“Before the pandemic,”wrote Nate Silver the US political analyst, “I would have guessed that conservatives were COVID hawks and liberals were COVID doves.” It is an intriguing thought: perhaps, if a few key figures had made different decisions, the political argument of the past 18 months could have flipped entirely between Left and Right?

Yesterday I chaired a fringe meeting at the Labour Party Conference in which we were given a glimpse of that parallel universe: a group of senior Labour figures, mainly from the Left of the party, brought together by the campaign group Big Brother Watch to discuss “the Left case against Covid passes.” Blur your eyes and you could just make out how it would have looked — a Left that was still animated by a defence of civil liberties.

Rebecca Long-Bailey, the close Corbyn ally who came second to Keir Starmer in the Labour leadership contest, gave a sense of what opposition during the pandemic might have looked like had her wing of the party still been in charge. Yes, it would be easy to point out inconsistencies in her position (she talked favourably about Zero Covid and the Chinese example while simultaneously championing individual freedoms) but there was no doubting the sincerity of her deep suspicion of pandemic power grabs by the Tory government. For a party in opposition that’s not necessarily a bad instinct — and the way she spoke showed up the absence of that animus in Keir Starmer. She said she had done an online survey which revealed she was a ‘Left libertarian, right underneath Gandhi’ — so make of that what you will.

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Dawn Butler, a former minister in Gordon Brown’s government and MP for Brent Central, had had a heavy night at her legendary party — “generally I adhere by some rules, yesterday I probably failed in that a little bit at the Jamaica Party, and for that I apologise,” she joked. But her concern was specific and clear. She has voted against renewing the “authoritarian” Coronavirus Act each time because she feels that the “police state” that comes with such measures will always make life hardest for minority and vulnerable communities. Random checks and exclusion of certain people will only lead to one thing:

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Bell Ribeiro-Addy agreed with Dawn, and was additionally frank about the reality for her constituents in Streatham. She simply doesn’t see the point at this stage.

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Emily Benn may be the granddaughter of socialist Tony Benn, but the former Labour candidate is a true Blairite and happy to be described as such.

So it was especially interesting to hear from this very different wing of the party. Her concerns were more centred on the abandonment of due process and the ease with which her centre-Left colleagues surrendered the proper checks and balances on state power during this pandemic.

She described how the past year and a half had been “transformative” to her political views, and suggested that her fellow Blairites had forgotten her grandfather’s famous five questions about power, and how you keep it in check (see pic).

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Shami Chakrabarti has spent decades as the controversial face of the Left civil liberties lobby, and her argument came out of that principle: persuasion, not coercion, is how we should attempt to change behaviours in a free society. She feels that discrimination is so much the default tendency of an unchecked society that government needs to intervene explicitly to prevent it — don’t just mandating but banning vaccine discrimination — just as discrimination is illegal on other grounds:

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A reality check: as we gathered outside the secure zone in Brighton, the main conference hall (and even the Momentum fringe event) were subject to Covid pass checks as a requirement for entry. These voices are the minority dissenters — as it stands the mainstream Left is not interested in their arguments.

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Freddie Sayers is the Editor-in-Chief & CEO of UnHerd. He was previously Editor-in-Chief of YouGov, and founder of PoliticsHome.

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