#Lab21 balance sheet. 1/ 80% of the members voted for PR after a long left+right campaign, substantially led by @labourlewis. A few union delegates had power to squash it - but when the time comes to form a Labour-led coalition, if consulted, the members will back it...
2/ So this is a major change in British politics, and driven from below. Defying the bureaucracy the members signalled to other parties they understand: we cannot govern alone, and need urgent constitutional change...
3/ @RachelReevesMP commitment to a £224bn climate investment spend also strategic win - a direct response to the consistent Green polling around 6%. This too is the building block for a governing coalition with Greens/PC/SNP...
4/ The members also won on Green New Deal, Palestine, Aukus... signalling that the party is still substantially a left/centre-left force, despite the leadership and the unions...
5/ Then @AndyMcDonaldMP ‘s resignation over £15 an hour minimum wage places further pressure on the leadership. Everyone knows the next domino to fall would have to be @AngelaRayner and that would bring the structure down... so the members now have leverage...
6/ A further upside. Instead of being a wake, (as it was TBH in 2019, when the game was clearly up with Corbynism), #TWT21 has bounced back and is vibrant, attracting young people, mostly not that committed to Labour as a party or ideology but laser focused on GND...
7/ Plus... Lisa Nandy & John Healey have quietly reinstalled a traditional social-democratic politics in foreign affairs/defence - which is what matters to the centrist swing voters, both on economics and cultural issues... now to the downsides...
8/ The deal I thought we had with Starmer is broken. He is retreating from key pledges - nationalising energy, redistributive income taxes - and facilitating attacks on democracy. There are now no left figures in the Shadow Cabinet... worse...
9/ the Venn diagram where the left and right of the party overlap is moving apart. There is acute cultural and personal dissociation between the “worlds” of the CLP left and the bureaucratic right... it’s already “two parties” ... Keir could have stopped that....
10/ Even in the Kinnock era, the far left would sit in the hotels/fringe and argue with seasoned Cold War right-wingers, all certain they were part of an unbreakable movement with shared cultural values... not any more. There is almost no crossover...
11/ Those who do move between the world of the three course dinners at the Grand and the world of lentil curry at #TWT21 are greeted with hostility in both locations. I mean really bitter, open, personal animosity in both locations...
12/ None of this will improve unless Starmer inspires that part of the left that voted for him, and that means policy commitments and a demonstrable connection with voters... I doubt he can do it in a single speech, because the damage is done over PR/party democracy...
13/ I am now certain, in a way I wasn’t in 2019, that we will end up with a big party realignment in the UK, and that the trigger for it will be a Labour-led coalition that enacts PR... Starmer’s job was to stop this happening by unifying Labour’s warring wings/political cultures
14/ ... but in the short term, patience is running thin with Starmer - absolutely on the left, but increasingly on the right - because the right need someone who can win with the meagre platform they’ve imposed, and it’s not looking very likely...
15/ Dunno how it will pan out but one thing’s clear: Labour conference is an unparalleled theatre of class struggle; the party is no longer a“safe” component of British state infrastructure. That’s bcos of the mass radicalisation of left voters and activists (oh, and networks).
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