Cause for hope

Despite the months of preparation and planning, there was no way of forecasting that Progress' annual conference yesterday would have fallen at the end of such a tumultuous week for Labour. As one cabinet aide suggested to me, if this event hadn't existed, somebody would have to have invented it.

Although interest in the event accelerated throughout the week (to the extent that we had, sadly, to turn down countless numbers of people trying to secure a place), the conference was already our most popular ever - a positive signal that there is a great hunger for open debate about the challenges Labour and Britain face over the next decade. And this, rather than an exercise in group therapy, was the real purpose of 2020 Vision: to use Progress' tenth birthday this year and the run-up to the tenth anniversary of Labour's first election victory next May to look ahead to the kind of issues, and politics, which are likely to figure heavily in the next decade.

So, what of the mood of the event? There were strong indications about the anger and sadness that many people in the party feel about the way the prime minister had been treated during the course of last week's events; an overwhelming desire that the vicious infighting at Westminster stops; and a realisation that, if it does not, Labour risks doing irreparable damage to its future electoral prospects, with all that means for those  it seeks to represent. People should think, suggested one delegate, of those who really have something to lose - like the mothers on Sure Start - before they engage in another round of hand to hand combat with their party colleagues.

One of the conference's more unlikely (though very sporting) speakers, former Tory cabinet minister Michael Portillo underlined this point when he warned  delegates at a seminar examining David Cameron's future prospects that parties which would rather squabble amongst themselves  than fight their opponents are usually signalling a loss of appetite for power. This process can take years - he had witnessed it himself at close quarters during the 1990s - but once under way, he argued, it is very difficult to reverse.

But two points - both made by Tony Blair in his morning address - should give Labour cause for hope. First, the party still has an opportunity to 'remake itself', turning away from the 'irredeemably old-fashioned' style of politics it had shown to the country last week and returning to the kind of behaviour it had shown 'when we were hungry for power before 1997'.

Second, Labour is not fundamentally ideologically divided. The vast majority of the party, the prime minister suggested, hold to, or want to be around, the 'modernising, progressive position', whereas the number of people who want to 'go back to the 1980s' are a 'very, very tiny in number'.

The real danger, Blair warned, as he ticked off challenges like international terrorism, energy security and pensions which barely figured on the public agenda ten years ago but are very live now, is 'not that people depart from the modernising, progressive position, but that we don't reasses what that position means for today's world'. It's a very real danger - but one that's all together much more manageable than that faced by Labour in the 1980s when, as the prime minister reminded his audience, many in the party appeared to inhabit not simply different worlds, but often different solar systems.

Comments

[Adrian McMenamin]

A bit of self-promotion here, but two mobile phone friendly clips of TB yesterday are

here - http://newgolddream.dyndns.info/blog/tony.3gp and here - http://newgolddream.dyndns.info/tony2.3gp

[Alan Scobbie]

Its a shame that Douglas Alexander's speech is not being discussed more widely. I felt he outlayed exactly what the challenges of the next decade are. Perhaps it may have lacked the flash that some in the media prefer but thats precisely why it matters.

If you treat the British public as apathetic consumers then you cant expect anything but that. However if you follow the tone that Douglas suggested then there is some hope.