No one who witnessed Neil Kinnock's leader's speech to the 1985 Labour conference will ever forget the blistering oratory that laid into local government ultra-leftism in Liverpool and sounded the death knell for Militant influence in the party. Certainly, nothing that Tony Blair has done before or since compares with either the emotional impact of Kinnock's onslaught at that time or his courage in launching it in a context in which he knew that the reaction of his audience -- and in particular of the "soft left" on whom he relied for his control of the NEC and the party -- was at best uncertain.

His attack on the "grotesque chaos of a Labour council -- a Labour council" (and my, how that rhetorical repetition sticks in the memory) "hiring taxis to scuttle around a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers" brought abuse fom Derek Hatton & Co and a theatrical platform walk-out from Eric Heffer. But it also forced a choice on those of us in the party whose hearts were in natural sympathy with anyone offering resistance to Thatcherism but whose heads told us that, in the aftermath of the defeat of the miners, the only alternative to Kinnock's "battered shield" (to use his metaphor from the Labour local government conference in February that year) was indeed no shield at all. We could continue down the road of "glorious failure" or start the long, messy slog back to political power, trimming our sails and making our necessary compromises as we did so.

"Gestures are fine but people cannot live in them," Kinnock had told the Liverpool council leaders when they appealed to the NEC for unconditional support in their battle with the Thatcher government. "If actions by Labour councillors mean more power to the Tories, no one gains but the Tories." A couple of years later, after another defeat, this time in the 1987 general election, he asked delegates attending that year's party conference to "remind themselves of the price that is paid for indiscipline and disunity". A price, he said, that "is paid most by those who need most . . . those who attract our greatest concern; those who most need our help; those who most depend upon our success. We cannot let them down. We must not let them pay that price again."

It was Neil Kinnock's absolute allegiance to "those who most need our help", and a belief that when it came to the crunch he could be trusted to be on the side of the impoverished and dispossessed every time, that led many of us to maintain our support for his transformation of the party even as we disagreed with some of his actions or regreted some of his retreats on policy. It was all the more hurtful, therefore, that it should have been Kinnock last week who was responsible for such an intemperate attack on the Grassroots Alliance candidates in the NEC elections, when he made the mistake of confusing a desire for a more open and representative party executive with some sort of return to the Militant "gesture politics" and disunity of the 1980s.

The language used in Kinnock's Guardian article last Friday denouncing the Alliance could have come straight out of the Militant lexicon. "Selfish parasites", "sneering leftists", "sour sectarians" -- his assertion that people standing on the Alliance ticket "don't engage in constructive criticism. In every debate they use more abuse than argument" could have been taken as silly self-parody had he not meant it so seriously. His description of everyone on the Alliance slate as "Trostkyites" (like Liz Davies) or "dupes" (like Mark Seddon) was as daft as it was untrue.

This week, the party meets in Blackpool for a conference that will be little more than a week-long rally. Effective policy-making now takes place elsewhere; votes, where they happen at all, are more symbolic than meaningful. What Neil Kinnock once described as the "purity of powerless . . . constant diets of resolutions condemning and motions deploring and statements opposing" has long since been swept away. But with it has also gone any real sense of what the party conference is now for. You don't need to want a return to the bunfights of the 1970s and 1980s to feel that there should be more to being a delegate at Labour's annual gathering than a seven-day stint as a cheerleader for the party hierarchy.

"A church with an open door is still a church," Neil Kinnock once remarked, justifying the expulsion of Militant supporters from the "open church" of the Labour Party. "But a church without walls is just an open space." A church in which the vicar is treated as though he is God, however, and only the chosen members of the choir are ever permitted to sing, is one in which the congregation will soon dwindle. Singing from the same hymn sheet doesn't mean that we can only ever sing the same hymns.

A final quote from Neil Kinnock may be in order here. "I warn you," he once told us in another famous speech of his, "[that] if Margaret Thatcher wins, she will be more a Leader than a Prime Minister. That power produces arrogance and when it is toughened by Tebbitry and flattered and fawned upon by spineless sycophants, the boot-licking tabloid Knights of Fleet Street and placemen in the Quangos, the arrogance corrupts absolutely." It is neither sour sectarianism nor sneering leftism to suggest that we should beware of replacing the impotence of division with the "unity" of absolutism.