To date no information has been released to the best of my knowledge about how many constituency Labour parties (CLPs) sent delegates to Annual Conference 2011 in Liverpool.
Critical and controversial decisions were taken at that event within hours of being published by former Liberal Party member, now Labour MP Peter Hain. Questions remain about their democratic legitimacy.
Unlike the early 1980s, Labour Party members are now mainly loyal..to a fault - of letting their elected leader behave like a 16th century monarch. This is regrettable. It, in part, accounts for the inability of the Labour Party to recruit and retain members. There is only a limited number of people who can hold sway in the court of King Ed. So far Labour First led by John Spellar MP, with scribe Luke Akehurst, elected to the NEC last year on a joint ticket with Progess, is doing well.
Data on previous year's Conference CLP delegates suggests a downward trend, like that of membership from 1997 until the 2010 General Election. A question arising from Conference 2011 is whether the stitchup was so blatant that a significant number of CLPs will decide not to bother to send a delegate to Conference 2012.
Even though I am no longer a member of the National Executive Committee, I was rung by the secretary of a CLP in a solid Tory seat to tell me: "never again", not on the grounds of anti-democratic behaviour by the Labour leadership, but because the CLP financial settlement buried in the minutia of Refounding Labour had blown a massive hole in the CLP's budget to fight local elections.
My own branch is minded for ideological reasons to support a Conference 2012 boycott on the grounds of 'No say, No pay' and that applies as much to membership subscriptions as conference delegate fees. Nothing has been formalised yet. But it would not take much more nonsense from the Leader , Ed Miliband, his appointed shadow cabinet and other party apparachniks to tip the balance in that direction.
Whether that could force change towards the staging of a deliberative assembly at Conference 2012, instead of a Nuremberg-style rally, is a moot point.
