Andy Burnham has, thus far, been an avowedly domestic prime minister, with his focus on devolution, housing and social care allowing Miliband more control over foreign affairs. And until now, the role has in some ways suited Miliband well. On the eve of this week’s Labour Party conference, murmurs abounded of Cabinet splits over the economy and immigration. A shift in foreign policy, however, has been more warmly received within the party. Earlier this month, Miliband announced a series of sanctions on illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. He has integrated elements of his old brief at the Energy Department to push for “climate diplomacy”, and has been more explicit in his advocacy for European reintegration than either of the previous two office holders. This all provides easy ammunition for rival parties and for the British press, but it’s catnip for party members.

During his Conference speech in Liverpool on Monday morning, Miliband hit all these notes and provided a clearer view of what his foreign policy will look like. “The world order needs rebuilding anew,” he said, arguing that his approach would be one of “resilient idealism”. He had made the same points at a corporate reception the previous evening, where business leaders uninterestedly chatted and chewed. In front of Labour delegates on Monday, however, he was more at home. The crowd thunderously cheered his labeling of Israeli settlers as “terrorists”, and his declaration that “our future lies in a stronger, deeper partnership with the European Union”.

Left-wing dissent towards Miliband’s agenda has, therefore, come not from within the walls of the conference but right outside. On Sunday evening, more than 50 protesters were arrested for demonstrating in support of the proscribed group Palestine Action. When I walked past the scene, there appeared to be more police than agitators. White-haired radicals sat cross-legged on the grass — standing for an extended period would have put pressure on those joints — and held up homemade signs pledging fealty to the organization, surrounded all the while by a bored-looking ring of officers. The same evening, a smaller group of activists had confronted Miliband in Pizza Express, telling him his Israel position was insufficient and demanding he abandon his doughballs to address the protesters.

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This encapsulates one of the chief problems faced by Labour foreign secretaries at a time of war in the Middle East. While the Right-leaning press decries Miliband as an extremist enemy of the people, there will invariably be a coterie of progressive objectionists who will settle for nothing less than the nuking of Tel Aviv. At the same time, Miliband, a British Jew whose mother escaped a ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland, has had to put up with allegations of antisemitism for his action on West Bank settlements, just as security officials brief the press that his approach to the US-Israeli offensive against Iran was “petulant, pacifist, legalistic and very political”.

That Miliband is political is obvious: he is arguably the most ideological member of Burnham’s Cabinet, deeply interested in ideas in a way that the more interpersonally minded PM is not. “He’s more demanding [than Cooper or Lammy],” one FCDO official tells me. “But he knows what he wants. As soon as he came in, there was a plan for how he wanted things done.” Shortly after he became energy secretary under the leadership of Keir Starmer, Miliband spoke in an interview of the need to “move fast and build things”. Initially tipped to be Burnham’s chancellor, he has put paid to the idea that a move to the Foreign brief — which for some ministers feels more like an ambassadorial role — would neuter his political influence.

As part of this new shift towards a more ideological foreign policy, Britain will have to accept its own mediocrity. Much of Miliband’s messaging so far has reinforced the image of the country as a secondary power, rather than one that should be competing with the big boys in DC and Beijing. The West Bank announcement was made in conjunction with similar action from Canada and France, other middle powers with which Britain is forging closer ties to compensate for White House capriciousness. The UK has found some success as a driver of European action on Ukraine, leading the “coalition of the willing” at a time when Kyiv has been uncertain of US backing. Miliband insisted in his Liverpool speech that “our alliance with the United States remains essential”, yet he made no effort to hide this government’s diplomatic realignment. Britons are “proud Europeans”, he said, adding: “This is our continent.” In other words: these are our true friends, not America.

While Miliband has sought to portray his plans as a radical break from the Starmer years, some of his prescriptions bear a resemblance to what came before. His talk of “resilient idealism” is immediately reminiscent of Lammy’s promotion of “progressive realism” abroad. According to that doctrine, governments “do not have to choose between values and interests”, and Left-wing ideals can still shape practical responses to global conflict. Where Miliband differs from the more Atlanticist Lammy is in the course that he is charting away from Washington and more determinedly into the embrace of Europe. Indeed, it is hard to picture him (illicitly) fishing with JD Vance.

The Foreign Secretary, then, clearly sees an opening for Britain to become, rather than a leading power, a moral brake on the worst impulses of its betters. On Monday, he vowed to “put climate at the heart of national security”. When the UK takes on the rotating G20 presidency next year, it will “lead the efforts to manage AI so we keep our country and our world safe, and I say no tech titan should stand in our way”. Earlier this month, in relation to Gaza, he said that “Britain is not silent in the face of injustice and nor is it powerless”.

Yet Miliband risks making the same mistake as Lammy, attempting to navigate a multipolar world armed with the outmoded weaponry of the old liberal order. The UK has in recent weeks launched another round of “tough new sanctions” in Russia, with little evidence that they will have a greater impact than those which came before, while continued invocations of international law hardly deter Xi and Putin. Miliband’s assumption of a like-minded federation of European allies will be put to the test, too, by the possibility of continental powers such as France and Germany electing Right-populist, anti-Brussels parties into government in the coming decade. “Europe is not just our geography, but so much more,” he said as he called for a deeper partnership with the bloc on Monday. But how might he deal with a prospective AfD chancellor who wants out of the union altogether?

Miliband may be looking towards Europe, but these pledges are always made with one eye on Labour’s domestic popularity. The party faces a crucial by-election in Holborn and St Pancras next week, where Green leader Zack Polanski is seeking election in a constituency which in more than 40 years of existence has chosen only Labour MPs. There is a case to be made that Polanski’s initial success was the result of progressive frustration with Starmer, and that the Burnham conquest has brought the Left back onside. Miliband’s rhetoric against the Israeli government may have some moral grounding, but it also functions as an attempt to match Green radicalism on the issue.

His enemies won’t be surprised by this: he’s “Red Ed”, after all. Having been party leader for the first half of Labour’s decade of humiliation, Miliband has become a more polished, wily politician in the years since. But he’s still an idealist. “They say that as you age you become more cynical,” he declared during his Liverpool speech. “Why? Not me.” Talk of “resilient idealism” might sound appealing to the Labour base, but that resilience is only tested in times of crisis. As for realpolitik, nobody is mistaking Miliband for Henry Kissinger, but there are plenty within the party who would like him to take inspiration from one of Labour’s more hard-headed foreign secretaries — Ernest Bevin, who served in the Clement Attlee government from 1945-51.

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Bevin, a former union boss, had impeccable Left-wing credentials when appointed by Attlee, but quickly marked himself out as a realist on foreign policy. Recognizing that Britain was a fading superpower, he pushed for the creation of Nato, and its principle of collective defense, so that the country could call on a network of Western European partners ready to support its aims. He championed the development of a nuclear deterrent, and a decade earlier had admonished Labour’s pacifist then-leader, George Lansbury, for “hawking his conscience around”. Bevin also opposed the establishment of Israel, believing it would become a “racial state”, and maintained that the Balfour Declaration of 1917 had been a grave error of foreign policy.

Of course, Bevin failed in his attempt to block the foundation of Israel, his power only extending so far. Miliband, who has used his extensive Whitehall experience to circumvent obstacles that had thwarted his predecessors, is well-positioned to reshape the international order so that British objectives better match his own idealistic, Europhile politics.

And yet, the public may ask how far this serves the national interest. They would be entitled, too, to argue that Miliband’s Net Zero zealotry in the Energy brief constrained national industry, at a cost to the country’s hard-power capabilities. Britain has an opportunity to make something of what Miliband correctly perceives to be its secondary status, leading a set of fellow middle powers. But Miliband’s progressive ideals would be better served by pragmatism than by sanctions and stern words alone. “It’s hard to change the world,” he acknowledged in his Liverpool speech. Sometimes, it’s better to recognize the world as it is, and leave the idealism to the activists sitting cross-legged outside the conference gate.

Cumulatively, these incidents reveal more than mere quirks of character. They tell us that behind the façade of technocratic competence — confected largely by the liberal press — is a man utterly out of his depth. Indeed, his chronic indecisiveness, let alone the vestiary vanity that dictates his behaviour, betrays a sensibility rather at odds with the trappings of technocracy. Technocrats typically see themselves as political plumbers, dour managers capable of unsentimentally transcending popular preoccupations in order to push through unpopular, if necessary, policies. Above all, they have a vision, however misguided; take their appalling record in the eurozone or the Third World.

Starmer, it is true, mimics the lexicon of technocrats with remarkable facility, all the trite soundbites about “sound money” and “short-term pain for long-term good”. Versions of these dicta have been repeated ad nauseam, most recently at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool this week. Yet the fact is that Starmer is no technocrat. He is, rather, a man without a plan, cluelessly blundering and muddling through from one crisis to the next. Lacking a vision for Britain, the “short-term pain” he promises with Calvinist glee can only be a prelude to long-term pain.

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Political incoherence, while damaging socially, can be rewarding individually. Indeed, it has stood Starmer in good stead. Possessed of a cynicism bordering on nihilism, our chameleon was happily reconciled to Osbornism in 2015 before taking a seat on Corbyn’s shadow cabinet only a year later. Two years on, by then already a darling of Islingtonian Europeanism, he led the anti-democratic putsch to reverse the result of the referendum, only to abandon the demand once its real objective — the displacement of the Left, of course, not re-entry into the EU — was achieved in 2019. His ascent to the party leadership followed shortly thereafter, on the strength of retaining the slate of reforms promised in the manifesto of old, including sweeping nationalisation and redistribution. Unsurprisingly, these pledges were swiftly jettisoned in a bid to refashion his party as a cut-price New Labour tribute act.

Adherents of a tradition less susceptible to spin-doctoring would no doubt have been left scratching their heads at Starmer’s seemingly endless capacity for reverse-ferreting. As it is, though, the mavens of self-respecting liberal opinion hardly batted an eyelid. The rare pleas for clarity voiced in the usual quarters of Labourist opinion — “Labour desperately needs to stand for something,” declared the New Statesman in 2021 — were drowned out by the plaudits of pundits praising such concessions to electability.

Much the same was said of Starmer’s bot-like proclamations to the press. We were led to believe that colourless Keir doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem, let alone a discerning literary taste. As a child, he had no fears, no phobias, the Guardian reported. “He doesn’t know what he dreamed last night — or ever: ‘I don’t dream.’” In the end, though, his carefully crafted conventionality counted for little. With fewer votes than Corbyn received in 2017 and 2019, Starmer was able to seize power only thanks to the distorting effect of the simple plurality system.

Having won, Starmer nevertheless finds himself at a loss. He has achieved power, but he has no idea what to do with it. There will be no more austerity, we are told, but we have every reason to believe otherwise. Committed, like Procrustes, to shortening the limbs of the state to fit the size of their budgetary bed, Starmer and Rachel Reeves have effectively set about outlawing growth. The first casualty, before the election, was the £28 billion “green prosperity” plan, scrapped in favour of a paltry £7 billion National Wealth Fund, literal peanuts compared to, say, Biden’s $369 billion climate package to reboot growth. Then, after the election, our austeritarian girlboss doubled down, doing for the £1.7 billion Stonehenge tunnel and slashing winter fuel payments for pensioners to the tune of £1.5 billion. All this, ostensibly, to help fill the £22 billion “black hole” that Reeves discovered on taking office — almost half of it in fact of her own making; Labour signed off on a £9.4 billion wage settlement with, among others, striking junior doctors and train drivers. Meanwhile, Labour has also committed to enforce additional spending cuts to the tune of £20 billion every year with the aim of shrinking public debt in year five of Starmer’s Labour.

Like a rope fetishist, then, Reeves has tightly bound the British economy. There can be no room for growth in such a circumscribed setup, the Financial Times and Institute for Fiscal Studies have independently warned. The figures speak volumes about the priorities of Starmer’s Labour. Capital investment, and therefore growth, have been sacrificed on the altar of wage expenditure for what has become a tiny aristocracy of Labour, while the Deliverooisation of the rest of the working class proceeds apace. On these benighted and un-unionised sections, austerity and casualisation can agreeably be imposed with no great loss to the carpetbagging Labour MPs of rentier, managerial and lobbyist backgrounds.

The upshot will be a return to Osbornite austerity after the brief one-nation Tory interlude of Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. Reeves denies this, even as she continues to subscribe to a heterodoxy no more dubious than extispicy, divination by means of inspecting animal entrails. “To my mum,” she says, “every penny mattered, and the basic test for whoever is Chancellor is to bring that attitude to our public finances.” Now, the cheese-paring mindset may have some value in the kitchen; but as every economist worth his salt has pointed out, it is of no use whatsoever in running the 6th-largest economy of the world. “Hard choices,” as she has it, in practice mean underinvestment in infrastructure, and accordingly low productivity and no growth, which in turns means less tax revenue and more spending cuts. It’s a vicious cycle. We know this not only through the sophistication of economic theory, but through historical experience.

Time was when Britain was the most productive nation in the world. These days, however, peer countries, even strike-ridden France, are on average 15% more productive. Post-communist Poland is set to overtake Britain on this metric by 2030. The contrast with our neighbours across the Channel, a recent policy paper persuasively argues, is painfully instructive. There, in France, massive investment in housing, infrastructure, and energy have sustained greater productivity even as French workers work fewer hours and take longer vacations, as anyone who has visited Paris in August knows. With roughly the same population, France has 38 million homes to Britain’s 30 million, with the result that the French enjoy lower rents and mortgages. Thanks to investments in clean energy, especially nuclear power, electricity is half as cheap as in Britain. France has opened 1,740 miles of high-speed rail since 1980; Britain, 67 miles. As with rail, so with roads: France has 12,000 kilometres of motorways; Britain, 4,000. Since 1945, metropolitan Paris has trebled in size; London is only a few % larger. Britain holds the dubious distinction of having Europe’s largest city without mass transit: Leeds. Chronic underinvestment, far below the OECD average, is to blame for all of this.

The upshot has been plain to see. When Starmer was sworn in, he took over a country in which 4 million households were in debt over utility bills, 7 million were forgoing food, heat, toiletries to make ends meet. The penny-pinchers at the Treasury could take pride in running the cheapest health service in the advanced capitalist world: the EU14 spent 21% more per capita on healthcare in the 2010s. The collateral damage, however, was world-leading cancer mortality rates, and the lowest number of MRI and CT scanners in the developed world. No doubt Starmer’s majority was augmented by the fact that 8% of Britons were awaiting an NHS procedure at the time of the election; or that real wages have flatlined, by some measures even fallen, since 2008.

Had there been no Osbornite austerity, and had capricious bureaucrats likewise not denied practically every investment proposal emanating from the private sector, it is likely — following the 1979-2008 trend line — that Britain would be some 25% more productive today. This, a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows, would have translated into a GDP per capita of £41,800 instead of £33,500, producing tax revenues of £1.28 billion instead £1.03 billion, with the result that our annual deficit of £85 billion in these years would have instead been an annual surplus of £170 billion.

It follows that in fetishising the fiscal straitjacket, Osborne, and by extension Starmer and Reeves, have in fact got it backwards. It was tax-and-spend investment that deflated the debt from 250% to 20% of GDP from the late-Forties to the early-Nineties; and it was the imposition of austerity and effective banning of investment that has now inflated it to 100%.

There was a time when politicos understood this. In the post-war period, they could be sanguine about high debt, knowing that they were committed to growing the pie, and assured by Keynes’s maxim: “Anything we can actually do we can afford.” These days, Reeves and her ilk are more likely to pull gargoyle faces at the very thought: “If we can’t afford it, we can’t do it,” she has declared.

Somehow foreign policy is exempt from these strictures. Starmer has promised Zelensky £3 billion a year “for as long as it takes”, a strong disincentive, if any, to diplomatic settlement in Donbas. His foreign secretary, meanwhile, has outlined his grim vision of “progressive realism” in the pages of Foreign Affairs, essentially a return to military power projection and democracy promotion at taxpayers’ expense, topped up with an unswerving commitment to Nato expansion.

Starmer, furthermore, is unruffled by the prospect of creating a £13 billion hole in public finances by bringing down legal migration — bad news for Britons a touch long in the tooth, who depend on bright young things coming from abroad to pay into their pension pots. As we have seen, Starmer is coming after the elderly; after the winter fuel subsidy, the triple-locked pension might be next. More pressing for our ruler is the £3 billion spent on housing the 30,000-odd refugees (0.05% of the national population) arriving annually in small boats.

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To save us from the indignity of having to facilitate the rapid assimilation of Syrian seamstresses and Afghan architects into the national populace, Starmer strolled about the Villa Doria Pamphili taking lessons from the Italian prime minister. No doubt reminding her that he is a figlio di un attrezzista, he praised at length the “remarkable progress” Giorgia Meloni had made in tackling refugees — which includes impounding vessels and curbing the funding of humanitarian groups who rescue migrants from drowning at sea, not to mention forging a deal with a Tunisian despot accused of torturing and dumping refugees on the Libyan border without food and shelter. Britain, Starmer says, has a lot to “learn” from Italy’s handling of refugees. One wonders if these are the practices he had in mind when he once declared that “the best of British values are also the best of Christian values”.

Then again, morality has never been at the heart of Starmer’s pitch. Fiscal prudence has. Truth be told, however, it’s really much ado about nothing. Based on the paltry figures I have already mentioned, unsuspecting readers might be forgiven for thinking that the Treasury has only a few billion lying about to toy with. The fact is that state spending exceeds £1 trillion. And a lot can be done with that sum, as Starmer himself sometimes recognises. Offsetting the doom and gloom that has been the core of his messaging, he has on occasion gestured towards ambition, as in his pledge to build 1.5 million homes over the course of his term. Good news, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. It will take a sea change in culture to combat council nimbyism and rentier interest. Michael Gove, that Whig interloper in the Tory party, discovered this the hard way when he attempted leasehold and eviction reforms. Today, 85 landlords sit in the Commons, 44 of them Labour’s, including Jas Athwal, the current parliament’s biggest slumlord with 15 mouldy and ant-infested rental properties to his name. It is likewise too early to tell what Labour’s sugar daddies like Lord Alli want from Starmer in return for indulging his penchant for paid-for pants.

At any event, reforming ambition doesn’t come naturally to self-respecting sensible centrists like Starmer. When it comes to fixing Britain, he declared at the Liverpool party conference, “there are no easy answers”. But there are. For one thing, a one-off, 1% wealth tax on millionaires, paid annually for five years, would raise a whopping £260 billion without punishing pensioners. For another, the Treasury could stop paying interest on the reserve balances of commercial banks, a scandalous subsidy to the tune of £35 billion a year. Labour would be saved from the unedifying spectacle of haggling over trifles like skint hippies in a Levantine flea market. Failing bold moves like these, it is hard not to come away with the impression that Starmer and his cronies are not serious people.

By the media’s assessment, many this year will have been cloaked in political hypocrisy, the past week having only provided more data for the robust rule of thumb that with the Tories the problem is always sex, and with Labour always money.

It is hard to escape the feeling, though, that “freebie-gate” has so far been sustained by the motley quantity, rather than the quality, of the evidence it relies on. The long-standing generosity of Lord Alli has combined loosely in the public imagination with the outputs of an undignified briefing war within No 10 to create the feeling that Labour ministers aren’t holding themselves to the standards of sober probity they so righteously affirmed in opposition.

While any one accusation could be litigated, perhaps successfully, on its merits, the slow accretion of new stories, in the manner of a pointillist image, creates a hazy, hard to dispel, impression of malaise. Not noticing this, or perhaps not knowing what to do about it, a number of ministers pursued oddly unpromising lines of personalised defence while under pressure in Liverpool’s media zone.

Among the most grimly plausible of the responses, Bridget Phillipson suggested that her 40th birthday party (funded by part of a £14,000 donation) had actually seemed to her to be very much celebrated in a “work context”; then, in an impressively cut-throat piece of buck-passing she blamed her own child for her accepting free tickets to a Taylor Swift concert. Not to be outdone on brazen front, Angela Rayner suggested that her declared reliance on Lord Alli’s largesse while visiting New York was in fact evidence of “over transparent” behaviour.

Whatever schadenfreude this might afford to those watching such contorted responses delivered half-heartedly to camera, it is probably worth recognising how overblown the litany of accusations has become. Perhaps Keir Starmer does have questions to answer about the historical, and possibly undeclared, use he made of Lord Alli’s London address. But the following is much more doubtful: that it is in principle scandalous that the prime minister wears clothes he hasn’t picked and paid for himself, that security requires he use a director’s box at football stadiums, and that his school-aged children escape the pre-election media buzz around their family home while taking exams.

Media has a responsibility to hold political figures to standards of transparency. But it is difficult to see how the current lines of questioning do anything but make Britain seem a parochial backwater whose media class is wilfully out of touch with the exigencies of political office. An American politician of Keir Starmer’s rank, for example, who refused the trappings of stylists and security would not be viewed as an honest broker but, at best, an eccentric.

Outrage over the perks of political power plays into a perennial theme — one especially indulged during conference season — that politicians should be just like ordinary people. Politicians themselves are guiltier than anyone for encouraging belief in this strained fiction: Keir Starmer’s awkward reminiscences about his tool-making father and Rachel Reeves’s foghorn reminders that she went to comprehensive school being just two claims to trenchant normality this government has been trying to condition the public into never forgetting. It’s a depressingly anti-elitist line which creates the expectation that front-line politicians should enjoy no special status or resources, even when representing their country in the eyes of the world.

Though some will find it controversial to say so, it is tempting to think that public practices of accountability lead most people to seriously overestimate the moral significance of hypocritical behaviour in public life. As a matter of ethical theory, the second-order question of whether one has flouted one’s own principles is arguably much less important than the primary question of whether one has transgressed any further principle of importance in doing so.

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At the institutional level, however, hypocrisy is a feature, rather than a bug, of our parliamentary system, with the Opposition operating under a standing incentive to hold the Government to a standard of behaviour higher than that it might instinctively apply to itself. Of course, once in office, the gulf between stated aspiration and the necessities of political reality grow starker still. A front-line politician who resolutely refused the option of hypocrisy under such circumstances would have a short career.

As Keir Starmer and his colleagues are currently finding out, accusations of hypocrisy are particularly popular with the media not because they are overwhelmingly important, but because they are so easy to prosecute. All it takes is a saunter down the archives to find an incriminating phrase or action. A simple contradiction is enough. Basically, they’re looking for a contradiction. This is far easier to land than arguing from first principles that a position they occupy, while not strictly inconsistent, is nonetheless mistaken.

Easily lost in all this is the idea that a certain measure of public hypocrisy is likely a constitutive feature of political life in the kind of well-functioning, open democracies one should wish to live in. Somewhat inevitably, these also tend to be countries in which there is inbuilt pressure on leading media figures to whip themselves up into a fervour over moralised criticisms that on reflection they would find hard to take at all seriously. After all, as we all know, if anyone loves a freebie more than a politician, it’s a journalist.

Jeremy Corbyn’s removal and non-personing has been meticulous. Incredible now how his name — “Corbyn to stand as an independent candidate”; “Corbyn considering running for Mayor of London” — comes at you from what feels like the past, even though he was party leader just three years ago. He is so faded from my consciousness, as indeed from the party, it’s like an acid flashback to a trip that started very promisingly, then went bad very quickly.

Those of us who voted for Corbyn in the 2015 Labour leadership election always liked his policies more than his personality: “irritable traffic warden”. But just remembering the energy of that first rush, after his hilarious elevation to leader, feels so weird and dislocating, the way quite a few things Before Covid now echo from a distant epoch. George Osborne editing the Evening Standard. Labour gaining 30 seats in a general election. Wait, did a political vacuum really open up, sucking in thousands and thousands of highly motivated young people, chanting “Oh Jeremy Corbyn” in a genuinely funny way to the “Seven Nation Army” riff? Was that really him on stage with Run The Jewels at Glastonbury? Was there a palpable sense that the Labour Party once again stood for nationalisation and a rebalancing of wealth from shareholders to citizens?

Yes, dear grandchildren, and I kind of miss whatever that was. “Corbynism” doesn’t seem quite right. I don’t miss Corbyn himself at all. He stood in a distinguished line of similarly totemic, charismaphobic Labour figures. Tony Benn was forever telling us politics was about “issues, not personalities” and he had a fervent following too, including me. Corbyn always seemed so peevish and impatient, stubborn and inflexible. And obviously nobody misses the shitty anti-Semitism, or the Corbitburo’s tetchy, flat-footed apology-via-denial. I don’t miss that chaotic bunker period before the 2019 election, when Labour HQ was panic-burping six new manifesto pledges a day — Milkshake Tax! Badger Amnesty! Municipal Wi-Fi!

Once upon a time I would have felt a surge of glee at the possible mischief of Don Quixotic having a tilt at the London mayoralty: why not, shake things up a bit. But we’ve all had quite enough of mischievous politics in the last four years or so, haven’t we? Particularly at the lying, contemptuous, wine o’clock, Christmas-jumper government level. If Corbyn did enter the race, it would be either tragic or hilarious, depending on which side of the culture war you’re on. Sadiq and Jeremy slugging it out to a pointless draw could seriously harm both of them and allow the Tory candidate in. And please, does London really deserve Call Me Susan, who says she’s political Marmite and who admires Liz Truss?

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The contrast between Starmer and Corbyn is striking, considering their very different attitudes to floating voters. Starmer would, it seems, do anything to win the approval of Conservative voters, a section of society Corbyn clearly scorned. But just as the current leader is winning admirers from a wide political spectrum, so Corbyn gathered respect from the most unlikely places. We’ve recently discovered how fond Rory Stewart is, but I was astonished in 2015 to read a piece by Peter Hitchens in praise of the old git.

Hitchens had gone along to Great St Mary’s church in Cambridge, one of the stops on Corbyn’s never-ending public speaking tour, the absolute sweet spot in his comfort zone; he found “a shuffling queue of Soviet length”. The church, as with every venue on the tour, was massively oversubscribed. “I warmed to Mr Corbyn personally for two things,” Hitchens wrote. “One was the unaffected, barely conscious way he bent down to scratch the head of a dog belonging to someone in the crowd. The other was when he acknowledged the majesty of the setting, the beautiful heart of one of the loveliest places in England, at sunset.” Even his opponents seemed to recognise a decent bloke. Part of that respect was grounded in the idea that Corbyn stuck to his principles, whereas Starmer is demonstrably willing to bend to win.

I too went to one of those Corbyn On Tour gigs, priority seating reserved for party members. Lancaster’s massive Priory Church, stuffed to its ancient ribs with what looked like the city’s entire middle class. That was the first reality check: where were the horny-handed sons and daughters of actual labour who would power the revolution? I could understand how the Cambridge event might mobilise the bourgeoisie, but clearly the old Dumbledore magic was strong in the North West too. Corbyn emerged to the sort of reception reserved for national treasures, and then, oh God, he started his speech. Obviously, it was the same speech he was doing every night, instead of his actual job. It was increasingly acknowledged by supporters, even at the peak of his popularity, that he was shit at politics but great at preaching. I found him strangely underwhelming, a political curate sermonising from memory.

His words reverberated in the sacred air. He would make the case for a public good, explain the current situation and what should be done to improve matters, reaching an emotional peroration: “and that’s why…” One item on his setlist was music teaching in schools. “And that’s why every single pupil deserves the right to learn an instrument!” This blew the roof off, huge applause. A little later he was into his stride about how British manufacturing had been destroyed by global capitalism, how steelworkers had been sold out by successive governments, and he was dead right. “And that’s why we need to rebuild Britain’s steel industry!” I started clapping, along with two or three other egregious muppets. Our light, quickly-halted smattering carried the social shame of philistines applauding in the wrong place at a classical music concert. Lesson learned: clarinet lessons good, steel industry bad.

Nevertheless, on the morning of the 2017 general election we local volunteers had a spring in our step, leafleting in the pouring rain. The local Labour party HQ was buzzing with hope. Then later, the exhilaration of the exit polls, the narrowness of the defeat. Theresa May forced into a costly Confidence and Supply arrangement with the fun-loving DUP. That’s the point, in retrospect, when Corbyn should have said he’d taken the party as far-Left as he could, accepted that the game was up and that it was clear he was essentially a rebel and definitely not a leader, handed over to someone younger and ideally of a different sex. Angela Rayner would have been a good bet, except of course for her Blairite credentials — as a teenage mother she was an early and grateful recipient of support from her local Sure Start centre. Maybe anyone would have done; nobody, as it turned out, could have been any worse than he was at the job after 2017.

The morning of the 2019 Get Brexit Done election was the antithesis of 2017. Despair was in the air, the messaging supply lines were broken, Corbyn was mostly hiding. I was out leafleting again, but nobody seemed to have a grip on strategy or logistics. One householder remonstrated with us more in bafflement than in anger — we were delivering the third batch of identical leaflets in the space of two days. Corbyn and his team were reduced to the status of a Downfall meme.

And now everything’s set fair for an incoming Labour government. Conference will be a dress rehearsal, a victory parade in advance. And yes, I suppose once in power, Starmer can only become more radical, having already moonwalked several yards to the Right of One Nation Tories. He could not have differentiated himself more decisively from his predecessor, who wanted to do a soft-shoe shuffle in the opposite direction.

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Now it’s Starmertime, and I’ll vote Labour, of course I will. I’ve voted Labour at every general election since 1974, my first, when we managed to heave nautical Tory Europhile Ted Heath overboard. Sixties legend Harold Wilson was reinstalled, but ill health caused him to be replaced by the bumbling Jim Callaghan, whose chief purpose in retrospect seems to have been as a music hall warm-up act for Margaret Thatcher. Our son was born in 1979; he would live in a Tory Britain until he was 18.

I can’t imagine not voting Labour. If I lived in a marginal and the only hope of hosing out a Tory was to vote Vichy Democrat, I’d hold my nose and do it. But our MP is brilliant, and has established a sound majority. Likewise, I can’t imagine not despairing of Labour. It’s too mad, or too managerial, or too boring, or far too keen to freeze out the interesting headbangers. It’s always felt slightly like being in an abusive relationship. The party can change. There are still good times. Everything will be better once they’re back in power.

Yet again this year I renewed my party membership, eventually. I say renewed, but nobody at local, regional or national level had answered any of the dozen or so emails I sent in response to the reminder, so by the time I got through to someone at Labour’s near-impenetrable centre of operations my membership had lapsed and I had to rejoin. Five years ago, an energetic young person would have rung me to ask if I was renewing but they seem to have drifted off. Starmer and his top table need to remember what powered the brief Corbyn reign: youth. It’s all very well looking at psephological forecasts and laughing about how the Tories are literally dying out. But where are the young people? They are not chanting Starmer’s name. They are not cheering his airless prose. I say this as an old man who would welcome upheaval. Still, head down, one foot in front of the other, let’s win the next one and prepare for disappointment. God, being Labour’s hard work.

There’s also some lesser inconvenience to what the media calls the public, but it doesn’t usually last for long. A lot of cleaners and shelf-stackers have to put up with the inconvenience of being poor for years on end, whereas some stockbrokers are enraged by a mere two or three days of cancelled trains. The public is a mythical entity, apparently quite distinct from nurses, postmen, railway workers, junior barristers and the like. These people cause social disruption, and thus can’t be members of the public. Members of the public are the objects of such disruption, not the agents of it. A CEO is a member of the public but an ambulance driver is not.

Strikes are double-edged swords, which hurt those who deploy them. When a manager sacks or disciplines an employee, only the employee suffers, whereas workers who take industrial action may have to diminish their already slim resources in order to try to increment them. Strikes are also purely negative strategies, and trade unions largely defensive bodies. We’re a long way from peasants with pitchforks marching on the lord’s castle. Bosses have a number of positive ways of exercising power over their employees: firing them, slashing their pay, cutting their tea breaks, imposing longer hours, speeding up their work and so on. Unions, by contrast, have the single option of withdrawing their labour, which is hardly a revolutionary move. Like those who practise civil disobedience, all they can do is take a stand and cry “Enough!”, aware that they will then be travestied as wreckers and hooligans who are holding the country to ransom.

Their behaviour is not just unprincipled but unpatriotic. Theirs is a strike against the community itself, a case hard to maintain when a lot of the community are also brandishing banners. To walk away from your workbench is to be a bully and a blackmailer. Simply by sitting on your hands, rather than by storming the Treasury or kidnapping merchant bankers, you become an object of odium, not least to the affluent elite whose profits you are putting in peril. Charles Dickens travelled to Preston in the mid-19th century to observe an industrial strike at close quarters, and wrote admiringly of the reasonableness and decency of the working people involved in it. He then produced a novel called Hard Times, which contains one of the most lurid caricatures of trade unionism in Victorian England.

Nobody objects to the right to withhold one’s labour; it’s only when it starts to be effective that people fire off letters to the Telegraph. Moves by strikers to lend their cause more impact — linking up different struggles, for example, or striking at certain key moments — are regarded as seizing an unfair advantage, as though it’s bad form to overtake another runner in a marathon. By contrast, stockpiling coal to prepare for a miners’ strike, as Margaret Thatcher did, is simple common sense. The ideal, surely, is to have a strike which has no effect whatsoever, rather like having a baby that never bawls or a brand of chocolate that is both delicious and slimming.

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The workers were never ignorant

By Terry Eagleton

Few civil rights have been at once so respected in theory and abhorred in practice. The first question a TV journalist tends to ask isn’t “What’s the cause of the dispute?” but “How can we stop it?” There’s an entrenched assumption that strikes, like salt or smoking, are bad in themselves — an assumption not shared by those who might benefit enough from them to switch the heating back on from time to time. You can’t ban strikes because that’s what fascist societies do, but you can’t stomach them either. Fifty years ago, it was customary to decry trade unions as too powerful; but as successive governments have bound them legislatively hand and foot, they have deprived themselves in the process of this reason for harassing them. Not that it was ever a plausible argument in the first place: the muscular capacity of trade unions is nothing compared to the power of capital.

The history of the British working-class movement is not one of wreckage and vandalism. The greatest wave of social protest in the 19th century, the Chartists, worked within the law to press for a set of reasonable reforms of the parliamentary system, almost all of which are now in operation despite being haughtily rejected at the time. Some decades later, the Suffragettes, in spite of being beaten, bludgeoned and force-fed in prison, outmatched the labour movement in their militancy. The General Strike of 1926 lasted for only nine days. From the Peterloo massacre to the dockers’ strike of 1898, there was no such reticence on the part of the British state. Instead, there is a sordid history of gagging, police and military violence, imprisonment, transportation and repressive legislation, the last of which, along with occasional outbreaks of state violence, survives to this day.

Even so, the feeling lingers that trade unionism is essentially archaic: an embarrassing hangover from the industrial past, a brake on modernisation, a throwback to the bad old days of class war. (Demanding higher wages is class warfare; refusing them is nothing of the sort.) The idea is that for all the bluster of the union bosses, they are fundamentally conservative creatures. But a dose of conservatism is just what we need. The German philosopher Walter Benjamin remarked that revolution isn’t a runaway train; it is the application of the emergency brake. He meant that it was global capitalism which is bucking out of control, and which needs to be restrained before it ruins too many lives. Working-class militants in Victorian Britain were often denounced as anarchists, but the truth is just the opposite.

What they called for was more state intervention, not less, to protect children and paupers and textile workers. The real anarchist is a market-driven society in which nobody is in charge, not even those who gather at Davos each year. (It’s appropriate that Davos is also the location for Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, set in a sanatorium in which everyone is desperately sick.) When it comes to climate change, it is the Left who are the preservationists and the Masters of the Universe who are the vandals. Capitalism will behave antisocially if it can get away with it and if it is profitable for it to do so. Anyone who sees this as empty sloganising should take a look at food banks in the civil service, not to speak of the continuing devastation of the planet. We still haven’t thrown the brake on the runaway train.

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There is a curious belief that social disruption is a bad thing in itself. Those who run the Miss World competition took this view of the feminists who noisily interrupted it some years ago, even though their protest was the only interesting aspect of the show. The young man who stood in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and turned himself instantly into a global icon was being politically disruptive, rather like the young women of Iran today. As a school student in Manchester, I saw Jewish men and women with yellow stars stitched on their sleeves lie down in the road to block a march by Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists through a largely black area of the city. Social disruption is not only tolerable but indispensable.

It can, however, be domesticated, as it is in the figure of the Shakespearian Fool. Fools and jesters exist to tell their royal masters unacceptable truths, but wrap them up in riddle and paradox to make them more palatable. Their role is to show how everyone around them is playing a role. The difference is that the Fool knows he is playacting whereas the others don’t. But if mocking and scolding others is part of your official brief, it becomes rather more tolerable. “There’s no harm in an allow’d Fool,” remarks Olivia in Twelfth Night. You’re only doing your job, as they say. The social system is shaken but not stirred to insurrection. This institutionalised form of rebellion lives on in British politics in the form of the Parliamentary Labour Party, or more generally His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.

Trade unions are more than just a defence against exploitation. The labour movement has traditionally seen itself as offering an alternative form of life to what we have at present, one based on cooperation rather than competition, solidarity rather than individualism. If it is engaged in the present, it also prefigures a different kind of future. How do we stop strikes? By the kind of redistribution of resources which will make them unnecessary. Otherwise we’ll carry on with the same old antithesis of private wealth and public squalor.

They fete themselves, and attack the Labour leadership, which they treat like a pantomime villain, with boos and hisses. Starmer is obviously Sylvia Plath’s Daddy: “Daddy, I have had to kill you”. The leadership named this event “Cancelled” on the conference app, but changed their minds, and this is their revenge. I can hear their narcissism in their cadences, and their applause. It is their Conference. They are Labour. When a trade union leader says her union is not affiliated to the Labour Party, they cheer. The obvious question: so why are they?

We hear Richard Burgon MP, and John McDonnell MP, then Corbyn comes, still denied the Labour whip. I marvel at the vanity of this supposedly humble man, but I never believed in his humility, any more than I believed in his anti-racism. Anti-racism is only meaningful when you extend it to your political enemies, and he never did. He ignored the abuse of live female Jewish MPs but stands in solidarity with dead Jews, who need nothing from him, can’t attack him, and are as theoretical to him as voters. The humble change their minds, and he never does: his humility is performative, in a shy glance at the youthful supporters, in a tender bowing of the head. He looks sorrowful — he lost — then happy: I still have you. To be fair, he does sound like the most sensible man in the room. But that is his job: to sound sane and vexed — Magic Grandpa — while his supporters bully and scream. “In the last leadership election, our members and unions were promised unity, but instead we are given division,” he mourns. He will spend the whole of Conference inciting division, and haunting Conference with his vanity.

He pleads for organisation: “If we want the Labour Party to be a vehicle to win elections to confront the climate emergency and redistribute wealth and power to the many from the few, then we need to come together” for policies “the majority of people actually want, not what the establishment and its media mouthpieces insist they should want. If our leadership won’t champion that path, our movement must and will.”

He speaks for a long time. I watch them as they get bored and shuffle about. I am not surprised by their boredom. Corbyn is a drug to them, and it is preferable to meet your drug on your own terms. Like the Queen, he is more magnificent in their heads. I think they treat him as he treats the voters: as theoretical.

The drama is in opposition here, the fun: and I am guilty of it too. I ignore the real Conference, in which Starmer wins most of the votes, glumly and determinedly securing the machinery of the party, and patiently being stalked by broadcast journalists who copy Paxman but have none of his gifts and so mostly sound like angry shoppers demanding a refund. I look at the edges: for the far-Left in flight. They are, I decide, very like chickens in nature and behaviour: when they feel threatened, they flock together, and they make a lot of noise.

I find Piers Corbyn standing outside Conference, talking into a megaphone. He does not speak to an audience because there isn’t one, beside me. He is talking to the megaphone, to which he seems surgically attached: to himself. “There were massive pterodactyls,” he says. There was a context, but the megaphone failed both of us.

I go to Jewish Voice for Labour [JVL], Corbyn’s ancient Pretorian guard of Jewish anti-Zionists, picketing Conference with a banner showing every one of their leadership scolded, or warned. It fills the page. You would think they might be ashamed, but they aren’t, because, like Corbyn, nothing is ever their fault. They are not as mad as the man with the painting of Keir Starmer segueing into Joseph Stalin, who killed 50 million people, standing just outside the Conference centre. “It is more his attitude to democracy,” he says, when I point out that Starmer has not killed 50 million people, or even one. But they are close behind.

At their event, which is called, hopefully, Labour in Crisis, they talk about the purge with all the self-knowledge of — well, people who don’t know a lot about Russia. I listen to 80 non-Jews enabled in their Jew hate by a clutch of Corbynist Jews. They are paranoiacs. “Maybe we should turn our phones off,” says Leah Levane, who was expelled from the Labour Party the day before, “Who knows who is listening? One of my comrades,” she adds, “suggested that I announce I am taking a big risk by appearing on a platform with myself”. She summarises Conference from the far-Left perspective, and quite well: “This is a shitshow.”

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John McDonnell MP is at the back, standing for ease of getaway. He needs it. Because Tony Greenstein, expelled from Labour for anti-Semitism, attacks a journalist from LBC while saying: “I don’t trust you!” He takes his telephone — he says the journalist is recording the vulnerable, meaning himself — and throws it on the floor. The journalist argues, but when he leaves the room, they applaud. Later, when Greenstein speaks — “it was never about anti-Semitism” — he says, meaning mainstream Jewish opposition to JVL, and it was — they cheer again. They love Greenstein because they love failure: he is their dilemma in a man. For them, it is easy to ignore an assault on a journalist if it is a journalist they dislike. It is easy, too, to laugh at Greenstein, who looks more like a child’s scruffy toy than anything else. Except, one day, the Greenstein will be bigger, and the journalist will be smaller.

It goes on all week: the Defend the Left rally, the Tribune rally, Labour against the Witchhunt [LAW], where Jackie Walker and Chris Williamson, both expelled from Labour, appear. At LAW, where Greenstein is again self-appointed security, a speaker says: “We would normally be full, but people are afraid to come.” I hope they don’t tell themselves that about the electorate. But they still believe in false consciousness: in the theoretical voter.

The night before Conference closes, the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs meet in the circus tent at The World Transformed – the parallel far-Left conference. It features many of Corbyn’s allies. It is the shadow Shadow Cabinet. There is a banner in the corner that says, “Take Back Control”. It may be a joke. They stand out into the night in monstrous rain and, because Corbynism is a religion, they chant a creed: “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn.” Corbyn speaks last, but is here from the beginning, which surprises me — does he not have better things to do? Of course not: he only speaks to his supporters, because he is a god in tiny rooms.

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Barry Gardiner MP calls the crowd, “the people who give us all hope” and he has never needed hope more. “There is no meat on the shelves,” he cries, as evidence of catastrophe. He stops himself and says, “Sorry about the vegans.” A man shouts: “Fuck Starmer, fuck Starmer!” They veer between defiance and despair: “All the dreams and optimism have been sucked out of us”. I notice someone is playing patience on their iPhone. They will need it.

“Despair will get us nowhere,” says Nadia Whittome MP. “Don’t leave. What would have happened if Jeremy Corbyn had left?” John McDonnell MP agrees: “You cannot win the fight if you are not in the struggle.”

Richard Burgon MP, who depends on repetition for all his oratory, and manages to sound both stupid and convinced, shouts: “The Labour left is alive! The Labour left is winning on the Conference floor! The Labour left is winning in the streets, and it will one day win a leadership election!” Lloyd Russell-Moyle MP makes the mistake of calling Starmer, “a nice man”. There are jeers: “Keir Out!” Then: “Keith, Keith, Keith!” It sounds quite chilling when they shout it in unison; I have never been afraid anywhere as a journalist except with the far-Left. Again, they must not leave: “When the phoenix rises again,” says Russell-Moyle, “we will be here, and we will win the General Election.” But they won’t – not by screaming, “Keith” in circus tents. Do they know that? They go back to shouting, “Keith! Keith! Keith!” which I believe is the real purpose of this rally. I do not know why they think this taunt is so deadly, but it does expose their classism and ageism: taunting the lower-middle class Boomer who really is called Keith.

Starmer’s strategy is to ignore them, while taunting them with policy: during his speech to Conference — calm, appropriate, and thrillingly Blairite — he speaks through them. Still, they heckle and hold red cards up — it’s a football metaphor, which they planned: Show Starmer the Red Card. Except they aren’t the referee, not this time. They shout, “It was your fault!” during a Brexit section and “£15 an hour!” — which is the minimum wage they seek. One holds up a sign that says, “No purge”. Another shouts, “Free Julian Assange,” as if Starmer has Assange in his possession, and can hand him over. Mostly they seem confused: when another shouts, “Where is Peter Mandelson?” he sounds as if he genuinely wants to know.

Then — calmly, appropriately, thrillingly – Starmer says words to give them pain, all of which are a warm bath to the Red Wall voters Corbyn lost: police; patriots: NATO; patriots; NATO; police. I wished he had kissed a model of a nuclear submarine; or put a judge’s black cap on his head; or toasted The Queen.

The far-Left hated it. But the far-Left has lost. When it recovers, perhaps it will come to love it. Because the struggle is everything, and the struggle lives on.

Those old enough to remember will recall that there were basically two approaches. You could simply bash the bejesus out of the buttons that controlled the flippers, not worrying too much about what the silver ball hit as long as it hit something, randomly clocking up points in the process. Or you could play things more strategically, working out which bits of the table offered the most points and, using the flippers sparingly and with rather more precision, try to ping the ball in the right direction.

On balance, the second approach may have produced less frenetic fun but it was nearly always more effective: ultimately, after all, you got to play longer and you tended to score more points — sometimes even enough to earn a replay.

And so it is with party leader’s conference speeches. Less can often be more. When you’re on the attack, aim for laconic rather than histrionic. And when you’re setting out your own stall, pointing to just a few special offers and hinting at more to come beats trying to leave your listeners spoiled for choice.

The model for me (at least for a Labour leader) will always be John Smith in Blackpool in 1992, making a speech to a party that was demoralised after its fourth defeat in a row yet just beginning to wonder whether, in the light of the chaos and incompetence displayed by the Major government in the days leading up to the Conference, the Tories were really as unbeatable as everyone had assumed.

The prospect facing Keir Starmer, another former lawyer, as he stood up to address the faithful (and the not-so-faithful) was, then, far from unprecedented.

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So did he deliver? Well, maybe not totally. But, to be fair, it was far from the kind of epic fail that Boris Johnson and the Corbynite stay-behinds who did their best to heckle “their” leader were no doubt hoping for. And it may even have left some of those with no skin in the game but whose expectations were low (especially after the pasting Starmer’s 14,000-word magnum opus got from the cognoscenti), pleasantly surprised.

Personality — at least with a big P — remains a problem. As a courtroom lawyer, Starmer, unlike Smith, was never the kind of performer who has the jury eating out of his hands and the audience hanging on his every word. As a politician, nothing’s changed. I’ve never seen him on the dance floor but, as an orator, he has no sense of rhythm. Or, indeed, of tone. A party caricatured as preachy and po-faced could really do with a leader who doesn’t always sound quite so plaintive. I’ve no idea if someone on his staff has sat him down and told him he desperately needs to get some voice coaching, but they should do. After all, it never did Margaret Thatcher any harm.

Instead, Team Keir is clearly still convinced that there’s mileage in marketing their man as the antithesis to Boris — the responsible ying to the PM’s frivolous yang, the guy whose approach (as he himself, like some kind of Checkatrade-approved plumber, put it) is “Down to earth. Working out what’s wrong. Fixing it.”

Hence all the stuff about the good deeds Starmer was doing as a civil rights advocate and a prosecutor while Johnson was fannying around phoning in trivial blah, blah, blah for the Telegraph — all of which also served as a useful reminder to a public that he’s had a job that actually means something outside politics.

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It sort of works — but even with a few jokes thrown in (of which the early one comparing hecklers with Tory MPs at PMQs was by far the best, and the best-delivered) — I’m still not sure that’s enough. To take an example, “Level up? You can’t even fill up” actually had the potential to be what passes in politics (a low bar, I admit) as a killer put-down. Coming out of Sir Keir’s mouth, however, it sounded a little leaden and contrived. Likewise, the more assertive and pleasingly alliterative “Get a grip or get out of the way.”

That said, to those who complain that we already know what Starmer got up to before going into politics, it’s worth saying (yet again) that the majority of people out there probably don’t. The same goes for him telling us (yet again) that his dad was a toolmaker and his mum was a nurse. How (and why), for instance, does anyone think so many people in London know that Sadiq Khan’s dad was a bus-driver?

Starmer’s family background shtick did tee up a peroration (“Work. Care. Equality. Security. These are the tools of my trade. And with them I will go to work.”) that was beautifully-crafted for television news. And those of us who complained about how long he was talking for as we watched live need to remember that those clips are all that sensible people (who weren’t) will ever hear.

The sheer length of the speech wasn’t entirely accidental, of course. By affording Starmer space to remind activists of his pukka-working class and NHS background, it made it harder for Labour’s Momentumite irreconcilables to lay into him in the hall — as did asking the always admirable Dame Doreen Lawrence to do his intro. They still had a damn good go, startling those in the broadcast media who, for some strange reason, think Starmer’s the first Labour leader to face a tough crowd — and so made it an integral (but totally disproportionate) part of their packages for the evening and morning news programmes.

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Still, Starmer’s long address also gave him the chance to kick the Corbynites where it really hurts by promising never to “go into an election with a manifesto that is not a serious plan for government” and (heresy of heresies) to “offer the Conservative party a lesson in levelling up” by listing (to one of the most genuinely striking standing ovations he received) the achievements of the last Labour government — one run by politicians who, like him, believed in “changing lives” rather than simply “shouting slogans”.

The ninety-minute speech also gave Starmer plenty of time to share some eye-catching (if not always entirely persuasive) policies on crime, state education and climate change — future-facing, focus-grouped to be voter-friendly and a retort to those who would otherwise bound to have banged on about a lack of “substance”.

To those of us watching for whom less is more, there was probably too much in there. But to those for whom “more is more” — those who might have taken the first, more frenetic approach to playing pinball down in Brighton all those years ago — that won’t have been a problem.

I’d be prepared to bet that Starmer (who’s three years older than me and so must occasionally have played when he was younger, too) would naturally prefer the second, more careful approach to the game. But this year he tried both. Whether that means he’s a wizard or whether there has to be a twist, we’ll soon find out.

51 years later McCluskey, now the leading trade unionist of the last decade, shows no regret as he reveals this scam in his memoir, Always Red (published to coincide with the annual conference of the Labour Party he helped to ruin). Indeed, he seems almost proud of getting away with it — his account mentions no comeuppance for the con. That’s fitting for a man whose career in politics and public life has been defined by two things: indifference to the consequences of his own actions, and the power of money.

Other people’s money, that is. Until recently, McCluskey headed Unite, and his liberal use of the union’s funds is a motif of this book. Even if you’re familiar with the grubby business of political party funding, there’s something startling about McCluskey’s lordly accounts of committing vast sums of his member’s money to whatever politician or campaign he’d chosen to favour. When Tom Watson spends the £50k Len handed him for a campaign, Len casually tosses him another £20k. When Alan Johnson calls about a donation to the Remain campaign, Len agrees £250k — the legal maximum — in one phone call.

The impression of McCluskey as a feudal lord, treating Unite as his fiefdom, grows with his account of using its resources to look after his own affairs. He criticises various adversaries for using expensive lawyers to fight their cause: when a challenger to the Unite throne seeks legal advice “from a top QC” it’s a sign of his “bottomless pockets” and “establishment” backing. Yet McCluskey recalls making repeated use of Unite’s in-house lawyers to threaten journalists who sought to report — accurately — his relationship with Karie Murphy, a close aide to Corbyn. If that relationship was a wholly private matter, why did the union spend members’ money concealing it?

All this is chickenfeed, of course, compared to the millions McCluskey spent propping up the man who would lead Labour to its worst defeat since 1935.

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For a book over-heavy on meetings, deals and chatter among and about politicians, there’s no clear explanation of why McCluskey thought Jeremy Corbyn was right — or just right for Unite. He backs Corbyn because he’s not a “Blairite” or from the “Labour Right”, a group that seemingly includes Ed Miliband — whose leadership campaign he backed — and any other Labour figure who doesn’t agree with Len. Indeed, McCluskey’s primary aim here appears to be to insist that he was right about, well, everything, despite the dreadful consequences of his choices.

Tony Blair gave Labour 13 years in power in part by breaking the unions’ grip on the party — a political success for which many in the Labour movement will never forgive him. McCluskey, interested in power as well as money, appears to see the primary job of a union leader today as reversing those changes. His aim, he writes, was to give Unite more “influence” over Labour. That influence is an end in itself — how it might be used, in the interests of Unite’s fee-paying members, is never explained. All that matters is that Len has senior Labour people at his beck and call. At least Corbyn was consistent in his principles; McCluskey offers far less ideological clarity. His politics are those of the back-scratching backroom deal.

Inevitably, then, McCluskey’s memoir reveals some stark inconsistencies. He expresses interest in Blue Labour, and its regard for traditional “family and flag” values. But without pause, he showers praise and cash on Corbyn, whose internationalism, pacifism and sympathy for identity politics is diametrically opposed to those values. He privately supports Scottish independence in 2014 while funding the No campaign. He thinks EU membership is bad for British workers, but campaigns to Remain.

His post-2016 position — to my mind convincing — was that Labour should commit to accepting Brexit, dismissing a second referendum or other schemes to overturn the result. If his arguments had won out, Labour might not have lost quite so much ground with its traditional voters. Yet even Unite’s money can’t buy him enough influence to make that the party’s policy. He blames John McDonnell and Diane Abbott: “Corbyn now had his two closest friends in politics, one in each ear, telling him to move on the issue — and that’s what he did, committing to a second referendum in all circumstances.”

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Not all Labour MPs backed Corbyn’s position, and McCluskey reports meeting members of the group who wanted to support Theresa May’s deal and “get Brexit done” long before the slogan was coined. They ask for Unite’s backing to go against party policy and deliver the Brexit McCluskey says he wants. But he refuses. Then he blames them for obeying the leadership. “They talked a good game but, whenever it came to the crunch, almost all of them fell into line with the whip,” he writes, failing to note that he funds and supports that very whip.

As a major player in the Corbyn project, McCluskey needs an excuse for its shattering failure in 2019 — and Brexit, rather than the infighting he’s implicated in, is it. In his account, Corbyn’s muddled position on leaving the EU was the sole reason for Labour’s collapse, especially in its working-class heartlands. To support this argument, McCluskey offers some second-hand anecdotes about Unite members’ dismay over Brexit, including some quotes that to my weary ear sound about as convincing as his testimony about his youthful broken arm. “At a meeting of the stewards I was told: ‘Jeremy is regarded as a traitor over Brexit’,” McCluskey recalls, conveniently.

He concludes with the bizarre claim that he and Unite were “vindicated” by the electoral catastrophe that he funded and “influenced”. Far from accepting any responsibility, he repeats a favoured Corbynite talking point about his man “winning the argument”, as if that makes up for reducing Labour to barely 200 Commons seats.

He also overlooks or cynically downplays the other major factors in that 2019 humiliation — most grievously anti-Semitism. “No evidence that antisemitism was more widespread in the Labour Party than in wider society has ever been produced. All the evidence that exists suggests the opposite,” he writes, dismissing the views of several Jewish Labour MPs, peers and members, and the Board of Jewish Deputies, and the Community Safety Trust, and the Jewish Chronicle. What, after all, do they know about anti-Semitism?

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Also dismissed is the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, which found that Labour, under Corbyn, had been “responsible for unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination”. Far more important to McCluskey is that accusations of institutional bigotry “demoralised” Corbyn and — worse — “devastated” poor Len himself. Will no-one think of the real victims here?

Besides, even if Labour was a little bigoted, voters didn’t care, in McCluskey’s telling. “I don’t believe antisemitism,” he writes, “was much of an issue on the doorsteps of Darlington or Doncaster in the 2019 general election.” Perhaps McCluskey, devoid of principles in politics, finds it hard to believe others might have them. Or perhaps this is just part of his wider habit of claiming the support of whoever he likes for whatever position he likes.

McCluskey has a habit of grandiosely speaking for the “ordinary workers” of Britain, the idealised grafters he allegedly represents. Despite a six-figure salary and a life spent in London offices and upmarket restaurants (as an aside in the book, he says he’s partial to Black and Blue in Borough Market, where a ribeye steak is £31), McCluskey insists that he retains a gut understanding of the workers, who, naturally, agree with him in all things.

But, strangely for a book by a union leader, Always Red pays little attention to trade unions and their members, at least in contemporary Britain. There’s lots of rose-tinted memories of earlier decades, and too many dull stories about the backroom politicking that saw McCluskey reach the top of the movement. But precious little about where unions stand now, and what their future might be.

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By Julie Bindel

McCluskey led Unite for a decade, until this year. He proudly reports that under his leadership, its funds grew tenfold to almost £500 million, “more than all the other British unions combined”.  For him, financial clout is all — and apparently more important than the number of people who actually support him and his union. He fails to mention some other numbers. In 2007, when Unite was formed by merging Amicus and the TGWU, it had 2 million members. Its most recent official filing shows it now has just 1.1 million members paying into its general fund.

That’s in keeping with overall union membership, which remains in long-term decline. Today barely 13% of private sector workers are union members. Perhaps the most stunning figure on the unions’ decline is that members are now more likely to be university graduates (28%) than to have no qualifications (17%). Education is the dividing line of our age, and trade unions speak for those at the top, not the bottom.

Why have those workers least able to bargain for higher wages turned away from the Labour movement?  Could that trend be stopped or reversed? Union sympathisers like to explain the decline by pointing to legislation and the growing power of big employers, which makes “exploitation” easier. But if that’s the case, why haven’t supposedly exploited workers become more inclined to seek the unions’ protection? McCluskey offers a few cursory paragraphs about automation and technology, and a lot of blaming Thatcher and the Right-wing media — but makes no real attempt to answer such questions. He’s more interested in himself.

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And money, of course. He’s not the only one. Could it be that the unions, in search of members with solid and reliable wages to pay membership dues, have been more interested in representing public sector workers? Almost 52% are now union members. And the public sector now has twice as many high-skilled roles than the private sector, since many jobs — teachers, nurses, the police — now require a degree.

No doubt those workers need representation, in the workplace and Parliament. But a labour movement that focuses on relatively secure and affluent state employees, while neglecting those in more precarious positions, is a movement that has lost its way. The “Blairites” share some blame for that, but it’s been more than a decade since Ed Miliband disowned Blair’s “naive” faith in markets — and 14 years since the man himself left office. 2019 was the nadir of the modern Labour movement, and that’s the responsibility of those who led it at the time.

It was Corbynism that turned Labour into the party of the middle class. But he was aided and abetted by the man who was being paid to speak for British workers — who instead spent millions of pounds of their money trying to buy himself influence over a political project that repelled them. And McCluskey is about as sorry for it as for lying about that broken arm.

By God, they need to hear it. And if, by doing so, he attracts the opprobrium of those who have led the party to the brink and have no desire to do what is necessary to drag it back he should wear it as a badge of honour. It would certainly do him no harm in the eyes of the millions beyond the conference hall who see Labour as having moved to the outer fringes.

I think, in fact, it’s time we re-introduced a little masochism back into politics. A bit more bravery. So many of our politicians take every precaution imaginable to avoid the prospect of negative publicity — the unfortunate encounter with the angry voter, being heckled during a speech, enduring the brickbats that come from stating an unfashionable opinion, from within the party, as well as from outside. The age of the spin doctor has seen a generation of senior politicians wrapped in cotton wool in an effort to head off these sorts of unwelcome scenarios. As a result, politicians look like automatons, living cocooned existences removed from the lives of everyday folk, and whose public interventions are stage-managed to within an inch of their lives.

These politicians need to open themselves up a little more — to risk taking a bit of a kicking from time to time. Most voters are, in my experience, sympathetic towards —even admiring of — elected representatives who are willing to submit themselves to the hazards that inevitably go with lowering the barriers between themselves and opponents. Witness, for example, John Major’s decision in the 1992 general election to ditch his party’s slick PR strategy and, armed only with a soapbox and loudspeaker, mix it head-on with the masses in town centres around the country. Sadly for us on the Labour side, it worked a treat.

So Starmer mustn’t shy away from reminding his party that it stands where it does as a consequence of its own failings. Its predicament — heading for a future as a pressure group rather than a serious alternative for government — is entirely self-inflicted. It forfeited the support of its traditional working-class base, voters in places such as the Red Wall without whom it simply cannot win power, because it took them for granted. Worse, it privately sneered at them and thought them unenlightened. In assuming that these people would never throw their lot in with the Tories, as millions of them eventually did, the party had gravely miscalculated.

The rupture was long in the making, but it ought to have been obvious to everyone in the movement that it was coming. While Labour was embracing the new global market, blue-collar Britain was becoming angry and disorientated at the deindustrialisation and rapid demographic change that came with it. While the party saw the world increasingly from the vantage point of our fashionable cities, those in the provinces felt a deep sense of neglect. While Labour was preaching the gospel of a militant cosmopolitan liberalism, post-industrial Britain was mourning the weakening of common cultural bonds and a lost sense of community and belonging. While the party was falling under the domination of the professional and managerial classes, the working-class saw that its representatives no longer looked or sounded very much like them, nor shared their priorities. The adoption by Labour in 2018 of a policy favouring a second referendum on the EU was, for the relationship between the party and its one-time core vote, the final nail in the coffin.

The party needs to hear all this. Starmer himself — upwardly mobile, north London liberal lawyer that he is — embodies the party’s ideological and demographic shift, of course. He also unquestionably — as the architect of the second referendum policy — contributed to the breach between the party and its working-class base. But he now needs to say and do what is necessary to put things right. There really is no alternative.

Starmer must implore the party to face up to the fact that, in no longer being an object of affection for the very people it was created to represent, Labour is betraying its heritage. He must tell the rank-and-file that Labour cannot be a party only for social activists, student radicals and middle-class urban liberals, but must also understand the lives of — and speak for — those living in small-town Britain. He should remind the party that a small ‘c’ conservative thread still runs through many working-class communities and, once upon a time, voters in these places felt no compunction about voting Labour. They stopped because they sensed, rightly, that the party started to see them as embarrassing elderly relatives; it wanted their votes at election time, but it had no desire to be seen in public with them.

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By Ian Martin

The party must stop obsessing over issues that have little traction in the real world — the current internal squabble over gender identity being one example — and concentrate on the doorstep issues that determine the outcome of elections.

Starmer should be bold and tell the party that, for too long, it has indulged — sometimes actively supported — those who seek to stifle freedom of thought and expression, and that ‘cancel culture’ and a suffocating woke orthodoxy are not merely contrived props in a Tory ‘culture war’, but are alarming realities. If Labour is to return to being a broad church, there must be space in the debate for those with nonconformist political or moral opinions — especially when those opinions often resonate loudly in the world beyond the political class.

Voters who aren’t supportive of taking the knee, voters who oppose mass immigration, voters who supported Brexit, voters who believe that someone with a penis cannot be a woman, voters who worry more about law and order than they do Palestine and more about national security than they do climate change: these are the people, many of them rooted in our working-class communities, whom the ranks of the Left have increasingly come to despise, but without whose support there is, for Labour, no path back to power.

The messaging from next week’s conference should be geared almost exclusively towards reconnecting with these voters. Perhaps a bit less resort to the usual buzzwords of “equality”, “diversity”, “tolerance” and “inclusion” — always in heavy supply at Labour conferences — and more focus on the themes of “family”, “community”, “work” and “nation”. If you want to win the votes of the mainstream, you have to speak their language and share their priorities.

There can be no pulling punches at this conference. Labour isn’t about to go out of business, but neither does it stand an earthly chance of forming the next government — indeed, any future government — without a major recalibration of its priorities. Starmer must make sure this message hits home, no matter the boos and catcalls it may attract from elements of the liberal and radical Left (from which most delegates will be comprised). It would, at least, be a signal to the outside world that he has the guts to do what is necessary to drag Labour back to electability.

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Warm words will not be enough (as we can see from the reaction to Starmer’s prosaic essay). Any strategy designed to reconnect the party with its lost voters must also be rooted in hard policy — in particular a clear programme for delivering economic justice after more than a decade of austerity. Achieving full employment, reviving our industrial base, addressing regional inequalities, closing the gap between rich and poor, rebalancing the economy away from finance capital and towards the productive sector — all challenges for which Labour must provide answers. A recognition that, for too long, it has focused disproportionately on the public sector (crucial though it is) at the expense of those who live and work in the real economy, where goods are made and wealth produced, will also be necessary to show that the party is willing to break out from its comfort zone in its quest to be the voice for all sections of the working-class.

Most crucially, Labour must seek to answer the question confronting all political parties of how we might maintain a meaningful sense of social solidarity and community in the age of a deeply atomising liberal globalisation. It was, after all, the failure to properly consider this question that has served in no small measure to bring about a fissure between several parties of the Left across the West and their traditional bases.

If, as seems possible, next week’s Labour conference is remembered chiefly for the fact that a female MP felt unable to attend on account of her defence of women’s sex-based rights, or the ongoing internal wrangle over voting systems, it would encapsulate everything that was wrong about the party. Instead, Labour must turn outwards. It must show that it once again understands there is a world beyond the M25, that provincial Britain exists, that the private sector matters, that hyper-liberalism has proven not to be the answer to the social and economic injustices that still bedevil our country, and that many voters still yearn for something that transcends money and individual rights.

And if, in conveying that message, Starmer riles up the assembled delegates, so be it. The objective of making Labour palatable again to the wider public is all that matters.

Far from the economic uplands promised by those who campaigned to remain, British industry was “bruised, lacerated, and bleeding to death because of the Common Market”. EEC membership meant British taxpayers were subsidising “fat cows” in Germany. “In future, all harvest festivals will be held in hangers at Heathrow”, he joked to thunderous applause. In even more vivid language, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, Peter Shore, told delegates that EEC membership constituted “a rape of the British people and British power and the constitution”.

When the time came to vote on whether to leave or remain in the EEC, 71% of Labour delegates voted to leave. Brexit, as we now call it, was Labour Party policy.

The 1980 conference vote would have come as no surprise to anyone familiar with British Labour history. Two special party conferences on Europe had already voted against membership: one in 1971 against joining and one in 1975 against remaining. Indeed, Euroscepticism had been the mainstream view of the British Labour movement ever since Clement Attlee rejected French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman’s plan for European unity in 1950.

The Labour Party National Executive Committee (NEC), with Attlee’s full support, declared: “No Socialist Party with the prospect of forming a government could accept a system by which important fields of national policy were surrendered to a supranational European representative authority.” It was intuitively understood by a vast majority in the Labour Party that entanglement in the European Economic Community ran contrary to three of the party’s core principles: democracy, socialism and internationalism.

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The Brexiteer who could have saved Labour

By Paul Embery

Following the 1980 conference vote, the Labour NEC began serious discussions to flesh out Labour’s Brexit policy. Labour’s MEPs were invited to London to help; it may seem rather unlikely now, but in the Eighties they were overwhelmingly Eurosceptic.

Then, at the 1981 Labour Party conference in Brighton, the NEC endorsed “withdrawal” as official Labour Party policy. By an even larger margin than the year before, 84% of delegates voted in favour of leaving the EEC. Hardly any activists could be described as “Remainers”.

In the following months, the NEC set about drawing up a “blueprint” for withdrawal. Unlike David Cameron, who blocked efforts to prepare for Brexit before the 2016 EU referendum, the Labour Party considered it vitally important to assess the future relationship between the UK and EEC before the withdrawal process began.

So in December, a delegation of Labour MPs went to Brussels to discuss Labour’s plan for withdrawal with the European Commission. A confidential memorandum of the meeting, prepared for the NEC and held in the Labour History Archive at the People’s History Museum, details how the Labour delegation was led by Judith Hart, a Left-wing Labour MP who had served in the Wilson government as Overseas Development Minister.

Hart and fellow Eurosceptic Barbara Castle, the leader of Labour’s MEPs, were the only two women in Wilson’s first cabinet. Undeterred by the sexism of the age — one Cabinet colleague dismissed her as “a prattling woman” — Hart was a passionate advocate for anti-colonial causes. She regarded the EEC as a “neo-colonial” project where the “white tribes of Europe” were teaming up together to create a circle of privilege. In Brussels, Hart was joined by three other Eurosceptic Labour MPs: Gwyneth Dunwoody, Denzil Davies and Doug Hoyle, father of the current Speaker of the House of Commons.

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Their initial reception from the EEC Commissioners was not encouraging. The notes record: “the original shape of the programme gave the impression that the delegation was to be taken on a ‘Cook’s tour’ of the Commission with much time to be spent on officials expounding the virtues of the EEC”. However, after a few phone calls and the intervention of British Labour MEPs, led by Barbara Castle, “the nature of the meetings changed completely and we were able to fulfil our original intentions” — namely, the technicalities of a Labour Brexit.

The Labour negotiators met with a dozen members of the Commission, including British Commissioner Christopher Tugendhat, a former Conservative MP and uncle of the current Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat. Curiously, the meetings went smoothly, with the exception of those with the British officials. “On the whole the discussions were both serious and fruitful and conducted in an atmosphere of considerable friendliness,” the Labour internal report reflected. “It was quite noticeable”, however, that the only “hostility that was shown came from the British officials”.

Predictably, many of Labour’s discussions with the EEC Commission — whether on trade, agriculture, Ireland or employment — presaged the kinds of wrangling which occurred after the 2016 referendum.

The Commission, for example, told the Labour negotiators that there were only two options available for a post-Brexit trade deal. The UK would either need to join the European Free Trade Area (EFTA), or it would have to trade with the EEC on GATT (WTO) rules – a “no deal” Brexit in post-2016 parlance. The Commissioners stated: “it would not be possible for the Community, if only for political reasons, to negotiate a better deal with the UK”.

Already, the EEC was playing hardball. A bespoke trade deal between the EEC and UK was ruled out before the starting gun had even fired. “The officials were keen to point out that we could expect no special considerations from the Community once we had withdrawn.” the Labour report reflected.

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The Labour team’s response equally mirrored the concerns of many Brexiteers in recent years. They ruled out joining EFTA because it would continue to subject the UK to EEC rules without having political influence to shape them. It meant that the only option before Labour was no deal. “The effect on the UK would,” said Labour’s negotiators, “be at worst highly marginal”; it would spur British manufacturing, while freeing the UK to form trade agreements with non-EEC countries on more favourable terms.

Ireland also proved a thorny topic. The Labour negotiators were comfortable with having an open border, but “Commission officials saw the problems in terms of the UK having to stop the ‘leakage’”. The Commission argued “certain controls on cross border commercial activity” would be necessary. A briefing note sent back to the Labour leader Michael Foot about the visit concluded: “It was agreed that the border with Ireland might create some problems and need further investigation.”

Finally, the two sides discussed the timeline for withdrawal. At that time, there was no provision similar to Article 50 that spelt out the specific way a member state could leave the EEC. It was agreed that 18 months to two years would be sufficient to draw up a withdrawal agreement initiating the formal process of leaving.

But there was a catch. The EEC negotiators said the agreement of all member states would be required for Britain to leave the organisation; the UK Labour representatives were not convinced. What would happen if a Labour government just unilaterally left the EEC without an agreement, they asked?

Thirty years on, the EEC’s response sounds eerily familiar. According to Labour’s internal report: “The officials stated at this point that ‘there had to be an agreement otherwise it would be terrible!’. They declined to speculate further.”

Labour runs on rage, which is why I dislike Corbyn: he is a raging man, but he tries to hide it. If you want to know who he really is, watch him shout at journalists and tell photographers they will behave better under Socialism. Was it a joke? If he lies about his rage — and he does — what else does he lie about? If rage attracts activists, it repels voters, because rage, by itself, has never changed a mind. That is not politics. It is psychosis.

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By Robert Colvile

I first met Corbynistas in 2016 at the inaugural Momentum conference, ‘The World Transformed’. They discussed, among other things, how to control the Labour Party, how calling Hitler a Zionist wasn’t that offensive if you read fringe historians who explain how the Zionists really did collaborate in Jew murder, and, alongside such sideshows, how they would transform the world. I liked them — they share, as you do in Alcoholics Anonymous, and they don’t mind being vulnerable because vulnerability is their currency; they have plenty of pity for themselves. But I feared them too; they ran on narcissism, victimhood and rage.

I have never been afraid to call myself a journalist anywhere but there. I wasn’t even a Tory. I was a Social Democrat, but that didn’t matter. If you agree with Corbynistas they are the kindest people in the world; they are searching for a family. Their desire to renew the country mirrors their own search for self-renewal: their journey from brokenness.

It is a personal thing, which is why they take things personally. And so, if you don’t agree with them, they hate you, and that is why they are bad campaigners. They define themselves as who they are not; and that is the very opposite of consensus. Corbyn’s Labour offered a haven to everyone left behind — but they forget, in their commune of victimhood, to extend that haven to anyone who had ever been a Tory; to anyone who doubted them; and to the vast majority of British Jews, preferring instead to set them against other minorities in a race for perfect victimhood. In this, Jews failed, and the punishment was awful.

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All this came from Corbyn, who was a trade union apparatchik and an MP at the very Left of the party: a hero in tiny rooms. The bunker was always his preferred home; his mistake was that, instead of leaving it on his elevation to the leadership, he drew his whole party inside. He is a man who likes applause: vanity, then.

His world is Manichean: there is good, and evil; exploited and exploiter. Most people are a combination of both, and many voters have supported both parties; but what matters for Labour is whether you support them or not. That is why it took so long for Jackie Walker and Chris Williamson to be expelled, and why Ken Livingstone was allowed to resign and to campaign for Corbyn, when a decent politician would have said he did not want his vote.

Labour did not even, until the campaign, work hard to earn support. Go off and join the Tories, they cried, treating floating voters as plutocratic scum or imbeciles; and many did. I wondered whether the central principle of parliamentary democracy eluded them: the need to persuade your enemy to become your friend. But that is not Corbyn’s way. He loves the purity of the edges; the thrill of hating your enemy, but not conquering him.

Is it inadequacy? He became leader chiefly because he was a reluctant; there is something pagan, and ancient, about Corbynism, despite its promise of progression. The compromises of real power disgusted him, and it showed. If you can’t sing the National Anthem or convince your colleagues, you won’t be prime minister. You will be a noble failure; and I wonder if that, in his deepest self, was what he always wanted.

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Is Chris Williamson an antisemite?

By Tanya Gold

Tory Conference can be the worst place on earth; but Corbynistas can match any monsters in performative rage and a desire to exclude and punish their enemies. I am not talking about Labour voters, who deserve better than their activists have given them. I am talking about the bourgeois Socialists who drive Labour to the Left so they can, at best, have free university education for their children and at worst, bloodless hands when the Tories win. They are the ones who should have joined the Tories all along; they benefited them enough. I am talking about affluent dead-eyed activists running on the energy of other people’s pain and young media activists gaslighting Jews and their allies for sport. They are journalists no longer, because they lie too much, and they had not a word of pity for a minority that was not vulnerable — or pliant — enough for Corbyn’s Labour.

The anti-Semitism scandal remains the best paradigm of Labour’s immobility and hubris; that is why it is so reported. They were wrong but they didn’t amend themselves. They blamed their opponents for noticing and accused them of their own flaw: racism. Labour could have fixed it with the Chakrabarti Report in 2016, but they saw anti-Semitism as a political, not a moral, problem. They don’t have moral problems, that is for others; and so, their penance was false, and Jews knew it. Everyone knew it, but them.

Labour is not self-aware enough to know itself, so if the project fails, they will blame enemies multiple and accuse two thirds of the country of a distressing false consciousness. There will be nothing else to say.

This year was no different. To observe the general atmosphere of anticipation and positivity around the streets, bars and meeting places of Brighton, one could be forgiven for assuming that Labour is on the brink of being swept to power by an enthusiastic populace desperate for us to build the New Jerusalem. Whereas the truth is that we are consistently trailing in the opinion polls and going nowhere fast – a failing all the more inexcusable considering the government’s current disarray.

The week got off to the worst possible start with the aborted defenestration of Tom Watson. There is no doubt that Watson has, to the fury of many inside the party, frequently sought to use his deputy leader post to undermine Jeremy Corbyn and present himself as an alternative leader. But instead of seeking to remove him from office via a democratic process, his opponents – the Momentum group and its outriders – resorted to the worst kind of bureaucratic manoeuvring. They couldn’t silence the man, so they tried to abolish his position. In doing so, however, they showed themselves to be undemocratic authoritarians who were frightened of a dissenting voice. The lesson of history, plainly lost on them, is that you don’t win the battle of ideas by purging people.

It is abundantly clear that the Corbynites now wield control over huge chunks of the party. So far as there is resistance, it comes principally from the Parliamentary Labour Party, which provides a redoubt for those – and there are many – who remain faithful to the creed of Blairite centrism.

But what is also clear, is that neither side truly understands Labour’s current dilemma – how to build that coalition between the party’s traditional working-class base and less tribal middle-class voters which is a precondition of electoral success. Or, if it does, it offers no credible strategy for achieving it.

The centrists seem to think that power will be won through a return to the pre-referendum status quo – a status quo that did so much to alienate working-class voters from the party and set in train the events which have led to our nation’s current polarisation; whilst the Corbynites believe that all we have to do is keep hammering on about elitism and economic injustice, and the voters will flock to us.

Both are mistaken. Labour will only win again when it offers a programme that combines its entirely laudable policies for a fairer economy alongside a social agenda that recognises the sense of cultural fragmentation and deracination brought about by globalisation, and seeks to build in its place a new, post-liberal politics of communitarianism. In short, it needs to marry its economic radicalism with a return to the politics of belonging.

There were signs in Brighton that some people in the party are beginning to understand this. It was heartening to see fringe meetings organised by some groups, including the Fabian Society, focusing on these very questions. A clutch of MPs too – often those representing constituencies which voted Leave – are beginning to address these issues. Stephen Kinnock has been particularly vocal in arguing that the party’s – indeed, the entire political establishment’s – relentless promotion of liberal cosmopolitanism has pushed away voters in the more traditional working-class constituencies and risks tipping the country into a full-scale culture war.

When set alongside efforts to subvert the result of the referendum result, it’s easy to see why the atmosphere in these communities is becoming increasingly toxic. And, maddeningly, Labour did nothing to ameliorate the tensions on this issue this week. On the contrary, the party’s absurd and anti-democratic position on Brexit will serve only to further disenchant those whom we should be moving heaven and earth to win back, as indeed will the spectacle of senior Labour MPs, including shadow cabinet members, heading a march around Brighton calling for a ‘People’s Vote’.

None of this is to say that nothing good came out of the conference. In fact, several policy commitments – such as the reduction in the working week, abolition of prescription charges and introduction of free personal care – are forward-thinking measures, entirely in keeping with the party’s traditional values.

But sadly these announcements were overshadowed by the conference’s decision to support motions that will make many voters recoil and serve to justify their perception of Labour as a party in the grip of militant hardliners. In particular, the pledges to extend free movement at a time when millions are demanding proper control over immigration; grant voting rights in elections to non-UK nationals, thereby undermining the very concept of citizenship; and abolish private schools — a sinister and authoritarian measure that has no place in a free society — will do nothing to help propel Labour towards power.

In making such controversial commitments, Labour fell into the classic trap of appealing to the activists within its own ranks, rather than to the wider country.

The air in Brighton was thick with fashionable buzzwords such as ‘diversity’, ‘inclusivity’ and ‘equality’ — the type of terminology that has become the stock in trade of the modern Left, but which has little resonance out there in the provinces of the nation.

The party, if it is to ever reconnect with its one-time core vote, needs urgently to start speaking the language of ‘place’, ‘community’, ‘belonging’, ‘work’ and ‘family’ — the things that hold real meaning for people and which they wish their politicians to focus on. Because, ultimately, until its own language and priorities match those of the millions for whom it purports to speak, the Labour party cannot expect to win their votes.

For all the upbeat chatter and optimism that I experienced in Brighton this week, the truth is that the Labour party has a mountain to climb if it is to form the next government. And we are – with potentially just weeks to go before a general election – still in the foothills.