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The Prosser Perspective.... a weekly column from Dover and Deal MP Gwyn Prosser.

12 October 2009

By the end of this week all the annual party conferences will be over for another year and a good thing too, I hear many people say.

I suppose it’s inevitable that as the general election comes closer, the polarity between parties will become more defined and the claims and counter claims more intense. This is the first time we’ve had five annual conferences within the span of one parliament for more than a decade so it’s not surprising that things are starting to hot-up.

I was never able to go to conference when I was sailing the seven seas so my first in-house experience of these gatherings was gained in the eighties, having moved to Dover to find work on the ferries and joined the local Labour Party.

In those days there was enormous competition to be chosen by your party to be their official delegate to Conference because it was the main policy-making forum of the Party. Consequently Labour’s whole political direction from far left through to centre-left and beyond was influenced by the men and women sent there by their local parties and the particular politics of those individual parties.

Once delegates were elected, they had to attend pre-conference policy meetings in their constituencies so that members could debate all the issues of the day, scrutinise all the tabled motions and mandate the delegate on which way to vote on their behalf. It was all deadly serious and woe betide anyone who disobeyed their mandate.

In the late eighties the issue that dominated the news in Dover and which was top of the political agenda in Kent was the proposal to build the Channel Tunnel and its impact on the ferries, the port, the people of Dover and the wider East Kent. It was also the subject I took to a series of Labour Conferences for debate with delegates and discussions with our Shadow Ministers.

During the same period I was sailing on Dover’s cross channel ferries and representing engineering staff in the merchant navy officer’s union. Wearing this hat I became Parliamentary Agent on behalf of people who wanted to appear as petitioners against the tunnel in Select Committees of both Houses of Parliament.

Our campaign operated within the Flexilink umbrella where the Port of Dover, all the local ferry companies, most trade unions and a lot more people worked in unison to influence the final shape of the Channel Tunnel Act.

My purpose, in Conference and in Parliament, was not to derail the tunnel project but to ensure a better deal for my constituents and in particular for our local seafarers and port workers.

These days, the conferences of all the parties have changed. They have become part jamboree for the activists and part showcase for the general public and where policy issues are debated and voted upon there is a high degree of stage management. But we still have our moments of drama at Conference – especially as things start hotting-up – and I wouldn’t miss them for the world.