WHAT now for Labour’s “hardcore” moderates? At Labour’s Liverpool conference MPs from Labour’s right admitted attempts to “bring down” Jeremy and force him to “implode” haven’t worked.
Instead, he has been re-elected with a bigger mandate. So what now?
The full-strength New Labour faction has a strong presence among MP’s.
But the leadership vote shows they are heavily out numbered by Corbyn’s supporters among party members.
Thanks to promotions and selections in the Blair and Brown years, these are a big slice of the parliamentary party, so knowing how they react to Corbyn counts.
I went to some of the meetings of the two main groups of the Labour right, Progress and Labour First on the fringe of the conference in Liverpool to find out.
Progress, formed from the machinery of Tony Blair’s election campaign, are seen as Blairite.
Labour First are a slightly older organisation, and see themselves as the organisation of the “traditional right.”
Progress have lots of money from Lord Sainsbury and seem a lot slicker. Labour First have more links to the trade unions, and to the Brownites. There is quite a lot of crossover between the two.
Clearly, their old strategy of trying to break Corbyn through relentless pressure has failed. Caroline Flint admitted to a packed rally of over 200 Progress supporters at the Liverpool conference that attempts to make Corbyn crack through constant undermining were a failure.
Talking about the palriamentary party, Flint said: “Some people thought that when Jeremy won last year it could all be brought down very quickly and ended and he would implode. That hasn’t happened.”
Instead, the coup forced an election that made Corbyn stronger. Labour’s membership has expanded massively, and become much more Corbyn-y.
This made Conor McGinn MP nervous. He told the Labour First rally: “There’s a scene from my favourite film, Zulu” — the Michael Caine movie that shows how 150 red-coated British soldiers fought off 4,000 Zulu warriors at Rorke’s Drift in 1879.
“I’m not saying we are in the same position as the Welsh Regiment at Rorke’s Drift,” he joked. “It’s much worse than that” — but he took heart from what the moustachioed colour sergeant said to the young soldier in the film who asked: “Why is it us? Why us?” The sergeant’s answer: “Because we’re here, lad. Nobody else. Just us.”
Stirring stiff-upper-lip stuff. But oddly McGinn casts the moderates as the British soldiers who seized and conquered African lands in a naked and quite vicious imperial conquest — when the small band of redcoats were relieved by other troops, the British forces “did not spare wounded Zulus” on the battlefield, throwing them into the graves with the dead and massacring Zulu prisoners.
These were Zulu lands which the British seized and held only with force. Whatever fantasies get you through the day.  
Labour First had around 150 people squeezed into a room above a pub, and McGinn repeated his speech to another 150 people in an overspill meeting outside in the street.
So he had a few plucky fighters against the Zulu warriors of Corbynism.
The Progress people are worried about the new members too.
At their rally Wes Streeting MP said: “Labour is a party is divided.
“It’s not about MPs versus our party, in so many cases it’s between  longstanding, long-serving party members and those people who have joined, yes, in huge numbers and with great enthusiasm but are effectively trying to set up a new kind of party.”

So how to deal with the new members? There is no sign of a moderate mood to leave them behind by splitting the party.
The press like to write “split” stories because it is full of “drama,” and they don’t have as much an understanding of how hard it is to organise as most MPs.
Nor is there a mood for another challenge to Corbyn any time soon, because they can’t face another loss.
Oddly enough, I never heard the obvious solution — persuasion and co-operation.
Both Progress and Labour First people were keen to argue that the 41 per cent who voted for Owen Smith included most of the councillors and canvassers, which has some truth.
However, I didn’t hear the obvious answer: make the hundreds of thousands of new members into the next generation of canvassers and councillors.
If the moderates were truly confident in their views, they would surely think this door-knocking experience would persuade the new members that their “moderation” is the best way to go.
Instead, they seem to just vaguely wish all these new people will just go away.
Labour First are keen to recruit new non-Corbyn supporting members to Labour and to form local Labour First groups.
Both Progress and Labour First are strongly urging their supporters to stay.
All of which is a good thing — the more members Labour has from any “wing,” the better.
But both groups must know they probably can’t recruit or hold enough members to counterbalance the Corbyn surge.
So it looks like they are hoping the new members will just lose interest; some local parties are certainly welcoming new members.
But some MPs and parts of the Labour machine are actively trying to chase them away, suspending branches and individuals and excluding new members from votes.
So instead it looks like the more aggressive “moderates” are going to try rule book manoeuvres to hem Corbyn in — to use control of the National Executive Committee, with its stitched-together new anti-Corbyn members, to put a brake on the leader.
Presumably they think putting sand in Corbyn’s gears will make it easier to annoy and demoralise the new members until they drift off.
Which means that Corbyn’s supporters will have to view this as a long haul.
It will mean they will have to become more active in constituency parties until they also have as big a representation at conference and in other party bodies as they do in the leadership elections.