Labour CND Committee member Christine Shawcroft looks back at an eventful week in Liverpool.
The Liverpool Conference Centre was certainly heaving with people, with the consequent huge queues to get in and shortage of places to sit down, but it later transpired that there were 15,000 visitors. There were only 1,109 voting delegates, which is less than two per constituency Labour Party. Many of the visitors were Party members and councillors, but others were corporate exhibitors and sponsors of fringe events, some of whom were really not the kind of organisations one would wish to see associated with a Labour Conference.
The agenda was also ‘fiddled ‘tweeked’ in the interests of some of these companies – after an intervention by the National Executive Committee, any resolutions opposing privatisation in the NHS were bundled into the ‘Health Services and Funding’ composite, and the powers- that-be campaigned strongly for the ‘An NHS Fit for the Future’ composite which merely paid lip service to a publicly owned NHS. The weak composite was duly prioritised and carried.
However, the CND stall attracted a lot of interest and our excellent new pamphlet, Labour, Climate Change and Nuclear Power: Not Cheap, Not Safe, Not Peaceful by Sam Mason was launched at Conference and on sale at the stall. The CND fringe meeting, held in the Conference Centre itself, was very well attended and effective.
During the meeting delegates heard from Vice President of the Fire Brigades Union Steve Wright, who spoke about the need for investment in public services and wages for workers rather than nuclear weapons. MPs Beth Winter and Bell Ribeiro-Addy demonstrated the strength of feeling of Labour members from the grassroots through to Parliament, with Bell also stressing the need to adhere to international treaties.