“NO MONEY LEFT”- NOW TAKE US SERIOUSLY

Liam Byrne might have thought he was being funny leaving a card on his desk saying there was no money left as he left office as Labour’s Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Actually Liam, it was arrogant, poor politics and sums up why people might not vote Labour back to power in 2015.

 

However the polls are looking good for Ed Miliband as he arrives in Manchester and people are starting to take Labour seriously again. So this week’s conference needs to give us some idea where the party stands on the major issues of public finances and growth.

 

Rachel Reeves now shadows Liam Byrne’s old job and made an impressive appearance at a Downtown event in Liverpool a year ago. What we need from her and Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls is not a detailed budget but some financial principles.

 

All political parties are already looking to the post 2015 years. George Osborne wants £10bn more cuts. Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats made it clear at their conference they won’t be bound beyond 2016. What will Labour do, reverse such cuts or stick with them? The public sector unions are waiting for an answer in Manchester.

 

Public sector reform is looming as a massive issue. Blair said he had scars on his back when he wrestled with this issue. But the economy in 1997 was very different from now. Councils and the health service are going to have to do things differently. Will we hear Labour’s meaningful thoughts on this in Manchester?

 

What Labour won’t need if they get back to power is a rerun of the Blair/Brown feud in the shape of the two Eds. Shadow Chancellor Ed is prone to defend Gordon Brown’s record. Ed Miliband points out that Labour presided over widening inequalities. The rivalry isn’t intense yet but the potential is there.

 

LABOUR AND THE LIB DEMS.

 

While I was in Brighton, I attended some meaty fringe meetings. Meaty in the sense that the Lib Dems were trying to get to grips with two key issues for the future. Do they disengage from the Coalition at any point and what are the prospects of partnering with Labour after 2015?

 

On unzipping the Coalition, Tim Farron was not a fan. He’s the Party President and I think a potential leader. The Westminster scribes write him off probably because he comes from the North and will always look a bit young. Farron told a fringe meeting that breaking up the Coalition would just let Tory Ministers in and would lead to the accusation that the Lib Dems were unreliable allies who couldn’t stay the course.

 

Caroline Lucas, the Green MP for Brighton was at the fringe and felt the Lib Dems should get out fast. The cuts were bringing real hardship to the most vulnerable in our society and the Lib Dems were doing serious damage to their reputation by staying in the Coalition she asserted. Making the Tories less nasty didn’t do it for her.

 

Lord Chris Rennard who cut his teeth in Liverpool politics in the 1970s was against breaking up the Coalition but did believe Lib Dems had to differentiate themselves in the next two years.

 

Another fringe looked at the possibility of a deal with Labour if there is another hung parliament. Here in the North it’s easy to think that the Lib Dems are natural allies of Labour and what we are witnessing now is an aberration. But down south many rural Lib Dems lean to the right. Nevertheless Labour’s Lord Adonis and MP John Cruddas got a warm reception at the fringe I attended on the prospects of a future Lab-Lib Dem Coalition.

 

Adonis confessed he wished Labour had introduced the Lib Dems’ pupil premium but overall felt the premise on which the Coalition was founded was shattered. The Tories had got their austerity cuts but the Lib Dems had not secured the constitutional reform they craved.

 

It was left to former leader Ming Campbell to make the wisest point. Lib Dem and Labour politicians might be texting each other and getting on well but the whole thing could founder on policy.

 

Quite rightly Ming cited Labour’s political opportunism that had wrecked Lords’ reform. It was a policy Labour had been committed to for years and yet they were prepared to scupper the legislation over the number of days needed for debate in the Commons.

 

By the way, let’s not hear any more about the southern venues being much more congenial for party conferences from a weather point of view. Blackpool strength winds and Manchester volumes of rain poured down on us.

WE DON’T WANT POLICY IDEAS, JUST BALLOONS

During one of Tony Benn’s great rants against the modernisation of the Labour Party, he forecast that one day delegates to the party conference would be told that they weren’t there to debate issues but merely to blow up balloons for the leader’s triumphal entry.

 

Benn’s forecast came to my mind as I watched the recent Republican and Democratic conventions. With our version of the conventions, the party conferences, starting this weekend I thought it might be worth comparing the two.

 

Way back in American convention history, they were the events at which candidates were chosen and policy formed, not any more.

 

The primary contests which start across America in the previous winter mean that the candidates are known well in advance. The last time a Republican Convention met with any uncertainty about the candidate was in 1976 when Ronald Reagan attempted to wrest the nomination from Gerald Ford. In the Democrats’ case it was Ted Kennedy’s effort to unseat Jimmy Carter in 1980.

 

This year yet again there was no opportunity for delegates in Tampa, Florida or Charlotte, North Carolina to influence the policy platform. Similarly while there will be debates on policy motions at the Labour conference in Manchester and the Tory gathering in Birmingham, it will only be Liberal Democrat delegates who will actually make policy line by line when they meet in Brighton.

 

The wives of political leaders are playing a growing role on both sides of the Atlantic. Here we’ve seen Sarah Brown introduce her husband at a Labour conference. Sam Cam is a fixture with the Tories, but they are bit parts compared to the central roles that Anne Romney and Michele Obama played at their conventions this month. Both put on sparkling performances in contrast to the more staid performances of their husbands, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.

 

Celebrities at party conferences were certainly a feature of the Blair era and many of Hollywood’s finest supported the Democrats this year in Charlotte. The Republicans however scored an own goal with a bizarre rambling performance by the ageing Clint Eastwood. It didn’t make their day.

 

So what might be coming to our party conferences in the future? The CNN news channel played the party videos shown to the delegates whereas the BBC always cut away when similar screenings are made at our party conferences. The BBC says it isn’t in the business of broadcasting straight party propaganda. That strikes me as odd considering the rest of the conference is just that.

 

In the American videos we saw the families of the candidates heavily featured. Everyone with a distant relationship to Romney or Obama was interviewed.

Another striking feature was the emphasis on families with relatives serving in the military.

 

It’s a close race in the US election this year with the Republicans turning up the heat on the economy and Obamacare (the President’s attempt to introduce something like the NHS to America). There is no doubt that the “Yes we can” Obama optimism of four years ago has faded but incumbent Presidents are rarely turned out. Only Jimmy Carter (1980) and HW Bush (1992) have suffered that fate since 1945.

 

So in 2012 will we just get balloons and stage managed baloney at our conferences? The Liberal Democrats do still have a real policy making conference and all credit to them. Labour needs an honest debate on its economic policy as the party is taken more seriously again and those Tories who really are unhappy with Cameron need to come out of the woodwork. I doubt it will happen.