Political party conference season is in full swing in the UK and political parties are gathering at public arenas up and down the country. While these conferences often serve as a decision making body that elects leaders and sets policy, this is often secondary to the opportunity it provides for controlled publicity.
For parties like the Liberal Democrats, who have spent the last few years in government, this has meant an opportunity to restate their ideals. As a party in government, but with little power therein, the Liberal Democrats have been shackled to the unpopular policies of government with little opportunity to celebrate their own successes.
The Lib Dem conference affords the party an opportunity to present their case, a chance to push, while the world are watching, for their ideals (Lindsay, 2013).
It is not, however, always that simple. For smaller, less established parties like UKIP, conference season presents a real opportunity to simply raise public awareness of their existence as an alternative. For that reason, even scandals, such as Mr Godfrey Bloom's sexist comments and lashing out at a journalist, unfortunately have their use (BBC, 2013).
For the major parties, conferences are a rare opportunity to control the message they send out to potential voters. Yet that opportunity is most often used as part of a pragmatic political long game rather than a respite from that competition, and a chance to make clear the things that they believe in.
The opposition, such as the UK Labour Party, use that platform to strike a blow against the government in an arena where it is difficult for them to respond. However, even using the conference platform for some something so focused is rarely a simple task. For example, at this year's Labour conference, Mr Ed Miliband's speech received plenty of coverage for being radical or profoundly leftist - yet, others have pointed out that the proposed policies are still firmly restricted politically by very orthodox language and practices (Bland, 2013).
The government, in this case the Conservative Party, will try to use this controlled space to present their direction in government as representative of the general will. As such they will want to avoid any sort of controversy or scandal, like for instance there being any suggestion that they were attempting to stifle public opinion (Sephton, 2013). Such a suggestion might lead people to think that there was a dissenting opinion that posed enough of a threat to need stifling.
Conference season is one of those rare opportunities in politics where idealism can take to the stage. But more often than not it drowns in pragmatism's swelling tide. It isn't often in the political world that you have a chance to so entirely stage manage a political event; to control the message, control the audience and control who says what to who and when, and that tends to lead to idealism being ignored in favour of pragmatism. The opportunity is just too great to pass up.
In a talk for the RSA, The Divided Brain (2011), psychiatrist Ian McGilchrist warned against the trapping effect caused by becoming too enamoured of the practical or the technical. When discussing the difference in the roles of the two spheres of the human brain, he stressed that at various points in western cultural history the balance between those two roles has slipped away from a perfect equilibrium towards the narrow focus of the left side of the brain. In that overindulgence of the focussed, practical and technical, we can lose context and perspective which only makes it harder to change, even for the better.
'There is a sort of hall of mirrors effect. The more we get trapped into this, the more we undercut and ironise those things that might have led us out of it and we just get reflected back into more of what we know about what we know about what we know. And I just want to make it clear: I'm not against whatever it is the left hemisphere [of the brain] has to offer. Nobody could be more passionate in an age in which we neglect reason, and we neglect careful use of language, nobody could be more passionate than myself about language and about reason. It's just that I'm even more passionate about the right hemisphere [of the brain] and the need to return what that knows to a broader context.'
The danger is in us becoming so focused on the pragmatic, the practical, the immediate necessity that we lose all sense of context. That our sight becomes so short and narrow that we cannot even imagine a different path or a better future.
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References:
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+ Caron Lindsay's 'The best speeches of Liberal Democrat Conference'; from Lib Dem Voice; 20 September 2013.
+ BBC's 'Godfrey Bloom quits as UKIP MEP after "sluts" joke row'; 24 September 2013.
+ Archie Bland's 'An in depth look at Labour conference week: Ed Miliband's speech - did you hear what I heard?'; in The Independent; 29 September 2013.
+ Connor Sephton's '50,000 rally outside Tory conference amid "censorship" row'; in The Metro; 29 September 2013.
+ Ian McGilchrist's 'The Divided Brain'; for RSA Animate; 21 October 2011.
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