I am not at the Scottish Conference. My weekend has instead been taken up with a visit to Tesco, a bit of leafleting and, OK, I admit it, following the conference on social media. It feels a bit strange to someone who was an Annual Conference junkie from 1983 on. I sometimes missed the Scottish one but never the ‘Labour Party Conference’.
Ask our two daughters and they will tell you tales of long journeys to Brighton and Blackpool and hours of conference crèche play. Sometimes we took Sandra’s mum to baby sit. Brighton and Blackpool in turn was suddenly interrupted with a year at Bournemouth. Ryanair did a direct flight from Prestwick then and I remember Bournemouth being very hilly. It just didn’t feel the same when the Conference started moving to other cities like Manchester or Liverpool.
It wasn’t just the location that changed - the conference itself changed. My early memories are of long compositing meetings and motions carried by the Union block votes. The joke used to be that when someone asked who would like tea or coffee the answer was 4 million for tea and 2 million for coffee. We were in the tea room at the Bournemouth Conference in 1985 when Eric Heffer marched past us having stormed off the platform and out of the hall after Neil Kinnock took on Militant. He won acclaim for his speech accusing Militant run Liverpool of causing a grotesque scene, "hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers."
High-spots for us in those days were contributions from Arthur Scargill in support of the Miners’ Strike, bravura performances from Trade Union leaders like Jack Jones and emotional pleas for nuclear disarmament by Philip Noel Baker and Monsignor Bruce Kent. Then there were the wall to wall fringe meetings. How often was it possible to hear Tony Benn speak in one night? It wasn’t all politics. I remember some amazing social nights. An Irish Night compèred by the irascible Dominic Behan sticks in my slightly befuddled memory. Another night Sandra and I went to a meeting which we thought was on some interesting international topic only to find we had gone into the wrong room and were now the only lay people in a room of staff from the reinforced steel industry. There was no escape from this riveting experience. What made it worse was we could hear applause and laughter through the wall from the meeting we had meant to go to.
These were the years of great conference punch ups. When New Labour took over everything changed. Conference became totally stage managed, window dressing around the Leader’s speech. Even so it was good to be alive then when we were winning and making such a difference to people’s lives. There were still memorable moments. Brighton 2000 saw Nelson Mandela address conference. In Blackpool 2002 it was the turn of Bill Clinton to give a masterclass in how to deliver a conference speech beginning with the words ‘Conference, Bill Clinton, Arkansas South CLP’. Gordon Brown delivered some fantastic speeches too.
As the years passed we started picking and choosing the sessions we would go to and even missing out Conference some years altogether. It’s really good to see that conferences have come alive again with a new generation feeling the excitement and adrenaline we experienced all those years ago. The conference still ends with the singing of the Red Flag - it’s just that next year it’s rumoured the singing will be led by Taylor Swift.
Ask our two daughters and they will tell you tales of long journeys to Brighton and Blackpool and hours of conference crèche play. Sometimes we took Sandra’s mum to baby sit. Brighton and Blackpool in turn was suddenly interrupted with a year at Bournemouth. Ryanair did a direct flight from Prestwick then and I remember Bournemouth being very hilly. It just didn’t feel the same when the Conference started moving to other cities like Manchester or Liverpool.
It wasn’t just the location that changed - the conference itself changed. My early memories are of long compositing meetings and motions carried by the Union block votes. The joke used to be that when someone asked who would like tea or coffee the answer was 4 million for tea and 2 million for coffee. We were in the tea room at the Bournemouth Conference in 1985 when Eric Heffer marched past us having stormed off the platform and out of the hall after Neil Kinnock took on Militant. He won acclaim for his speech accusing Militant run Liverpool of causing a grotesque scene, "hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers."
High-spots for us in those days were contributions from Arthur Scargill in support of the Miners’ Strike, bravura performances from Trade Union leaders like Jack Jones and emotional pleas for nuclear disarmament by Philip Noel Baker and Monsignor Bruce Kent. Then there were the wall to wall fringe meetings. How often was it possible to hear Tony Benn speak in one night? It wasn’t all politics. I remember some amazing social nights. An Irish Night compèred by the irascible Dominic Behan sticks in my slightly befuddled memory. Another night Sandra and I went to a meeting which we thought was on some interesting international topic only to find we had gone into the wrong room and were now the only lay people in a room of staff from the reinforced steel industry. There was no escape from this riveting experience. What made it worse was we could hear applause and laughter through the wall from the meeting we had meant to go to.
These were the years of great conference punch ups. When New Labour took over everything changed. Conference became totally stage managed, window dressing around the Leader’s speech. Even so it was good to be alive then when we were winning and making such a difference to people’s lives. There were still memorable moments. Brighton 2000 saw Nelson Mandela address conference. In Blackpool 2002 it was the turn of Bill Clinton to give a masterclass in how to deliver a conference speech beginning with the words ‘Conference, Bill Clinton, Arkansas South CLP’. Gordon Brown delivered some fantastic speeches too.
As the years passed we started picking and choosing the sessions we would go to and even missing out Conference some years altogether. It’s really good to see that conferences have come alive again with a new generation feeling the excitement and adrenaline we experienced all those years ago. The conference still ends with the singing of the Red Flag - it’s just that next year it’s rumoured the singing will be led by Taylor Swift.
RSS Feed
