With Labour ahead in the polls by around 15 points, and the party seemingly on course to win a general election next year, you would think it would be all sunshine and smiles at the Labour conference, held in Liverpool.
It appears though that some of the party are less than happy with the current situation they find themselves in. Yesterday, at a packed fringe event at conference, the Labour Assembly Against Austerity and the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs gathered to discuss ‘Socialist Solutions to the Tory Crisis’ – but predominantly seemed occupied with the dreadful thought that the party might actually get elected.
Chief among the naysayers was Zarah Sultana MP, who didn’t exactly dispel her reputation for sounding like a student politician, when she informed the room that she tells people all the time that: ‘politics is a bit s***, innit’, and expressed her displeasure at the idea that ‘corporates’ were sponsoring conference events.
Other featured speakers included Bell Ribeiro-Addy, who led a group ‘solidarity Diane Abbott’ chant, after Abbott lost the whip in April for her musings on anti-Semitism in a letter to the Guardian (Abbott later said she sent the wrong draft of a letter in).
But it was former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell who was the faded star of the evening. McDonnell began by saying it was nice to be amongst Labour party members because:
‘When I came into conference this morning, there were so many corporates I thought it was the CBI conference.’
As the man he tried to make prime minister refused to condemn Hamas outside the conference hall, McDonnell assured the room that it was in fact the Tories who were the true menace to society, saying:
‘What always happens with regimes like this is that they get more reactionary… there’s a debate in the media… arguments in the Financial Times about why isn’t there an extreme right-wing party in this country, a fascist party. Well, it’s not necessary because the fascists are in government’.
But if McDonnell isn’t a fan of the Tories, he’s not much more fond of the current Labour leadership either. The Labour MP said the current administration brought to mind the Napoleonic saying about lucky generals, saying:
‘Starmer is a lucky general. To be honest, we haven’t done an awful lot to gain power, but the Tories have done enough to fall apart… It’s like winning an election by default.’
Mr S wonders if you could possibly say the same about the 2017 election, which saw Theresa May conduct one of the most stunningly awful election campaigns in British politics, only to still beat the Corbynite rabble.
As if to underline the dire fate of the Labour left at the moment, the fringe ended with a speech from that master of wit and erudition, Richard Burgon, who was met with rapturous applause. If Burgon is one of your leading lights, the path ahead must be very dark indeed…
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