Jeremy Corbyn jettisons the Labour Party's aspirations of forming a government

THE Labour Party’s annual conference is not yet over but already some are drawing the wrong conclusions from it. A turbulent couple of weeks followed the unexpected election of Jeremy Corbyn, one of the most left-wing MPs in the House of Commons, as its leader on September 12th. Yet its gathering in Brighton has produced no acrimonious public rows, nor any terrible gaffes. Some are giving Mr Corbyn’s just-finished speech to the party a tepid thumbs up. Their argument goes: his unpolished arguments are just what a sceptical electorate wants, his tone was conciliatory and his leftism surprisingly nuanced. Perhaps things might just work out for Labour’s bearded, twinkly-eyed new leader.



I do not share this analysis. Watching his speech—the (incontestable) argument of which was that Britain needs a kinder, more decent politics—I could only see confirmation that, no, things really are as dire for the country's main opposition party as they first seemed.



This is not to say that the individual observations are entirely wrong, or that there was nothing of merit in the speech. In a refreshing break from the usual embarrassing attempt to evoke the swagger of America’s convention season, for example, Mr Corbyn’s address was almost Scandinavian in its sobriety. It was always sincere, sometimes warm, occasionally witty and relatively brief. It contained no cor-blimey policy announcements devised to secure headlines. His wife did not rush to his side, adoring, to share his applause at the end—a merciful departure from a patronising tradition that should have died out decades ago but inexplicably lives on at Britain’s party conferences.



And Labour’s leader, it is true, sounded a moderate tone at points. He insisted that his are majority British values, encouraged the hall to applaud Liz Kendall, his Blairite opponent in the leadership race, and urged his supporters to “cut out the abuse, cut out the misogyny and and get back to real politics”. “Straight Talking. Honest Politics.” ran the banner on his lectern. His arguments about housing, mental health and a safety net for the self-employed illustrated that he is right about some of the iniquities that he identifies in Britain—in his diagnoses if not his prescriptions.



Yet still the speech indicated that the outlook for Labour is terrible. Insofar as Mr Corbyn sounded a conciliatory tone, it was a palimpsest of his many slip-ups as leader so far. When he insisted that he shares the country’s values, that was a nod to the self-mutilating politics of his decision not to sing the national anthem at a recent memorial service for the participants of the Battle of Britain. When he angrily rejected claims that he is a risk to the country he was responding (probably too late) to energetic Conservative Party attempts to portray him, and with him the entire Labour Party, as a threat to its security. His calls for decency and unity addressed criticisms of his mismanagement of his shadow cabinet appointments, his supporters’ routine verbal abuse of his critics and moves by his union allies to boot out MPs considered too centrist. Most of what was good and conciliatory in the speech was also defensive.



And much of it was none of those things. Apart from his vague talk of fairness and decency, and a few lines about young people struggling to afford a home, hardly anything in the speech spoke to the sort of voters on whom Labour relies to win elections—or referred in any specificity to the circumstances of their daily lives. There was almost no attempt whatsoever to challenge negative perceptions of Labour or its leader, despite the fact that the early polling on Mr Corbyn is dire. After an election which the party lost, badly, because voters did not trust it with the nation’s economy and finances he did not talk about the budget deficit—precisely the issue on which it was skewered—at all. Businesses, where they made an appearance, were the sort run by cackling sadists in top hats. The Conservatives, recently not just returned to power but awarded a majority by the British people, were straightforwardly bad people in politics for the wrong reasons.



Then there was the technical quality of the speech, which was very far on the wrong side of the line between “un-spun” and “turgid”. The structure was confused. It lurched from one subject to another, then back again. Parts read like paragraphs lifted from press releases and strung together with connecting words. Vague commendations of motherhood and apple pie—decency, fairness, democracy—sprawled in spaces where enlivening examples and splashes of colour should have been. Subjects on which Mr Corbyn is strongest, like housing and generational inequalities, dissolved in torrents of cliché. For all that his supporters in the hall (many of whom had queued for hours for their places) clung to his every word and cheered loudly at the obvious places, his delivery was often hectoring and unpersuasive. Ironically for a politician who rejects spin, he had all the lyrical rhythm of a washing machine.



This may seem superficial, but it points to something deeper. Good oratory is often mistaken for a gift and an art when in fact it is a science and a discipline. It must be learned, practised, refined and sweated over. Deft speech-givers, like Tony Blair most of the time and both David Cameron and Ed Miliband on good days, appear effortless in direct proportion to the effort that they put in. Even granting the greatest possible allowance for Mr Corbyn’s lack of experience and recent election, it is hard not to conclude from the speech’s shakiness that Labour’s leader simply did not think it worth the bother. Irrespective of the substance of his arguments or his position on the left-right spectrum, it could have been so much better.



Therein lies a glimpse of what really wrecks the party’s chances. Under Mr Corbyn, winning votes in elections is no longer a major priority of the Labour Party. He made not one reference to the election just-passed, nor to the general election in 2020, nor to the fact that winning national office is the only means by which the party can change anything much. In his Labour Party, he argued, there would be fizz, ideas, openness, differences of opinion and most of all debate (he even made a decent joke about this, responding to a lurid tabloid claim that he would welcome an asteroid strike with the assurance: “Obviously I wouldn’t endorse this policy without getting the support of conference first.”) These things are, of course, important in a political party—especially one that has just lost an election and that has a tradition of hyper-active top-down control. But, crucially, at no point did Mr Corbyn connect this with the need to obtain power. He wanted ideas not to win over the public or to implement once Labour was elected, but for their own sake; debate as an end in itself.



The basic purpose of the Labour Party has traditionally been and should be to win power and wield it on behalf of ordinary people. Political scientists call this “instrumental” politics. But under Mr Corbyn it is primarily a platform for single-issue campaigns, perma-consultation and opposition to government policies. At best this turns Labour into a glorified pressure group: a more lumbering version of 38 Degrees or Avaaz. At worst it renders it a particularly sanctimonious debating club, the concrete mission of which is to help its members define themselves and their opinions (“declaratory” politics) to no better end than unproductive self-gratification: dialectical onanism, as it were. With no interest in winning a general election—and doing the hard work of persuading and reflecting the lives of ordinary voters that this entails—the party is on track to see its vote share (30.4% in May) fall into the 20-25% range at the next election; not inconceivably costing it a third or more of its parliamentary seats.



Such are the new battle lines in Labour. Everyone in the party values debate and campaigning (it is symptomatic of some Corbynites’ propensity for baseless self-congratulation that they imply otherwise) but the sensibles see these things as means to an end: effecting change on a national scale. In Mr Corbyn’s scheme, however good his intentions, that is at best an afterthought. Yesterday delegates tellingly applauded Clive Lewis, an MP and one of his closest allies, for saying that, even if the party loses the next election, it will have changed for the better. Thus the most fundamental thing that I take from Mr Corbyn’s speech and the debates and the fringe events and the conversations in the bars and lobbies of the past days is that there are now two Labour parties. Under the one in charge Labour is careening towards acrimony, at least a decade in opposition—and perhaps even oblivion.