Keir Starmer’s win over party rules can’t mask the tension simmering around Labour conference

Editorial: The spat over internal processes has overshadowed more far-reaching policy discussion

Keir Starmer with Angela Rayner during Labour conference on Sunday (PA)

Not quite Sir Keir Starmer’s Clause IV moment then. Almost 30 years ago Tony Blair asked his desperate party, after four successive general election defeats, to drop an article of socialist faith. There were ructions, but he got his way, and a bland series of 1990s soundbites replaced Edwardian phrase-making and Labour’s very aims and purposes were rewritten.

Sir Keir was looking for rather less. His changes were significant, but required no change to the party’s shibboleths. He wanted to return the election of leader and deputy leader to the old electoral college, which gave unions and MPs a large say in the matter, to make it more difficult for local parties to deselect MPs, and to make policy-making less cumbersome and less reliant on the annual conference. His measures had to be watered down before they had a hope of passing on the conference floor, and even then the vote was tight. Most party members, and virtually the entire general public, won’t notice the difference.

Yet he got his way, and it is now less likely that someone such as Jeremy Corbyn would ever become leader of the party again, and less likely that the kind of policies for which Mr Corbyn was famous would find their way into a Labour manifesto. The Starmer reforms make any performative leadership challenges from the left practically impossible.

Despite the affront felt by the left, it is hardly the first time Labour’s factions have tried to engineer bureaucratic changes (usually and bogusly dressed in “democratic” decoration) to gain some advantage. The electoral college to which Sir Keir was so keen to return was in fact invented by the left when the right of MPs alone to elect the leader was abolished in 1981. “One member, one vote” was a foundational belief of New Labour, and its extension under Ed Miliband was supposed to ensure the election of some other soft left candidate to succeed him – yet Mr Corbyn was the greatest beneficiary of the new franchise. The meaning of “democracy” in the Labour Party depends on whose interests are served by it.

In any case, Sir Keir has won, even if he was clumsy about it; but there is a downside. Potentially much more far-reaching policies on industrial relations, nationalising the gas supply industry and taxing private schools were overshadowed by the rules changes and Angela Rayner’s “scum” missile attack on the government. There is some irony in the fact that the deputy leader’s ideas about comprehensive workers’ rights from day one and her call for a return to sectoral collective bargaining – a huge extension of trade union power – should be so sidelined by what she called her “street language”. Arguably that is just as well, as it is not self-evidently obvious that they will foster job creation.

And so the Labour conference started with a row about internal processes, a split between the leader and deputy leader, and a general lack of harmony. The best that can be said about it is that Sir Keir managed to get his unpleasant business out of the way relatively early in the electoral cycle, and there is time to repair the reputational damage.

So far, though, Labour’s first in-person conference under Sir Keir has been a discouraging affair.