BREDENE is a beach resort a short tram ride along the dunes from Ostend where the annual Manifiesta fete of the Belgian Workers Party — the PTB/PvdA — is sited. The fete attracts large crowds from across the country’s two linguistic communities.

The fete grounds are built around the marquees of the various French- and Dutch-speaking provinces where local food, excellent Belgian beer, entertainment and argument maintains a party atmosphere shot through with serious debates, comedy and music.

Last Saturday the Morning Star’s cycling equipe Pedal4Progress arrived at the Manifiesta after a solidarity ride that went from Maastricht, the site of the eponymous treaty that ushered in EU austerity, spending limits and private finance initiatives to the Brussels headquarters of the Nato war alliance. 

Within minutes of our arrival both the cyclists and the logistics team were besieged by interested enquiries about the politics of our country.

The PTB/PvdA is almost unique in organising across Belgium’s linguistic divide and in the last elections it won almost 9 per cent of the vote, doubling its support.

It increased its MPs from two to 12, elected a big team of deputies to Belgium’s powerful regional assemblies and bagged a seat in the European Parliament.

Like the Labour Party, it is unusual in bucking the electoral decline of left-wing parties in Europe. 

But it is also unusual in that it transformed itself from a small and militant group of ’60s Maoist-inclined students originally in the Catholic University of Louvain into a political party that over decades grew from what was a propagandist group to a substantial party with deep roots.

Part of its appeal derives from its Medicines for the People movement in which PTB-sympathising  doctors and health professionals working in a network of health centres aim to give affordable and high-quality healthcare to working-class communities.

A revealing by product is that the big Socialist and Catholic social insurance bodies to which Belgians opt to handle their social insurance contributions feel obliged to take out large adverts in the Manifiesta programme.

In Belgium it is hard to break out of the so-called “pillar” society in which social life is structured around Catholic, Liberal and Socialist institutions. 

The main driver for the PTB/PvdA success is the deep political and economic crisis in Belgium and the failure of the two linguistically divided socialist parties to maintain a grip on government while they are mired in the neoliberal austerity policies of continental social democracy. 

In parts of the country the Socialist Party-linked trade unions are now willing to work with the PTB, including in electoral formations.

The PTB militants and other foreign delegations at the Manifiesta were very interested in developments in Britain, finding it a challenge to grasp the particular nature of the Labour Party and the surprise development of the Corbyn phenomenon and the deep working-class antipathy to the EU.

The searching nature of their questions made me think a bit outside the box in trying to explain to them the distinctive features of the British system and the special character of the problems that face us as the long-running campaign to derail Labour’s revival was beginning to achieve its goals. 

That it was temporarily stopped dead in its tracks at this week’s Labour conference is a bonus, but significant problems remain.

Because Labour is a federal party in which power is unequally distributed between the parliamentary party, the trade union affiliates, the constituency parties and the various socialist societies, the internal struggle assumes the character of a contest between the contending ideological trends in the party that is refracted differently in each of its strands.

Corbyn’s concluding speech brilliantly presented a raft of measures that can be accommodated within the framework of continuing capitalism but which, by their breadth and the the challenge they make to the way things are done, contests the imperatives of profit.  

For some at the fete the enormous potential opened up by Labour’s renaissance troubles the dogmatic thought processes which still hold some on the left in a frozen moment.

The defeat suffered by the Thornberry/Starmer axis over the direction of Labour’s Brexit policy signified the end of the myth that Labour could be enrolled in a one-sided campaign to reverse the referendum result.

Corbyn’s clear positioning — that Labour speaks not for the 52 per cent or the 48 per cent but for the 99 per cent — struck a real chord. 

As the BBC uncharacteristically commented, Corbyn is in his groove. The media-driven bid to present the conference as hobbled by divisions foundered on the rock of the manifest enthusiasm of delegates for the policies laid out with clarity and passion.

The notoriously disloyal and unprecedentedly disruptive deputy leader of the party — a man elected originally because he was seen as a trade union figure available to balance the contending forces in the party and temper the impetuosity of the Corbynite mass membership — looked maladroit, mischievous and malign. 

But in ruling the proroguing of Parliament as illegitimate and compelling its recall the Supreme Court cut short conference and deprived Watson of his 15 minutes of media limelight and sheltered him both from the disapproval of delegates and from serious consideration of the need for democratic mechanisms to address his disloyalty. 

Justice is blind but for Watson will it be merciless? For Labour’s electoral success Momentum is tremendously important as a mobilisation and social media mechanism. But its intensely internal focus addresses just part of the needs of the hour. 

A certain disdain for the trade union role is evident and strengthens the counter-productive tendency in unions to see their role as a sheet anchor for party processes that no longer dovetail with those needs.

This suppressed current of feeling is one reason why the affiliated unions — co-ordinated through the Trade Union Labour Organisation TULO — was unwilling to sanction much in the way of reselection battles and why even quite reactionary Blairite MPs with extensive crime sheets of disloyalty to the clear wishes of the party’s mass membership and serial assaults on Corbyn himself have not faced reselection battles.

The unchallenged position of a whole legion of intensely disloyal MPs will hold a Labour government to hostage unless a mass movement outside of Parliament can hold them to Labour’s radical project.

We have to acknowledge that the mobilisation potential that distinguishes the Corbyn project from previous left-wing revivals in Labour’s base has been weakened over the past two years.

Momentum possesses still a powerful machinery that can mobilise support within the party — playing an important role in securing advances in elections for the NEC and other bodies and with a quite extensive reach into constituencies. 

It has mounted very effective offensives in critical by-elections like Peterborough and deserves full credit for this.

However, there is a noticeable atmosphere of dissatisfaction that surrounds Momentum that is only partially dispelled by attempts to broaden its leadership circle. 

Bids — mostly from neo-Trotskyite factions — to transform Momentum into a policy-making and highly structured membership organisation, a quasi-party within a party where resolution-mongering and factional intrigues make up a malign internal culture should be rejected. 

But Momentum needs to renew its legitimacy in a broader milieu than constituency party activists.

The entire left project within Labour is doomed to the margins of political life if it is not directed outwards to the working class as a whole, to the very significant sections of the middle class who identify with Labour’s progressive agenda and especially to young people, and most especially young people in working-class areas.

It is not necessary to labour the point that this cannot be around issues which mostly animate the middle class. 

Of course, Brexit is an issue that poses particular problems for Labour and attempts from both ends of the argument to make support for one or other of these positions the critical test strike at the very heart of Labour’s key strategy.

Conference put a temporary stop to that and Corbyn’s call for Boris Johnson to resign has refocused political debate on the illegitimacy of the prime minister and his government and the need for an election.

It is entirely possible that the recall of Parliament may mean the Tory Party conference is cancelled. 

This will be a disappointment to the many thousands already mobilised to attend the People’s Assembly Against Austerity demonstration. 

Nothing demonstrates the unrepresentative character of a Tory conference more than the tsunami of noise from a mass demonstration outside the conference centre.

We are entering what will inevitably turn into a full-scale election campaign with the anti-Labour campaign blunted but not broken. 

The more even-handed environment which election conditions impose on the broadcast media will allow Labour’s wide policy appeal, much of which was on show at this week’s conference, to reach key sections of the working people on the issues — welfare, social care, housing, education, rights at work, wages, pensions and health — and overcome the toxicity of the Brexit debate.

Explaining our particular situation to our Belgian comrades illustrates just how different our situations are. 

Belgium is a small divided state with little room to move inside the eurozone and the EU/Nato straitjacket. 

Its proportional election system and highly devolved administration gives insurgent forces a chance to make a big impact with quite limited resources.

Labour’s electoral support is four or five times bigger in a country many times bigger than Belgium but the lesson we can learn is that a party needs not only leaders of integrity and compelling working-class policies but it must have deep roots in the working class.

Labour’s have atrophied over the years and while the Corbyn renaissance has enabled a substantial recovery — with a claim to the four million votes frittered away by Blair and Brown — Labour needs to be more solidly rooted in the communities and its trade union-affiliated members must be mobilised in workplaces and localities. 

The fusion in agitation and propaganda of an activated individual membership and a mobilised trade union movement makes for an irresistible force.

This is only possible if Labour activists and the party’s leaders at local level begin to act not only to command of the internal machine but as tribunes of the people, identified with every campaign, leading every protest, exposing every incident of exploitation and oppression, challenging every oppressive act of bureaucratic power.

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com.