It was a brief one-day visit for me this year to the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, but I was there long enough to sense that there was a new mood afoot: the crazy Judean People’s Front leafleteers that used to congregate along the Brighton seafront were less numerous (albeit not completely absent).
Reduced too was the lack of confidence, at least when it comes to thinking about future electoral success: the parliamentarians I spoke to seemed confident, for example, of a big victory in the Tamworth by-election on the back of the by-election win in Scotland last week. But this was balanced by a fear of smiling too much or looking over-confident; it all reminded me of nothing so much as the 2009 Conservative Party conference.
And there was still arguably a lack of confidence in terms of bold policies. If it is the case that the Government is getting the really big questions wrong, it would be good to know more about what the main alternative looks like. There was no shortage of people to tell shadow ministers what the future should look like but that has been true for the past 14 years, since Labour last lost office, and some – though not all – attendees were clearly frustrated by the remaining lack of detail about what might actually succeed a Labour general election victory.
