A year ago, the Labour party conference in Brighton was more like a four-day celebration. Mostly of Jeremy Corbyn. Against the odds, the Labour leader had rubbed out the Tory overall majority with an energised campaign and the party had come back from the dead. It was a defeat that felt like a victory and the conference treated it as such. It became almost obligatory for every speaker to begin their turns with their personal thanks and indebtedness to Jeremy. The more critical the speaker had previously been, the longer the eulogy was expected to be. Tom Watson’s lasted for about 10 minutes. Even he was cringing by the end.
Twelve months on and some of the euphoria has worn off. Despite the Tories having achieved nothing of any note and being openly at war with one another over Brexit, Labour has failed to make any progress in the polls. In a two-horse race for who would make the best prime minister, Corbyn is still coming third – just behind Theresa May and a long way behind “Don’t know”.
The mood in the conference hall at Liverpool now is more reflective. Guarded even. Delegates sense there may be another general election in the offing and they want to know why they aren’t clear favourites to win it. Just imagine the shame of being thought to be even more hopeless than the Tories. Explanations are required.
After finding one common enemy in the mainstream media – to make a point, the newspapers have this year been located in the dog exercise area – the conference hall settled down to try to agree what it would be talking about. Though not before deciding what it wouldn’t be talking about. It wouldn’t be talking about antisemitism in the party, because there was no need. Jennie Formby, the general secretary, said all outstanding complaints of antisemitism had now been successfully resolved. She didn’t explain how.
Having also finessed its way to finding a way of talking about Brexit that would allow the party to fudge its position and commit itself to nothing binding, the conference then went for the real enemy. The enemy within. Some grassroots Momentum members reckoned Labour’s real existential problem was its own MPs who didn’t believe enough in Jeremy, and were determined to make their voices heard. Not content with an agreed motion to reduce the deselection threshold from 50% to 33% – cries of “traitors” went up when this was suggested – they wanted open selection.
What was needed was a system of permanent open selection where any MP could be deselected at any time. Any MP who didn’t do exactly what the constituency Labour party wanted when it wanted could be given the boot. “How can we tolerate MPs who defy the whip and vote with the Tories and the rightwing media?” asked one delegate. He’s going to have a hell of a shock when he discovers Corbyn voted against his party on 428 occasions, and seven times with the Tory majority. A token speaker who observed that MPs had to appeal to a constituency rather wider than a few hundred members to get elected was given the cold shoulder.
Curiously, the one place where some kind of cooperation and unity was on offer was at Momentum’s fringe festival. In previous years The World Transformed has felt like little more than a cheerleading operation for Corbyn but now it has gone beyond that into something rather more serious. There are still a few fairly bonkers events, such as “Origami for Peace” and “A war-game based on ‘A Very British Coup’ in which 50 players re-enact the Labour party of the 1980s and try to prevent the malign deep state from frustrating the creation of a socialist vision”, but most are rather more what you might expect from the main conference.
Hard to believe, but not so long ago Ed Miliband was considered to be on the far left of the Labour party. Now he’s more recognisable as a centrist dad – with a nice sideline as a chatshow host – but he’s still treated with affection, if not as royalty, by audiences and he managed to chair a panel on the economy in a way that managed to unite everyone, from the right of the party to the far left. Quite some feat. And one that may not be repeated again all week.
