Labour is on its way back to ­government was the bold message from leader Jeremy Corbyn in the confident speech that rounded off his party’s annual conference.

Yet the gathering in Brighton last week underlined how different this Labour administration would be compared with the last one that occupied No 10 Downing Street.

Any suspicions that Labour might water down the left-wing agenda outlined in its June election manifesto were swiftly dispelled by shadow chancellor John McDonnell’s speech to the conference on Monday.

The party’s leadership clearly feels that June’s result, when Labour outperformed the expectations of all but its most optimistic supporters, was a signal that it should be bolder on the policy front.

McDonnell’s promise to buy back private finance initiative contracts illustrated how determined the top team is to bury the legacy of the Blair/Brown governments, which had been such enthusiastic proponents of the controversial mechanism.

The conference underlined Labour’s strong support for renewable energy, which has become more totemic on the left following US president Donald Trump’s decision to quit the Paris climate change agreement.

Labour’s business, energy and industrial strategy (BEIS) shadow secretary of state Rebecca Long-Bailey told a reception of green groups that cutting carbon emissions would be at the “core” of the party’s approach to energy policy.

And McDonnell said in his speech that the public-owned energy companies, which Labour is championing, would be based on renewable power sources.

Meanwhile, the nuclear industry will be glad that Corbyn showed little appetite for stoking the party’s internal divisions on nuclear power.

Former energy and climate change shadow secretary Lisa Nandy revealed at a fringe meeting that she had been assured by Corbyn, when she agreed to serve in his shadow cabinet, that his main concerns were about military rather than civilian nuclear.

Long-Bailey provided further succour when she expressed concerns that the row over the cost of the Hinkley plant’s strike price was providing a “skewed and unfortunate” perspective on the wider nuclear programme.

But the conference showed that the Labour leadership is going for broke with a more radical approach to ownership of the utilities.

At the general election, Labour had pledged to bring National Grid back into public ownership and regain control of networks by altering their licence conditions.

But McDonnell’s statement that Labour is “taking back ownership and control” of the utilities, including water and energy, is much broader.

Labour’s radical mood on the issue was captured at a fringe meeting by Long-­Bailey’s predecessor Clive Lewis.

“We have a system that is not fit for ­purpose with large corporates making vast ­profits from our natural resources,” he said.

The distribution network operators should be first in line to be taken back into public ownership, argued Sam Mason of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, at the same meeting. “Distribution operators take enormous profits out of the system: we argue that distribution and transmission need to be taken back first and then sort out the energy mix that goes into it.”

Analysts at Jefferies have calculated that renationalisation of utilities would cost a future Labour government £77 billion at ­current prices.

But Cat Hobbs of We Own It told the fringe meeting that bringing utilities back into ­public ownership was affordable.

She said the anti-privatisation campaign had estimated it would cost £15-20 billion to compensate the shareholders of the gas and electricity companies, adding that the public purse would benefit from £1.5 billion per annum in dividends, while customers would indirectly benefit from a £1 billion annual saving on borrowing costs.

And the public ownership message is resonating with the public, judging by the results of a new report published at the end of last week by the Legatum Institute, a right-leaning think tank.

This showed that 83 per cent of the public back renationalisation of water, while 77 per cent support bringing back both electricity and gas into state ownership.

The task of turning these lofty goals into hard policy falls to Labour’s seasoned energy spokesman Alan Whitehead.

But while Corbyn has trumpeted that Labour is ready for government, details are still scanty about how the party would carry out its ambitious pledges.

Whitehead’s focus remains on his vision of a radically reformed energy market, acknowledging that Labour only supports a £1,000 cap on fuel bills as a stop-gap solution.

He said Labour wanted municipal energy companies to take control of the whole gamut of the energy system incorporating generation, transmission and supply.

And he suggested that the challenge of creating a more decentralised gas grid would be eased by how the underlying infrastructure had been developed by local utilities before the Second World War. The Southampton MP pointed to Bristol as an example of how it may be feasible to seal off this pre-war infrastructure to create local grids.

But while an enthusiast for a more decentralised energy system, Whitehead’s vision contains space for a continued National Grid, which he said would remain “absolutely essential” for transmitting energy from the nuclear plants and the offshore windfarms proliferating off the UK’s coastlines. “It needs to be there as a public good to hold things together.”

Mason agreed: “If we have offshore clean wind power we will need a gational grid and for it to be publicly owned.”

And Whitehead was alive to concerns that a decentralised system would need to be carefully thought through in order to avoid some areas being left behind.

But he acknowledged that it would take a lot of parliamentary legwork to introduce the changes needed to unpick the centralised system that the existing energy system is based on.

Whitehead will be seeking answers to some of these questions as he prepares to set out on a “green tour” of the UK, alongside former Labour MP Alan Simpson, who is advising John McDonnell on energy issues.  

Long-Bailey said Whitehead and Simpson would be seeking evidence from local businesses, unions and co-operatives about practical measures that will be needed to be put in place in a more localised energy system.

Utilities will be hoping that the door will be open to them, too.

 

What we learned at the Labour party conference

1. Driving down carbon emissions is core to Labour energy policy. It proposes publicly-owned, municipal energy companies should become the driving force behind deployment of renewable energy sources.

2. Labour remains committed to “taking back control” of energy and water utilities and insists renationalisation would be affordable.

3. Labour still advocates a £1,000 cap for annual domestic energy bills, but says this would only be the first step in a wider-ranging reform of the market.

4. Labour backs nuclear power for a clean economy – Corbyn’s nuclear concerns relate to military applications.