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Hard question

My favourite Conservative fringe meeting takes place this evening. Here's the title:

Syria: Friend or Foe?

Mmm. That's one to ponder.

Crude rhetoric

Conference fringe meeting speeches do not generally add much to the sum of human knowledge. This interesting speech by Liam Fox seems to be something of an exception. The figures he uses to make a link between oil prices and defence spending in Iran are startling.

Robbie Millen

The future of political communication

I remember the arguments in Conservative Central Office about how much to spend on party political broadcasts. They were always unbelievably expensive. Now David Cameron's advisers have come up with a solution - make them without any production values whatsoever.

But, shaky camera and all, anyone interested in the future of political communication simply has to visit the new Webcameron site.

The Goodies used to talk about the Lord Privy Seal while pictures of a Lord, a privy and a seal flashed up on the screen.

On Webcameron the Tory leader is, I am not making this up, stacking a dishwasher while talking about cleaning up politics.

What?

Words fail me. Tom Watson's review of Tony Blair's conference speech is hysterically funny. It includes this extraordinary sentence:

More than anything, he [Blair] deserved a good send off

Er. Hello?

Guests at the feast

John McCain's visit to next week's Conservative party conference is certainly an improvement on days gone by.

At one conference during my period at Conservative Central office, the Labour Party was addressed by Nelson Mandela. We had Ed "Stewpot" Stewart.

No charisma here

That is the conclusion of Anne Perkins watching Alan Johnson for the Guardian. She does, however, think that he has:

A better back story than any Labour leader since Ramsay MacDonald.

I am not convinced that the back story matters anywhere near as much as is commonly believed. What matters is to be able to tell a story of your premiership.

Clintonomics

Bill Clinton wowed the Labour faithful. But one thing he said seemed a bit odd and, as I have heard him say it before, I just thought I would ask if it struck anyone else the same way.

Clinton said that an economy like the UK's and America’s constantly needs to find a fresh source of new jobs. He said that we had done so but the US had not. And then he went on to argue that our new source was our drive towards a greener economy.

Is this right? I thought our new source, accounting for almost the entire growth in employment, was the growth of the public sector.

Thatcher's victory explained

David Miliband has informed Labour conference that the reason why the Conservatives won in 1979 is because progressives ran out of ideas. And there was I thinking it was because the Government had brought the country to its knees.

The real champion of new Labour

The conference speeches of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair give the lie to the idea that Brown is old Labour and Blair, new Labour. In fact, Brown is classic new Labour while Blair has long since abandoned this position.

Consider two facts.

First, the most effective section of Tony Blair's speech was an argument that leaders have to make choices. Voters, he said, would forgive wrong choices but not the failure to make them. Later, he attacked Cameron for failing to choose between positions that the Prime Minister suggested were incompatible.

This argument is a direct rejection of new Labour's central idea. In the mid 1990s Mr Blair argued that politicians were always making choices when they did not need to. He said that policy options that looked incompatible were not. He promised to eradicate such false choices. This very idea, the one new Labour first brought into the debate, is the one he now treats with most scorn.

Now, take Brown. The characterisation of Brown as old Labour is absurd. What he is, is classic new Labour. He hasn't moved an inch since he trawled around the Clinton think-tanks in the mid 90s.

Now, as then, he is looking for policy schemes that avoid choosing. It is he, not Blair, who still holds the candle for the third way, he who is looking for idea that doesn't involve hard choices.

The windfall tax (tax more without being a high taxer) was a classic Brown idea. And so, more than a decade later, is his NHS plan - a third way between market reform and no reform.

It is Brown, not Blair, who is new Labour’s constant champion.

A Labour leader speaks

Watching Gordon Brown's moist-eyed reception of Tony Blair's praise a few minutes ago, I was reminded of a story about James Maxton, the early socialist leader (and subject of a biography by Gordon Brown).

After the death of Maxton's wife the Clydesider sat on a platform to hear Ramsay MacDonald. The Labour leader, with whom Maxton's relationship had become tense, addressed the meeting with great eloquence. MacDonald, whose speciality was sentimental rhetoric, praised Maxton's wife and Maxton himself. His words were generous and moving.

The tears streamed down Maxton's face and under his breath he kept saying this: "The bastard, the bastard".

Advancing ideas

Over the next week, with Labour meeting in Manchester, we will be hearing plenty of calls for renewal. But calling for a debate about the future is one thing, actually having one is something else entirely, as Jamie Whyte pointed out in this article.

So I am going to be keeping a special eye on those people actually advancing ideas rather than advancing the idea that ideas should be advanced.

On the impressive Progress website, Peter Facey of the New Politics Network spends a lot of time clearing his throat. But then he suggests this:

There are two ideas that Labour should embrace that would put it back at the fore of the democratic reform movement. It should formally adopt the idea of a constitutional convention, made up of ordinary citizens, to draw up a new political settlement for the UK. This would also have the benefit of allowing Labour to put to rest its failure to fulfil its promise in the 1997 manifesto of a referendum on electoral reform.

Second, Labour should move away from simply using the market as a mechanism to empower consumers and start looking to democracy as a way to empower people as citizens and to give them more control over their lives.

Matthew Parris's podcast

Matthew Parris is doing a series of podcasts on this year's party conferences. You can find his first podcast on the Lib Dem conference here.