'Justine Thornton’s dress was deemed OK. Whose agenda is this?' Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA
Sorry I haven't had time to prepare this properly. I haven't been coached for weeks by film directors in how to walk and talk, and say: "Here's the thing." This is not written by a team so I can only react passively to Ed Miliband's hard-twerking speech because conference season commands passivity for the few, irrelevance for the many.
Not that you would know this from the media who are sure that a new kind of socialism is stalking the land or that power blackouts are imminent if anyone votes Labour.
What is new and modern and very American about these rallies – and so many Americans have been hired in as consultants – is this concentration on the leader himself and how long he can talk for. Lauded as huge successes at the time, most people, and I am one, find these speeches inherently boring. The last time I heard a good speech was at a fringe meeting.
Still the consensus is that Ed is not as vegan as we feared and put some meat on the bones of opposition. His wife, Justine Thornton, who is more than a dress, had to wear a dress,which was deemed OK. Whose agenda is this?
Against the jubilation and "modernisation", membership of all parties is plummeting because the relationship of the leadership to the member is simply one-way. The spin, the choreographed applause, the unlikely music, the stage-managed reaction. And that is if you are actually there. Labour, of all parties, could have some relationship with anti-fracking, anti-fascist or anti–hospital closure activists but it doesn't. Activism operates separately to the hierarchies of all the parties.
During conference season, the media simply reinforce this essentially passive relationship to politics. We are merely the audience who will judge performances, much as we would Strictly Come Dancing. The establishment's refusal to examine its own role in this top-down process again ignores the reality: the era of mass party membership is over. Most people do not want to sit and be bored to death by endless speeches. Ukip functions not only as coded racism but as a protest against the old hierarchies.
The actual organisation of political parties is not a sexy topic and one that only a tiny minority of people who are in them want to address. There are apparently bigger issues than democracy being utterly dysfunctional now.
But no matter how near Ed got to saying the S word – socialism – the personality-led, top-down, private schoolboy way of politics is failing fast. In geek-speak we need to replace vertical structures with horizontal. Party politics has become ever more rigid over the years. Blair dispensed with cabinet and had a sofa government, Brown and Damian McBride, it appears had sauvignon government. We end up with bigger and bigger decisions being made by fewer people, some of them unelected.
Whether a voter or even a party member, one's relationship is subservient. No party has properly embraced social media and sees how it may help them talk to "real" people. Miliband's Twitter feed has the passion of a dead potplant. And yes, I know it's not him really, but why bother? Politicians can simply pronounce or engage. For if you are asking people to join something, what do they get in return beyond clapping policy delivered from on high and delivering flyers?
The old-fashioned nature of conference season is a total turn-off. Do you want to see celebrities laughing at bad jokes, "well-crafted" speeches, media saturation or are you completely sick of the annual spectacle that reminds us of how unrepresentative, representative democracy is?
I have no truck with any organisation that won't challenge this newly invented "tradition" of these cloned guys who have to present their wives in nice frocks. I want nothing to do with the continuing dominance of the privately schooled over the rest of us. I don't want to be governed by people who have never made mistakes, never had the "wrong" kind of sex or taken drugs. Party politics and how it presents its leaders has become more and more straight, while social attitudes have loosened.
Imagine a Ted Heath now. No wife? No frock? Gosh, they fret about diversity but the current structures cannot produce anything that resembles the actual makeup of this country.
Changing the system is the big one, but why does everyone have to lower their expectations the minute they join a party? The most radical thing Miliband said was about giving 16-year-olds the vote. By God do they need some new blood.
But we also need new ways to organise. I propose a looser, less top-down party. Uslut. In my party, we would meet when we felt like it. We would do politics differently, though that makes it sound like a dating site. Still, we have to finance it somehow.
We will hammer out some policies as and when we get some signings. Personally, I want an English parliament and nationalised energy companies. We would challenge the left and the right. We wouldn't have "women's issues" because women's issues are everyone's issues. We would be women and men and everything in between. Usluts may not clean behind the fridge and we may not win power. But we would have an actual party trying.
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