The Labour leader knows he must keep the party together – and that allows space for the European cause to advance
As Jeremy Corbyn gazed out over the 2018 Labour conference on Wednesday, after the most confident and relaxed speech of his time as leader, he will have seen an energised party about which two apparently incompatible generalisations can be made. The first is that, three years into the Corbyn revolution, Labour has now been radically transformed into a party in the leader’s own far-left political image. The second is that Labour’s many factions, interest groups and traditions are nevertheless mostly managing to work together in a surprisingly pragmatic way.
There was evidence for each of these claims in Corbyn’s speech. The left radicalism was there in the attacks on privatisation and outsourcing – the “racket” on which a Corbyn government would call time. It was there in the enormous list of uncosted government spending commitments, which covered housing, police, childcare, public sector pay, universal benefits for older people, and investment in transport and green energy. And it was there in the well-trailed section denouncing the political and economic elite (by implication New Labour as well as Conservative) that kept the banking system afloat after the financial crisis a decade ago.
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