Brighton Rocked. Labour is about to conclude a conference that has been all about itself
Jeremy Corbyn had been due, as this BVCA Insight reaches you, to bring the Labour Party conference in Brighton to its conclusion. Circumstances meant that his speech was brought forward instead. In all other respects, nevertheless, what he said and how it was received was very largely predictable.
The Labour Party leader’s oration had the huge benefit of coming after the unanimous Supreme Court judgement yesterday that the prorogation of Parliament earlier this month was illegal and hence is now rendered null and void. This handed him helpful ammunition to turn his fire on the Prime Minister and in so doing distract attention from what has been a difficult week for Labour on multiple fronts.
Whether Lady Hale and her colleagues on the highest court of the land will recast the political landscape for long is more doubtful. Their verdict is undoubtedly legally sensational. Whether it will shift votes is another matter entirely. Parliament has returned earlier than ministers would have liked, and might search for yet more means of making a no-deal Brexit without the explicit consent of the House of Commons even more challenging, but this could, ironically, have the advantage for Boris Johnson that it will increase fear among the most committed Brexit supporters on his benches that if they do not back whatever deal he might be able to extract from Brussels over the next few weeks then they risk an extension of an unpredictable length and uncertain impact.
The Labour conference has been a strange affair even for those familiar with attending them (this was my 22nd Labour conclave and 67th party conference overall, I clearly need help). It managed to be both bitter and flat at the same time. The absence of much of the Parliamentary Labour Party was striking and many of those who did show their faces were quietly commuting down from the capital city in order to be seen and then returned home as soon as possible. Those who came privately conceded a distinct sense of pessimism both about their own prospects and the party.
This was a conference that faced inwards and was all about entrenching factional authority
At one level, the theme of this conference appeared to be all about abolition. Ofsted was to be abolished. Private schools were to be abolished. Prescription charges were to be abolished. The five-day working week was to be abolished (in a decade). Austerity was to be abolished. At one moment early on Saturday morning it looked as if Tom Watson, the Deputy Leader, was to be abolished too. That final suggestion prompted outrage and turned out to be an act of abolition that went too far.
The real feature of this assembly, however, was entrenchment. The hard left had to move faster than it would have assumed it needed to a few months ago to entrench its control over the organisation, structure and rulebook of the party and to push through a radical policy agenda of a scale that travels beyond even the fabled 1983 Manifesto (dubbed the ‘longest suicide note in history’).
This frantic pace is driven by the expectation that there is more likely than not to be an election before the next Labour Party conference in Liverpool in 2020. Momentum and its allies need to be sure that their control over the party can survive an election defeat. Paradoxically, if that means an open party division and a series of proposals which make that loss more likely, that would be more than acceptable if it also made continued hegemony over the party more plausible.
Added to this, although few of his inner circle would concede it, there is a belief even among his admirers that if the general election were somehow deferred all the way to 2022, Mr Corbyn would be looking to leave the helm of the party. So, bar an election victory in the near future, those who now hold the reins in the Labour Party have to be prepared for an internal election without the charismatic individual who seized the party for them in 2015 and then held it with a larger victory in 2016. This conference will set the scene for some brutal battles over the re-selection or not of MPs to come.
Labour’s stance on Brexit is again best seen through the prism of sectional politics
The principal policy battle of the week was over Brexit where many of Mr Corbyn’s most senior colleagues, and a very large section of the membership, want Labour to be overtly for Remain. The leader and his closest allies have fiercely resisted this, in part because of their historic scepticism about the EU, partly due to their concern that EU law and State Aid limitations might be a block to some of their more radical aspirations, but mostly because they view the entire People’s Vote enterprise as a Trojan Horse, a thinly disguised attempt to split the trade union movement and lure some of it back to a more mainstream Labour stance, and an even more overt device for dividing the Corbynite movement between its older (anti-EU) and much younger (very pro-EU) segments.
Mr Corbyn carried the day by making the matter an issue of personal and political loyalty to him. The Labour Party will enter an election campaign pledging that it will negotiate a ‘better’ Brexit than the Conservatives have managed to do and, within a three-month time period, legislate to hold another referendum within six months and offer the public a choice between this new, improved Brexit or staying in on the previous terms. Labour would determine its own preference after the election and the renegotiation at a special conference much closer to the referendum date itself. To all intents and purposes, therefore, Mr Corbyn would claim at a general election to be a neutral on Brexit.
To say that this is a formula which most senior members of the Shadow Cabinet and others on the backbenches who are widely respected as heavy-hitters regard as somewhere between farcical and foolish would be a heroic understatement. There is absolutely no chance of it holding during the heat of the hustings.
Those MPs who want to remain will state so openly. The much small number who will have to defend themselves in seats where Labour-inclined voters want to leave the EU will jump ship in the other direction. The risk of an absolute shambles is obvious. Yet in a strange manner this suits Mr Corbyn because he really does not want the general election to be a de facto second referendum over membership or not of the European Union. He wants it to be focused on his long-standing combination of anti-austerity measures at home and anti-American instincts abroad. That is the campaign which he will enthusiastically embrace if the polling stations are opened in December.
Where does that leave Labour?
In deep need of rescue by the Conservative Party destroying itself. This is, needless to note, far from impossible and it will be intriguing to see how the Prime Minister responds to adverse events and whether he alters his message, and especially his tone, in Manchester next week. One suspects that the high point of the Dominic Cummings era might have passed.
Absent such an implosion by the Government, and the Conservatives have historically had a survival instinct, it is difficult to envisage how Labour will secure more than a percentage of the vote ranging somewhere around 22%-28%. This would represent a fall of about one third in its share of the vote over 2017. Unless we have an election where the Conservatives are also losing support on a similar scale, then it falls to reason that there will be fewer Labour MPs after the next election than who won their seats two years ago.
The exact scale of that slippage and the comparative standings of the Conservatives and Labour are complicated by the first-past-the-post electoral system and the fact that both the Liberal Democrats and the SNP are likely to acquire more representation at Westminster. The best realistic hope for Labour is that it contains its losses, comes back with 200-220 seats, while the Conservatives acquire no more than 300 seats and might be tolerated as a very weak minority administration by the Liberal Democrats and the SNP solely for the purpose of delivering another EU referendum and then moving on to another election not long after that. This might not seem a very enticing motion to a large slice of the electorate. If it is any consolation, it is not a possibility which Mr Corbyn would enjoy either.
This is the last BVCA Insight that I will write as I stand down as Director General on Monday night. It is also the last BVCA Insight of this form. Thank you for reading it over the past five years when it started life in May 2014 as Election Countdown. My contact email address is below.
Tim Hames
Director General, BVCA
[email protected]
