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This is quite amazing damnation of our political system and those in it by a respected mainstream commentator.

Have you noticed how the political system and those in it are becoming more and more isolated by the day.

If I was a coalition politician (national, EU or local), after reading this, I would get out of politics immediately to save my soul.

dave

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2045260/Conservative-conference-2011-Its-time-party-end.html

but for now -

It’s time for the party to end!

By Quentin Letts

Last updated at 4:43 PM on 5th October 2011

CRRRASSSH went the bottles in Manchester early yesterday as they cascaded into a waiting skip. It was breakfast on day three of the Conservative Party conference and the long-suffering staff at the £180-a-night Midland Hotel had finished clearing away the detritus of another night’s crazed networking.

The exhausted barmen had finally locked the optics, pulled down their shutters and sloped off to bed. It had been another great night for takings – and another ignoble night for the British political elite.

Today, thank goodness, the party conference season ends. David Cameron will speak this afternoon and after that we can all head home.

 

Contrast: By day, delegates discuss cuts and austerity. By night, they attend dinners and parties in Manchester’s restaurants and hotels

As a political journalist I am grateful, not from some selfish desire to reacquaint myself with my wife and terriers, welcome though that will be. I am thankful because watching the conference schmoozathon for the past three weeks has left me feeling seedy. Soiled. Outraged, actually.

It is not that I am a saint. I have sucked on the odd sherbet myself. I confess that on Sunday night, between the hours of 8 and 10.30pm, your honour, I was given dinner (four-course Chinese) by a friend who left Fleet Street for the PR business and is now a millionaire. So I am not spotless. Father, forgive me, I have dined.

Even so, the level of drinking at this year’s conferences has been astonishing. I did hope that, given the state of the nation’s economy, they might rein themselves in.

But at all three conferences – not just the Tories in Manchester but also Labour in Liverpool and the Lib Dems in Birmingham – the evening carousing has been beyond sybaritic.

By day they have talked of cuts. By night they have been Bacchanalian. Grotesque. Ponds, lakes, lagoons of alcohol have been consumed, while the rest of the country teeters on the brink of a double-dip recession.

I have seen frontbench MPs in all three parties barely able to speak, so much have they gargled down. The organisers of one conference cocktail party had to employ thick-necked bouncers to stop gatecrashers.

 

By day they have talked of cuts. By night they have been Bacchanalian.

How can this political elite deplore the yobbishness of the recent riots when its own members, the supposed leaders of our society, demonstrate so little self-restraint?

As I trotted down to brekker yesterday morning – third one in to the dining room, if you please – I realised that the system is broken. The party conference game is up, or at least it should be. The sheer decadence of today’s party conferences weakens our democracy.

Modern party conferences are all about money. Fund-raising. The parties charge high fees not only to attending delegates, but also to companies taking out exhibition space.

Should you be foolhardy enough to mislay your security pass, boy, you get whacked. A friend of mine was told he would have to pay £800 for replacement accreditation.

Conferences were once held to allow members to decide party policy. It was the rank and file’s chance to have a say. Was that not the whole idea of political parties in a western democracy? You joined and you were given a vote.

To make the conferences accessible, they were held in jaunty seaside towns with out-of-season hotel room prices.

Conferences could be dramatic events.

Lord Hailsham campaigned for the Conservative leadership in 1963 by taking a dip in the sea and then making a tub-thumping speech. Neil Kinnock, and before him Denis Healey, took on the Labour Left with real courage.

Mrs Thatcher cried that the lady was not for turning. Fine oratory abounded.

Some parties were more democratic than others. Labour had votes but certain comrades – such as the unions – had block votes. Tory conferences regarded voting as something for fetishists and fifth columnists.

The Liberals did hold card votes but often their party faithful were too deaf or dotty to know precisely what was going on. But the principle was there: conferences were for the members.

Not now they ain’t.

The seaside towns have been dumped, for a start. Poor old Blackpool has been given the heave-ho because Tony Blair, and now everyone else, has decided that it was insufficiently trendy. So now we troop off to city venues with city hotel prices.

The past three weeks have given delegates only the tiniest part in proceedings. Party activists have not been stitched up. They have been stitched out.

The 21st century party conference draws, instead, a rum crowd, mainly commercial. Public relations operatives swarm like nests of flies reactivated by the Indian summer. Hundreds of them. Thousands, even.

There are the trade bodies, the professions’ alliances, the Private Finance Initiative companies. There are the privatised utilities, the more go-ahead charities or “Third Sector” as they demand to be called, and then the foreign observers.

A few would-be parliamentary candidates attend, agreeing madly with everyone they meet. But for the most part, as figures from the Conservativehome.com website this week showed, the conference-goers are what we might loosely call “trade”: suited smoothies who press business cards into the palms of passers-by, dispensing trinkets, sweet-meats and whispers that “we must do lunch”.

Just look at some of the groups who this week took expensive floor space in the exhibition hall next to the Tory conference hall: the BBC, the Airport Operators’ Association, E.On, Lloyds Banking Group, the Nuclear Industry Association, Royal Mail, the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health, the Tobacco Retailers’ Alliance, the National Union of Teachers.

I make no allegation of improper behaviour by any of these organisations, but they are not there for charity. They want something in return for their time and money.

Is there not a possibility, no matter how unjustified, that politicians might, after pocketing those welcome cheques for the exhibition space, feel beholden, or at very least warmer, to whatever cause it is that their clients promote?

The conference halls are reached via jazzy trade halls and these peddlers and hawkers line the route, cocking their come-hithers, greasing wheels, smarming for England.

Members of Parliament are a special catch, particularly those on Westminster’s select committees. Party strategists are ushered into rear corners, to have their ears nibbled by pleasantries and suggestive propositions. “It’s the way the world works,” one lobbyist said this week, urging me not to be prim. Well, it might be. But need it remain so?

We have to find a better way for our political parties to galvanise themselves.

It is not just the loucheness, the licentiousness (much corridor creeping at night) and the shadow of corruption. It is also the heinous cost of security at these week-long events. And it is the remoteness they engender, the conference venues being cut off by tall fences.

The contribution of party conferences to genuine political engagement has dwindled to near nothing. The speeches are formulaic and colourless. Policy decisions are now made by analysing focus groups. Reputations are generally made in the TV studios.

I suggest this: conferences should be limited to two days; lobbyists should be banned; the venues should be open-air, perhaps a football or cricket stadium, with admission prices no higher than a cinema; they should be held not every year but a year before a general election, as happens in the United States, when the parties can explain their manifestos and present their candidates.

Conferences, furthermore, should be open to all members of the public, like primaries; security at the gate should be minimal – if the party leaders have to speak inside glass boxes, as American presidents have to do sometimes, that would be better than the slow strangulation of democracy that we have at present.

The parties will complain that they could not survive without the revenue of the party conferences. My answer to that is that unless they find a way of reconnecting with the public, they deserve to go out of business.

This conference season I stood in one drinks party and looked across a large room in which perhaps 400 people were gathered. It included some of the most senior politicians in the land.

The fug was fetid with alcohol, sweat, self-serving gossip and ambition. The TV cameras might once have captured the scene but they were banned.

If the electors of Britain had seen that room, I seriously doubt they would have voted for any of these parties again.

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