Jeremy Corbyn might have wanted to wipe the slate clean and start over with his MPs after the summer’s leadership contest. But the mood on the Labour conference fringe shows that this is going to be extremely difficult in practice, even if the Labour leader does everything that his MPs ask of him (which he won’t). Many members are furious with the MPs for orchestrating a coup against their leader and forcing a leadership contest; many MPs are utterly defiant about the importance of said coup, even though it failed, and aren’t prepared to fall meekly behind the leader, no matter how much members tell them to. Indeed, if the stand-off between a group of leading moderate MPs and members at a fringe event at lunchtime today was anything to go by, things can only get more bitter.
Chris Leslie, Caroline Flint, Steve McCabe, Gavin Shuker and Stephen Timms, who are all chairs of the parliamentary Labour party’s backbench policy committees, were repeatedly nagged and criticised by members in the audience for the way they had spoken out against the leadership and the effect that those members felt it had had on the party’s standing in the polls. None of them seemed to be in a mood to calm things down: when one woman told the room that she had moved to Labour from another party, Flint interrupted to ask which party she had come from. ‘None of your business!’ the woman snapped. Other members of the audience groaned. A woman sitting behind me muttered ‘Oh, Christ, these people are from a different party’.
When Flint had a chance to respond, she launched into an impassioned lecture about how hard she and other MPs worked in their constituencies and how the party needs to listen to what voters actually worried about. Shuker was similarly bullish: as well as arguing that Labour might as well give up if it couldn’t find answers to voters’ concerns on the economy, immigration and welfare, he confronted one activist from the City of London who had asked the MPs whether they had made life more difficult for those actively working in communities and said he was trying to suggest that members worked hard while MPs sat in Parliament ‘eating swan’. Leslie insisted that he wasn’t going to lie about what he thought and what he believed about the party. Some members, clearly fans of the moderate MPs who were speaking, tried to disagree with the questions being asked. But many speakers were furious that the panel was already suggesting that Labour was weak and couldn’t win an election — at a meeting that was supposed to be about how the party could win.
That the members are angry is well-known: those working on the Owen Smith campaign were concerned by the number of canvassing returns they received that said members were voting for Smith but blamed the PLP for the leadership contest and the mess the party was in. But what was a surprise was quite how confrontational the MPs were. They aren’t prepared to sit and grovel to the members who re-elected Jeremy Corbyn. They aren’t prepared to stop highlighting the issues on which they fear Labour is going astray. They actually seem to have more fire in their bellies after the failed coup than they did before. Which means that Chris Leslie’s rather mild closing statement that ‘we have to find ways to coexist’ sounded as big a challenge for Labour to solve as its credibility on the economy, immigration or welfare.
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