As Labour MPs prepared to head to Brighton yesterday, some were scratching their heads and asking themselves the same question: can it really only be two years ago that they last trooped to the Sussex seaside for the first annual gathering under the new leadership of Jeremy Corbyn?
Back then, shellshocked MPs spent the conference attempting to ensure the party did not ditch its support for the Trident nuclear programme and speculating on how long their new leader would last. “I’m absolutely relaxed and delighted to be totally supportive of him in public because it is obvious this thing is going to end in total disaster relatively soon,” one chuckling senior MP predicted at the time, almost giddy with derision.
The intervening two years have seen Corbyn transformed from a man assumed to be taking his party towards oblivion to a leader seemingly on the cusp of power, after having ridden out an attempted coup in-between.
Delegates packed their bags for Brighton this year with the once outlandish idea of prime minister Corbyn gaining currency. The latest front page of the Economist pictured him walking out of Downing Street, its famous black door repainted red, with the headline: “The likely lad.” Businesses and lobbyists, having deserted the party’s conference last year, are starting to reappear as they sense power.
June’s surprisingly strong election result handed Corbyn huge security, demonstrated by the fact that a number of party rule changes strengthening its left wing – which would once have been fought tooth and nail by his opponents – were agreed with barely a whimper before the conference. It will now be easier for leftwing candidates to run for the leadership and win support for reforms from the party’s ruling body.
There will also be far more Corbyn supporters at this week’s conference than two years ago as his backers have won minor party posts across the country. Corbyn’s team, however, are adamant that they know Labour needs to show it is ready for power and not out simply to please the conference hall.
Writing in today’s Observer, the Labour leader states: “We are now the political mainstream and have the chance to transform our country. To do that we must use our new strength inside and outside parliament to challenge the Conservatives at every step – and prepare to form a government to change Britain whenever the next election is called.”
Yet with the prospect of power comes scrutiny on policy. For all the job security Corbyn now enjoys, all will not be calm in Brighton. The row over his leadership has been replaced by one over the party’s most important policy issue – Brexit.
On crucial issues of trade with the EU and on Britain’s immigration rules, Corbyn faces a fight. Such has been the kaleidoscope of forces at work in British politics that on some of the most crucial Brexit questions, Corbyn will find himself on the wrong side of many of his own supporters. Given that the overwhelming majority of Labour members back single-market membership, the public support for that stance from senior Labour figures, reported in today’s Observer, becomes a major flashpoint.
Immigration is just as tricky. A new campaign for the party to support the EU’s free movement rules is gaining ground. It is backed by Clive Lewis, an early Corbyn-supporting MP who resigned from the shadow cabinet over the triggering of Brexit, and overseen by Michael Chessum, once a senior figure in the Corbyn-backing Momentum group.
There will be an attempt to engineer a vote at conference on the issue. Insiders remain convinced Corbyn agrees with the campaign, but is being made to rule out free movement by Labour figures concerned about immigration levels.
“Win or lose at this conference, this is just the beginning of the campaign for free movement,” Chessum said. “This is a pivotal moment for Labour and the position we take in the migration debate will be a marker of what the party does more generally. We must reject the lie that migrants are to blame for the crisis in the economy and public services.”
Ian Hodson, president of the Bakers and Allied Food Workers Union (BFAWU), which backs Corbyn, said: “At this conference, Labour has an opportunity to adopt an agenda of hope and solidarity rather than division and fear. We need a movement that builds unity among all workers, regardless of where they are from. Ending free movement does the opposite.”
Dozens of motions could embarrass the leadership should they reach the conference floor. There are said to be more than 40 relating to Brexit. They will go into the party’s “compositing” process, ostensibly to crunch many motions into one debate. In practice, it is designed to make whatever is debated so anodyne that it causes no problems for the party.
“Everyone will go into a room, look at the many motions covering the difficult issues around migration and Brexit and come up with a glorious fudge,” said a Labour insider. “This is why the machine works so well!”
As for the overall direction of the Labour party, critics of Corbyn insist they still believe he is the wrong man with the wrong philosophy, but that this is the time for a tactical retreat. Those who remember the runup to the 1997 landslide reflect there is not the same sense the party is on the verge of government.
“The election in June killed internal dissent, but didn’t put us on the verge of power,” says one Labour stalwart and Downing Street veteran. “So conference is neither the triumphalism of 1996 or the civil war of 1980. It’ll end up being like a filler track on a Chris Rea album.”
For many Corbyn sceptics, the latest key text is a piece by MP Bridget Phillipson in the New Statesman this month. “I find it hard to rejoice in a result that gives us fewer than 10 seats more than we managed in 2010 when we were last kicked out of power,” she wrote. “Seven years of Tory austerity and incompetence have passed since then, but we are pretty much back to where we started: a hung parliament where the Tories have to do deals with a minor party.”
New polling today by Opinium for the Social Market Foundation suggests that only a quarter of older people would consider voting Labour. Corbyn is the bookies’ favourite to win the next election but the polls do not point to his inevitable success. The latest Opinium poll for the Observer puts the Tories two points ahead of Labour, with Corbyn’s approval rating just a point ahead of Theresa May’s minus 11.
Figures such as Tom Watson, the deputy leader, have been suggesting that rather than rerun the 2017 campaign with more socialist policies, Labour needs to reach the voters who abandoned it in seats like Mansfield. Far away from the public gaze, there is some heavy lifting being done by moderate groups funded by old-Labour donors, trying to come up with a programme that could win majority support.
Not all Corbyn critics have been silenced. At a rally held by the Blairite Progress group on Sunday, Wes Streeting, the Labour MP for Ilford North, will challenge the party’s modernising wing to raise its game and stop sulking.
“For people who are meant to be on the ‘modernising wing’ of the party, we’ve been painted too easily as stuck in the past,” he will say. “It’s no use spending all our time carping and criticising others or hoping there will be an organisational fix out of our predicament. I’m not sure the New Labour wing of the party has ever developed a sufficient response to the big challenges facing the world post-financial crash and so the centre left has surrendered the pitch to pretty old-school politics on both the left and right – neither of which have answers to the social and economic problems that have driven Brexit.”
