Corbyn’s world is now transformed

JEREMY Corbyn will get the type of welcome that a rock star would covet when he takes the conference stage today.

Labour may not have won the June election, but thousands of the activists in Brighton believe they made history.

Instead of losing MPs, they gained 30 seats. Theresa May was denied her landslide and the Conservatives lost their majority.

Mr Corbyn’s supporters are united by a powerful sense of shared achievement. They kept the faith and proved everyone who predicted a Labour wipeout dead wrong.

This trouncing of conventional wisdom felt like a victory and thousands of Mr Corbyn’s supporters – both those in the hall and around the country – will want to celebrate that today.

They feel the wind is at their back. The centre of gravity in Labour has swung to the left.

Left-wingers no longer occupy a lonely position on the fringe of the party. Instead, pro-Corbyn groups such as Momentum are shaping the Labour zeitgeist.

They are not just energised, they are organised.

The conference is packed with people of different ages who want to play a role in changing society. Many believe that if the election campaign had continued just a little longer then Labour would have overtaken the Conservatives.

Tory strategists will also wonder what would have happened if Theresa May’s storm-rocked campaign had spluttered on. Would they have lost not just a majority but power altogether?

They will study Mr Corbyn’s speech with unprecedented attention today and assess the extent of the electoral threat he represents. Labour’s rivals know they cannot afford not to take Mr Corbyn and his team seriously.

Shadow ministers have spent the last few days describing how they would use the levers of government if they won power. Pundits were astonished when Mr Corbyn and his comrades moved from the backbenches into the key Opposition roles; now they are determined to take over Whitehall.

Business leaders are now imagining how John McDonnell would handle the economy if he ran the Treasury, as demonstrated by the alarm with which the CBI responded to his speech.

Labour’s leadership can expect new and intense scrutiny of their policies and their statements in the period leading up to the next election, however long that might be.

Such close examination of their plans may often prove an irritation for shadow ministers. However, it would be a mistake to resist requests for clarity about their policies on Brexit, the economy and many other issues.

Mr Corbyn has won the attention of voters across the country and the Labour leader’s challenge is to win the trust of the bulk of the electorate. Britain is in the throes of change and Mr Corbyn today has an opportunity to describe how he wants to transform this country of nations.

He can expect to be hit with a warm wave of applause in the conference hall today – but he must do more than preach to the choir. The Western Mail newspaper is published by Media Wales a subsidiary company of Trinity Mirror PLC, which is a member of IPSO, the Independent Press Standards Organisation. The entire contents of The Western Mail are the copyright of Media Wales Ltd. It is an offence to copy any of its contents in any way without the company’s permission. If you require a licence to copy parts of it in any way or form, write to the Head of Finance at Six Park Street. The recycled paper content of UK newspapers in 2016 was 62.8%