LABOUR conference? The first thing to understand is that it is not, in essence, a very serious event.

A serious Labour Party conference this year would have included a sober review of the party’s election result, which yielded a large but highly brittle majority on a puny vote share.

The reasons for polling around 10 per cent less of the electorate than anticipated would be examined, and ideas for how to do better next time explored.

The difficulties of seeing off Reform while halting the loss of votes to Greens and independent progressive candidates would be discussed.

Such a serious conference would then turn to vital policy questions, like how the new government could help avert a world war and how it could contribute to justice for the Palestinian people, an issue which cost Labour dear at the general election.

It would also have an informed debate on the Treasury’s fiscal rules and how they are strangling any hope of serious reform.

None of these things happened, of course — not in the conference hall and not, by and large, on the fringe.

Labour is not that sort of party. Those matters are left to the professional politicians and their advisers, strategists, spin doctors and so on.

Yes, the trade unions did force a vote on the cutting of the winter fuel allowance. It was shunted to the conference graveyard slot as an unwelcome intrusion of the real world, and a total of four contributions were made to the debate.

And there was no sense that Starmer and Reeves would pay the slightest heed to the conference rejection of the cut, symbolically important as it was.

Labour conference is not a policy-making or strategy-shaping event, as it still was to a significant extent when I first attended in 1978. The government’s course is in no way set in Liverpool.

In that it resembles, and has long done, allowing for the brief Corbyn interlude, both the conventions of US political parties and the Tory Party’s own gathering, which now dispenses with policy motions altogether.

So, in assessing the Labour conference, you are largely left with matters of tone and colour. The activist milieu of recent conferences has now been very largely dispersed, with besuited lobbyists in its place.

Suits — and frocks — were indeed an issue, however, with the freebie couture culture of Starmer, Rayner, Reeves and many others casting a dismal shadow of elitist self-entitlement over proceedings.

Exiting Labour MP Rosie Duffield, sensational Canterbury victor of 2017, is merely the most forthright in pointing out the cognitive dissonance of a Cabinet cutting benefits to pensioners while helping themselves to a millionaire’s wardrobe.

Her noisome resignation is just the latest example of the big differences between Starmer and New Labour at an equivalent stage — mounting unpopularity compounded by a malfunctioning political operation which neither spots problems heading its way nor resolves them expeditiously when they arrive.

It has led to the worst honeymoon since the Dostoyevskys, which featured gambling addiction, a rumoured secret lover, mounting debt and epileptic seizures, mitigated mainly by the conjugal composition of limericks about poverty.

Alas, we have no great literature in prospect. The pedestrian platform performances of the parliamentarians, snugly hegemonic once more and recovered from their humiliation by the movement in 2016, when their overwhelming desire to rid themselves of the troublesome Corbyn was powerfully rebuffed, testify to that.

Keir Starmer’s speech was meandering and unfocused, despite Lord Alli’s varifocals perched on his nose, forever circling the issue as to what the pay-off from all the “tough decisions” would look like in the end without ever really landing.

Angela Rayner, Starmer’s John Prescott with a budget for image improvement, won applause because she was given most of such applause lines as the government’s programme allows — trade union rights and house-building mainly.

These are two areas in which this is clearly not New Labour mark two. Rachel Reeves spoke of an industrial strategy and told the Treasury to change its blinkered ways on public investment, which, given she is in charge of it, may amount to something.

And even Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, who presents impressively and may rival Rayner and Reeves when the time comes for Starmer to return to buying his own Arsenal tickets, snuck in a reference to socialism in her speech.

So not a very Blairite vibe. There is another side, of course. The neoliberals were also on parade, from Wes Streeting to Liz Kendall, whose speech left one wondering however she managed even 4.5 per cent of the 2015 leadership vote.

There is also the familiar control freakery, with embarrassing votes shunted out of the limelight, but as noted this is scarcely delivering with the awesome efficiency of Mandelson and Campbell in their prime.

And then there are the substantive issues of welfare cuts and, above all, full engagement with imperialism’s drive to war in eastern Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific.

So there is little to cheer but something to chew on. There is no scope in 2024 for a 1997-style embrace of the wonders of the market, which reconciled the tattered remains of social democracy with the demands of high finance.

It would not be plausible any longer, and electoral results would be still more meagre. Problem is, if the actual offer from Starmerism — competent management of the reconstruction of an increasingly dysfunctional bourgeois state — is not New Labour, nor is it a compelling alternative to national populism.

On that point, our expensively dressed emperors are actually wearing no clothes at all. If they are smart, they will send Lord Alli packing and instead read the motion passed over their opposition at the instigation of Unite calling for the restoration of the winter fuel allowance cut, the scrapping of the Procrustean fiscal rules and the introduction of a wealth tax.

Of course, if they were smart, they would not be in this pickle three months in. Their only consolation may be that the Dostoyevskys did, withal, remain married. Certainly, Crime and Punishment lie ahead and, without a shift in foreign policy, perhaps even the House of the Dead.

Unfriendly fire doesn’t help Palestine solidarity

Some of those attending the pre-conference Palestine solidarity march in Liverpool thought it was sensible to boo and heckle Labour MP Kim Johnson when she came to address the concluding rally.

Why? Because she is a Labour MP, nothing more. That may speak to a hatred of the Labour Party, which is not hard to explain.

But it does not help the Palestinians one whit. They need parliamentarians speaking up for them, putting pressure on the government. The number of MPs who are to the left of the Labour Party, even on the Gaza issue, is less than 3 per cent of the total.

The solidarity movement, therefore, needs willing Labour MPs at its rallies. Personally, if a Tory wants to speak up for a ceasefire and an end to arms sales to Israel, I would have no problem putting them on a platform, too.

If you want to indulge your anger at the Labour Party, go right ahead, but let it not be at the expense of the Palestinians.