Labour is in electoral meltdown. The newspaper headlines are screaming ‘We’re all doomed’ on account of the world economic crisis. But they were desperately trying not to allow the real world to impinge on the surreal world inside Labour Party Conference. 

“The weirdest conference I’ve ever attended,” so said one experienced political commentator in reviewing this year’s Labour Party conference in Manchester. With Labour trailing badly in the opinion polls and having faced a series of bad to awful results in successive by elections, local council elections and the London Mayoral election, you might have expected the mood to be depressed and flat. And so for most it was. 

. With attendance way down on previous years, most of the conference hall was empty with the lights turned off on those vast seating areas left unused. Many of those present looked like they wished they were anywhere else but there. Needless to say the usual (if sometimes inept) stage management applied so that discussion, such as it was, was dominated by careerists, wannabe careerists, councillors, prospective parliamentary candidates and serial government loyalists. Delegates dozed as hour after hour of dreary ministerial presentations, policy forum reports and so-called question and answer sessions came and went.  What few resolutions actually got discussed were often critical, albeit in a mild form, of the government and – pushed through by the unions who still have a large voting presence – were usually passed despite opposition from the platform. However, no one was under any real illusion that the government had any real intention of acting on them. Even the pretence of decision making has slipped away.  Looming over everybody was the threat of a disaster at the next election – a disaster that many at the hall seemed privately to concede is now unavoidable. This only issue to be considered is – just how bad will it be? 

But some at the conference seemed to be in complete denial about the realities of the mess Labour is now in. For these people, conference was taking place against the fantasy backdrop of a world where all is going well for a government which had evidently given so much to people. All that is needed to turn things around by the next election is just a little more effort to explain things to voters and the fourth term will be a certainty. In their alternative universe, people on the streets are demanding wage restraint, privatisation and cuts in public services.  Of course, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan was never mentioned, the recent wave of public sector strikes ignored and the growing inequality between rich and poor – nothing to do with us so far as these people were concerned. One speaker even tried to blame things on the last Tory government, despite eleven years having passed since. 

For these people their main role in conference was just to praise the Labour government in all things and above all praise Brown, who spent most of the conference scowling from the platform. Up and down they went to the speaker’s microphone to try and outdo themselves in North Korean style praise of various ministers, Labour councils and always not forgetting Gordon. Of course, naturally away from the conference floor many of these same people – especially MPs, government ministers and ‘insiders’ – were busily briefing all and sundry as to how useless the leadership was, or how useless the opposition to the leadership was, depending on their position in the scheme of things. This infighting between rightwing factions has nothing to do with policy differences, because in the main they have none, but everything to do with petty personalities. 

Of course, everything at conference was supposed to focus around the leader’s traditional Tuesday afternoon speech. Depending on where you stood this would either turn things around as if by magic or doom the man as if he had just won a ticket on the Titanic. In fact, not least since Brown had very little to actually say, it will make virtually no difference either way. It is events, events, events that will determine his fate and that of the whole government. In the cold light of day nothing has changed because it is Labour’s record in power which has cost it support not the quality of how a single speech is given. Indeed it took only a few hours after the great man had finished his oration before normal service was resumed and Ruth Kelly, arch Blairite and Opus Dei entrist, had to announce that she was leaving the government. (Opus Dei is a Roman Catholic secret society famous for propping up the Franco fascist regime in Spain with torture and corruption.) She said she wanted to ‘spend more time with her family.’ Surely this is the most coded of excuses. ‘Did she jump or was she pushed?’ seems to be a question that answers itself. Brown may soon follow her into the wilderness.

Commentators consider Brown’s leadership credentials were bolstered, at least for a few days or weeks, by the avalanche of economic bad news. ‘Rally behind the leader and don’t rock the boat’, was the refrain. If this is so, this is totally undeserved by Gordon. Brown’s record of ‘light touch regulation’ and his blind obsessive belief in opening everything up to the market have done a great deal to make Britain very susceptible to the crisis emanating from the malfunctioning world financial markets.

However, the Tories have been seriously wrongfooted by the onset of crisis. When shadow Chancellor George Osborne went on ‘Newsnight’ to declare, “Well look, no one takes pleasure from people making money out of the misery of others, but that is a function of capitalist markets” he was telling no more than the unvarnished truth. But this is not what ‘middle England’ wants to hear. When even the Daily Express (17.09.08) is shouting “Don’t let the spivs destroy Britain” and the Mail declares, “Free-market capitalism lies shredded” they are articulating a mood of incandescence against the financiers who are threatening to destroy people’s livelihoods. So far this mood is not being channeled in any organised political expression.

During the conference, time and time again, the threat of a possible Tory government, coming to power a year or two from now, was raised. We agree that this is a serious threat to workers’ living standards and to the organised Labour movement. Next week, Cameron and the rest will be hard at work trying to convince people that they are a kind caring bunch who will look after everybody and in no way will be anything like the last Tory governments of Thatcher and Major. We should not be fooled. They will be a vicious rightwing government whose first task will be to take revenge on the working for the great humiliation of 1997.  They must be kept out and the best way to do it is to give voters a real choice – and that means for Labour a fundamental change of direction. Nothing like that was on offer at this year’s Labour conference and it showed on the dazed look of many delegates and visitors faces as they stared into the abyss. 

However, we should be clear that it is the policies of the Labour government which is costing the party votes - not just the issue of the leadership. Most workers in the country are already quite clear that switching say Brown with Miliband, or whoever is the flavour of the month with Blairites pinning for a return to the old days, will not count for anything in their eyes. A leadership change is needed, but that should not be changing like for like but rather bringing in a fighting socialist leadership armed with a socialist programme that will ensure that Labour changes course and works to defend the interests of the working masses not the City of London. This would win Labour a fourth term.