Historic Warwick: Comrades, Sisters and Brothers, Colleagues - What Has Been Delivered?

That prize clown Luke Akehurst believes that Trade Union Turkeys have again voted for Christmas. This is based on BBC Report which suggests that Harriet Harman is going to make a tub thumping Prezza-like speech at Bournemouth to send delegates home happy.

Luke and Harriet were ecstatic that they had fooled the Unions

But they have also voted to axe "Contemporary Resolutions" at Conference. One of the ways party units can seek to change or make the Party's policies. Others being through lobbying MPs and Ministers on the quiet with the odd EDM or petition thrown in (perhaps the most successful) and the National Policy Forum (NPF) - a delegate body so far effectively ruled by PM and TPTB.

If Luke had been there - at the Party's National Executive Committee (NEC) - his position and his gurning face might well have swayed some of the craven idiots stuck on the NEC by Unions to actually vote for their Union's policy or if they could conjure up the vaguest idea of what this means: for their members' interests.

If what the Unions have achieved through Warwick (a particularly "Historic" NPF session) surpasses all that has gone before - as Luke happily claims - then that really is a VERY SAD indictment on party democracy.

What exactly has been not only agreed but also delivered from the "historic Warwick" agreement? Government hegemony over the unions?

Which admittedly is lovely triangulation to attract support from those who want the unions smashed.

Luke may well argue that whatever has been achieved is more than X years of resolutions and he may even be right. But that means he is saying that for X years the parliamentary party has been riding roughshod over party policy decisions.

Now, don't get me wrong. It is just possible that the NPF or similar IS a better way of making policy IN THEORY. But that's all. IN PRACTICE it is widely derided as undemocratic, unaccountable, manipulated, unlistening, and at the end of the day railroaded by the government.

At this point the undemocratic conclusions are put before conference for an all or nothing vote. That is heavily whipped by the platform's agents in the crowd. It is beyond belief really that only half a dozen people will vote against say a Britain in the World document (in 2005) which says "business as usual" over the likes of Iraq. Even if it does say "onwards and upwards" over international development.

Iraq incidentally which we were not allowed to discuss due to manipulation of the contemporary resolutions list to exclude it.

The ballot would have been rigged in any case.

Contemporary resolutions have not delivered. That much is true. But the National Policy Forum is going to be a whole lot better than it ever has been if the heart and soul of the Labour Party is to find its way onto the page.