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Reflections I
By Andy | March 4, 2008
Well, I suppose I should start by reflecting on the conference’s leadership speeches.
Brown’s speech on Saturday seemed to completely divide the membership. Some were very impressed with the speech while others felt it was lacking. Others still felt it was a very poor speech. Not only did the speech divide the audience but those divisions were often quite unusual. There were hard core Blairites praising the speech and Brown supporters who didn’t like it. One Minister was supposed to have said that “at last Brown has stopped trying the pretend to be different to Blair”. To others, of course, that difference is critical.
On my part I thought it was the best speech that I’ve heard him give so far, but that doesn’t mean that I considered it to be a good speech. On the positive side this was more of the kind of speech that I’d imagine a Labour leader giving. When Brown talks about his long term project - to build a better Britain - you don’t doubt his sincerity. Brown is a man aiming to build a society for the future to sit alongside the economy for the future that he has been struggling with for so long. For example, he peppers the speech with references to Facebook, YouTube and the internet in general. He’s not trying to be hip here. I’m sure he doesn’t spend much time with any of these services but he does understand the way in which new, interactive, media is changing the world in which we live.
But then was the worrying side. There seemed to be rather a lot of the speech that was aimed at the Daily Mail. We kept hearing about supporting “Hard Working Families”; it almost became the mantra of the conference. But it was never clear what this meant and many members - including those that are most loyal - were disturbed by the under-currents of this. Similarly, references to our country and to Britain seemed slightly odd and might have been taken to be pandering to the worst kind of sub, suburban racism.
For me the most striking thing about his speech was how it simply didn’t reflect the complexities of real challenges. I’ve talked about this before but it is simply no longer enough to shout about the amount of investment that we are putting into health and education. Talking with delegates it was quite clear that they share a public perception that you simply do not gain credit in proportion for the new money you put in. Simply, the public are sceptical that we are seeing a return for our investment. It is what we do with key services that is now of greatest concern.
During a question and answer session a teacher illustrated my concerns perfectly. Now teachers have a habit of raising issues around how badly teachers are treated and this drives the rest of us nuts, but this one was quite thoughtful. The delegate drew our attention to styles of early years education. He was frustrated by a model of delivery that he felt was loved by our mandarins and that was based on a North American model, a model which has been shown in a number of studies to be a failure. In this country a growing number of educationalists share a similar view wanting to see less structures education during the early years. When - the questioner seemed to be asking - will we listen to knowledge of expertise of educationalists rather than the old prejudices of Whitehall. Brown was simply unable to deal with this. Of course we all shared the understanding that early years was important; that’s why there would be more money.
The arguments about delivery and the choices that have to be made in using allotted funds are quite complicated. it is certainly easier to simply bang on about amounts of investment but I’m not sure that this is going to be enough.
We also saw the first airing of the strategy that is going to be employed to fight the Tories. There’s no doubt that New Labour - always better at campaigning than governing I often think - is going to give the Tories a hard time and land some real punches. But somehow I’m not sure that this is going to be enough.
So it was a speech with some promise. It connected with many important issues both domestic and international. But somehow it didn’t quite hit the button.
Around the conference hall the most common concern was that we ‘just might not be up to it”. Brown’s speech didn’t really dispel these fears. The Prime Minister still has a lot to do over the coming months.
Topics: Spring Conference |
