Walking into the Logan Hall yesterday initially brought back a Pavlovian memory of a very different occasion, back at the turn of the century, when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown joined forces in the spirit of “my enemy’s enemy is now my friend”, trying to dissuade London Labour Party members from electing Ken Livingstone as London Mayor. On that midweek evening in winter there were queues round the block and people locked out, such was the demand to be in the audience; Alastair Campbell and the then recently defected Shaun Woodward manned the stairwells, communicating via headsets like a New Labour Secret Police.
The anti-Livingstone message of course, thankfully, had no effect, but the audience were allowed to ask questions on anything, and they did. The everlasting memory of the night was seeing Blair, who spoke charismatically throughout, talk with real passion and genuine belief in favour of international intervention in oppressed countries in order to save lives, withstanding the hostility he was facing from a questioner who was asking about Britain’s specific interests in the then more innocent age of the time, pre-9/11.
Yesterday’s event was something completely different, the Compass’ annual conference, this year entitled ‘Building the Good Society’. I was a guest of Philosophy Football, supporting them on a day when they staged their first ever Compass Seminar, which was on the subject of engaging people in politics. Unlike most seminars it started with a live song from Maddy Carty and a short five minute You Tube film on Egypt by student Sanum Ghafoor A panel of Pat Kane, (the writer once of Hue and Cry), Heather Wakefield (Unison National Officer) and Deborah Grayson (writer and activist) followed, discussing social networking as Jessica Riches tweeted throughout, while also touching on ideas including the “franchising” of future Uncut protests, so demonstrations take place simultaneously nationwide, as well as the collective experience of being involved in politics through both music and comedy.
The main event of the day though was a Question Time debate in the main conference hall, expertly chaired, with both decisiveness and humour, by The New Statesman’s Medhi Hasan. In contrast to television’s Question Time, there was no dumbing down, and there were proper answers from a strong panel. The panel included Polly Toynbee, whose writing I was first introduced to in an English Language lesson at school, at a time when she still worked for the BBC; I went onto write about her in a final Public Relations exam I had at University the day after she was the subject of a typically misogynistic attack by the Daily Mail, and remain a big fan of her books and regular Guardian columns. (When I first arrived at the conference and was standing behind the Philosophy Football stall, I took the opportunity, to say hello to her as she was passing – always nice to speak to people you admire).
Also on the panel was Green MP Caroline Lucas, Labour’s rising star Chuka Umunna (who was speaking in between appearing at three separate London school fates), Baroness Professor Ruth Lister, and the always engaging, intelligent and incisive John Harris. Earlier in the day I had gone to a seminar where Harris was speaking on how the Labour Party can engage with the progressive left, where he highlighted the need to not be complacent. In the main session he told how due to the ridiculous First Past the Post electoral system, he, a Labour activist, was compelled to campaign for a Liberal Democrat at the last General Election in order to stop a Tory winning, something he said, to the cheers of the crowd, he would never do again.
Harris is such a good speaker because as well as being intelligent, he is always honest, and speaking in favour of nuclear power as a viable source of energy compared to unclean coal, as he did in this debate, was both intelligent and honest, if not universally popular in the room, and certainly not on a panel with The Green Party’s Caroline Lucas.
Lucas was also critical about the perception of Labour Party’s recent focus on benefit fraud, saying they were targeting people fighting to get by, and inferring they were punching down rather than up; Chuka Umunna acknowledged there was disproportionate coverage of benefit fraud which, according to the figures he quoted, cost the Treasury £800m a year compared to Banking Sector issues that cost £1.3 trillion.
The profile on Compass’ Twitter Page explains that Compass is committed to building a good society, with greater equality and democracy, and that is what this Question Time was ultimately about. In one question a member of the audience told of the banning of girls wearing trousers at a school, giving a perfect example of the unaccountability of decision makers that have risen up in David Cameron’s “Big Society”, an idea flawed on so many levels.
The deficit is a very thin disguise to the severe ideological and political cuts Cameron’s Government is making to state spending, and it was this that was inevitably at the root of most of the questions from the floor. In the answers, there was general agreement that as well as a pay-ration in the public sector, there should also be one in the private sector. Caroline Lucas also pointed out the fallacy of the coalition’s talk of protecting front-line services while making cuts to back-line services that the front-lines services depend on to run properly.
Impending industrial action, the “Labour of Love” Hue and Cry once sang about, that may stem from the cuts was of course discussed. All the panellists, while defending the right to withdraw labour, were vary of long strikes; echoing Ed Balls’ recent public comments, Umunna suggested a long drawn-out strike was exactly what this Government wanted to turn the public mood against state workers; Polly Toynbee said long strikes should always be avoided unless they were certain to produce a win; and John Harris, stylishly getting to the heart of the matter as always, pointed out how poorly the case had been made by unions so far for striking – there is a case to be made that public sector workers are on low-pay that hasn’t been made but the idea of “gold-plated pensions” have got to be ditched and comparisons with the miners strike were particularly bad.
In sharp contrast to the Blair-Brown axis against Ken Livingstone over ten years ago now, both the main debate and the conference were progressive and forward looking with Umunna at one point, perhaps unwittingly, using the Bruce Springsteen lyric, “the ties that bind” when talking about the next steps with The Labour Party. The days for in-fighting and political naivety need to be over as from the IMF to the current coalition government, the monetarists are currently calling the shots and quickly unravelling the fabric of what a good society is built on. Those of us who do believe in a Good Society need to co-ordinate, communicate the message clearly and present an alternative. This conference was a good start.
