Emma Bishton’s Conference Diary
– Serious government is making steady progress towards a brighter future.
It’s not surprising that conference has felt busy – my fact of the day is that there are apparently 22,000 people here. An awful lot of them aren’t Labour Party MPs, delegates or visiting party members – although there are quite a lot of those too, as was evident when we all queued up in one way or another today for the Prime Minister’s speech! Instead, they are exhibitors and visitors – people from industry, from business, from the voluntary sector, trade unions, think tanks, pressure groups and expert witnesses. That’s a lot of conversations: some planned, some unexpected, some purposeful, others social. Before tonight, for instance, I’d never had a properly informed conversation with anyone about developments in AI – it was actually rather interesting!
Many of these conversations inevitably start with “where are you from?” and, whilst the market towns and villages of South Suffolk might be very familiar to me, not everyone outside East Anglia knows them. So, when they don’t, I’ve said that our patch includes the place where Constable painted one of his most famous pictures, the Hay Wain. As it happens, this picture has been in the news recently because art historians have pointed out that the bucolic image it presents does not accurately reflect the tough lives and financial hardship endured by those who farmed and managed the countryside it depicts.
Image versus reality has been one of the themes of this week’s speeches. As we know, Tories appear to enjoy government through theatre. In contrast Kier Starmer and his Labour cabinet are having to point out that government is less fun and much harder work than the Tories would have us believe if everyone is really to benefit.
So today was a pretty serious day. Not because people have lost energy, humour, or the hunger for change, but because much of the content of today’s speeches and motions – from knife crime to Grenfell to immigration – is difficult to think about and even harder to resolve but absolutely necessary to consider and address if things are to improve.
As any teacher will tell you, thinking, planning, then doing are all necessary components of a lesson plan if anyone is to learn. They are also necessary ingredients for reforming public services and bringing together all the strands of government to ensure everyone has equality of opportunity and – as one of the young speakers this afternoon put it – each person earns the respect they deserve. Luckily, you don’t have to listen for long to people like Yvette Cooper or Shabana Mahmood to realise that they know WHAT needs doing, WHY it needs doing, and quite often HOW to do it. When they don’t already know how, they will listen to people who do know. Such as, for instance, the people at this evening’s event on inclusion in education led by the Education Policy Institute and Mission 44 – an education organisation set up by Lewis Hamilton in response to his experience of school.
Today reinforced our understanding that governing – locally as well as nationally – is serious business. There was also hope, because ministers like Yvette Cooper are saying “Conference, we WILL” and because, as Lisa Nandy put it so neatly this morning, there is “light on the hill” due to our Labour government’s desire to invest in all our futures, for now and the generations that follow. For me and the thousands of other party members here, guarding and fostering that light is what conference has been all about. We’re not finished here yet, as there is still half a day to go, but, conversation by conversation, a lot is getting done.