Mick Hartley

Rachel Sylvester [again the Times, £] gets it right:

In Liverpool it is all too clear that Labour is no longer the party of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Harold Wilson, Clement Attlee or Keir Hardie. It has become an intolerant, illiberal and backward-looking personality cult that is masquerading as a mass movement by tapping into the more general anti-politics mood. It’s fortunate that a room in the conference centre has been designated as the official “safe space” since there is such a nasty undercurrent of aggression. Speakers at the Progress rally on Sunday night were heckled as they spoke out against the deselection of MPs. At the World Transformed fringe, organised by Momentum, there are mugs for sale with the slogan “Tories are Lower than Vermin”.

What struck me most, though, as I watched Jeremy Corbyn touring the exhibition hall yesterday, posing for photographs with the Cuban Solidarity Campaign and a think tank called Class (the Centre for Labour and Social Studies) was how old-fashioned Labour now seems. It has talked about reopening coalmines but wants to outlaw fracking. It takes for granted traditional class-based allegiances that no longer exist. It is so out of touch with modern Britain that it voted against having a conference debate on Brexit.

The truth is that Labour’s biggest problem is not Mr Corbyn himself but the fact that the world has moved on and the party has not. Although its battles are conducted on Twitter and Facebook, it is still an analogue organisation in a digital age. Even its name looks like an anachronism. This is a party of “the workers”, which grew out of the trade union movement but which has failed spectacularly to understand that the nature of work has changed over the past 30 years.

The call for Labour moderates to now unite behind Jeremy (eg here) seems just a tad hypocritical for a man who voted against his own party line on every possible occasion as a back-bencher – but that's the nature of the Corbyn cult.