LABOUR’S Liverpool conference basked in the expectation that the victory over the Scottish nationalists at Rutherglen heralds a return to the days when the party could rely on a substantial, even inflated, block of Scottish seats.

The rough parity that First Past the Post (FPTP) voting provided in the post-war period has eroded — remember the Conservatives were the biggest Scottish party in 1968 — and the post-independence referendum wipeout of Labour's Scottish contingent, only temporarily mitigated by the return of a handful of extra MPs generated by the 2017 Corbyn surge, looks like ending.

Naturally, Labour has spun the Rutherglen by-election figures as signalling a massive increase in Labour's Scottish presence at Westminster. The victory margin was substantial but the peculiarities of the seat — it alternates between the SNP and Labour — and the general crisis of the SNP and independence movement as a whole, helped Labour.

And this was compounded by the obdurate behaviour of the sitting SNP MP who broke Covid rules in a flagrant manner and refused to step down on conviction, which meant Labour was able to win quite conclusively.

Whether FPTP will enable Labour to displace the SNP as effectively as itself was disposed of is in doubt. By-elections are, by definition, atypical.

In this election, Labour in its heavily unionist mode gained a useful tranche of Tory voters keen to punish the SNP and doubtless unenthused by the Tory Party at Westminster. But even so, only four out of 10 voters felt voting was worthwhile.

We expected a festival of high-flown rhetoric about the win at Labour’s conference — and so it was.

The changed nature of the conference, with controversy almost ironed out of the agenda, the constituency left purged and paralysed, left-wing MPs silenced by the threat of losing the whip, and thus facing deselection, and the unions unco-ordinated and abstentionist on most internal party matters — presents little challenge to the Keir Starmer regime despite the votes to recommence HS2 if elected and in favour of renationalising energy.

In the division of tasks, Starmer and Rachel Reeves have the job of presenting Labour's case to big business and the City (and thus the patrician class), while Angela Rayner has the plebeian franchise.

Hence her carefully crafted commitments to “ban zero-hour contracts, and fire and rehire, and give workers basic rights from day one.”

She said: “We’ll go further and faster in closing the gender pay gap, make work more family-friendly and tackle sexual harassment. And we won’t stop there. We’ll ensure that unions can stand up for their members.

“We will boost collective bargaining to improve workers’ pay, terms and conditions.”

She also promised Labour would deliver new council homes, strengthen renters’ rights, and abolish leasehold land tenure.

Each of these carefully constructed formulations is designed to give wriggle room when actual legislation is presented to a parliament and Starmer’s record for political consistency hardly inspires confidence that they will be implemented.

The New Deal for Workers — the last substantial policy vestige from 2017-19 entailing a commitment to repeal 2016 and 2023 anti-union laws, is seen by affiliated unions as a red line and will provide a key short-term test for the future of the union link.

Delegates cheered when the leadership were overturned on energy nationalisation.

Holding Westminster Labour to such commitments is a task beyond the forces presently assembled in the Labour Party. If the party holds a parliamentary majority composed of the present MPs and those candidates more recently selected under the new regime, it will take an extra-parliamentary force to hold the party to any body of legislation consistent with these promises.

To take a step back from the daily detail of Labour’s disintegration as a radical challenge to consensus politics and try to conceptualise what a route to socialism might entail in these new conditions is to confront a problem that has no solution without a re-emergence of the working class as the decisive force in the nation’s affairs.

Set aside for the moment our consideration of the dominant modes of thought in those trade union circles where the internal affairs of the Labour Party are deemed more important than union policies and take account of the mood in the working class and among working people in general.

All are experiencing a cost-of-living crisis without precedent in living memory. Housing and energy costs and runaway food prices are the direct product of clearly defined policy decisions including high interest rates and blowback from sanctions on Russia.

Apart from the millions of strikers themselves, almost everyone in working-class Britain has a relative or friend who has been on strike. Everyone, especially workers in the public sector, knows that the responsibility for the cost-of-living crisis principally lies with the succession of Tory administrations.

Some groups of workers — especially in sectors where high profits are generated — have won important concessions from employers including significant pay increases. But for millions covered by pay agreements settlements have not met the cost of living rises past or the new increases constantly generated by the deepening economic and political crisis of capitalism.

Trade unions have been strengthened by the struggle with new layers radicalised and drawn into activity. However, there is a sense that the tactics hitherto used — principally intermittent strikes — while accompanied by high levels of enthusiasm and great creativity, have been only partly successful.

An often unstated feature of the 2022-23 strike wave has been government-backed employer resilience — Royal Mail, train operating companies, teaching, universities and so on have all played hardball in negotiations. Despite the enthusiasm and fun to be had, striking is not a sport and unions find themselves considering the need to create more effective bargaining leverage in their collective action strategies.

This signifies a problem of leadership not just in the sense that disputes have been conducted sector by sector and without much co-ordination but that the political challenge to government and the employers that could turn a series of separate disputes into a decisive movement for change has been lacking.

This is in contradiction to the mood among striking workers and the deep layers of support they enjoyed.

We shouldn’t discount the very valuable role played by many of the trade union leadership, not just at the general secretary level but among other officials and lay activists, in trades councils and workplaces.

They were able to articulate deep-seated feelings of injustice and mobilise a sense that the relationship between frozen wages and runaway profits says something vital about present-day Britain.

We saw a distinct sharpening of class consciousness and the contours of a developing political consciousness that goes beyond simple anti-Tory sentiment to embrace criticism of all the parties of government.

The damage done to public utilities, mail and rail, the energy price hike, the water pollution, and the housing crisis together are widely condemned and are beginning to constitute the foundation of a widespread feeling that verges on a generalised anti-capitalism most sharply expressed by the near-universal support for energy to be taken into public ownership.

Labour looks like becoming the main electoral beneficiary of this despite Starmer being barely better regarded than Rishi Sunak and suffering from a substantial negativity rating.

Compare the 20-point leap that Labour harvested from Corbyn's leadership and its radical 2017 manifesto to the 20-point lead that Labour presently enjoys.

In 2017, a radical manifesto and the real prospect of a left-led Labour government mobilised a counter-movement to further aggregate the Tory vote. This time, Labour’s lead goes with a conviction among the ruling class that the continuity of capitalist orthodoxy in any sphere of government is not under threat by a Labour government. Accordingly, there is little serious effort to assure a Tory victory.

We saw, in the interregnum between Labour’s 2017 moment of narrowly thwarted triumph and its 2019 humiliation, the mobilisation of all the state, media and ideological resources needed — given the level of class consciousness and political understanding among the working class — to destabilise the then-Labour leadership and narrow its appeal.

The mechanics of this assault have been endlessly analysed, and if a full understanding of the lengths to which our ruling class will go to avert any threat to the wealth and power they possess is not yet universal at least everyone now knows that power is not exclusively exercised in Parliament.

Liz Truss and Kwarsi Kwarteng at least have assimilated this truth.

It would be a big step forward if the working class and labour movement started factoring such an understanding into its calculations.

If extra-parliamentary power can be exercised by the Establishment to effect profound policy changes contrary to that which the government proposes, why should the labour movement deny itself this option?

Of course, in the strike movement, millions of workers have recent experience of the relative progress that can be made by the exercise of such rights that still exist. This is precisely why the Tories want to truss the unions up in further limitations of their freedom to organise.

The pent-up demand for wages is a time bomb ticking under Westminster Labour that no amount of bipartisan posturing and performative fiscal rectitude can dispel. There will be another strike wave next year unless wages rise.

When every public service is monetised to generate profits and the capitalist market determines the price of everything needed for life to be sustained, the money nexus dominates our collective consciousness.

In contrast, socialist ownership allows the social wage to grow which transforms money wages into the source of discretionary, rather than essential, spending. Free education, health and most utilities flow from public ownership, price controls become possible, rent controls can squeeze profits out of housing and thus the importance of the money wage diminishes.

Marx seized on the alienated nature of capitalist existence in contrast to the human character of socialism thus: “The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc, the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt — your capital.

“The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being.”