The Labour Party conference took place as if in a state of siege, both physically and politically. Around the GMex conference in the centre of Manchester police had erected a ring of fortified barricades against the supposed threat of a car bomb attack. Delegates had to enter the conference area down walk ways with 10-foot high fences on either side. At the entrance in John Dalton Street, Labour Party officials vetted people for their delegate, press or visitor passes. They were assisted by two policemen toting submachine guns. Such weaponry was very much in evidence elsewhere around the GMex. Manchester’s finest were also very diligent in policing the small anti-war march – perhaps 3,000 strong – that wound its way past the conference centre on the Saturday before the conference started. Police cameramen were all over the march. There were attempts to arrest those who were wearing masks. Robert Clough reports.
No one expected anything new at the conference. It has no policy-making authority and this time there was not even going to be any votes. It exists solely for the media, to sell personalities, sound bites, whatever commodities can be created from bourgeois politics. That is what Labour’s democracy amounts to. As it happened, the media’s principle obsession was whether Brown would do enough to cling on to the premiership. They felt he had, for the moment. They also dwelt on David Miliband’s speech: would there be any coded challenge to Brown’s position? They were more divided on this: some thought he had, others thought he was biding his time. Does it matter? Both are united on key issues of domestic, economic and foreign policy. As it was, the threat of a cabinet revolt faded into nothing.
On the opening of the conference the Daily Telegraph published an opinion poll which confirmed that Labour is still on course for a wipe-out at the next general election, 20% behind the Tories. This was confirmed by a Politics Home poll which suggested that the Tories would win with a majority of 146. In The Times, former health minister Charles Clarke has urged Miliband not to equivocate – but then he is amongst a group of senior Blairites including Works and Pensions Secretary James Purnell who would lose their seats.
There is no serious challenge to Labour policy. The TUC conference which met two weeks earlier ruled out one-day national strikes in opposition to the government’s 2% public sector pay limit. It called for a windfall tax on energy companies, but delegates listened in silence when Chancellor Alistair Darling ruled this out in his speech. Trade unions may still hold the purse strings for the Labour Party, but there is no way they are going to organise serious opposition to the government. Unison General Secretary Dave Prentis confirmed this when commenting on Brown’s Labour Party speech he said that ‘The prime minister has shown his grit today and delivered a powerful speech full of determination and passion…[he] made it absolutely clear that the NHS will remain at the heart of a fair society…He showed clear red water between Labour and the Conservatives.’ He is very easily pleased: his members, however, are the ones who are going to suffer with rising food and fuel prices on the one hand, and wage cuts on the other. Unison gave Labour £1.5 million in the second quarter of this year. Nor was Prentis alone: Unite joint General Secretary Derek Simpson said that ‘this was a real Labour speech from a real Labour leader. He showed there is a huge gulf between Labour and the Tories.’
And what of the left? It was completely irrelevant at the conference and, like the TUC, eager to be pleased. In The Guardian, Seumas Milne described Brown’s speech as ‘the most unashamedly left-leaning speech by a British prime minister since the mid-1970s’ and then wrote of the ‘debate in Manchester’ that ‘Everywhere, fuelled by the financial crisis, there has been a thirst to discuss government intervention, equality and progressive taxation unheard of at a Labour conference for more than a decade’ (25 September 2008). The truth is very different. Labour’s solutions for the crisis will always involve making the working class pay. There was no break with the interests of financial capital and the City of London. There was no change in foreign policy, no change in immigration and asylum policy. That is why there can be no solution other than breaking from Labour and creating a real opposition.
FRFI 205 October / November 2008
