'Crush the splitters!'

It can be hard to get in the door of a party conference without a half dozen leaflets

It is always an enormous pleasure to traverse the City Square in the great and noble city of Dundee. Particularly when, as today, it is suffused with sunshine.

I associate it with youthful memories: of Christmas, of concerts at the Caird Hall, of the Armitstead Lectures in the same venue (are they still running? I hope so, must check).

More recently, I recall the square thronged with fanatical, cheering Arabs, saluting the latest triumph in the glorious saga of Dundee United. The League, the cup, the league cup. Ok, not that recently, sadly.

Incidentally, how sagacious of United to abandon this season's cup run in order to focus on the league. That was the plan. Wasn't it? Ach, go for it, lads.

This morning I trod the square in pursuit of a different objective. To cover the Scottish Labour conference, Day Two.

It is the custom, at such events, for the eager and the zealous to pursue arriving delegates, journalists and observers, seeking to thrust leaflets into sundry hands.

There were a few diligent souls in action this morning, cajoling and campaigning. But I was struck by one in particular. He was loudly urging solidarity, ending his plea with the phrase "crush the splitters!"

This appeal has totemic significance for the left. It glances back to historic concerns that the true Socialist message risks dilution through internal squabbling. The workers united etc.

But was there perhaps just the hint of a faint smile on the face of our City Square lobbyist? Was he privately nursing the thought that the "splitters", as he would define them, are already, if not crushed, then certainly somewhat subdued, at least by comparison with the Blairite past?

Jeremy Corbyn addressed the conference on Saturday

But still the objective of crushing remains extant. One speaker this morning urged conference to root out the "neo-liberalism" which she associated with Labour's recent past.

A briefing by the Campaign for Socialism laments the "timid centrism" of Kezia Dugdale and the "absurd 'pint at the football' gimmicks" of Jim Murphy. Both, lest you forget, former Scottish Labour leaders.

There was no such talk from Jeremy Corbyn. He eschewed suggestions of crushing. But he did urge unity, placing it deftly within the context of an appeal to Labour history in the shape of the 1915 Glasgow women's rent strike.

Labour conference delegates are never happier than when they are invited to reflect upon past triumphs for proletarian solidarity. The more distant, the warmer the glow.

At first, I wondered where Mr Corbyn was going with this. Was it simply nostalgia, the chat of the dispossessed in the allotment shed?

No, he was seeking to posit a lasting and consistent set of Socialist values - and to suggest that disquiet with those would simply seek to bolster the Tories and their "wealthy establishment interests".

Now, a pedant might offer up a wry smile at a plea for party unity from a man who made a persistent habit of voting against the Labour whip in the Commons. Mr Corbyn would undoubtedly argue that the whip was ineptly wielded at the time, in pursuit of the wrong aims.

But the unity plea was substantive, allied to another familiar Socialist trope. The argument that class solidarity transcends other links driven by nationality. That, consequently, constitutional concerns are subordinate.

Scottish Leader Richard Leonard will address the conference on Saturday

Mr Corbyn sounded bored with Brexit - or, more precisely, exasperated by its continuing dominance in UK political discourse.

He contrived, deliberately, to sound particularly irritated with the persistent demands, including from within his party, including here at the conference in Dundee, for a further Brexit referendum.

Yes, he said the words. He uttered apparent support for a "public vote to prevent disaster". But it was pronounced in a perfunctory fashion, a calculated throwaway by contrast with the emphasis which he placed on the alternative prospect of a general election or the advocacy of an alternative form of Brexit.

Richard Leonard takes this further. The Scottish Labour leader believes that, in addition to Brexit, the discourse in Scotland must be shifted away from independence, if at all possible.

Now, you may say that such a pitch contrasts with some of his interventions at first minister's questions. Only on Thursday, he was pursuing the FM about the issue of an unauthorised indyref2 (she was agin it).

But that was a topical question. More generally, Mr Leonard - as he will emphasise in his speech today - wants away from the constitution and on to issues which engage with dispossessed communities. With the working class and the workless.

He believes that, in a battle over independence, the Tories can always corral the Unionist vote. So he believes that Labour needs to get off that roundabout - and pursue its own issues: welfare, poverty, housing.

Mr Leonard knows that Labour is still apparently lagging in the polls. Behind the Tories in the latest UK monthly survey. Seemingly third in Scotland, behind SNP and Conservative. But he believes that can be redressed by a positive emphasis on radical Socialist redistribution; by a focus on topics like workers' rights and social ownership.

Wearily, one senior party figure tells me it is a tale which the party has sporadically told, an uncosted, unworkable, unwinnable programme. But then he's probably just a splitter, ripe for crushing.