If one of the most memorable images of a party conference is of hands around a human throat, something has surely gone very wrong. Last Monday, on the second day of Labour’s gathering in Liverpool, there it was: as two activists from the campaign group Climate Resistance disrupted the speech by Rachel Reeves, 45 seconds of panic ensued, in which the most vocal protester – who decided to remain anonymous, though he was soon named by the Daily Mail – was violently bundled out in the most grim way imaginable.
I am not sure whether the ugliness of what happened really registered, but the footage makes it clear. “We are still selling arms to Israel,” the protester shouts. “I thought we were voting for change, Rachel. Climate breakdown is on our doorstep.” He lets out a few more words, but they are lost in what happens next: a sudden knock to the floor, quickly followed by one hand curling around the back of his neck to the point that it looks as if he might choke, before another hand momentarily comes close to strangling him from the front.
The camera cuts to the chancellor, trying to affect an air of unruffled control, but looking nervous. And then comes her big line. She bellows it: “This is a changed Labour party. A Labour party that represents working people, not a party of protest.”
When something similar happened during Keir Starmer’s oration – this time, the protest was pointedly about the killing of Palestinian children – he followed much the same script. “This guy’s obviously got a pass for the 2019 conference,” he said. “We’ve changed the party.” A burst of his very inappropriate laughter came with body language that was obviously intended to convey a swaggering disdain. It later turned out that the 18-year-old heckler, Daniel Riley, had joined Labour in 2022, approving of “a more moderate force that could win the election”. However, he had since been pushed to despair, mostly by the leadership’s responses to the assault on Gaza.
I went to Liverpool last week, and felt a very familiar sense of disorientation. There is nothing else in our culture like the modern conference ritual, particularly when it is organised by the party of government: a complete absence of natural light, thousands of men dressed in dark blue suits, speeches whose relevance to anything evaporates almost as soon as they are delivered, and the kind of overwhelming whiff of corporate influence that led to Labour’s gathering being swiftly dubbed “Davos on the Mersey”.
Woven through what happens, of course, are worthwhile discussions of very important subjects, and a chance for MPs, councillors and party activists to share ideas. But precious little of that makes its way into the foreground. Instead, what defines these events – certainly in the minds of the public – is an almost unique mixture of dullness and absurdity.
My favourite example is the convention of cabinet ministers being seated en bloc and watching the prime minister’s speech in full view of the cameras, which catch all their forced laughs and overenthusiastic applause, along with any flickers of unease: proper Soviet Union stuff, and one of those practices that everyone involved knows is utterly ridiculous even as they willingly play along.
In that sense, those two disruptions did their job, briefly delivering an injection of the dissent and raw humanity that was either kept out or stage-managed away. Even if the protesters had to be ejected, I can just about imagine more dignified responses from Starmer and Reeves. “I completely understand that you want climate action and peace in the Middle East, but you should think for a minute and support a government working for both those things”, or some such.
They could even have taken the old-fashioned option of letting the protesters make their points, and then responding. The fact that this feels like an outlandish point to make is proof of how hopelessly rigid and formulaic the political mainstream now is – which, in a world awash with a very modern mixture of passion and cynicism, is part of the reason why it no longer connects.
Remember: we have just been through an election in which the two main parties received their lowest ever combined share of the vote. Does the answer to that really lie in such anachronistic nonsense as hour-long leader’s speeches, and events that arrive in the places lucky enough to host them like vast alien spacecraft, almost completely cut off from their surrounding environment?
All this boils down to a thought that nagged at me throughout my Liverpool experience: after the Scottish independence referendum, Brexit, the rise and fall of Jeremy Corbyn and the arrival in politics of the indefatigable Nigel Farage, why are mainstream politicians now behaving as if none of that has happened?
Labour has a few additional things to think about. The leadership’s endlessly parroted dichotomy between serious politics and mere “protest” does not even begin to stack up. Deep in the marrow of the party that Starmer now leads is an enduring connection to dissent and disruption reflected in the biographies of countless Labour politicians.
The prime minister himself was once a co-editor of a leftwing magazine called Socialist Alternatives – and, I would imagine, was no stranger to marches and placards. As a lawyer, he helped the two environmental and social justice activists whose battle with McDonald’s (and the British state) went all the way to the European court of human rights. If all that is now to be thrown overboard, a once vital link between the social grassroots and formal politics will be lost. Maybe that is what the people in charge want. But if it happens, the party will look even more drab and distant.
This week it is the turn of the Tories to spend a few days in conference land. It is some token of their sudden irrelevance that any would-be protesters will probably think that there are much better uses of their time than travelling to Birmingham to heckle Robert Jenrick or Kemi Badenoch. But even in the Conservatives’ case, much the same critique applies. The battle between the remaining leadership candidates might give the proceedings a frisson of dramatic tension, but the basic features of the gathering will be familiar: dark blue suits and corporate stands, but in fewer numbers.
One aspect of last week’s political coverage highlighted the basic problem, for both parties. The majority of reports said that Labour’s conference was a very awkward affair: “weird”, “subdued”, “like one of those now rather out-of-date weddings at which the bride and groom leave early”.
Most of that was put down to the controversies over gifts and donations, the cut to the winter fuel allowance and splits in Downing Street. But the event also felt profoundly strange because in times such as ours, such occasions deserve that description, irrespective of what happens. Everything has changed. The old rituals no longer work. Has anyone noticed?
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
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