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Jeremy Corbyn at the Labour conference in Brighton
‘The key to the success of Mr Corbyn’s refashioning of the Labour party may well be the restraint he is able to muster.’ Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA
‘The key to the success of Mr Corbyn’s refashioning of the Labour party may well be the restraint he is able to muster.’ Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA

The Guardian view of the Labour conference: Corbyn’s party

This article is more than 6 years old
The Labour leader needs an idea at least as attractive as the vision his detractors have been asked to reject

It is an understatement to say that Jeremy Corbyn has revolutionised the politics of the British left. Rather than triangulating around the centre, Mr Corbyn demonstrated that the Labour party can succeed by standing for what it says it believes in. Mr Corbyn argued the country was sick of austerity and inequality and prescribed the sugary medicine of “tax and spend” policies to heal it. His unexpectedly good showing at the June election, when he was written off by the pollsters and dismissed by his opponents, has ensured the Labour party now belongs to Mr Corbyn.

The 68-year-old has proved an unlikely political entrepreneur. His policies spotted a gap in the market – young voters who had been electorally orphaned by mainstream policies – and he produced ideas designed to appeal to them, such as scrapping university tuition fees, wrapped up in a message of hope: that of a new kind of politics. Mr Corbyn advanced a participatory model of politics, which argued that party members in groups such as Momentum should be on equal footing with Labour MPs.

What this means for Labour might start to be answered at its party conference, which began this weekend in the seaside town of Brighton. Mr Corbyn’s team has tightened its grip over the leadership and gained control of the national executive committee, the party’s administrative body, by expanding the number of seats controlled by the left. This went through with a change to the rules for leadership elections, cutting the number of nominations from MPs and MEPs needed from 15% to 10%, important for the left to ensure that one of its own has a chance to succeed Mr Corbyn.

The cause of intra-party democracy is worth considering from the vantage point of history. It is true that party members, who enthusiastically backed Mr Corbyn when his MPs did not, had a better sense of the mood of the country than the parliamentary party in the last elections. However, democratic principles should not end up being exploited for the benefit of putschists, a threat made real by warnings of mandatory reselection. The left’s recent victories – electing Mr Corbyn, not once but twice; democratising the party; and energising an activist base – could easily become pyrrhic ones, as similar episodes proved in the past.

The key to the success of Mr Corbyn’s refashioning of the Labour party may well be the restraint he is able to muster. The Labour party’s manifesto was a programme that was leftwing by recent British standards but it would be considered mainstream in much of western Europe. Mr Corbyn has many more radical ideas: his suggestion for a maximum wage goes way beyond the party’s platform. However, he has not forced his own views onto his party.

Brexit is Mr Corbyn’s achilles heel: where the expanding party membership is more pro-EU than he is. Today the left lobbied hard to avoid a damaging conference row over membership of the single market, which Mr Corbyn argues might restrict a future Labour government’s ability to implement a truly radical agenda. The impression is that ordinary members’ opinions matter less than activists’, who perhaps share Mr Corbyn’s Euroscepticism.

The Labour leader’s ideas for “movement” politics are rooted in global trends, which have led to the grassroots success of US senator Bernie Sanders and the advances of Podemos’s people’s assemblies in Spain. While such experiments have a dynamism missing from slow-moving parliamentary processes, it is a mistake to think representative democracy is redundant in an age of networked politics. In parliament, the Labour party will have to make the case for higher taxes and better public services for years to come. Mr Corbyn’s election results showed that he could come up with an idea at least as attractive as the vision his internal detractors have been asked to turn their eyes from. He will have to do so again.

This article was amended on 25 September 2017. In an earlier version the first line said it was not an understatement to say that Jeremy Corbyn revolutionised the politics of the British left. This has been changed to say it is an understatement.

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