A lot of Labour’s energy at the moment seems to be spent on internal battles over which faction wins power on which committee, and whether it should be easier to deselect sitting MPs. A measure of whether its conference is a success is whether it manages to talk about what it wants to do in government.
I understand that the leadership’s aim this week is to try to produce an analysis of where society has gone wrong. This sounds rather ‘Broken Britain’, though unsurprisingly the party won’t be using that line. Instead, the tag is ‘rebuilding Britain’, and Jeremy Corbyn and his colleagues will be talking about the impact of eight years of austerity, and post-industrialisation, particularly on parts of the UK that feel left behind. This includes towns in areas of the North and the Midlands: something Wigan MP Lisa Nandy has been trying to get her party to pay more attention to for years.

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