Conference season is upon us. I have never been a big fan of the conference recess. It doesn’t make a huge amount of sense to me that parliament returns from the summer break for three weeks then goes off again so that political parties can wave from piers and the newspapers can run fluff stories about how senior figures visited a local curry house in Birmingham, as if it were news that David Cameron ate a chicken jalfrezi. I’m not against us having conferences, I am just not sure about the timing of them.
Last year, at the Labour Party conference, I travelled by car to Brighton. I passed hundreds of people queuing for petrol on every forecourt along the way, a story of bad decisions and broken policy brought to life. This year, I will drive to Liverpool again, not out of choice, but instead because – like everyone else travelling to the conference – I have found that once again broken policy and an idle government means that there are hardly any trains and those that are running release the tickets for two minutes and then they are gone.
I usually have a good time at conference, but I am not sure that it should demand a Glastonbury-style rush by the delegates, all poised with their phones waiting for train tickets to be released.
It has amused me chatting with journalists and southern colleagues all pulling their hair out about how there are no trains to get them up north. For those of us who live beyond the wall, this is the case week in, week out. There used to be three trains every hour from Birmingham to London that took an hour and half tops to get me to work. Now I’m lucky if there is one an hour and it now takes nearly two hours, more if I add on the constant delay and the extra hours because every other one is cancelled.
This has nothing to do with strikes. It happens every single day because of bad contracts and poor staffing. This is because the Tory government – in power for 12 years – has degraded every single service that people rely on.
In Liverpool, this is Labour’s chance for us to present to the country with the ideas that many of us have been working hard on, about our services, our finances, our future. It comes hot on the back of the budget (nothing mini about the tens of billions of pounds of debt the chancellor has just saddled our people with so that the richest can get a wedge of cash), which offered nothing to the country about childcare, social care, social security or wages.
The chancellor has just given people who earn a million pounds a year over £50,000 back in their pockets, while most people in the conference towns of Liverpool and Birmingham will be lucky if they see more than £30 a month in their pay packets. That extra £7.50 a week will have scousers and Brummies celebrating in the streets I’m sure. Let’s hope their mortgages and rent don’t go up more than £30 per month. Oh, too late.
There was absolutely nothing in the chancellor’s plans for growth that will help people earn more and progress. Labour will take to a freshly built set in the north west, and lay out its plans to make sure that people who want to work more but can’t because of caring responsibilities, or the complete lack of locally available good jobs or training, are actually thought about. You cannot grow the economy when 95 per cent of the population have received literally nothing to change their fortunes.
I could scream at the idea that the Conservatives claim to be the party of wealth creation, when the only people they create wealth for are those who are already wealthy. Literally any idiot could do that – money follows money, it breeds and multiplies when you’ve got it. Just look at Donald Trump.
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The Labour government elected in 1997 literally changed the fortunes of my little family. Policies on childcare, tax credits for most families – not just the million pound earners – and good, stable jobs meant that a lift engineer and a charity worker in Birmingham had secure incomes, childcare and support in caring for dying and ill relatives. It meant that, in our 20s with our two little boys, we could buy a house and we could keep reskilling and retraining. We could dedicate time to supporting others in our community.
My sons are growing up in a completely different situation to the one my husband and I did because of that Labour government. It brought us wealth.
In Liverpool, I look forward to hearing about how all the families in that city, all the families in Birmingham and all the families across the country can look forward to something akin to what I got, how a different way where everyone benefits is possible. And it’s not just possible – I literally lived it.
When the Tories rock up to Birmingham, they will be handing out £50k to their million pound mates and ignoring the fact that that is nearly twice the annual salary of the million people who live in the city. The Labour Party knows it, but the Tories never seem to learn: we are all better off when we are all better off.