What a week it has been from arriving as a fresh faced first timer at Liberal Democrat Conference in Glasgow on Saturday after an epic 7 hour coach journey to finally being home and feeling a lot less sleep deprived.
I’m in a relatively unique position having been able to attend and take part in two different party political conferences. For the last two years, I attended and spoke at Labour Conference. In May of this year, I joined the Liberal Democrats. You can read more about that here.
I thought it might be interesting to talk about the main differences and similarities between both parties’ annual gatherings.
For the Liberal Democrats, Conference is formally opened before moving to wine and the conference rally. For Labour it’s much the same but a day later and then the fringes start. The Liberal Democrats discuss policy, and vote on motions published in advance with an opportunity to amend them should conference wish. In Labour they discuss up to 6 contemporary issues which are submitted by constituency parties. These general topics are voted on and then composited. There are votes at labour conferences, but never any debate or contentiousness – very different from the Liberal Democrats.
The 6 debates at labour conference are chosen by ballot. The trade union/socialist societies get to pick 3 and the constituencies get to pick the rest. However, the constituency groups are “whipped” by their regional officers to vote for what the unions want. So more often then not, only 3 actual motions are debated. And I use the word debate in the loosest possible sense. There is a mover (usually a trade union general secretary) and a seconder (usually a constituency member). The “debate” that then follows contains members picked from the floor to speak on the vague subject. When you hear the votes of the ballots announced you will notice that the numbers seem odd. The trade union ballot cast by one member of that union – count for the number of affiliated members in that union. So roughly 3 million votes get cast to decide what is debated. The same applies for constituencies, where a single delegate voting counts for all their members in that constituency. At Liberal Democrat Conference, the voting rep’s card counts as just one vote.
At Liberal Democrat conference we submit speakers’ cards and the chair and the aide pick cards to ensure a balanced debate on the motion. Again Labour conference is very different. Watch a debate at Labour conference this week, and I am pretty certain the speakers called will go something like this: a prospective parliamentary candidate, a trade unionist and then someone from a constituency hand-picked and ensured that their speech is “on message.” I have spoken twice at Labour conference. If you want to see them they are here and here. My Liberal Democrat conference speech is here.
The similarities between the two events are what you might expect. The fringe events are similar (RSPCA beer and curry anyone?) and many of the exhibition stands are the same (BBC, Royal Mail etc). The conference bar is the hub of socialising, MPs being around and about. However Liberal Democrat conference featured a real ale bar (hurrah!) and the MPs are much more accessible and not surrounded by their staffers. At Labour conference it’s much more difficult to meet MPs and the key players in the party.
Labour conference lacks is at best democracy lite whereas Liberal Democrat conference is and remains our party’s policy forming body and we should be proud of that.
See you in York!
* Sarah Brown is a Liberal Democrat activist who lives in Manchester.
