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Move Labour conference to weekends says Alexander |
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Douglas Alexander says that a "long weekend" Labour conference would allow more working people to take part.
Shifting the Labour conference to a "long weekend" could help the party to reach out and reconnect, the party's election coordinator Douglas Alexander told the Fabian fringe. A working week conference made it too difficult for many working people to participate fully in Labour's biggest annual event, unless they are trade union organisers or professionally involved in politics.
"I would not say that the Labour conference is beyond improvement. We need constantly to be looking at the way that society is changing around and about us. Let me offer a heretical thought. We hold our Labour Party conference over a working week. That cuts out a lot of the people we aspire to represent and who we want to participate. We should at least consider having conference over a long weekend: it is more likely that working people would be able to attend", Alexander told the Labour conference on Campaigning for Change on Sunday.
"One of the tests of our party conference should be that if somebody walking past could see what was happening on the inside, would it make them more or less likely to join the Labour Party? We have made huge progress in the years since Neil Kinnock spoke here in showing that the Labour party is in touch with the concerns of the British people.
A lot of the years, when there was blood on the walls at the Labour Party conference, that was the start and end of the debate. It really matters in a constituency like mine whether this is a resolution or whether it is about something that will happen in government".
"We had the idea that conference is a parliament of the working-class. But that was never how policy was made in the Labour party under Clement Attlee or Harold Wilson", he said.
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