Learning how to get beyond the ring of steel around the Conference centre became an essential skill during Conference week. I arrived on Sunday and found myself on the wrong side of the wire. I watched a demonstration of people from all over the country shouting “Tony Blair, hear us say, tax the rich and make them pay!” In Conference we were continually reminded that dissent within our ranks will lose us the next election. The sub-text of which was “shut up or get out”. Nowhere was this more evident in the Partnership in Power (PiP) debate.
Ken Livingstone argued that PiP would make policy-making disappear into bureaucracy. “I think we should debate whether we have tuition fees, whether to set the Bank of England free before we read about it in the papers.” I hate to agree with him but I fear that we may have just voted ourselves out of any structural influence and decision-making rights.
My moment of greatest disillusionment was when the RMT and the TSSA remitted their motion on renationalisation. The debate was a good one despite Cabinet members swiftly despatching to the dustbin proposals to issue bonds to shareholders in lieu of straight cash to finance the deal. I wanted to vote but was denied the opportunity in this and many other debates. I asked members of the union delegations what they thought they gained by remitting. Their reply was that a vote might end in defeat but not to vote at all would allow further negotiation. This approach restricts policy making to the few, not the many (an over-used Blairite phrase).
Gordon Brown’s ringer of the week was “We stand not on the shifting sands of political expediency but on the solid rock of social justice.” I don’t quite see how tuition fees and the refusal to introduce more progressive taxes fit into a social justice plan for action.
In the defence debate I was astounded at the reliance on the small island mentality as an argument to change nothing. Not only will there be no reduction in the defence budget, the third highest spending department, but our human rights-based foreign policy will suffer. One speaker said: “Beacons to the world (which Robin Cook called Britain) don’t revoke two export licences and then sell £350m arms to the same country. More like a match in the wind.” Exactly.