Almost exactly two years ago, in the early hours of the morning, I was scampering round hotels in central Liverpool, briefing delegates and negotiating the wording of a motion with trade union officials. The following day, around two hundred delegates at Labour’s 2018 conference would hammer out a text on Brexit to be voted on by the full conference. The outcome of this process defined Labour’s Brexit policy. It was passed by conference unanimously and hailed at the time by many Remainers as a step in the right direction. Looking back, I think the moment encapsulates what went wrong.
In the run up to the conference, Another Europe is Possible and a coalition of other groups had organised an unprecedented campaign to get Brexit onto the agenda of the conference. After 2017, when the Leader’s office and Momentum organised to block discussion of motions on free movement and single market membership, we were taking no chances. In the end, more than a hundred constituency parties submitted pro-second referendum text, the largest number of motions on any subject in the party’s history. Run primarily by left wing activists, this was a campaign that comprehensively debunked the idea that the demand for a second referendum was the preserve of sour Blairites. Polling showed that 78% of members by this point supported one, as did a majority of Labour voters in every constituency, and we arrived at conference confident that we could decisively shift the party’s position forwards from the existing fudge.
The decisive shift was not to be. With the outline of a motion broadly agreed with sympathetic unions and over a hundred delegates intensively briefed ahead of the compositing meeting that would produce the final text, the coalition fell apart literally as the meeting opened. UNISON, whose bloc vote would have been essential to seeing the motion passed, pulled the plug – presumably as the result of some horse trade – and the GMB, not wanting to find themselves isolated among the big unions, followed suit. The result was that, despite having the overwhelming majority of delegates in the room and having spent days briefing them en masse, our operation fell apart and had to be reassembled over the course of six hours.
