Tim Evans, Political Commentator – A Tale of Two Conferences

A Tale of Two Conferences

OK so it was a tale of two conferences. Each one had its own particular tensions. Let’s start with Labour. Now I’ve been watching Labour conferences for more years than I care to remember, but this was something else. The atmosphere, for a start, was very different from pre-Corbyn conferences. Very different from the Stalinist control freakery of the Blair years, where everything was subject to Alastair Campbell, the spin doctor from hell, and an elderly anti-war activist could be violently expelled for a bit of mild heckling. Nor was it in any way similar to the excruciating conferences headed up by Ed Miliband: directionless, timid and unsure in the face of Tory austerity, skewered on its own embrace of the free market and by the hollowing-out of party democracy under Kinnock and Blair.

It was clear this year that, three years on, the influence of new, Corbyn-supporting members was beginning to make itself felt. A decision had clearly been made to give ordinary delegates their voice, and that voice was confident, focused and optimistic. The number of first-time delegates, first-time speakers was high. The conference was young, ethnically diverse, very female, politically sophisticated and with very radical expectations. The powerful and angry debates about the Grenfell and Windrush scandals, the MP Laura Smith calling for a general strike at a fringe meeting, the hall a sea of Palestinian flags, the ‘Internationale’ being name checked (even if not actually sung!), and the determination to stand up to the racists and fascists, marked a break from the Blairite past of corporate warmongering and sucking up to Murdoch and other dubious characters. So, a very good conference for Corbyn and the Labour left. And all this after years of attacks not only from the media and the Tories, but from most of the Parliamentary Labour Party. And yet, and yet…

Only hours after the hall was full of Palestinian flags, and of speaker after speaker calling for Israeli aggression against the Palestinians to cease, Tom Watson, the deputy leader of the Labour Party and Emily (‘No Pasaran’) Thornberry, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, were speaking at the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) meeting, alongside Mark Regev the Israeli Ambassador. Worse, Watson was continuing to stoke the confected ‘anti-Semitism’ slur against Corbyn and the rest of the Labour left. The most dangerous thing now is for Corbyn supporters to believe, after a good, left-sounding conference, that the Blairites and the rest of the Labour right are on the back foot. They are not. They comprise most of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and the PLP controls the party. Thornberry, who one minute was calling out ‘No Pasaran’, and the next was rallying the Zionists at the LFI meeting, cannot be trusted to support Corbyn. And, unfortunately, there are many more like her. A hall full of Palestinian flags was an exhilarating sight. But if Corbyn and his supporters in the Constituency Labour Parties want this to be more than a rhetorical flourish, they must seriously consider how best to shift the balance of power in the party, beginning with the deselection of those MPs who are working day and night to bring him down. In my opinion, this can only be done as part of a wider shift in society – a mass movement on the streets and in the workplaces that can bring down May’s government. In that sense, Laura Smith’s call for a general strike came closest to pointing the way forward.

I’m not going to spend much time on the Tory conference, except to say it was dull, flat, robotic and with no spirit or vision. I don’t know which special adviser suggested May’s ‘Dancing Queen’ entrance, but it was truly cringeworthy. As for the rest of the conference, I did make some postings on Facebook. Here are some, at random. “Just remember there are three Ms in Momentum – Militant, Militant, Militant’…We are compassionate Conservatives…those who say we are cutting budgets are peddling fake news…We are the party of opportunity and social mobility – Esther McVey, Work and Pensions Secretary’; ‘OK so Dominic Raab is talking about Brexit and I’m nodding off…’ “Hammond’s speech, in which everything is getting better and better, is so utterly disconnected from people’s actual experience (of a wretched and disintegrating country where services are collapsing, the streets are full of homeless people and nothing works, even the computers) that one has to wonder what chemicals are coursing through his bloodstream…” “Gove: Corbyn’s Labour Party is a toxic mix of Marxist-Leninism and anti-Semitism…” ‘Gove is talking about voles.’ ‘Gove is talking about fish again: “More fish for British boats…’ “Gove is talking about elephants.” I’m not making this up.

May’s speech was not as catastrophic as last year’s : she had no coughing fits, nobody handed her her P45, and no bits of the set fell off. But her speech was flat and unmemorable, with no sense of direction or of how to deal with the crisis the party is in, split all ends up over Brexit and with not a clue of how to deal with the problem. One thing, however, did make me feel decidedly uneasy. Boris Johnson not only gave the best conference speech, even if it was at a fringe meeting, but he attracted an audience, I heard, of 2,000, which cheered him to the rafters. In a sense, this showed the problems the party has: delegates and party members love him, but he has so many enemies in the upper echelons of the party that it is highly unlikely he will command enough support to ever have a crack at the leadership. Plus he has alienated large sections of ethnic minority communities, women and LGBT people in his attempts to rebrand himself as a Poundland Donald Trump. But these are volatile times. Tommy Robinson and the far right are on the rise. UKIP is tacking to the right. The emergence of a hard right populist coalition, with Johnson as a central figure, is not inconceivable. The man only poses as a buffoon. In reality he is a ruthless, unprincipled, ambitious operator. To underestimate him would be a serious mistake.