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Labour: Big Conversation a success
5 Dec 2003
The Labour Party's 'Big Conversation', a new consultation exercise launched to great fanfare last week, was today judged a "complete success" by a Party spokesman after the words "big" and "conversation" were redefined. "If you take 'big' to mean more than one person – two or three, perhaps – and 'conversation' to mean those people saying different things and ignoring each other, then yes, I think it's been a remarkable success so far," she said at a press conference this morning.
"Already, a simply vast number of people have told us what they want us to do, and we have told them what we want to do, and I think both sides now have a pretty good idea of what is going to happen," she continued. "The Prime Minister is personally very happy because so far in the majority of cases what is going to happen is in fact what he wants to happen. Never before has a leader been in such harmony with public opinion."
One example of where the Big Conversation has been particularly successful was on the issue of university tuition fees, when 150 Labour backbenchers signed a motion opposing top-up fees. "This was one side of the conversation and then the Whips gave the other," said one backbencher. "Basically that consisted of 'shut up or else'."
The exercise has not, however, been successful in every case. During a visit to Newport in Wales to launch the initiative, Mr Blair was forced to abandon a conversation with a group of teenagers about foundation hospitals due to "language problems". Speaking afterwards to our bling bling correspondent, the teenagers said that they could speak perfect English, but for some reason Mr Blair did not understand their hand gestures.
Plans to extend the Big Conversation to include "a little conversation" between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have meanwhile been deemed unfeasible and abandoned.
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