It is very considerate of the Labour, Liberal and Conservative Parties to hold their annual conferences in the autumn.
At any rate, the seaside hotel keepers must think so, because the conferences bring them some welcome business just as the season is dying; and so must all those seaside landladies, who can keep the secret machines which put lumps into the porridge and burn the toast in profitable operation for another week or so. There is even the sea, which everyone expects to be cold in the autumn, allowing politicians to prove what lovable eccentrics they are by having themselves photographed taking a dip.
It is all good fun, although since the object of it is to win the game of power politics it can hardly be described as clean. But more than other any other reason for feeling grateful for the autumn conferences is that they provide us with something to chuckle over in the long, dark evenings ahead.
There are two types of annual conferences. One sort is run by the parties which are out of power; a certain amount of freedom is allowed here. In most cases—although there have been some famous exceptions, of which more later critics can be treated indulgently, as living proof of ruthless self-criticism, a restless drive for new ideas and a young, zestful heart.
When, for example, Edward Heath was asked on television what he thought about the prospects of receiving a lot of criticism of his leadership at this year’s Tory conference he replied, with a huge grin, that he enjoyed conferences and would be there all the time. Jo Grimond, far from being upset at the noisy activities of the Young Liberals at their conference, went out of his way to praise them and was photographed having an amiable drink with some of them.
There is no such carefree goodwill towards the rebels in a party which is in power. At their conferences the leaders on the platform, are trying to justify broken promises, to explain away diametrical changes in policy and, above all, to convince everyone that, although the present times are hard, with patience and support and unity all will be well. In this situation, critics are not welcomed as a stimulus; they are condemned—sometimes outlawed—as traitors to their party and to what politicians like to call the country.
There are many weary hours to be spent in the conference hall, and it is common for the newspaper men to try to brighten these up a little by fastening their attention upon some so-called personality of the conference. This usually means a lot of publicity for someone who, although he does no more than repeat the same weary platitudes and misconceptions which have been heard so many times before, wakes everybody up by sounding as if he actually believed what he says.
So it was this year with the Young Liberals, who came storming down to Brighton to demand all sorts of reckless things like “workers control” in industry (the inverted commas are intended, and necessary). These young people laid about them and one of them went so far as to shatter the peace of the conference by swearing—or at any rate he said “bloody” and “damn”, which in this age of Kenneth Tynan probably no longer rate as swear words.
The newspapers loved it and decided that no title would be appropriate for the Young Liberals short of Jo Grimond’s Red Guards. It is interesting to wonder what the fanatical young hooligans in Peking would think about being compared with a few hysterical students daring to say “bloody” to an assembly of Liberals on an autumn afternoon at an English seaside resort.
Such, however, are the ways of the press, which also has a liking for putting the finger on what they consider to be political stars of the future who enter the limelight at a conference. This is what the papers did some years back to Ray Gunter, who has now risen so far and so fast that he has the important job of implementing the very policy on wages which his party once scorned. This year, at the TUC, some reporters decided that Leslie Cannon, President of the Electrical Trade Union, showed by his speech that he is a future MP, perhaps even a Minister.
It is hardly necessary to point out that to win this nomination for future stardom a man has to agree with official policy. No member of the Labour Party has ever been selected as a rising leader after making an attack, no matter how capable, on his party’s line on wages or nuclear armaments; Frank Cousins, the most prominent of the critics on those issues, has always been regarded as something of a joke. Still less would a person be noticed for attacking the fundamentals of the Labour Party—its capitalist policies, its obsession with leadership, its unavoidable failure. The newspapers have their own standards of success and they are sticking by them.
Behind all the ballyhoo and the alleged drama and excitement what are conferences for? Every man in the street knows that they are supposed to lay down their party's policy and to take decisions based on that policy. A simple man in a backward street may even think that, because the capitalist parties profess to be democratic, the decisions taken by their conference delegates are binding.
The first thing to say about this is that some of the delegates’ votes are cast in ways which are anything but an expression of their members’ opinions. At this year’s Labour conference the voting policy of the Amalgamated Engineering Union changed suddenly from support of the government to opposition. This was not because the AEU delegates had received different instructions from their members. It simply happened that their leader, Bank of England director Sir William Carron, who is an unmovable supporter of the government, left Brighton for a meeting of the board of the Fairfield shipyard.
This apparently left the AEU delegation floundering, until a series of other absences gave the leadership to Hugh Scanlon, who is generally critical of the government. The result of this was that the AEU, voting as whoever was their leader at the time wished, was one day for the government and another against it.
Yet even without this sort of maneouvering, the votes of a conference are anything but decisive. Labour this year declared several times in favour of the government—on wage freezing, Rhodesia, foreign policy. But when the conference went the other way on other issues—redundancy, Germany and support for America over Vietnam—Ministers made it plain that they would take no notice. It was all summed up by Harold Wilson himself, in one word, when he asked what he intended to do about the famous Cousins victory over work sharing—“Govern”.
This has of course happened before. In 1959, when Labour was licking its wounds after Macmillan had thrashed them at the polls, they decided at one of their rowdiest conferences not to follow Hugh Gaitskell’s advice to delete Clause Four from their constitution. So in theory, and by conference decision, the Labour. Party stands for the sort of capitalism where all the means of production, distribution and exchange are nationalised. But of course they have not the slightest intention of doing anything about it.
Poor Gaitskell had a knack of infuriating his party’s conferences. Another example of a refusal to accept inconvenient decisions was when, after the 1960 vote in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament, he declared his intention to “fight, fight and fight again” and, because on that occasion some of the big unions had voted against him, questioned the morality of the block vote which had always been accepted as long as it docilely accepted the policy of the platform:
I sometimes think, firmly, that the system we have by which great unions decide their policy before even their conference can consider their executive's recommendation is not really a wise one or a good one.
It is clear that when a conference agrees with its leaders it is the authentic voice of democracy, rich in wisdom. When it disagrees it is irresponsible and treacherous. The peculiar thing is that, although the members of the capitalist parties must know this very well, they are still prepared to be delegates to their conferences, they still work for their party, they still welcome its taking power.
The plain fact is that whatever a conference may decide, a party’s policy is already fixed. No matter how bloodthirstily the Tory hangers and floggers pursued their prey at conference, Conservative Home Secretaries stuck out for penal reform. No matter what support the Rhodesia lobby gathers, the Conservative leadership must agree that the Smith regime should be brought to an end.
Similarly, even if the 1960 vote on nuclear weapons had not been reversed, no Labour government would have surrendered the British Bomb simply because their conference had told them to. Whichever way the vote went on this year’s battle over incomes, the government's mind was made up and the more coercive Part IV of the Prices and Incomes Bill was ready to be brought into operation.
And while we are on the subject, there is something which we should notice about the Prices and Incomes Bill. It is the first openly anti-trade union legislation for something like 40 years—and it is the work of a party which came into existence as a result of a conference decision of February, 1900, to establish
a distinct labour group in Parliament . . . which must embrace a readiness to co-operate with any party which for the time being may be engaged in promoting legislation in the direct interests of labour and . . . with any party in opposing measures having an opposite tendency.
What, we asked, are conferences for? Even if their decisions can be, and are, ignored they are often an opportunity for a party to pronounce on its policy. Perhaps some people may prefer to describe this as warning the working class what to expect, or as making the promises the breaking of which later conferences will have to explain away. In 1963, for example, Labour was hypnotised by the Wilson vision of a technological Britain, with a wise government guiding massive investment into the “science based” industries, with technicians enthusiastically at work in their laboratories and at their drawing boards and with everyone’s wages going up in a nice, steady, organised curve. It was all very good for the headlines, for the electoral image and all the other political public relations man's obsessions.
It usually happens that at such times there is so much concern with a party’s public image that nobody notices the policies which are being expounded from the platform do not amount to much. Consider George Brown’s unoriginal idea of settling the Vietnam war by recalling the Geneva conference—the very conference which first set up the division of the country and so played its part in bringing about the present war there.
At other times the publicity a conference receives can be disastrous for the party, like the 1960 Labour uproar over CND and the public spectacle of Tory leaders savaging each other as they clawed for the place left vacant by Macmillan’s retirement during the 1963 Blackpool conference.
Or a conference can be an outlet for a party's donkey workers. It can give them a break from the hard slog of committee work, canvassing, addressing. They can come to express their doubts and disappointments, to wonder what happened to the visions they once had, Then they can stifle their doubts, admire their leaders and finally submerge themselves in what they call loyalty, but for which there is an unkinder if more accurate name, at a mass rally. Then they can go back to the donkey work with renewed energy.
No conference ever probes, or even discusses the facts. No resolution ever says that the parties of capitalism exist to run the social system which oppresses and degrades millions of human beings, that this system can only be run in the interests of a minority and to the detriment of the majority. Labour’s “left wing” come to their conferences convinced that they are looking for the lost soul of their party—none of them points out, perhaps none of them realises, that a capitalist party is bound to deceive, to override its members’ wishes and to disappoint its followers by pushing through unpleasant and inhuman measures.
Conferences make a lot of noise, exhale a lot of hot air, attract a lot of publicity. But when it is all over, when the delegates have gone home and the hall has been cleared and the seaside has sunk back into its out-of-season doze, one thing is abundantly clear.
It was all a waste of time.
Ivan
