IT WAS a bold move by Keir Starmer to offer Labour Party members a pre-conference distillation of his most profound thoughts. And in setting them out at such length he has made it clear that any Labour accession to government under his leadership will not be driven by innovation or clear thinking but rather by a complete submission to capitalist financial orthodoxy.

The £15 minimum wage policy, to which former shadow employment minister Andy McDonald is committed, was casually abandoned in a routine parade of Treasury dogma designed to underline the truth that Labour is back under corporate control.

Cabinet collective responsibility would have put him in the impossible position of arguing against his own policy in a key meeting with union leaders and this, to his great credit, he would not do.

The £15 an hour minimum wage is a policy in which constituency delegates and union contingents alike are enthusiastic. It is a policy that enjoys wide, even decisive, popularity among the electorate and in mobilising working-class voters generally. Among the lost legions of Labour voters in particular, it is electoral gold.

In this sequence of events, the studied ambiguities in Angela Rayner’s carefully calibrated stance are rather overshadowed by Andy McDonald’s clear stand, and she has let it be known that she is had no foreknowledge of his resignation and remains annoyed.

Starmer’s chosen vehicle was a Fabian Society tract. The Fabian Society is one of the original “socialist societies” that, along with the trade unions, founded the Labour Party. The others, among them the Independent Labour Party and the British Socialist Party no longer exist in their original form or, in the case of the BSP, which morphed into the Communist Party, remain affiliated.

It took more than a quarter of a century for the communists to be purged from Labour, but the Fabians have always enjoyed protected status and have long been the go-to think tank for Labour’s right wing.

For Starmer this is the third relaunch in less than two years. The Labour leader has abandoned any attempt to anchor his thinking in the socialist tradition, even one as attenuated as that followed by Fabians.

Instead he has borrowed uncritically from the worn-out lexicon of liberalism, even dipped into the Tories’ dressing-up box for the occasional Union Jack waistcoat or imperial sun helmet, and is now unambiguously revealed as a tribune of neoliberal orthodoxy.

If his essay The Road Ahead was meant to raise expectations that the Labour leader’s first live-to-audience conference speech would make clear what a Starmer-led government might look like, it failed. And not only because it avoided direct commitments.

It failed not because his master plan to change the way the party elects its leadership diverted attention, or that it proved so maladroit, but because the essay contains little beyond intangible cliche and endless circumlocution.

It is arguably the most boring political manifesto ever put before an almost completely indifferent electorate. It finds almost no real enthusiasts even among the various tribes of vacillating careerists who make up the parliamentary right. And they themselves are almost equally bereft of a compelling narrative to attract even the centre ground of voters they conceive of as the terrain over which elections should be fought.

However, among some of these people there is a sense that, with Starmer’s missteps, an opportunity is opening up. Among the more transparent of the ambitious right wing, Wes Streeting MP has tapped up his financial backers, while Dan Jarvis MP is abandoning his double mandate as mayor of South Yorkshire after just one term in office. There will be others, even from among the also-rans that Jeremy Corbyn so decisively defeated.

Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves improved her profile with a carefully crafted speech that  included a pledge to invest £28 billion in year-on-year transition funding to a green economy and topped it with a claim that she would be “Britain’s first green chancellor.”

Given that the party establishment, within which she is a key figure, spent the pre-conference period trying to kill the green new deal, this demonstrates tactical flexibility in inverse proportion to political consistency.

In Brighton even the assembled scribes of the British establishment media — who can usually be found to tap out a servile keystroke in support of any liberal offering — have fallen silent before Starmer’s banality.

His astonishingly misconceived bid to restore the moat, drawbridge and portcullis that allows the parliamentary party to veto candidates for the party leadership has seen him and his advisers humiliated, and any media attention his musings might attract abandoned.

The failure, qualified by success in raising the bar for nominations, of his constitutional ploy lay not in the proposal itself. In fact, its naked appeal to what he must see as a narrow trade union interest has something of a respectable back-story, in that it plays to the party’s origins, and attenuated contemporary reality, as a federal party of labour.

Prior to the popular irruption of support that gave Jeremy Corbyn his overwhelming mandate, the federal model was seen by much of the left as a guarantee that the trade union interest would not be neglected.

This romantic view, that the unions, as originally conceived by Labour’s founders, remain the sheet anchor of the party, while such unorganised workers and middle-class supporters attracted to Labour could play a part in the constituency section, has been rendered largely redundant by the reordering of the working class by late capitalism.

The principle of representation through membership of affiliated bodies made more sense when the working class was constituted around industrial production, more organised into trade unions and where bodies of socialist militants, or at least members, could find a voice within the party either through their political organisation or as representatives of their trade union.

I remember sitting in the balcony at one Labour conference with Ken Gill, the communist leader of one of Labour’s biggest affiliated organisations, when some tortured procedural vote required new guidance.

His delegation in the body of the hall turned as one to see what he might signal. No matter that he was president of the Trades Union Congress that called the Labour Party into being, the right of his trade union members to choose themselves who might represent them in party deliberations was denied.

In truth, the trade union block vote, for much of the 20th century, was a mechanism for keeping Labour wedded to a subaltern role in the management of capitalism and a loyal cold war ally in every colonial repression, anti-communist crusade and imperialist resource war.

Today the right wing is in a fit of suppressed anxiety that this may be at an end.

In the latest chapter of Labour’s long-running and frequently thwarted reconciliation between the constituencies and the unions, a majority vote by constituency delegates for proportional representation was checkmated by an even more overwhelming vote against by union delegations.

In their confusion, some Labour people see the collective expression of a class position by the affiliated trade unions as a negation of democracy rather than the more fully democratic centralism that class struggle makes essential in capitalist society.

The Great War of 1914-18 saw the historic split in social democracy — brought about by the collapse into national chauvinism by the right wing — result in an organisational, political and ideological division in the European labour movement that has been deepened since the European socialist states were dismantled and the communist left driven to the margins.

This marginalisation of the left is almost exclusively a European phenomenon, and in other parts of the world, right-wing social democracy of the modern mode has little purchase or presence.

Outside of the imperial metropolis, politics doesn’t always proceed as rule-bound electoral contests between well-ordered parties but through violent eruptions of ungoverned conflict, uprisings and mass strikes, coup and countercoup, invasion and resistance.

In the relative tranquility of European politics it is almost as if Starmer sees electoral success as flowing from an unconscious assimilation by the electorate of his diffused sense of values: one part Empire nostalgia disguised as patriotism and one part an idealised world of social peace in which all of society’s complex dreams can be distilled into an imaginary world of homeowning “hard-working families.”

This illusion is made possible by our archaic first-past-the-post system for parliamentary elections, which compels parties that aspire to national government to aggregate interests that are fundamentally contradictory.

We can see Boris Johnson’s success in party management, achieved through a ruthless purge, as the mirror image of Starmer’s bid to drive the left to the margins. The crisis management of 21st-century British capitalism first compels unity in the bourgeois camp and, equally, submission to the market in Labour.

As the Morning Star has spelled out this week, even after the betrayals of the last year or so, there is a solid core of committed progressive opinion in Labour, while the fringe events organised by The World Transformed have convinced even the bourgeois press that this is where ideas and innovation exists.

Conference votes for a £15 minimum wage and to adopt the UN characterisation of Israel as an apartheid state, which Lisa Nandy immediately condemned as unacceptable, show that a powerful stream of left-wing thinking animates many delegates.

The World Transformed reminds us of the electoral lessons of Labour’s most recent renaissance: that a clear sense of values is best expressed in concrete polices that address the major concerns of working people set in a vision of a planet and people on the road ahead to a sustainable future.

Labour’s conference was far from a parade of triumph for a right wing that is increasingly seen as the direct expression of ruling-class interests within the party — and without such attachments to Labour tradition that made earlier leaders such as James Callaghan or John Smith credible leaders.

Even with mass working-class abstentions and not a few defections, Labour remains, for most working people in most of Britain, the most credible repository of their votes.

The battle to we waged within and without the party is for it to become the instrument of such desires that can be satisfied within capitalism. If not beyond.

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com.