To whom does a political party belong? To its leader? To the MPs who have been elected in the party’s colours to represent it in parliament? To the party’s members? To the organisations who founded the party and still pay most of its bills, which in Labour’s case are the trades unions? This question doesn’t often trouble anyone except political scientists, but who owns the Labour party suddenly matters a great deal. It will be one of the big questions – perhaps the biggest, and certainly a more important, question than whether or not Jeremy Corbyn can master reading from an autocue – at the party’s conference in Brighton.
The new leader and those who put him there may feel entitled to think they ought to be the masters now. Whether Labour MPs like it or not – and it is no secret that most of his parliamentary colleagues do not like it at all – he has just won a leadership contest and by a margin that squashed his competitors. More than 50,000 new members are said to have joined the party in the past fortnight. It is a fair assumption that this represents a fresh injection of Corbynistas. Labour MPs have no choice but to acknowledge that this gives him a strong base of support in the party at large, but they will contend that they have a competing mandate. Parliamentarians will argue that they have a rival authority, one derived at the general election, from the nine million voters who sent them to the Commons under a very different manifesto from the Corbyn prospectus. That is the tension that now runs through Labour like the stripe in seaside rock. This week will give us important clues about whether it is going to be resolved creatively or destructively.
It is a bit of a myth on the left that conference was once the supreme decision-making body of Labour, to whose decisions MPs were always obliged to bow. It is a bit more complicated than that. Successive Labour leaders, even the sainted Clem Attlee, have ignored conference resolutions when they thought the party had decided something crazy. It is also a bit of a myth that the conference was totally emasculated by New Labour under those “control freaks” Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. A conference revolt, if it was fierce enough, could force them to change track, as one did over pensions. It is entirely fair to say that the Labour conference became increasingly denuded of authority and respect over the years. This happened for a reason. In Labour’s good old, bad old days, the party went to the seaside each autumn to commit suicide in public. Rather than being a showcase to the voters for the party’s offer to the country, Labour conferences were an annual advertisement of its divisions. If there is a great scrap this year over the future of Trident, it will be a bit like a theatrical revival of an old play. Labour many times in the past tore itself apart over the nuclear deterrent, especially during its long periods in opposition in the 1950s and 1980s. While the party expended enormous amounts of energy arguing about weapons over which it had absolutely no control, the Tories enjoyed governing.
In today’s New Review, I offer my selection of the 10 most significant speeches made at Labour conferences. Rather a lot of the most electric performances, from Hugh Gaitskell vowing to “fight and fight and fight again to save the party we love” to Neil Kinnock’s scorching denunciation of the Militant Tendency, were battling speeches delivered amid an internal Labour war. That is why Labour conferences subsequently turned boring. Discipline and unity became the watchwords for fear of arousing and displaying division. Arguments were anaesthetised. Dissent was exiled from the conference hall to the fringe. Then the fringe became soporific, too. The role of delegates was steadily reduced to that of a clap machine for the great ones strutting their sound-bites on the platform. The party’s activists were increasingly out-numbered at their own conference by lobbyists. Quite understandably, they grew pissed off with the leadership behaving as if the party was its exclusive property and treating the members as irrelevant. It was an explosion of pent-up revolt against that which helped surge Jeremy Corbyn to where he sits now. Even veterans of the New Labour years accept that his victory was a rejection of that style of top-down, buttoned-up politics.
The biggest promise he made was not any one specific policy. The biggest promise he made was that the Labour party could have arguments again.
And so far he has been as good as his word. One Labour MP, someone a long way from being a Corbynista, remarks: “At least we can now have a debate in a way we never could during Ed’s years. The awful, suffocating, oxygen-draining false unity has broken down.” A member of the shadow cabinet, someone who originally thought he could not be part of the frontbench team because he and the new leader were so far apart, says he changed his mind when he had conversations with Mr Corbyn and found him undidactic and pluralist. In his first fortnight as leader, he has already bowed to opinion among his parliamentary colleagues. His most significant accommodation has been to accept that Labour will definitely advocate remaining within the EU. Labour frontbenchers even have licence to go on the airwaves and cheerfully list all the areas in which they disagree with Mr Corbyn, a trampling on conventional notions about a leader’s authority. As I remarked last week, this is the price that he has had to pay to avoid an immediate civil war with his parliamentary party. It is a necessary dose of pragmatism to keep the Labour show on the road.
The media will spend its week in Brighton harvesting as many anti-Corbyn quotes as can be drawn from his parliamentary colleagues, but I suspect the trawl will not be as bountiful as some expect. “The party wants the parliamentary party to co-operate with Jeremy,” says one senior Labour figure. There will be plenty of conspiratorial muttering in the bars and over restaurant tables, but most MPs will be careful what they say on the record. Mr Corbyn has received a hostile welcome from the vast majority of the press, but that makes it more likely he will get an extremely warm reception from the conference. The heavier the onslaught from the Tories and their media allies, the more defiantly supportive the delegates are likely to be. “The membership voted for change,” says one member of the shadow cabinet. “Anyone who doesn’t understand that will find themselves on the wrong side of the conference.”
I expect a large theme of Mr Corbyn’s speech on Tuesday will be about re-empowering the members, which has the double purpose of pleasing them and strengthening his hand with his MPs. Immediately the conference is ended, he wants to go back on tour, this time to try to engage members in policy debates. “Easier said than done,” remarks one not unsympathetic senior frontbencher. It doesn’t take much effort to click and vote. It takes rather more commitment to develop a housing strategy. A true mass membership party wrestling creatively with policy development would be a splendid thing. It might be an education for MPs to engage more deeply with their members. It might be an education for their activists to engage seriously with the nightmarish dilemmas that face politicians. In the optimistic scenario, there will be lively but friendly argument between the various wings of the party and the result of this ferment will be an improvement in everyone’s ideas.
Then there’s the pessimistic scenario and it is the one that will unfold if Labour repeats its uncomradely history of going to war with itself. There will be a poisonous struggle to the death between rival factions. The way in which some Labour MPs have talked about deposing their leader is already being reciprocated by Corbynista zealots who threaten to eject parliamentarians who step out of line. Mr Corbyn may sincerely want to let a thousand flowers bloom; some of his zealots sound like they want to tear up by the roots anyone who disagrees with them. This is why Labour MPs are so fearful of a return to “mandatory re-selection”: forcing each one of them to reapply to be the Labour candidate in his or her seat. There is a perfectly sound argument in favour of re-selection. It is not healthy if MPs think they can regard a safe seat as a seat for life. The reason Labour MPs are so hostile is that re-selection was used in the 1980s by the Bennite left to start a purge of parliamentarians who were judged wanting in ideological purity. As things stand now, I don’t see any Labour MPs, bar possibly the odd maverick, splitting off to form a new party or rushing into the arms of the Liberal Democrats. De-selection is what could change that. The trigger for the SDP breakaway in the 1980s was when the hard left started coming for the centre left at a constituency level.
If that dark road is taken, to whom the party belongs will be a subject only for seminars because it will be an entirely academic question. There won’t be anything much remaining of Labour that is worth owning.
The 10 best Labour conference speeches. New Review, page 6
