So much for sloganeering

As a former Labour Party mem­ber who is now a sort-of sup­porter, albeit semi-lapsed (can you see how pain­fully I’m sit­ting on the fence here?), each year I try and make it my busi­ness to tune in to our great leader’s speech to the massed ranks of the faith­ful at the party con­fer­ence. Sadly, I was busy this after­noon, so had to catch the high­lights on the news this evening.

And some­thing rather con­fused me.

No, it wasn’t the Right Rev­er­end Blair’s speech that con­fused me. That seemed fairly straight­for­ward, really — it was a less strident, less all-conquering ser­mon, undoubtedly influ­enced by the dis­tinct lack of pop­ular­ity he’s cur­rently exper­i­en­cing in almost all quar­ters. I don’t think he could have held out more olive branches to party mem­bers if he’d tried, even admit­ting that he was wrong about the main reason for going to war in Iraq. While the rest of the coun­try has been telling him for months, in no uncer­tain terms, that Sad­dam Hus­sein obvi­ously had no weapons of mass destruc­tion hid­den up his sleeves, the Prime Min­is­ter has finally caught up with this fact for him­self. Bravo, Tony. Of course, he didn’t go so far as to say that the whole war itself was wrong, but I guess that would have been one road to Dam­as­cus moment too far.

He fur­ther pla­cated (and pos­sibly even delighted) his Brighton audi­ence by nick­ing Gor­don Brown’s trick from last year’s con­fer­ence, fre­quently refer­ring to ‘Labour’ or ‘the Labour Party’ — which is, after all, what they’re called. I decided to go through the full text of Blair’s speech with a fine-toothed comb (I know, I really should get out more), and I coun­ted five men­tions of ‘Labour’, a faintly stag­ger­ing nine uses of the decidedly old school ‘Labour Party’, yet only two paltry ref­er­ences to the mod­ern­ising leader’s favoured ‘New Labour’ pro­ject. Oh yes, he was def­in­itely try­ing to press all the right but­tons amongst the party diehards, and the trade union del­eg­a­tions scattered across the hall may well have been dab­bing at their eyes with red handker­chiefs. “Any minute now,” they were prob­ably think­ing, “he’s going to announce that they’re ren­ation­al­ising the rail­ways and intro­du­cing a min­imum wage of £6.50 an hour. Hur­rah for Socialism!”

But I’ve digressed. I was con­fused about some­thing, and I sense that by now you’re equally con­fused about the exact nature of what con­fused me in the first place.

Well, it was this year’s con­fer­ence slo­gan. There it was, the bold text almost unavoid­able every time the cam­eras panned across the stage or the con­fer­ence hall: “A bet­ter life for all”. Gosh, how ter­ribly bland. Yet, bland­ness aside, I was find­ing it deeply troub­ling, You see, “A bet­ter life for all” is eer­ily sim­ilar, yet also alarm­ingly dif­fer­ent, to last year’s Labour Party con­fer­ence slo­gan of “A future fit for all”.

It is, isn’t it? I’m not just ima­gin­ing things.

Hmm. Let me get this straight in my tiny mind. Last year, Tony Blair’s aim was for all of us to have a decent future. This year, how­ever, he wants us to have a bet­ter life. So does this mean that Labour is no longer con­cerned about our future? Maybe the Prime Min­is­ter thinks that he’s actu­ally sor­ted out all our futures over the past twelve months (without us noti­cing, seem­ingly), mean­ing that he can turn his atten­tion to the here and now? Or maybe the PM and his team held an utterly des­pond­ent Cab­inet meet­ing a few weeks back — as viol­ence raged in Iraq, the Coun­tryside Alli­ance stood bay­ing for min­is­terial blood at the gates of Down­ing Street and the opin­ion polls col­lapsed all around them — dur­ing which they con­cluded that since they didn’t have a cat in hell’s chance about doing any­thing for our future, they should for­get about it and simply get by with doing what’s achiev­able right now. Which isn’t much.

Hence the phrase “A bet­ter life for all”. It gently, almost imper­cept­ibly, lowers our expectations.

Or does it? Maybe “A bet­ter life for all” is, er, bet­ter than “A future fit for all”? You can see why I’m confused.

But then again, maybe we should throw cau­tion to the wind and just give the people what they want, namely “A bet­ter life and a future fit for all. Please. If it’s not too much trouble”. (Incid­ent­ally, those last few words have been added to the slo­gan — des­pite mak­ing it rather more ungainly — because we should never for­get that we’re Brit­ish, and there­fore aren’t really that bothered and don’t par­tic­u­larly want to make a fuss.)

Which all goes to show that polit­ical parties should think about their slo­gans rather more care­fully. Don’t simply opt for appar­ently power­ful but ulti­mately empty, mean­ing­less rhet­oric. When con­fer­ence sea­son comes around, you need a phrase that is going to sum up the past year of your exist­ence for the vot­ing pop­u­la­tion at large, telling them pre­cisely and con­cisely what you stand for, what you rep­res­ent, at that moment in time. So in Brighton in 2004, maybe the Labour Party should have gone for: “Christ, what a year. Sorry”.