The Thick of It writer has had a love-hate relationship with the party for years. After two days at conference in Manchester, watching its wonk-chic ‘muppets’ mixing austerity pancakes, he is close to despair

Outside the conference hall, beyond the security barrier, they stand and shout. Clusters of activists, crusted like salt on the rim of Labour’s frozen margarita. Loud and short and to the point. “Living wage now!” “Scrap Trident!” “Stop HS2!” Something about bees? Someone’s dressed as a bee, anyway.

Then there are those high-volume, old-fashioned Q&As that irritated you in the 70s and now really do your head in because you are not a parrot or a puppy and your tolerance threshold is much lower these days. Whose NHS? Our NHS! Whose NHS? Our NHS, I just said! Whose NHS? Ours. OURS! Whose NHS? God, someone press 2 on his megaphone for non-urgent calls.

There’s street pantomime, too. Anti-G4S demonstrators pretending to be G4S contractors, forcing someone into a cage. How shocking can this be, given that we all know we’re watching the 10th matinee performance and that the older bloke who’s enjoying being the bully isn’t actually going to Taser the lad? No, I’m not saying make it it more real. I don’t want amateur dramatic cruelty. I’m saying that if you’re playing it out as street magic, throw a sheet over the cage and make the detainee disappear in a puff of smoke, then announce with a flourish: “Yeah, and THAT’s how easy it would be to end our contracts with G4S!” Whatever, I’ve had enough. I join the shuffling line of delegates meekly offering their passes for inspection by the G4S security guys.

G4S-inspired street pantomime. Photograph: Christopher Thomond

The picket lines of demonstrators are angry but lovely. Even the young man leading the NHS call-and-response stops and rather sweetly asks the crowd if he should do a different one. No, the crowd indicates, you carry on son, and off they go again. Whose NHS, our NHS, chuff chuff chuff, in through the turnstile to the second ring of hell, the conference periphery.

Outside the main hall are the fringe marquees, an odd collision of steampunk socialism and pop-up bubbles of celebrity air-kissers. There goes someone who looks like Lil down our road in a motorised wheelchair, a crude banner gaffa’d to the back, heading for the Unite the Union tent. A gaggle of guys straight out of a GQ spread on Wonk Chic head into the “London Lounge” for free Pimm’s and Andrew Marr launching his political thriller. There’s Eddie Izzard tottering around in high-heeled boots, nearly bumping into stubbly old Len McCluskey. Oh, and here’s John Prescott. Lord Munchkin. It’s worth bitterly remembering that in his mullet-punching, croquet-playing, chipolata-presenting pomp, when he was being yanked onstage as Blair’s working-class credibility gimp, Prescott was the one who championed PFI and put public sector procurement on tick for the next half-century, at payback rates that would shame Wonga.

From the smoking promontory you get a clear view of the New Manchester enabled by New Labour. Thrusting upwards around us, the stacked money boxes of luxury apartments and boutique offices. Translucent, grey, watery blue, algae green. Beetham Tower the tallest, a 47-storey USB stick. Here and there a few red Victorian buildings stranded by a long-receded tide of factory work and Methodism, their brickwork soft and crumbling. They gave up the ghost generations ago. They’ve been left as little parsley sprigs of heritage. Or assimilated by the boa constrictors of new development.

The conference venue itself was originally Manchester Central railway station. It shut in the 60s, became the G-Mex Centre during the Thatcher years and is now an antiseptic giant space ideal for hosting antiseptic giant occasions. Inside, a massive foyer is crammed with stalls and kiosks, a contemporary souk of ideas about social justice and workers’ rights and crappy free gifts, though the first thing you see when you enter are a couple of gleaming showroom cars. And everywhere, the conference slogan: “Labour’s Plan For Britain’s Future”. Bold in the sense that it contains two apostrophes and tells you nothing. A gift tag for an empty box.

On the fringe there is much talk about Labour’s Scottish Problem, but what about its English Problem? Angela Eagle opened proceedings with Twitter hashtags, glued together by caffeinated advisers at 3am. The prime minister “was chillaxing in Cornwall, pretending to be in Baywatch. Though with him, conference, it’s less the Hoff and more like the Toff.” And the party line: “Now we’ve kept our country together, we need to change our country together.” The two togethers don’t go together. Why is nobody correcting this piffle? Why isn’t it being properly written in the first place?

Miliband’s team set the bar high when they responded recently to yet more social security cuts announced by Iain Nosferatu Smith. If you were responding, which two words would you start with? It wouldn’t be “overcoming worklessness” would it? That’s a Labour “pledge”, by the way. To redefine unemployment as a condition that, disgracefully, sounds an awful lot like fecklessness. And then to promise to cure people of it. That pledge in full – “Overcoming worklessness, rewarding work and tackling low pay, investing in the future and recognising contribution: these are the Labour ways to reform our social security system.” What do we want? Contributions recognised! How do we want that recognised? By investing them in the near future, you MUPPETS.

Dennis Skinner … last of the old gang. Photograph: Christopher Thomond

I spot the veteran socialist Dennis Skinner. Bolshey, arsey, funny, formed by the pits and the war. Now, there’s a member of the Labour party who can speak proper English, to devastating effect. Was there ever a better Commons moment than Skinner jabbing his finger at the Conservative benches and shouting: “Half the members opposite are crooks!” And the clamouring outrage that followed. And the speaker insisting that he withdraw the remark. And Skinner saying: “OK, half the members opposite AREN’T crooks.” He’s now into his 80s, looking a bit frail, the last of the gang to die. The John Lee Hooker of Old Labour. I go over and shake his hand. I mean to say: “It’s an honour to meet you,” but my starstruck brain squeezes out something like, “Hurdle wurdle hi yeah murhurhur.”

The auditorium is vast but holds few surprises. A historically red backdrop has these days morphed into a sick pink, although on the live feeds it’s moved even further along the spectrum, to fuchsia. Ha ha, I say to the nearest snotty delegate – Britain’s Fuchsia. He stares back as if I just asked him to kiss me.

In the audience, the usual mix of awkward squad and loyalists. The latter accommodate the former simply by listening to them. In an interminable session on work and business, a company owner talks about how essential it is to have free movement of capital within the EU. Chuka Umunna is next with his smoothie estate-agent act. We’re in Manchester Free Trade Hall apparently then BANG! McCluskey’s ranting about 20 years of “Labour’s indifference to the working class” and a Ucatt guy’s calling for all construction firms found guilty of blacklisting to be barred from public contracts.

All this rousing stuff is applauded, but then so is the silky batter of Ed Balls’ austerity pancake mix. I mean, it takes a nerve-janging level of complacency to sound this complacent and then tell the hall that this is no time for complacency. He billows on and on. My unguyed thoughts balloon away several times, until the repetitive cadence of his winding-up brings me back into the moment. The Balls iPhone marimba. What? He’s getting a standing ovation! I’m sitting down and the entire audience has surged to its feet. I’m baffled. It’s The Book of Mormon all over again.

Eds Miliband and Balls at the Labour conference. Photograph: Getty Images

“So why are you here?” I ask people. The answers vary, depending on where you are – not many union reps in the Total Politics Coffee House, not many social strategists smoking by the bins. Someone asks me why I’m here. I find myself saying: “Because I don’t think I’ve ever despised the Labour party as much as I do now and I’m thinking of rejoining it.” It’s been a while. I left in the mid-80s after a few years of local Labour and CND stuff. Can’t remember why specifically, although I did have an allergic reaction to Neil Kinnock, the blustering showbiz Mussolini of centre-left politics.

Labour’s message to the electorate is clear – austerity is the new reality but we’re nicer than the Tories. Berks. I hate Labour more than I did when Blair was in charge, squinting into the distance, joshing with America, socialising with the Murdochs. At least he believed in neo-liberalism. The current Loyal Opposition half-believe, but also half-yearn to reconnect to the movement that sustains them, which is half-decent of them I must say. The first clear chance for years to differentiate themselves, to renounce austerity and commit to a genuine Labour manifesto, sod the Mail, renationalise, reunionise, tax the rich, protect the poor, FIGHT FOR THE WORKING CLASS WHICH IS TECHNICALLY THEIR FUCKING PURPOSE and all they can offer is the Vegetarian Option.

Thing is, that’s exactly what everyone’s telling me. My lot. The Facebook smartarses. The lunchy left. We hate Labour. Labour’s finished, irrelevant. Never going to vote for them again. And honestly, the more I hear it, the more it sounds like a warning, a dare. Don’t vote Labour next time, you middle-class-raising-a-glass-to-the-working-class traitor. If you’re Old Labour vote TUSC, or Green. But come on. That won’t prevent another five years of Tory rule. And that simply can’t be tolerated. Because by 2020 it’ll be whose NHS, their NHS. Union members on an offenders’ register. Parents helping young people save for a deposit on a zero hours contract. The world’s 32 richest men will own a London borough each and they’ll be fracking the air for oxygen to sell back to us.

The delegates who make me want to rejoin are the ones who are clearly frustrated and angry with the Austerity Second XI on the platform. Ach, I don’t know. I don’t like joining but I do like belonging. And on the fringe, in the marquees pulsating with indignation, I hear electrifying speeches from Owen Jones and others calling for the overthrow of austerity, for the class struggle to be rekindled and I think: yeah. People call one another brother and sister and comrade and I confess this stuff makes me a bit teary. It’s like hearing a Beatles song or seeing a beautiful old church. Look, they say, here’s capitalism, bosses and workers. Pick a side. Fight. It’s an eternal class war, and right now the goodies are getting massacred. In the Unite tent, they talk in short sentences about real policies. And they sound like ordinary people, all glottal stops and brutalist phrasing, reminding us of the late great Bob Crow and how routinely we used to hear those voices on the news and how these days everyone sounds as if they’re presenting a TED talk.

Yes of course we should renationalise the railways. Most of the country believes that. But the shadow cabinet does an “ooh no” Mexican wave around a bleached-pine kitchen-supper table. The priority is “balancing the books”. Let’s not go back to the loony leftism of publicly paid-for, publicly owned assets. This caution saturates loyalist delegates here too. If for, example, you mention the East Coast railway line – publicly owned and running at a profit for the Treasury – well, the loyalists point out, Ed has promised that under a Labour government public sector franchises will be allowed to compete for contracts, blah blah. MATE that’s not renationalisation, it’s the public sector having a dog in a capitalist dog fight. And the other dogs are BIG.

In the end I don’t bother staying for Miliband’s big speech. We all knew what was going to be in it, didn’t we? I head for home, where the sitting Tory MP has a majority of just 333. Oh, the stupid Labour party. I can’t remember a more spineless opposition. But there is at least within it a viable opposition to that opposition. Maybe it’s worth joining to help nurture that. In the end it can’t be less use than doing nothing at all, can it? I don’t know.

On my way out a bunch of activists are singing folk songs and I just want to punch them.

• This article was amended on 24 September 2014. The original version misnamed the Beetham Tower in Manchester as Beecham Tower.

