Labour Party Conference or Convention?

It was New York Governor Mario Cuomo who said, “You campaign in poetry, govern in prose”. Labour conference will struggle to identify which literary style it is speaking in.

In a parallel universe, the 2024 conference season would be the platform from which the parties would launch their manifestoes ahead of a general election campaign in the next seven weeks. But as with so many things, Labour can thank Rishi Sunak for the predicament they find themselves in, due to the timing of the election.

Labour conference now sits awkwardly between the ‘poetry’ of the manifesto and King’s Speech in the summer and the hard ‘prose’ of what is to be the most significant budget of this Parliament at the end of October and the Spending Review in the Spring.

Members of the Labour Cabinet who do not yet know what new money if any their departments will have to spend will struggle to fill even 15 minutes of conference platform speech time without resorting to cliches of how their personal biography taught them the lesson of (insert one of Labour’s five missions here). So rather than limited Secretaries of State to 10 minutes we expect several cabinet members will forge their speeches entirely. So what replaces this?

Labour’s plan is to produce an event that could almost be mistaken for quadrennial party conventions of the United States; pageantry over policy. Expect more videos akin to party political broadcasts that BBC Parliament will need to cut away from and potentially some surprise endorsements from (not quite) households names.

Expect to see Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves collectively taking up the lion’s share of the focus as Labour seeks to ‘reintroduce’ them to the public and the several thousand additional attendees to Liverpool compared with last year. But do not expect much air time given to the smaller department minister unless it is to introduce to the stage one the bigger ones.

This time next year we will know the outcome of the budget, the spending review and a spring statement, along with several assented acts of Parliament. Labour’s leadership will decide if Conference should return to a more meaningful update on its progress in Government to the faithful, or if its should look more towards the horizon and continue the poetry.

Are you heading to Labour Conference, get in touch with the team here.
Photo credit: Number 10, Flickr