Is Labour on the ‘threshold of power’?

Labour is ready for government, Jeremy Corbyn told his party conference this afternoon - but some commentators are wondering whether Britain is ready for the radical change his government would enact.

He wrapped up the last day of the Brighton conference saying Labour’s election showing in June “put the Tories on notice” and calling on ministers to “pull themselves together or make way”. Labour is now “on the threshold of power”, he said

In a critique of the policies of both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, Corbyn said: “The disregard for rampant inequality, the hollowing out of our public services, the disdain for the powerless and the poor have made our society more brutal and less caring.”

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The Grenfell Tower fire was at the heart of Corbyn’s pitch, with the Labour leader claiming it was a “tragic monument” to three decades of government failures.

The need to engage

Corbyn may have caught the anti-austerity wave at its crest, with cuts to the health service and school funding apparently pushing corners of society to breaking point, but some responded to his speech by asking whether Labour is the solution.

While Unite union leader Len McCluskey endorsed Corbyn and Labour’s ability to “transform our country to make it work for the many not the few”, the Institute of Directors was concerned that Corbyn didn’t appear to find anything positive in Britain’s business community.

“Let’s be honest,” the Institute’s Stephen Martin said, “business leaders were not expecting to be praised in Jeremy Corbyn’s speech, but they will still be disappointed that there was not one positive thing said about the millions of companies, large and small, that form the bedrock of our economy.”

Still, Corbyn’s success can be measured in the number of business lobbyists at this year’s conference, writes Andrew Sparrow in The Guardian. “They might not necessarily like Labour much, but they feel the need to engage.”

A party united?

The Huffington Post’s Paul Waugh says Corbyn’s “mix of empathy and break-with-the-past policies is certainly his unique selling point” and leading a party “more united and more leftwing than it has been in years, puts him undoubtedly in a strong position”.

But Corbyn sceptics questioned the Labour leader’s spin on the 2017 election results, with The New Statesman’s Stephen Bush claiming it “was one the Conservatives did everything to lose - and still Labour couldn't win it”.

Labour may prove vulnerable on shadow chancellor John McDonnell’s Public Finance Initiatives policy, with shadow cabinet ministers already rowing back on how many contracts would be brought back under public control.

“How radical should Labour really be?” asks the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg. “Would they win the next time if they move further to the left, be even bolder than many of Corbyn's backers would desire? Or as one member of the shadow cabinet suggested to me yesterday, they have to put pragmatism first.”

An uneasy marriage

Corbyn also faces an uneasy balancing act between the young activists of Momentum and the older generation of traditional Labour supporters.

“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,” says Rachel Sylvester in The Times.

If the voters don’t tear Labour apart, that internal contradiction just might.