FOUR years on and Jeremy Corbyn is still Labour leader. He still has the membership’s support and his grip on the Labour machine is firmer, if incomplete.

So what are Labour’s right wing, the ones who are utterly irreconcilable to Corbyn, doing?

I went to some of their meetings at Labour conference to find out. They are weaker on the ground, and they know it, though they still have institutional strength.

There are two main Labour right organisations. Progress was created out of Tony Blair’s Labour leadership campaign in 1996. Progress is “Blairite” with a “Shiny Happy People” vibe. They like to look “modern” and have a good proportion of younger members.

The other is Labour First, who are sometimes seen as the organisation of the “traditional right,” closer to the trade unions, more concerned about Nato and less about “free market” reform. Progress and Labour First reflect the “Blairite” v “Brownite” divide of New Labour, but since Corbyn they have co-operated and pooled their resources.

Labour First had their rally in a hotel basement — I think they like the impression of a “smoke filled room.” Progress had their rally in a cinema, preceded by a would-be-slick video presentation.

Both organisations have institutional strength. Plenty of journalists, a (shrinking) core of MPs and some Labour staff care what they say.

But they are getting weaker in the grassroots. Progress’s new director, Nathan Yeowell, addressed Labour First’s meeting, saying “It is interesting every passing year for the past couple of years there are fewer and fewer of us, and that’s a shame.”

Both rallies were much smaller than the year before. Yeowell also said “too many people, good people, comrades, longstanding friends have felt the need to leave.” The MPs who left Labour, like Chuka Umunna or Angela Smith depleted Progress and Labour First.

Speakers from both groups were obviously shaken by these losses — though they “refused to condemn” ex-Labour MPs like Mike Gapes, who are now trying to stop people voting Labour.

In one interesting note, Ayesha Hazarika, a columnist for George Osborne’s Evening Standard who is a popular speaker in “moderate” Labour circles told the Progress rally that the defectors were causing other problems.

To applause, Hazarika said that the “bullying has got to stop” and asked those that had left Labour “please stop bullying people like us who have decided to stay in the party and fight. It might make you feel personally good to leave the party, and I get that, and I respect your view, but please don’t attack me and others because we are doing something really hard, we are trying to to stay and fight for something we believe in.”

Speakers for both organisations were clear that things are difficult for them. Ruth Smeeth MP said it’s “not been a great 12 months, it’s been a bit crap” adding, “we’ve not had a great year, but it can’t get much worse” — the ironic laughter in the room showed they thought it could.

Tom Watson had a bit of a backs-to-the-wall message, arguing “it takes real moral courage and discipline and a breadth of imagination to keep going” for the “moderates.”

Labour First’s Luke Akehurst said “I agonise over whether I am doing the right thing by staying and fighting. If people think this is like a glib decision, it’s not. Every night, when I go to bed, I think, am I doing the right thing staying in the Labour Party, and other people come to different conclusions, I’m not going to condemn people who have arrived at a different moral decision” and left the party.

One problem that is particularly strong for Progress is they have recruited by selling success: they have offered a programme of compromising Labour politics with market methods on the promise that it will deliver success — electoral success inside and outside the party, and arguably a chance for individual advancement within the party.

However, they can’t offer any guaranteed success or help for a career so are trying to give their members a new slogan: “Progress is not inevitable, but neither is it impossible.” The “keep on fighting” approach is familiar on the left, but a novelty for centrists.

How do they see turning this around? How can they have a less “crap” year? Essentially both organisations are banking on Labour losing the next election on the (to my mind unrealistic) expectation that a defeat will mean that their turn will come again — the right will regain control.

Luke Akehurst told his rally: “We need to think about succession planning and making sure that the next leader of the Labour Party is a moderate, because I hope that we can do better than the opinion polls suggest, but some of them suggest we are in third place because this bunch of clowns are leading the party over a cliff. If we go to that kind of catastrophic general election defeat, straight after it there will be a leadership election. We have to be ready to fight that.”

Akehurst argued that “the party has barely survived this shameful period” — an assertion which doesn’t really reflect voting or membership figures — and that “I do not think the Labour Party can survive having two leaders in a row from that tradition” — meaning the Corbyn-style left.

Progress’s Nathan Yeowell put more emphasis on developing new, attractive, but as yet unspecified moderate policies, but again in the context of a Labour defeat.

He said the moderates must “start thinking about the future. What is our alternative to the policy line that we are being forced down by the current leadership? What is the positive, optimistic, alternative vision for this country?

“In the next couple of months, after the general election, should we lose it, I want to basically be in a position to start working… To start doing some really hard thinking about what our vision for the country would be for 2030 and quite frankly how can we start to mobilise and provide a progressive grassroots movement that will be robust in the future to stop any of this kind of activity happening again.

“The message going out of this room is we have to ensure we in the Labour Party and the Labour Party itself returns to relevance pretty damned quick.”