Labour Conference 2022 where Toryism ices the cake of centrism.
When the year is 2022, and you are the Labour Party and think your best path to power is to leach disaffected Tories into the fold by making your political brand about patriotism rather than pragmatic socialism, you’ve lost more than your way, you’ve lost your soul. More importantly, Britain doesn't have time for Labour to find its way back to being a party which represents the interests of ordinary people.
The Labour Party conference in Liverpool will be as inspiring as a convention for HR professionals in the debt recovery industry.
If my dad were alive, I know he wouldn’t have been invited to speak at this year’s conference like he was in 2014 when it was held in Manchester. But then again, in 2014 Labour was a centre-left party or at least it was on paper.
My dad was ninety-one that year and, before then had never been invited to speak at a Labour Party convention because he was a political nobody and happy to be a political nobody. My father, however, stopped being a political nobody at the age of 90 when in anger over the dismantling of the Welfare State by centre and rightwing political parties, he began to speak out on social media about what awaited society if we didn't save the Welfare State. People took notice including labour. So there he was in 2014, a speaker at a political party conference. Yet, he was no fan of political conferences and had never attended one before in any capacity.
“All my life, I’ve believed politics can change a society. But I just cannot stand the bullshit that comes from being in a convention hall with a bunch of politicians. Even the best will betray someone, some ideal or some cause from spite, foolishness, greed, or self-advancement.”
Unite and The Mirror had asked him to speak at their joint Fringe event on Tory austerity. He agreed because it was a good venue for him to promote his just-published, Harry’s Last Stand and the socialist values represented in his book.
The day before his event we checked into the Premier Inn and went to investigate the conference centre.
My dad laughed when he spotted Chuka Umunna strut about the empty conference centre, instructing people on how best to put up displays.
"He's a man with ambition that exceeds his grasp."
The following morning at breakfast, my father watched Dennis Skinner hold court at the Premiere Inn restaurant telling tales of campaigns and conferences of long ago. He impressed ordinary conference-goers by his legitimate boast Labour HQ had offered him more expensive digs, but he preferred slumming it with the ordinary folk. Afterwards, my dad remarked,
“He’s a dandy from the coal face. But that’s ok because he is no class traitor and fought for the disadvantaged all his life.”
To the 2014 Labour party Harry Leslie Smith was an enigma they tolerated because the Daily Mirror and Unite said he was a thing. They simply didn’t know what to make of someone coming to speak at the Labour Party conference with no political, business or union connections, who had lived in Canada for 50 years but had the temerity to scold modern British society for forgetting its socialist roots. Moreover, my dad was only supposed to do that one fringe event and be gone. But my father’s fringe speech about what it was like growing up Working Class before the Welfare State was so well received Labour invited him to give a speech about the NHS to party delegates in the main hall right before Andy Burnham was to give his keynote speech about the healthcare system. I suspect it was the Mirror and Unite pushing for this rather than Labour itself because, although polite to him, they didn’t grasp my father’s potential to move an auditorium to its feet.
The day before my dad’s speech, The Mirror set up a meet and greet with Labour’s then-leader Ed Miliband which didn’t go that well because both men were tired, and both men looked each other up and down as if to say: “Why the hell am I wasting my time with the other when I have a speech to prepare.”
After the meeting, my dad said to me.
“I don’t give a shit about those mucks.” My speech tomorrow is about giving voice to the dead who were lost beneath the waves of capitalism and a class system that favoured wealth. I want to remind people of their working-class past and motivate them to fight for a better society. If this all falls on deaf ears, I had an honourable shot at changing things. Never in my life did I expect to be here. So, to hell with it if it goes to shit. We will have a beer, a good dinner, and fuck off back home.”
The following morning I wheeled my dad in a transport wheelchair to the green room at the conference centre for those scheduled to speak. Dennis Skinner was in the room and said hello to my dad, which calmed my dad’s nerves a bit. My father was anxious because he had never spoken to thousands of people. Before this, his audiences had been a handful of people at a time.
His mood was eased when Dennis Skinner began telling stories to him about political canvassing with Tony Benn in the late 1960s.
Then an attendant called my dad’s name and ushered him backstage for his speech. After my father left, the green room was deserted, except for Dennis Skinner, Keith Vaz, and me.
Skinner and Vaz got into an intense argument over Vaz’s machinations, to remove Skinner from the foreign affairs committee. At first, the two were polite, and then Skinner tore into Vaz like he had done to the coalface when he was a young man toiling in the pits of Derbyshire.
It was excruciatingly uncomfortable to witness. It was like being at a restaurant where at the next table a couple's argument is driving them to a brutal divorce. When it was over, Vaz stormed out but returned after Skinner was called to the auditorium. Vaz then chastised his assistant and demanded he was never left alone in a room with “that man again.”
While my dad waited to be called on stage to give his NHS speech at the Labour Party conference, Dennis Skinner kept him company in the auditorium hall. Skinner kept him calm by cracking jokes. He took my dad’s mind away from the job he was about to do- remind Britain it had a duty to preserve the Welfare State built by the generation who had fought in World War Two.
The speech my dad gave at the 2014 Labour Party conference was a great political triumph for a man who only wanted to give voice to the voiceless from his generation. Finally, someone from the working class who had lived through the horrors of the Great Depression told the Labour Party: “Don’t make my past your future.”
And, it resonated with them. The day after my dad gave that speech, he was on the front page of all major British newspapers. Over the next 48 hours, news producers requested interviews for their outlets in Britain, Canada, and the USA. The Independent said, with a picture of my dad on their front page:
“Finally, Labour has found its voice.”
But after Labour’s electoral defeat in 2019 and Starmer’s winning Labour's party leadership race in 2020, Labour’s voice is no longer for people like my father or people that want a Britain for the many rather than the view. It is a voice that speaks to those who desire power not to change things but gild a kinder face of oppression on a system of inequality and greed. Society can not survive the current status quo regardless of whether it is in Tory hands or Labour's hands.
