Brace yourself for the revenge of the Corbynistas
If I were running the Labour conference, I’d turn the stage into a catwalk and have ministers sashay up and down to Vogue by Madonna. But the Left can’t laugh at itself. Instead, Angela Rayner looked almost vulnerable as she addressed the delegates, with the tired, frightened face of a lady who’s spent a week going through her receipts.
The leadership has blown itself up. No one is more upset than the party’s Left.
There are two Lefts: hard and soft. The hard, aka the Corbynites, have been so ruthlessly purged by Starmer’s Stalinist regime that most of them are now found outside the conference, shouting in. One protestor, a white granny in an Arab headdress, held a sign that read PARTY OF CROOKS. Inside, Morning Star staged a meeting in a tent in the basement. It was a litany of doom and gloom, interspersed with pleas to “challenge” the “hegemony of capital”.
Their argument is mad but logical and sympathetic. For years they were told “socialism can’t win” – yet Jeremy Corbyn almost did it, in 2017. The party elite, rather than seizing this historic opportunity, undermined him and saddled him with an unpopular Remain policy in 2019. Starmer then recaptured the party by lying to it – saying he’d keep Corbyn’s manifesto – and moved the party back to the centre, claiming that this would make it competent and electable.
But, as the Morning Star comrades said, Labour only won in July because the public hates the Tories – it got fewer votes than Corbyn did – and the veneer of professionalism has already worn off. We are witnessing the “corporatisation of the Labour Party,” said a fireman: as benefits are cut, private donations roll in. Corbyn always bought his own clothes. I’m sure every penny went to Oxfam.
Diane Abbott says Keir is in the “pocket of millionaires” and is enabling the far-Right by failing to project a vision while pandering to migration fears. This is the perennial debate within Labour. The centrists seek to improve Britain; the Left wants to transform it, arguing that unless one redistributes wealth and power irreversibly, any improvements a Labour administration achieves will be wiped away when the Tories retake power. Lenin wrote: “one step forward, two steps back”.
The soft Left, which is far stronger within the back benches and unions, shares some of Diane’s analysis but differs in strategy: more practical, less dogmatic. Their great hope is Rayner, whose workers rights plan contains much to commend it, and she’d make a far better leader than Starmer.
But she’s faced pushback from the business department, of course, and finds herself compromised by the Alli revelations: one can imagine the inner turmoil as she gave her report to conference, or “confluence” as she pronounces it. Minus any plan to build a new Jerusalem, the party falls back into the politics of class representation. “You know me,” she said; she was a single mum living on sixty quid a week. She’ll not make any apology “for where we came from or how we’ve ended up here.” The delegates applauded. The subtext is that our girl might wear Prada, but there’s a solid working-class woman underneath, and that is what the Tories really hate.
I thought of Hartley Shawcross saying “We are the masters now” in 1946 – as if a Labour victory, the elevation of a toolmaker’s son to Number 10, is an end in itself. This is the view socialists regard as shallow and foolhardy, for darn good reason.
What will the malcontents do? Starmer is under the illusion that being in government ought to unify the Left by giving it purpose, but the experience of history is that it radicalises and splinters – that the more the centre tries to apply discipline, the more it rebels.
Expect strikes. Prepare for backbench rebellions. Labour will likely undergo the same fracturing that the Tories suffered – the Conservatives via Reform, Labour into an umbrella of socialist pressure groups that include environmentalists and pro-Palestine independents. The election of such MPs to Parliament already proves that you no longer need the Labour label to win, that socialists don’t have to compromise themselves with loyalty to a party that has been scarcely loyal to them. Call it “Corbyn’s revenge.”
For a snack I go to the bar, order tea and sandwiches and try my luck. “It’s on Lord Alli’s credit card,” I say. Blank faces. No sense of humour.
A fond goodbye
Columnists do read correspondence. For the past few years, every time I wrote for the Telegraph I received an email from one Daphne Pearson, offering words of wisdom on Britain’s decline. We never met, I don’t even know where she was writing from, but I always tried to reply.
Last week I received an email from Daphne’s son to say that she had died. I took the news hard. It felt like losing a friend.
Going back through our old conversations, I realise that she must have been in her eighties – as she recalled being three when the War broke out “and did not see a banana till 1946, when an uncle brought me one from London as a curiosity”.
Daphne was a Christian; she often wrote about the importance of tradition, family and civility. She is the kind of person I think of when I’m writing, and I will continue to write as if she were reading.