Mick Hartley

Rachel Sylvester in the Times (£) at the Labour Party conference:

It is clear in Brighton that the Corbynisation of the Labour Party is complete. Yesterday there was a standing ovation for Dennis Skinner and rapturous applause for John McDonnell’s pledge to renationalise “rail, water, energy and Royal Mail”….

I bumped into one Labour moderate on the seafront who said that for the first time in decades of attending conferences, he felt as if he was at another party’s event. “There’s been a hostile takeover,” he admitted. “The people who used to be outside the conference handing out their leaflets have now got control of the delegations and debates.” Left-wingers are equally clear that power has shifted fundamentally. Jon Lansman, the chairman of Momentum who was Tony Benn’s campaign manager in the 1980s, writes in his Twitter biography: “After decades in the Wilderness, the Promised Land is not far off”…

The truth is the cult of Corbyn is an uneasy coalition between youthful idealists and hard-left cynics. There’s a generational divide between the students who chanted Mr Corbyn’s name at Glastonbury and the sixty-something class warriors who have spent decades trying to push the Labour Party to the left. Underlying that are cultural differences between those who learnt their politics from the Occupy protest movement, which rejects hierarchy, and those who came out of the trade unions and Labour committees system, who see organisation as the route to power. In policy terms, disagreements are emerging between a younger generation that supported Remain in the referendum and an older one that sees the EU as part of a capitalist neo-liberal plot. Although both groups are on the left of politics they are on opposite sides of the “open-closed” divide identified by Tony Blair and others as the defining split in politics. “Well-meaning middle-class people are being manipulated by the Trots,” says one former special adviser. “The original hard-left groups are still in there fighting it out and Momentum is the battleground.”…

The Labour leader has attracted a new generation to his party, by advocating an uncompromising idealism, but his own approach has always been based on the factionalism of the hard left. Those searching for a new form of politics are bound to be disappointed because the Corbyn myth is at odds with the reality of the man.