by Pete Bowyer
On the surface all seemed well. Or as well as could be, given the circumstances. There was no vote on Trident. John McDonnell pretended that the overthrow of capitalism was no longer one of his leisure pursuits. The Leader downplayed his leftist credentials, whilst the rest of the Shadow Cabinet played up theirs.
True, Owen Jones, the Dear Leader’s unofficial mouthpiece, was unusually demure, but at least Tom Watson was on hand to ebulliantly paper over any cracks. And nobody died, just remember that folks, nobody died. Not yet, anyway.
However, you didn’t have to scratch the surface too much to reveal deep fissures. A brief sojourn to any of the many conference bars and the murmurings were there for all those who wanted to hear them.
Former Cabinet Ministers were already drawing up a shortlist of five potential candidates who could replace Corbyn within the next eighteen months, fancifully in my view.
Members of Parliament – many with shadow ministerial responsibilities – were devising their own leadership in exile to oppose the worst excesses of the current leadership.
London councillors, increasingly nervous about the prospect of a Tory victory in the capital in eight months’ time, were desperately distancing the London party from the national party just as obviously as Sadiq Khan, the party’s own nominee for Mayor, was.
Think Tank chiefs who had supported various of the other leadership candidates were now uniting to create a common policy framework as a mainstream alternative to Corbynism.
More mischievously, former senior advisers to the shadow cabinet were looking at ways they could quickly hang John McDonnell by his own petard, way before George Osborne, sensibly playing a longer game, could get his own dirty hands on him.
Wiser heads acknowledged that, despite the heady, bar-room talk of fomenting revolution, a swift de-capitation is not on the cards. After all, the leader has a mandate, and a huge one at that.
Yes, he will make his own mistakes and mis-steps, as he has many times already in just the last two, short weeks since becoming leader. But whilst these need to be encouraged and promoted, they will not be the end of him in themselves.
They are a necessary, but not sufficient, criteria for his regime to fall.
The modernisers see themselves less as catalysts in bringing down the leader in the immediate future, but more as petrifiers, ensuring that when the inevitable disaffection comes, it lingers over the next three years and sets as hard as stone.
The easy part is encouraging the far left activists, who swelled Labour’s ranks in the midst of Corbynmania, to become disillusioned by the necessary compromises the party will have to make whether on tuition fees, unilateralism or the magic money tree.
They are likely to simply march away, as briskly as they came, and retreat back to groupings on the very fringes of the political spectrum whence they are from.
But a more challenging and substantial group is to be found amongst the ‘soft left’ who tolerate Corbyn and have been excited by the support he has generated in new members to the party.
Unlike the ‘hard left’, who are merely content with being right, the soft left ultimately want to win too. Deep in their hearts, they recognise that Labour is not simply a debating society, or a pressure group, but a political party with the objective of winning power and transforming the country.
Once this group gets to experience the dialectical confrontation between the electorate and Corbyn’s doctrine of refusing to compromise with the electorate, time and time again, whether in London, in Scotland & Wales, in local elections or – potentially disastrously for the country – in the European referendum, they are likely to drift rightwards, just as the generation before them did in the 1980s, and want to elect a leader with, at least, an outside chance of victory in 2020.
History repeating itself, first as tragedy then as farce.
None of this is on the cards for now. So, in the meantime, the right and more mainstream elements in the party, currently subdued, are actively organising behind the scenes, drawing up their own policy platforms that can be produced when the inevitable happens, and starting to communicate a vision of what a future, centrist Labour government would look like.
They are interested in understanding why Labour actually lost the last election and learning from that humiliating defeat by engaging with the middle ground where elections are won.
By contrast, the current leader, a 5/7 denier who refused to acknowledge that defeat at any point during his one-hour leadership speech, simply believes in the myth of the non-voter flocking to Labour in their droves when everyone else knows that non-voters do as they say on the tin and don’t vote (and, even if they did, research from the ‘Tory-Lite’ TUC showed they would be just as right-wing as the rest of the electorate, perhaps even more so on issues like immigration, welfare and spending – in Corbyn’s mentor, Karl Marx’s terminology, this represents ‘false consciousness’).
At some point, the kissing will have to stop and the fantasy politics come to an end. But, just as in Brighton Rock, which begins with calm, but sinister, overtones and ends in Pinky’s body parts being splattered everywhere, the same fate faces the Labour party before a new dawn breaks once again.
Pete Bowyer is a Labour activist