DISCLAIMER: This article contains the personal views of the author and should not be inferred to be the views of Unlock Democracy.

As the memory of this year’s party conferences fades into the background, I have to ask myself what are conferences for. I have to admit that I am a conference junkie. I have been attending party conferences regularly for 17 years and have gone to some 45 party conferences in most parts of the UK as well as ones in several other European countries.

Firstly we must recognise that the week long party conferences is a strange British tradition. No other European country has them. In many countries they are simply weekend events and in some cases only happen every four years to ratify a manifesto. So what is the function of these bizarre events by the seaside (though next year for the first time both Labour and the Conservatives will hold their conferences in Manchester and Birmingham respectively)?

Historically party conferences were the places where policy was made or at least ratified. When I started going to all three main conferences in 1995 a colleague at the time told me that Liberal Democrat conference thinks it makes policy and it does, Labour conference thinks it makes policy but doesn’t and the Conservative conference know it doesn’t make policy and doesn’t care. Over the last 12 years the trend is for conferences to be less and less about policy making and more about policy showing. Now no Labour delegate thinks conference makes policy and the Conservatives have abolished the last pretences of policy making and even abolished motions. And the Liberal Democrats? Well like many of the smaller parties conference still plays a major role in the policy making process as the Lib Dem leadership can testify, but even here setting out their wares is now as important as the ratification of policy.

When I started attending conferences, they were broadcast live on BBC2. Now they are covered on BBC Parliament where only the most dedicated political obsessive will watch them. But it is still true that the week of party conference provides the best opportunity of the year for a party to set the political agenda and try and communicate with the wider public more directly. In reality it’s the journalists who now decide who has had a good week and not the conference delegate. Their power as interpreters is greater than ever. I have attended many a conference where the people at the conference thought they had a good day only to read in the papers next day that the party is suicidal and about to jump off the cliff in a fit of collective despair.

But conference weeks can change the collective mood unlike any other thing in the parties control, you only have to look at this year’s Conservative Party conference. All the headlines the week before were about a early election being inevitable and Brown threatening to finally kill off the Conservative Party. Yet the events in Blackpool changed the national mood, killed off a snap election and ended the Brown bounce.

Party conferences also play a major part in the internal life of a political party. They provide activists with an opportunity to meet friends, get training and generally re-energise their political batteries. Particularly at a time when being involved in a party politics is seen by many as strange or even slightly seedy, we forget the importance of building an esprit de corps among the volunteer activists upon whom parties depend. This is particularly important for those parties who are in opposition and probably far from power. That partially explains why parties such as the Lib Dems and Plaid the tradition of singing political songs is still alive, because it helps reaffirm where they have collectively been and what they are fighting for. But even for parties in power or close to it, party conferences are a way of reaffirming who they are and why they exist.

Apart from these reasons, there is one that parties are largely silent on but may now be the dominant reason for these weeklong festivals of politics. Money. To be frank, parties wouldn’t hold such events if they did not so much money out of them. We are not just talking about the money parties make from attendees, but also from selling exhibition space. Labour made a profit of £1,128,000 from commercial activities in 2006 we don’t have a breakdown of how much comes from party conferences, but we can assume a large part does. Even the Liberal Democrats made £363,122.

We need to be clear that some of this money is in effect cash for access. Organisations are paying to get access to decision makers. And it is not just the money that formally goes to the parties, it is the money that gets spent by think tanks and NGO’s such as Unlock Democracy and the companies that sponsor these events. This is an area where the regulator, the Electoral Commission, needs to take a greater interest.

So as long as the media keeps reporting them and the money keeps flowing these festivals will continue, regardless of whether they actually decide anything.