Political conferences are as pointless as Synod

Our tribes only come together at communion, writes George Pitcher. Politicians could learn from that

The overwhelming response to media coverage of political party conferences must be: “What’s the point?” (Insert adjective of choice for emphasis).

Alternating between hubris and humiliation, they do provide some good theatre, I suppose. But, beyond that, they appear to achieve even less than their delegates may have produced by staying in Westminster. So why do we do them?

Accountability

Part of the answer must be that humiliation requires accepting a big lump of accountability. It’s hard to believe that chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng would have had to endure the crushing G-forces of such a supersonic U-turn on tax policy – more of a V-turn actually – had he not had to stand in front of 4,000-odd Conservatives and hundreds of thousands beyond the hall to justify himself and his eccentric mini-budget. You don’t get that pressure in the House of Commons.

But that’s not really an answer to the question. Because the modern politician’s task is to avoid accountability. So that’s not really why conferences are held.

Conferences: What’s the point?

A more candid answer is that they’re tribal. And tribes, among other things (such as self-defence), are about self-identity. It’s intoxicating and affirming to be in the same room – and sometimes in the same seaside town – as thousands of other people who share your ideology and want to applaud it wildly.

Shared adulation

The trouble with that is there’s very rarely only one tribe. The closest that political parties have got to achieving unity lately were the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher and Labour under Tony Blair. Those offered their delegates opportunities to bathe in a shared adulation of their demagogues. But tribes fragment more often than unite.

It’s been the same at the two Lambeth Conferences of this new millennium, the decennial convocations of the bishops of the worldwide Anglican churches, hosted by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Rowan Williams made a very decent fist of holding the Anglican communion together at the Lambeth Conference of 2008. But the bitterly divisive issue then, as now, was Christian teaching on sexuality; Justin Welby faced just the same division at the conference he chaired at the covid-delayed conference this summer, against a background of arguably far more pressing world issues to address.

Tribal warfare

This is tribal warfare. “My Tribe” believes that the Bible teaches sex is only permissable between a married man and woman. So “Your Tribe”, who believe otherwise, can go to hell (and probably will). It’s really only another version of the political conference: My tribe believes the economy is all the fault of Brexit; your tribe believes in economic growth from tax cuts.

It’s the same at the Church of England’s General Synod, except in microcosm. It’s mildly amusing from the press gallery, in York or Westminster, to watch clerics and laity trying to show how much they despise each others’ tribes, while simultaneously bearing the burden of expressing such rank contempt in the vocabulary of Christian love.

Delegates at Synod long to do a Neil Kinnock, as leader at the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth in 1985, when he laid excoriatingly into “the grotesque chaos of a Labour council” in Liverpool, run by left-winger Derek Hatton. Believe me, Synod delegates do that – and with worse language – but just in private.

Divine right

Otherwise, conferences remain pretty pointless, politically and ecclesiologically. For Tories, they look like an exercise in an assumed divine right to power; Labour gave up decades ago actually passing policy motions and the Liberal Democrats appear, in recent memory, to have been exercises in irrelevance. Lib Dems seem to manage hubris and humiliation at the same time, simultaneously returning to their constituencies “to prepare for government”, while looking for a “progressive alliance” with the big parties.

These are not conference models for religious gatherings to emulate. But indeed they do. Who, in almost any role in church management, hasn’t been to a conference that hasn’t involved some affirmation that we have a divine right to exist (Conservatives), have abandoned making Church policies (Labour) or been despatched back to our parishes with threadbare resources to “prepare for the kingdom” (Lib Dems).

But wait. There is usually a time in any Church conference when all tribes come together. That is at the Eucharist. There are exceptions to this. I’ve been at conference services where congregants have declined to make their communion because women, or gays or some other category of sinners of whom they don’t approve are present.

Abomination

I have no hesitation in calling out this behaviour, in biblical terms, as an abomination. One of the whole points of holy communion is that we all come together, as a convocation, exactly as we are and in all our diversity. There’s a clue in the name. Every Sunday, all over the world, people are coming together in this way as a single body, whatever their differences.

We break bread to demonstrate that out of the one bread there will be many participants. We share the one cup to indicate that the congregation’s many members are witnessing to their unity by sharing that one cup.

I don’t expect political conferences to start with communion any time soon (though parliament still starts with prayers, thank God). But it shouldn’t be too much to ask that those politicians and delegates who confess the faith of our Church, which is established in law, carry its central tenets into their political conferences.

George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.

A version of this column appeared in PremierChristianity