The Empty Hall — what I miss most about Labour conference
If you know what ‘late accreditation’ means, then this article is for you. Like Dante’s purgatorio, lying between hellfire and paradise, late accreditation is a place, behind a seaside hotel, filled with lost, wandering souls waiting for their passes to allow them in to Labour Party conference. They have left it too late, or failed to post the application, or have committed the sin of being called ‘Murphy’ or ‘Shalhoub’ or ‘Trotsky’ and have attracted the attention of special branch.
In my 30 years of attending party conference, I have found myself in the queue for the magic pass more than once. But not this year. This year, we must make do with ‘Labour Connected’ which starts today, on what would have been the first day of Labour Party conference in Liverpool.
No amount of Zooming can compensate for the loss of Labour’s annual gathering of the clans in Manchester, Liverpool, Bournemouth or Brighton. Everyone’s conference is different — the NEC members in grand hotels and grim morning meetings; the journalists stalking the bars late at night like panthers, the cabinet/shadow cabinet dementedly rushing from fringe to fringe with young, folder-carrying aides in their slipstream, the leader’s office building towards the Big Speech, and drunkenly celebrating afterwards, the lobbyists earnestly hoping for a word with the MP amid the clatter of the Brighton Centre coffee bar, knowing nothing will be remembered afterwards, and of course the constituency delegates, slowly realising their role is mostly a walk-on, without lines, designed to make the hall look full.
I recall my first conference, as the delegate from an affiliated organisation with a block vote of 4,000 in my hand. I sneaked a peak at the rail union’s Jimmy Knapp’s block vote. It said 94,000. That was the last conference when the entire constituency section of conference — every CLP in the land — amounted to 10% of the conference floor. One in ten. Don’t let anyone tell you there was a golden age of delegate democracy in the Labour Party, fatally undermined by Tony Blair. Until the modernisers got to work, for 90 years constituency delegates had virtually no influence on the result of votes.
There was a kind of rhythm to conference. For the cognoscenti it began on Friday or Saturday, with the London Labour Party reception as the first mass gathering. Then began the strange ritual of nodding at acquaintances — half-remembered faces from long-ago meetings — as they sped past you in the corridors of the Brighton Grand or the seafront at Blackpool. At first, huge enthusiasm, like brothers and sisters reuniting. By the fourth of fifth time, a resigned, half-hearted nod of the head.
I learned early on, through laziness rather than insight, that if you stop, conference keeps going. So, a prominent sofa in the conference hotel can be taken up, and sooner or later, everyone you know will pass and say hello. Ten hours on a sofa is bad from the point of view of deep-vein thrombosis, but great for gossip.
There are those who drink into the small hours, and somehow emerge in time for 8am breakfast fringe meetings. In the olden days, we would wait for the first editions of the newspapers to arrive at 5am or 6am, straight from the London train to the lobby of the Grand or Metropole, with write-ups which read like the journalist was reporting on a different event altogether.
One year, the weather was so sunny I took an early morning dip in the English Channel, only to emerge from the waves like a male, bald, fat, hairy Ursula Andress and bump into the entire Unite delegation, suited and booted, on their way to their breakfast meeting.
Then, on Sunday, things begin in earnest. The Christian Socialist church service, the EPLP reception, the Tribune Rally, fish and chips with the NUT, clandestine caucuses for Labour First or CLPD, depending on your preference, the Mirror party, the Progress Rally, the Animal Welfare karaoke, and the anticipation for the Leader’s Speech on Tuesday afternoon. Saturday to Tuesday — the steady crescendo to the climax, and once the Leader has spoken, a downward spiral of drinks, dramas and departures. Scots Night, Welsh Night, the Labour Students disco, the New Statesman party.
There is, of course, an actual conference going on. At times during our history, the conference floor has been the scene of great spectacle. Bevin the trade unionist denouncing Lansbury the pacifist at Brighton in 1935 for ‘hawking your conscience around’ and hastening the ejection of the old boy from the leadership.
Nye Bevan conducting a reverse ferret on his support for unilateral nuclear disarmament in 1957, again in Brighton, warning of going ‘naked into the conference chamber’, which his biographer Michael Foot later described like being present at a murder.
Kinnock in 1985 in Bournemouth with his brave attack on the ‘tendency tacticians’ of Militant: ‘some of our number become like latter-day public school-boys. It seems it matters not whether you won or lost, but how you played the game.’
There have been great moments in the hall — conference stars like Jo Richardson or Barbara Castle, orators like Brown or Benn, comedians like Skinner or Tony Banks, statespeople like Mandela and Bill Clinton, delegates from the NHS, schools, care homes and factory floors who can fill your eyes with tears and rouse you to your feet in applause.
I have only spoken to conference a couple of times, the first time thirty years ago in support of proportional representation (still waiting) and the second as the vote of thanks after Barbara Castle. Those who have made it to the podium, with the lights in your eyes and your heart pumping, will never forget the experience.
And the final day — usually the deputy leader — and a knock-about speech, the Red Flag, Jerusalem, the endless goodbyes, and a return to a world where people don’t nod and smile as they pass you by, nobody knows where the Fabian fringe is, and you have to pay for food and drink.
Conference (always without a definite or indefinite article) is the annual reminder that the Labour Party is a family. Like all families, it has its share of lecherous uncles, disappointing children, and racist grandparents. It is sometimes, to borrow from Orwell, a family with the wrong members in control.
But it is a family nonetheless, and this year I am missing it.
Paul Richards is a writer-for-hire.
