5 October 2023
Blowin’ in the Wind
by Paul Branch
Another month, another round of Party conferences. The LibDems seemed to set no one alight with theirs, maybe because they had nothing much new to say, other than let’s get the Tories out. Next week the Labour Party return to Liverpool for their annual jamboree, taking time out from measuring the curtains in preparation for their move back into to Number Ten, perhaps fretting over ways to make Sir Keir look a bit more dynamic and hoping that Jeremy’s day in the sun is well and truly over. But eyes turn to Manchester, its significance as a staging post for HS2 looking increasingly untenable if our high-speed fiasco turns into a northern extension to the Elizabeth Line, as a way of levelling up the Midlands and the Home Counties.
Traditionally the Conservatives need no excuse for a party, as exemplified and amplified this week by the Farage-Patel karaoke. Luckily this strange fandango between an even stranger couple took some of the attention from the keynote speeches delivered by the likes of the Chancellor, the Education Secretary and the Home Secretary. Takeaways and details from these were thin on the ground. On the economy we heard that reducing our hyper-inflation was as good as a tax break. In schools there will be no more mobile phones in class. And on immigration there was a characteristically bravura self-promotional performance by Suella, castigating all those daring to seek a better life in this neck of the woods. Even if Rishi’s self-preservation input to the conference climax were to be judged excellent, the entertainment and enlightenment levels leading up to his performance have been pretty grim. Why oh why wasn’t Michael Gove invited onto the dance floor with Nigel and Priti, just to give the whole extravaganza that little bit more oomph?
Party conferences don’t come cheap, so one wonders about their real importance and how much influence they carry. In the case of the LibDems and Labour there’s a chance to reflect on and celebrate recent by-election successes and project forward to the possible outcomes of a national election, whenever that might occur. Reinforcing basic tenets of each party’s beliefs and values by means of non-controversial policy statements carries little risk for them of the opinion polls slipping away. For the Conservatives however it seems their conference needs to at least play some part in keeping the party faithful happy and keeping ministers in their jobs. Rishi Sunak has not exactly had a stellar year with factions within his party baying for tax cuts as defence against a possible impending election, so one could argue that Manchester loomed large in his diary as an opportunity to steady the ship, reassure the nay-sayers and gather the membership behind him as their leader. One wonders what he makes now of the sell-out event involving Liz Truss flanked by the avuncular omnipresent Nigel Farage, and the speculation that one or the other could be the next Conservative leader. Some ardent supporters argue that Liz was right all along, and will be vindicated in her approach once mortgage rates descend to affordable levels. Others contend that Nigel professes Conservative values and has always been one of their own. Rishi needed his address to the conference to encourage those with contrary views on both personalities, so little wonder that this domestic occasion took precedence over attending a UN summit in New York, including a show-and-tell session on how well each national leader was doing on their plans to avert global warming. Rishi’s decision to let the likes of Biden, Macron and the rest get on with it without him was admirable in its reduction in pollution levels by not taking a return flight to the US, but these international gatherings don’t happen too often and it does seem like an opportunity missed to discuss with his peers the important global matters of the day (Ukraine, say, and indeed climate change) but no doubt his deputy made a good job of it …. and hopefully expended less pollutants getting there.
What the electorate makes of Party conferences is another matter. A political scientist based at the Paris Institute of Political Studies has performed an anthropological analysis of British party conferences over several decades, starting with the assumption that these events are central to political party life in their aims to help set policy agendas and develop policy options, legitimise policy choices, build party cohesion, motivate activists and test the effectiveness of campaign messages on the general public. Or at least that was the original intention. Many moons ago, before the tidal waves of wall-to-wall live TV and social media coverage, significant policies were proposed in some detail and serious debates were had. Nowadays as we’ve seen, the focus has sharpened towards presenting an attractive face to the electorate, of both the party and its leader, by turning the event into a publicity platform. Standing ovations for the leader’s concluding speech are a mandatory centrepiece of the conference, following scripted and polished political theatre aimed at provoking headlines across every available media platform. This significant change in direction and attitude prompted the Paris study to gauge the effectiveness of party conferences by examining electorate voting intentions before and after each conference based on aggregating opinion polls taken between August and October. A successful conference should result in an improvement in voting intentions after the conference season in October compared to beforehand in August, whereas a disastrous conference would show a significant decline.
One example of such a shift in public opinion occurred after the Labour conference in 1960, where there was widespread disunity following loss of the election the previous year. At the conference and in spite of passionate opposition by leader Hugh Gaitskell, party activists pushed through a motion unilaterally abandoning Britain’s nuclear deterrent. The loss in voting intentions that year was 5%, from 42% in August to 37% in October. A converse example occurred last year when Labour’s voting intentions soared by 11%, from 41% in August 2022 to 52% in October. The study does point out however that a major contributor may well have been the reactions of the financial markets and public opinion (outrage) to the attempt by Liz Truss to introduce unfunded tax cuts, and the opportunity given to Labour at its conference to attack the government’s handling of the ensuing crisis. The fact that Liz bizarrely started her own address at the Conservative conference with a standing ovation even before she spoke may also have been a factor. Conservative voting intentions August-October last year plummeted 7%, from 31% to 24%.
But these are exceptions rather than the norm. The study found that over the period 1955 (when the Conservative Party conference was first televised, no doubt following the trend in the US) to 2022, there were no significant changes in voting intentions. The numbers barely moved between August and October with averages of 38% Conservatives, 42% Labour, and 14% Liberals/Libdems. Hardly surprisingly, the study concludes that party conferences carry more risks than benefits, cause party leaders enormous anxiety, and have zero impact in the eyes of an electorate that discounts the childish theatrics, the windbag rhetoric and the hype. Bottom line – ditch the egoistical cheerleading nonsense, and go back to focusing on the electorate with serious debate and professional policy development. And hopefully, one day, our leaders will get the message and indeed feel the wind of change blowing them in a new direction.
[Stop press: since this was written the northern part of HS2 has been cancelled. Ed]
