Kath Raymond Hinton

The last Labour party conference I went to was Gordon Brown’s first as Prime Minister. It was during my short stint in the No 10 policy unit, before a gypsy read my palm and told me to emigrate to America (only some of that sentence is true).
Ever since then, I’ve been meaning to go back. But, every year, something more important or interesting has stopped me. I’m not going to make this year’s conference either. I’ll be in New York – as will Gordon Brown, come to think of it.
It’s no overstatement to say the Labour movement is beginning to fracture. On the Left, Ed Miliband has alienated the unions, on the Right the Blairites despair. Now add Damian McBride to this stew.
It’s all reminiscent of the faction-riven, dysfunctional days of the early 1980s. Not so bad, for sure, but still worrying.
It will take a real leader to put it all back together again. Whether Ed is that leader is uncertain, at best.
Miliband is now drinking in his own Last Chance Saloon – the Labour Party conference in Brighton.
He must now be putting the last touches to what needs to be the speech of his life, something to negate the backstabbing misery of his summer of discontents, and shift the now-entrenched perception that he hasn’t quite got ‘it’.
Like a Butlin’s holiday, his speech needs to have something for everyone. For angry trade unionists still gunning for a fight; for door-knocking activists desperate for reassurance; for disillusioned backbenchers who have watched with impotent horror as the party hurtled towards a train crash of self-imposed poverty and exile. I’d mention voters, but who has the time to worry about them this week?
It’s going to take more than bog-standard anti-Tory rhetoric to contain the party panic, or calm the union ire. There will be crowd-pleasing promises to abolish the ‘bedroom tax’, crackdown on minimum-wage dodging employers and force big business to take on apprentices. Policies, at last – but they won’t do much.
Michael Gove last month wielded what he must have imagined was the ultimate insult – comparing Miliband unfavorably with Neil Kinnock, circa 1985. Speaking to Conservative members, Gove painted Unite as a modern Militant Tendency and Miliband as an unworthy heir.
“While Kinnock moved bravely and remorselessly to eradicate Militant’s influence and Militant-sponsored MPs from Labour, Miliband has done nothing to stop the takeover of his own party,” said Gove.
It was a crude, cruel piece of politicking, but just close enough to the truth to leave a few bruises. Miliband’s speech in July on the “new politics” and Labour’s relationship with the trade unions had been a shrewd but cynical response to weeks of bad publicity. This was proven beyond doubt by Labour’s eventual ruling that Unite had, after all, acted with propriety; Miliband’s limp and retreating TUC appearance; and Lord (Ray) Collins’s empty paper on trade union “reform.”
But maybe Ed Miliband can still take a lesson from Neil Kinnock and his dramatic, unifying 1985 Conference speech. The truth is that history has not – yet – given Kinnock his due. In the popular mind, there is no recognition that he was Labour’s first true moderniser.
We don’t need Ed to yell and heckle; we don’t want a speech to send the GMB’s Paul Kenny stalking, Eric Heffer-like, out of the hall. Labour isn’t quite at that stage yet.
The most important, party-changing part of Kinnock’s Militant-busting speech wasn’t his attack on Derek Hatton or the Labour councilors who had condemned Liverpool to chaos and bankruptcy. It was this:
“We must not dogmatise or browbeat. We have got to reason with people; we have got to persuade people. That is their due. We have voluntarily, every one of us, joined a political party. We wish a lot more people would come and join us, help us, give us their counsel, their energies, their advice, broaden our participation. But in making the choice to join a political party we took a decision, and it was that, by persuasion, we hoped that we could bring more people with us. So that is the basis on which we have got to act, want to act”.
That’s the real “new politics”. And if Ed Miliband stands up at Conference and tells us all that, and means it, maybe he’s got something after all. Maybe even the unions will listen.