Bright's Blog: Conference 2007

Walking along Bournemouth seafront after a long day at the Labour party conference, I bumped into one of the prospective candidates for the next election scuttling off to yet another fringe meeting on "the fourth option for council housing" or "making mutualism mainstream". She told me she had arrived at Bournemouth already bruised by battles with a particularly unpleasant bully of a sitting Tory MP. She felt increasingly nervous about ... read more

One of the most important functions of a Labour party conference, perhaps the only useful one left, is to bring activists together to talk about their heritage and history. Bournemouth 2007, like all conferences in recent memory, will be an exercise in collective nostalgia, a celebration of a once great movement. The rhetoric may say that everything must be "new" (Gordon Brown has already announced that politics itself must be ... read more