeds, as well as women of a certain age wearing pearls.
At Labour there were harassed-looking sharply dressed special advisers – but also plenty of placards and CND badges.
Lib Dem activists really did wear sandals and a “Glee club” was the hotly anticipated event of the week.
Party conferences are a display of our political tribes like no other and when things go right, they can create a sense of common purpose for the activists who knock on doors and deliver leaflets.
We’re in Aberdeen this week as the SNP gathers for its first conference in person since 2019.
SNP leader and Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon – who is on our show this Sunday – has enjoyed years of extraordinary political success at the ballot box.
The first minister will be lauded here, but conferences can sometimes provide tricky moments too, where party activists’ beliefs clash with their leaders’ approaches.
Ms Sturgeon has had to grapple with calls from members to go further and faster towards its push for independence.
In 2019 she rejected calls for more radical option – a “Plan B” if the UK government kept saying no to a second referendum – which was booed on the conference floor.
Three years on, some of the most ardent independence enthusiasts have gone to former SNP leader Alex Salmond’s Alba Party which advocates a more aggressive approach.
But now Ms Sturgeon has outlined an alternative where her party will treat the next general election as a referendum.
There are question marks about whether such a plan is feasible, yet she is not expected to face too much internal pressure this week.
And it’s interesting that with Labour soaring in the polls, the SNP opened its conference by attacking Sir Keir Starmer’s party. But it is clear Ms Sturgeon wants to use the Tories’ travails to make the case that chaos in the UK is more of a risk to Scotland than the many uncertainties of leaving the union itself.
And as we have all just witnessed in gory technicolour, party conferences can act as both magnifying glass and megaphone for any party’s woes.
In a few short days in Birmingham, the Conservatives put on one of the most unedifying displays of political breakdown ever seen.
To end the week with the cabinet in open dispute, and the polls crashing, was a disaster. It raised the question, as one insider put it, as to whether the government could run a bath let alone the country.
One former No 10 staffer told me conference can “give the leadership a chance to set out deeper policy ideas and provide the conditions for a few people to have a snog or be lobbied”.
But this time “a lot of the public tuned in for the first time to hear this Conservative government unhelpfully speaking in red meat top lines beloved by some of the membership but tin-eared and undetailed in a time of crisis for normal voters”.
It wasn’t just that the opportunity to talk to the country was wasted, it was squandered, and turned into a few days that made things even more difficult for Prime Minister Liz Truss.
At the end of her conference the question is not “was the event a success or failure?” it is instead “what kind of political miracle will there have to be for her to recover?”.
Labour, in contrast, grabbed the opportunity conference season provides to get media coverage it doesn’t always attract.
Starmer’s party this year was determined to appear organised, competent, and show a break with its recent past
Activists on the left of the party barely got a look in and it’s almost unimaginable that the national anthem would have been sung on the conference floor before Starmer’s tenure.
His team knew they could create a powerful visual moment that would be lapped up by the cameras as well as being an important mark of respect following the death of the late Queen.
Labour benefitted too from what was going on in the markets and in Westminster. Or, as the former No 10 staffer put it: “Labour could have smiled and waved their way through theirs like the Madagascar penguins, and still come out brilliantly because the government was making such a hash of things by themselves.”
It is just a few weeks each year. The events are attended by only a few thousand people. Yet these gatherings are important way-markers for our politics.
They are health checks on the parties that seek to govern us and show us moments when flaws are horribly exposed or progress revealed.
What happens at these events does shape the conversation that ultimately decides who runs the country.
So, yes, party conferences may indeed be “Glastonbury for weirdos” but they give millions an insight into the parties who seek to govern us.
Reports /TrainViral/