Jeremy Corbyn has, so far, had a reasonably good conference. Nothing has gone noticeably wrong. There have been no stand-up rows, no fights in the fringes, no heckling in the hall. And the atmosphere has been far better than Labour’s awful autumn conference last year, where everyone was full of gloom when the party was a few points ahead in the polls.
But the Labour conference was still going to plan at this point last year, albeit in a moribund way. Ed Miliband hadn’t delivered his speech yet, and he therefore hadn’t forgotten to mention the deficit (the speech was poor, too, but the overall quality was quickly eclipsed by the discovery of his omission). So though Corbyn has had good interviews and his frontbenchers have stuck by him and so on, all this could evaporate if he gives a bad speech.
Corbyn’s long-term challenge is to appear Prime Ministerial. Today he needs at least to appear to be a convincing leader of the Opposition. So far he has done this by talking about his huge mandate. He seems to be opting to be a chairperson of policy debates, rather than a leader who imposes his will on every area, which is attractive in some respects, but does beg the question of what the point of being leader is – or indeed of what the point in running on a ticket of ‘principled politics’, if you don’t push very hard for those principles to be realised in official party policy.
The pre-briefed extracts show Corbyn will paint himself as a leader of a ‘kinder politics’, and he is expected to turn on Twitter trolls as part of this. But some of those who left the frontbench are wondering whether this ‘kinder politics’ means that they will be regarded as truly Labour even if they continue to refuse to serve. Corbyn will need to clarify what John McDonnell’s ‘come back’ line means.
And when it comes to those already on the frontbench, Corbyn is expected to say that there are no set lines for them to stick to. But will he clarify how his party will present a message for the electorate so that voters know what Labour actually stands for? It is indeed no surprise that there are disagreements between senior members of a political party, and it is in many ways refreshing that those members are able to debate their differences in the open. But those disagreements won’t look refreshing on a manifesto: the party cannot say it believes two things on the renewal of Trident, for instance.
On the subject of communicating with voters, will Corbyn offer any evidence of this latent left-wing yearning in the electorate that just needs unlocking? Jon Cruddas’ review suggested that voters thought Labour was too anti-austerity, not too much in favour of it. So why does Corbyn think that opposing austerity will work for Labour?
It will be interesting to see whether Corbyn does focus much on this question of wider appeal to voters, or whether he talks more to the party membership. This is a party conference with just under five years to go until the next election with members who still don’t know much about their new leader, so it is not unreasonable to focus on the membership. But given members and MPs who did not vote for Corbyn are primarily worried that he is unelectable, he would be wise to address both his party and the country.
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