The lunatic fringe is now the main event
Labour’s conference begins tomorrow and will probably be its most significant in decades. The most colourful, too. It will be a chance for Corbynites to flex their muscles, to vote through policies that will show who runs the party now. In only a matter of weeks, the Labour fringe has become the main event. It is a chilling coincidence that Mr Corbyn’s first conference as leader is being held in Brighton. Thirty one years ago, the IRA attempted to assassinate Margaret Thatcher at The Grand hotel. Five people were killed and 31 injured. At the time Mr Corbyn favoured talks with the IRA. His new shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, went even further in 2003 and argued that IRA killers should be “honoured” for their struggle against British “occupation”. To questions about these previous statements, both men have offered vague answers about trying to advance the peace process.
This is typical of Mr Corbyn, a man who trades on honesty yet is forever spinning the facts. Asked why he called Hamas and Hizbollah “friends”, he said that he meant the word in a non-friendly, formal way. Asked if he would scrap Trident, he said that he would leave the issue up to the party to decide. The party is expected, of course, to vote for abolition at the Brighton conference – so leaving complex matters up to a democratic vote is really a way of getting the hard-Left grassroots to rubber stamp Mr Corbyn’s positions.
It was ever thus. Before Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair dragged Labour into the modern world, its conferences were a ritual of Left-wing-led bloodletting. The party leadership would sit glumly on the stage as one speaker after another took to the podium to rant in support of bizarre policy ideas. It was an embarrassment that contributed to the impression that Labour was too extreme and too divided to govern.
Mr Kinnock and Mr Blair slowly changed the rules to ensure that debates were either toothless or ignored. In all the years that Mr Blair was prime minister the only time that conference caught the popular imagination was when a man cried “that’s a lie!” at Jack Straw and was dragged out by security. That event highlighted the control freakery of New Labour and the isolation of the Left. At this conference, by contrast, the socialist Mr Corbyn will be hailed by his followers as a man of integrity, despite his endless equivocations.
Expect platitudes. Poverty, Mr Corbyn will assure us, is entirely the fault of the Tories and their austerity agenda. Spend more, print money, squeeze the rich and all of Britain’s problems will vanish. Ed Miliband famously forgot to mention the deficit in a conference speech. Mr Corbyn will probably argue that the deficit can be reduced without cuts. His message is economically illiterate and would do enormous harm if ever put into effect. But it will be cheered.
So, too, will anything he has to say about foreign policy. Anger about Iraq takes a great share of the blame for the election of Mr Corbyn as party leader. Sadly, criticism of one controversial foreign policy decision has reinforced a wider, utterly irrational distrust of Western policy.
Today this newspaper details Mr Corbyn’s emerging belief in the Nineties in the existence of a New World Order conspiracy to dominate the globe, an idea traditionally articulated by the far-Right and far-Left. In 2003, he appeared to suggest that 9/11 had been manipulated in order to justify war in Afghanistan. All of which indicates that at the root of Mr Corbyn’s philosophy is a mindset that belongs well outside the mainstream of British politics.
It is that radicalism that Labour meets tomorrow to endorse. Will the Blairites fight back? Probably not – for the moment. Peter Mandelson has advised that the party needs to comprehend fully Mr Corbyn’s unelectability before there can be a successful effort to remove him. Unfortunately for Mr Mandelson, Labour’s grassroots have already proven their capacity for believing in magic beans when they elected Mr Corbyn with nearly 60 per cent of the vote. This might be the first of many Corbynite conferences to come.