What Labour can learn from Liverpool

In this member post, Young Fabian member Andrew Shearwood reflects on his first Labour Party Conference, currently taking place in his home-town of Liverpool.

There a few words that can really describe the great feeling of attending your first party conference, particularly when the event is being hosted in your own city. Even without going into the main hall (alas my own exhibitor ticket doesn’t get me access), the sheer number of different fringe events has been incredible. And seeing the surprised looks when people realise what Liverpool is actually like has been quite a highlight.

On the first day of conference I decided to catch up with some members from around the country to show them around the city. Their exclamations of “it’s like Berlin but with more classical buildings” took even me by surprise: it’s clear that the city has made an incredible impression on visitors to conference.

Perhaps what is so surprising is that it has taken so long to finally bring the Labour Party Conference to Liverpool (it is the first since 1925). This was a talking point for local MP, Louise Ellman, at a fringe meeting that I helped arrange at a local landmark microbrewery –  “The Baltic Fleet” (much cheaper than the Albert Dock for those of you who haven’t tried). In a speech to rally the mostly local crowd, she described how just a few years ago if you suggested bring conference to the city, the organisers would simply smile and then list an abundance of reasons as to why it wouldn’t be possible, and how in such a short space of time the city has been able to turn that around.

At a time when the Labour Party is facing an incredible dilemma in creating policies that can bring the party back into power in the face of years of austerity and economic woes, it is exceptionally appropriate to be in a city that has more experience in these areas than any other.

In the city the local Labour Party managed to win back the council at the very height of “Clegg-Mania”. Since taking back control, and in the face of the highest level of cuts of any council in the country, the local party has still been able to introduce a programme of investing millions into schools that could have been so easily left behind by the axing of Building Schools for the Future.

Such a re-energised local party should form a cornerstone of how the national Labour Party can succeed in trying times, and it is these trying times that truly show what the party is made of.

Andrew Shearwood is a member of the Young Fabians.

Lib Dem conference and Coalition Government: who’s dragging who round the circus?

Years of ignoring the Lib Dems’ conferences are at an end, the Left should be careful to read the signs in Liverpool and the public’s reaction closely.

By the time you read this Nick Clegg will have made his pitch to the Liberal Democrat faithful that their Coalition with the Conservatives is “the right government for right now”. With the polls where they are, this message is going to be a tough sell and whether it convinces either his party’s faithful or the public is something only time will tell.

Poor Nick’s got a difficult balancing act: reaching out to the public without completely trampling over his party. Clegg has to convince his party that that he hasn’t gone native in Mr Cameron’s company.

Many will have thought that Coalition Government would be about Conservatives instigating policies and Liberal Democrats holding back the nastier Tory tendencies but the reality is proving more complex.

Over the weekend senior Liberal Democrat figures were actively trying to paint their party’s role in Government, behind closed doors at least, as being about ensuring the Lib Dem’s distinctive signature on every policy this Government puts through. On the BBC this weekend Simon Hughes was keen to make sure people understood that “ …there are lots of times when Nick will say ‘No, not now, or not this way’…or they’ll [Lib Dem ministers] be saying we need to go further, faster or differently”. I’m not sure whose fears that is supposed to allay. Its cold comfort for party members already uncomfortable on a whole raft of issues, already the word ‘dictatorship’ is being bandied around by the grassroots.

When you add public opinion that they don’t like large strands of Government policy, the question emerges: is it Cameron’s lot to blame or Clegg’s?

So far the Conservatives seem to be happy to acquiesce Clegg’s political muscle flexing but the future post-conference, especially the post-coalition agreement, looks stormier than ever. Already Saint Vince’s comments on the migrant cap have put him at odds with Teresa May, whilst Evan Harris has decided to put some distance between the ‘progressive wing’ of the Lib Dems and Clegg (though that distinction should probably have been made clearer to Lib Dem voters).

The Lib Dems are now tarred with very cut, every policy, and all the rhetoric of this Coalition Government. Why shouldn’t Labour cover them with feathers call them what they seem to be?

This puts a little pressure on Labour as it journeys up to Manchester. Thousands of new Labour members are actually Lib Dem voters angry at being sold a duff political project and by the end of this conference there are likely to be many more of them ready to  follow their lead.

But it is a very different scenario if uneasy Lib Dems MPs and councillors are, after a week in Liverpool, pushed/shoved/encouraged to search for a more comfortable political home.  What will Labour be ready, or able, to offer them?

Cameron and the spirit of Stanley Baldwin

In this guest post, Young Fabian member Laurence Turner reflects on the historical comparisons made with the current coalition government.

Nick Clegg would have us believe that we live in an age of reform comparable to the 1830s, but in truth it feels more like the 1930s.

On May 12th, David Cameron announced that the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats had ‘overcom[e] political differences to forge a new government in the national interest.’ This was powerful rhetoric, but the words were of a different age. They could easily have been uttered by a triumphant Stanley Baldwin almost eighty years earlier.

As historical actors, Baldwin and Cameron strike a similar pose. Both modernisers, both easy media performers, both leaders of anti-Labour coalitions. It seems from his speeches that Cameron is taking Baldwin’s style of leadership seriously, and so should we.

Like Cameron, Baldwin transformed the Conservative Party from a sectional organisation, ill-equipped to appeal to a changed electorate, into the dominant force in British politics. Most importantly, he successfully established his Party’s ‘non-political’ credentials and, by way of contrast, associated his opponents with the stigma of factionalism.

Of course, ‘non-political’ appeals are by their nature political, and inclusive rhetoric can be one of the most effective means of excluding and marginalising opposition groups. Baldwin spent almost ten years building a contrast between the ‘National’ Conservative Party and a ‘Socialist’ Labour Party – a strategy which provided the National Government with its rhetorical clothing.

There is a present danger for Labour here.

As Philip Williamson has argued, after 1931 ‘appeals to national interest, national unity, equal sacrifices, and responsibility overwhelmed those to socialism, social justice, and class’. The proof is striking: the National Government ticket won the 1935 General Election with 53.3% of the vote. Labour must engage more meaningfully with values and ideology, but if we phrase our appeal too narrowly then we will be similarly outmanoeuvred. The Left’s intellectual renaissance during the thirties needs to be emulated today, but that in itself was small compensation for a decade of Tory ascendancy.

Cameron and Clegg will try to emulate this achievement. The Left must develop the arguments needed to prevent this from occurring. History provides us with one small example: how can this be the ‘New Politics,’ when even the rhetoric has been lifted from the era of the Great Depression?

Of course, the parallel is inexact, and the contrasts are encouraging. Labour is not so hopelessly fractured as in 1931, and Cameron – though he has taken to coalition life well – does not seem as formidable an opponent as Baldwin. In terms of grand vision, for example, the Big Society is weak stuff compared to the enduring appeal of the Property Owning Democracy.

The spectre of The National Government does, however, help us to define the scale of the challenge that must be overcome if we are to see a genuinely progressive government back in Number 10.