It is quite to be expected that the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) would be in a mood to crow after the success of its 63rd annual conference last weekend.

While not a reflection on outcomes, success here is narrowly defined as the huge crowd that turned up at the National Arena on Sunday for the public session of the conference to hear party leader Bruce Golding outline his broad vision for Jamaica. And that is our problem: the penchant of politicians to allow numbers to trump substance.

So in September when the People's National Party (PNP) held its annual conference, the first under new leader Portia Simpson Miller, it felt that it had to make a profound statement with the numbers, a sort of public validation of Mrs. Simpson Miller's leadership.

The public session of that conference was duly declared the largest by the PNP in three decades, perhaps even dwarfing that of 1976, during the heady days of democratic socialism when the party's late leader Michael Manley was at his demagogic height. But it is as if the numbers are ends in themselves and there is nothing to learn from history; like the fact that four years later, when Manley held a rally in Montego Bay, the PNP ran an ad to declare that "150,000-strong can't be wrong". Weeks afterwards the PNP went down in an ignominious electoral defeat.

In the case of Mrs. Simpson Miller's 'mother of all conferences', it turned out that it may have been financed by that $31 million ostensible 'gift' from the Dutch commodity trader, Trafigura Beheer, which has contracts with the Government. The ensuing scandal, in the face of the revelation of governmental sleaze, has cost Mrs. Simpson Miller's party dearly. Both its and her popularity have suffered.

It might not be so worrisome, and would perhaps count for far more if people made their own effort to attend these conferences. It might suggest that people have a deep, abiding interest in the direction of the country rather than a free day out for the party's hard-core faithful.

Delroy Chuck, the Shadow Justice Minister, however, boasts of the "over 600 buses" that transported people to the National Arena; that Daryl Vaz was able to pack 131 of those buses and Shahine Robinson, 70, with their supporters. We know of the frequent consequences of such political mobilisation, as in the case in Stony Hill when halting a motorcade of supporters of the PNP's Dr. Peter Phillips ended with a young man being chased and murdered.

On Sunday, there were numerous instances of buses, with bodies protruding from all angles, disobeying traffic rules and even the directions of police officers. Indeed, photographs in this newspaper captured the behaviour. We were, perhaps, lucky there was not worse, and that we might have got away with only the ransacking of an office at the National Arena and the stealing of computers and other equipment. For this, of course, the JLP does not accept liability, although the party may be willing to offer restitution.

Perhaps it's time to move the party conferences beyond being big, public jam sessions to thoughtful episodes, which get to the gut of issues, and delegates have real opportunities to contribute to the formation of policy.