Empty words in Liverpool

Tales of penthouse suites, designer clothes and freebie specs have embarrassed Starmer & Co –much to the delight of the Tory press. Health Secretary Wes Streeting says he’s “proud of people who want to contribute, not just their time and volunteering, but their money to our politics. It is a noble pursuit just like giving to charity and we don’t recognise that enough. The alternative is we ask taxpayers to fund our politics. I’d think they’d rather their taxes went into the NHS and our schools or stayed in their own pockets”. Whether Lord Alli, whose generosity stretched for funding £5,000 worth of clothes for Starmer’s wife,  really is an altruistic philanthropist remains a matter of opinion but it certainly provided an amusing diversion from the dreary spectacle of Labour Party conference in Liverpool. 
The Labour Party was founded by the trade unions to give the working class its own voice within Parliament but the Parliamentary Party leadership has been dominated by the middle class intelligentsia since the days of Ramsay McDonald. Labour has always been a mass party encompassing a very wide political spectrum though its agenda has historically bee largely set by right‑wing social-democratic factions. In the old days left factions were tolerated, though every now and again it would purge those of a Trotskyist persuasion if they strayed beyond the consensus of the senior Labour politicians and union leaders who led the movement. These days anyone who departs from the bourgeois norm can be hounded out.
While Labour Party conference is formally the supreme decision-making body of the party
 its decisions have never been binding on the Labour leadership. Hugh Gaitskell, the right-winger who led Labour from 1955 to 1963, bitterly clashed with Conference over unilateral nuclear disarmament. His attempt to dump Clause IV of the Labour Party Constitution, which committed Labour to nationalisation of all the means of production, failed though it was eventually carried out during the Blair era. 
Starmer talks about “Changed Labour”. He made his keynote speech promising that there is “light at the end of this tunnel” while making it clear that we can expect no change from him on austerity. 
Once upon a time the grandees saw the need to allow the rank-and-file some space for genuine debate. Nowadays conference has largely been reduced to a leadership rally with set piece top-table speeches and stage-managed standing ovations from the delegates in the hall.
Sure delegates defied the Starmer leadership when they voted for a motion calling for the party to reverse winter fuel allowance cuts, impose a wealth tax and revise fiscal rules. But it hardly matters as nothing will come of it anyway.
Labour is meaningless unless it reflects the wishes of the millions of its affiliated union members. That’s real democracy. But Labour will never be truly democratic if it’s not controlled by its affiliates. That’s what it was set up for in the first place. And a Labour Party whose policies reflect those of a democratic union movement would become a powerful instrument for progressive reforms that would strengthen organised labour and benefit the working class.