The issue of the role of contemporary motions at Labour Party conferences is unlikely to interest anyone bar political obsessives. They are a device by which policy declarations can be placed on the agenda on the dubious pretext that they are a response to some emergency. This has been exploited by trade union leaders, in particular, and the endorsement of these resolutions by delegates has embarrassed ministers periodically. Embarrassment has been, however, about the limit of that discomfort. The motions are not binding on either the party or its manifesto.

While Gordon Brown’s widely expected victory today on reform of these motions is symbolic, it is not insignificant. The effect will be to shift authority away from trade unions and towards the party as a whole. It is for that reason, and not merely loyalty to the Prime Minister, that constituency parties are enthusiastic about the reform while unions, especially those in the grip of the hard Left, would like to see them derailed.

This is a modest step in a sensible direction. It should not be the last such step by any means. It is understandable why Mr Brown chose to focus on this specific measure this year rather than bring forward more comprehensive proposals. He has other demands on his attention and time – not least the business of government - and it was shrewd to test the waters before committing himself to a fundamental overhaul of the Labour Party’s internal arrangements. That push must, nonetheless, be extended in 2008.

For, in truth, the impact which Tony Blair had here was modest. He changed Clause Four of the Labour Party but not much else. There were institutional innovations such as the creation of the National Policy Forum, which had the effect of boosting the influence of ordinary members over the trade union barons. On the whole, though, Mr Blair’s attempt to alter the Labour Party relied on changing the character of who chose to join it (which worked at first, but not after 1999) and soliciting large sums of money from wealthy supporters to offset the financial hold of the unions (a well-intentioned scheme but one that led directly to the debacle that was cash-for-peerages). He did nothing, for instance, about the cumbersome electoral college which elected a deputy leader in June.

The reality is that there is a paradox at the core of the new Labour enterprise. A party which is deeply fond of urging the modernisation of many and varied aspects of national life has proved somewhat reluctant to modernise itself. Yet the need for such a root-and-branch review is evident. The contest to be the deputy leader was an unedifying spectacle precisely because the current electoral college creates an incentive to appeal for the votes of union henchmen and unrepresentative activists. A straightforward one-member, one-vote procedure would have been more democratic and might well have ensured a different outcome. Meanwhile, the trade union block vote, long an offensive item, is becoming more obscene still as a series of mergers across the union movement means that an ever larger block is being placed in fewer, often more politically extreme, hands.

It is, however, also obscene that the Prime Minister is so cavalier about an undemocratic shift of power to Europe and, in particular, to a European judiciary that has little empathy for British legal traditions. Mr Brown’s apparent love of democracy should be reflected in his attitude to both party and country.