Labour conference:
Party’s ‘gobsmacked’ MPS accuse their leadership of ‘manoeuvring to avoid the biggest issue of our time’ as annual conference decides against debate to avoid a row
LABOUR was last night reduced to a “laughing stock”, in the words of its own MPS, after the party decided Brexit will not be debated at this year’s party conference.
After a day in which deep divisions within the party over Brexit were exposed, the pro-jeremy Corbyn group Momentum told members and unions to choose other topics for debate at the conference in Brighton to avoid a public row over the biggest issue facing the country.
It came as a former Labour frontbencher suggested that managed migration was “racist” and Mr Corbyn came under intense pressure to commit to staying in the single market and customs union.
Andrew Gwynne, Labour’s election coordinator, admitted earlier in the day that Brexit could “tear the party in two” if MPS and party members could not reach agreement in a “comradely fashion”.
The Labour rift over Brexit seemed likely to overshadow the entire conference after 30 MPS, together with MEPS, Labour peers, trade union leaders and mayors, published an open letter in The Observer demanding that Labour committed to full and permanent membership of the single market and customs union.
Instead, members responded by wiping Brexit off the agenda altogether.
In a ballot of members Brexit did not make it into the top eight of 13 topics offered for debate.
Heidi Alexander, the Labour MP and former shadow health secretary, said she was “gobsmacked” that Brexit had been kept off the agenda, adding: “How can Labour not have a full and proper debate on Brexit policy at [the conference]? We will be a laughing stock.”
Chris Leslie, Labour MP for Nottingham, said the decision was “utterly ridiculous” and that members would be shocked at the party “manoeuvring to avoid the biggest issue of our time”.
Topics including Grenfell Tower, railways and housing will be debated instead.
A Labour source said: “This was meant to be a conference about democracy but it will be remembered for one of the biggest leadership stitch-ups in recent history. Party members’ right to a voice seems to extend to chanting the leader’s name and no further.”
Alison Mcgovern MP said: “We needed to talk about Brexit. It’s the biggest issue for our country and will be the biggest issue for whoever is the next government. Those who organised against this debate need to ask themselves what they really believe about Labour Party democracy.”
Outside the conference hall in Brighton, arguments over Brexit had dominated the first day of the Labour gathering.
The letter published in The Observer called on Labour to have the “courage of its convictions” on Brexit by rejecting a “destructive Brexit” that would involve leaving the single market and customs union.
Mr Corbyn, appearing on The Andrew Marr Show on BBC, appeared to be softening his stance when he failed to rule out the idea that a Brexit transifellow tion period could last for as long as 10 years, while John Mcdonnell, the shadow chancellor, told ITV’S Robert Peston that a transition of up to four years would be sensible.
Then Clive Lewis, the former shadow defence secretary, added further controversy by suggesting people who oppose freedom of movement were racists. In a clash of views with Labour MP Caroline Flint, he told Sky News: “I actually believe in freedom of movement. You are talking
‘How can Labour not have a full and proper debate on Brexit policy at conference? We will be a laughing stock’
about managing migration. You are not going to like to hear this, it always comes back down to something the Left in this country has very much difficulty with, which is that it is ultimately about racism. It comes down to racism.”
Today, Sir Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, will use similarly inflammatory language when he tells delegates that the Conservatives’ Brexit policy shows they have “post-imperial delusions”.
In his conference speech – which will not be debated – he will claim that Labour are now “the grown-ups in the room” on Brexit despite their deep divisions.
Further north-south divisions in the party also opened up in a row over whether Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, should be allowed to speak.
Delegates from the north objected to Mr Khan being given a slot, suggesting it made the conference too Londoncentric, with the “star” speakers – Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, John Mcdonnell and Emily Thornberry – all representing constituencies in the capital. Andy Burnham, the Greater
Manchester mayor, has also been denied a speaking slot, saying he was “disappointed”.
He said the decision not to give one of Mr Khan’s northern counterparts a slot suggested the party was “halfhearted” in its commitment to devolving power in England.
For a party that has lost three general elections in a row, Labour is in a remarkably chipper mood as its annual conference continues in Brighton. Its optimism is hardly surprising. In June the party won three million more votes than it did in 2015. Its membership has grown and Jeremy Corbyn, written off as a joke even by his own colleagues just a few months ago, is confident and compelling. He does not rant or lose his head; he is absolutely certain of his own rectitude; and he comes across as an avuncular figure anxious to do his best for the country.
All of which makes him a far greater political threat than the Conservatives have hitherto been prepared to acknowledge.
Like the Wild West snake-oil salesman proffering his palliative medicines to the gullible, Mr Corbyn is tapping into a sense of national unease to persuade voters that his remedies are emollient and benign. They are not. Mr Corbyn is a hard-line Left-winger of the sort that Labour rejected in the late Eighties in order to make the party electable once more.
There is now a danger that his brand of interventionist, big-state socialism will win by default because it is not being robustly challenged – not by Conservatives, nor by the Blairites in the Labour Party, who have gone strangely silent since the election. The past objections of Labour moderates to Mr Corbyn’s policies seem to have been gossamer-thin. Their concern seems not to have been with the prospect that he would bankrupt the country but with their own seats. The party is preparing for another election soon and, with politics in such a febrile state, who is to say there will not be one?
The Conservatives are understandably fixated on Brexit, but must raise their sights to the domestic policy agenda and reassert the values and policies that have trumped the Left before. Focusing on social grievance and equality as priorities, rather than on wealth creation and freeing up the economy, is to play into Mr Corbyn’s hands.
In Brighton this week, we will see the unions reassert their power and prepare to take on the Government over public sector pay this winter. The Left will demand higher taxes and more regulations, which will ossify Britain just when greater flexibility is needed: the fate of Uber in London is the shape of things to come. Labour is a serious threat once more. The Conservatives, who won far more votes at the election, need to exhibit the same self-confidence.