Labour is in a weirdly disciplined state

The phrase you overhear the most at Labour conference is: ‘this is a good one to come to’. Most delegates assume this is the last conference before a general election, and both Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have made comments to that effect in their speeches. The latter said she hoped to be standing before the next conference as the first ever female Chancellor of the Exchequer.

It has been a very long time since the party has realistically had these expectations: the pre-election conference in 2014, for instance, was so markedly muted and depressed that it became very clear to those attending that Labour’s frontbenchers did not think they were on the brink of an election win. In the intervening years, each conference has become progressively less attractive to attend, unless you enjoy watching human misery. Last year there was still a sense of a battle within the party over its structures. This year, the mood has changed, and Labour is now in an election winning frame of mind.

The party has snapped into a weird disciplined state: fringes have largely been unremarkable because almost everyone is anxious not to distract from the leadership’s mission. Even culture war flashpoints have been carefully managed: at a fringe hosted by LGBT Labour and Stonewall, there was a very careful emphasis on polite disagreement, rather than shouting at people with different views on gender identity. Angela Eagle insisted to the meeting that this was how to win the argument, rather than shouting at those who had doubts (she did also say that the Equalities and Human Rights Commission was being used to ‘gaslight’ the people it was supposed to be protecting, so the disagreements are still running very deep). Even the fringes hosted by the various groups concerned with the Israel-Hamas conflict have been largely disciplined and restrained.

I say ‘weird disciplined state’ because it has been so long since Labour looked like it was pulling in the same direction that many of us have forgotten what its MPs and activists look and sound like when they are in loyalty mode. The Tories have splits and factions almost as hobbies, and never fully fall into line even in election campaigns. But when Labour MPs want to be loyal, they really, really go for it. One explained this to me a few years ago as being born from the solidarity of the picket lines, except of course Labour frontbenchers don’t stand on picket lines these days.

But underneath all of that loyalty is still an anxiety about whether the party really will win the election, or whether it might scrape through into a minority government or one with a wafer-thin majority. ‘There are still too many unknowns across the country,’ one aide explained to me. ‘We don’t know if the red wall voters are actually going to come back to us en masse, and Scotland looks promising but isn’t a done deal.’ When Starmer spoke yesterday of a ‘decade of renewal’, he meant that the changes he wanted to make were going to take time.

But some in his party also wonder if Labour might need more than one election to get the numbers it needs to make those changes at all.