Socialists must play a full part in getting a Labour government elected, argues Mike Phipps.

If 2019 was dubbed the “Brexit election”, Rishi Sunak’s decision to go for a July poll is already being dubbed “kamikaze” by Conservative MPs.

Polls show not only a 20 point lead for Labour over the Tories, but the Party ahead on all the main political issues – health, education, housing and unemployment, of course – but also, the economy, taxation, law and order, immigration and Brexit. Only on defence is Labour two points behind, which is why Sunak will make the issue of ‘Britain’s safety’ a major plank of his campaign. The problem is that only 13% of voters think this is the big issue – it comes ninth in voters’ priorities.

The air of despondency among Tories is palpable. Steve Baker, MP for Wycombe, said he was sticking to his plans to go on holiday, admitting he was likely to lose his seat. This in a constituency that has been Conservative since 1951!

A high price

Labour activists should be overjoyed at this state of affairs, although a sense of relief may be a more accurate description. After 2019, the prospect of overturning a Tory 80-seat majority looked bleak. Now it looks entirely feasible – largely because of the complete incompetence, corruption and lies of the Tories. But the transformation of Labour’s electoral prospects have come at a price.

Long-standing MPs have had the Party whip withdrawn, often on a blatantly factional basis, most significantly Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott. Councillors have been suspended for voting for a ceasefire in Gaza or told they can’t stand again for Labour despite impeccable records – and not just councillors. Popular and successful North of Tyne Mayor Jamie Driscoll was kept off Labour’s longlist for the new mayoralty in the North East. Emma Dent Coad, Labour’s Kensington MP from 2017 to 2019, was kept off the list for Kensington.

This strategy of repressing the left has left many activists feeling bruised, undervalued and demoralised. And yet, we have a huge responsibility. We have to defeat the Tories – that’s not something we can leave to the leadership, who don’t always seem to be very good at it. We may not think much of the diluted policies that Keir Starmer is likely to run on, but this is a once-in-five-years opportunity to have conversations with people who are politically engaged at election time, like no other.

This is vital – because despite the polls, the result is not guaranteed. To get a majority of just one, Labour needs a 12.7% swing – bigger than Blair’s in 1997 which gave him a 179 seat majority. And that is in conditions where we are unlikely to win back Scotland, and where the Tories have introduced tough new voter ID laws.

Lost voters

Secondly, the local election results earlier this month underlined that the Party is losing Muslim voters. Labour’s Richard Parker became West Midlands mayor by a margin of just 1,500 votes. Akhmed Yakoob, a pro-Palestinian Independent, came third with over 69,000 votes, 11.7% of the overall vote share, and in Birmingham, taking nearly a fifth of the votes cast. Labour also suffered significant losses in the North West.

Prior to the local elections, Labour had already lost around 100 council seats over Gaza. On average, the Party’s support fell by eleven points since last year in wards where more than 10% of people identify as Muslim. Any shift now in Labour’s position may be too late to win back this lost support.

That said, Sadiq Khan’s re-election as Mayor of London this month bucked  the trend of Labour losing Muslim votes. It underlined that where a candidate takes a principled position – for example, Khan called for a ceasefire early on in the conflict – Labour support among Muslim voters remains strong. On this basis, the Labour Muslim Network has issued a statement saying it will be working hard in the upcoming general election “to support Labour candidates who have consistently supported the Muslim community – particularly in Gaza.”

Labour should be concerned about other demographics too. The Party won seats for the first time in 2017 under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership in areas with large numbers of private renters and graduates and high house prices – not because Labour was ‘woke’ or fixated on identity politics, but because young graduates are being ever harder hit by precarious jobs and housing.  If Starmer’s Labour triangulates too far to conservative positions on immigration and civil liberties, younger voters could easily fracture to minor parties.

Additionally, an estimated 1.4 million people who voted Labour in 2017 did not vote in 2019. Non-voters need to be inspired. That requires strong leadership and exciting policies. Yet Keir Starmer’s personal ratings are low. And a poll in January 2024 found 47% of voters are unclear what he stands for.

The fact that Keir Starmer has broken every one of the ten pledges he made when he ran for the Party leadership will not be lost on the Tory press. They will ask: does he believe in what he said then or later? This is the treatment Neil Kinnock got in 1992 – he thought he would be praised for modernising the Party but was instead hammered for his inconsistency.

One of Labour’s achievements in 2017 was to establish a dominant electoral narrative –  that austerity was a political choice and not an economic necessity and it wasn’t working. In 2019, our narrative failed. Yet today, Labour increasingly seems to accept chunks of the Tory narrative. On immigration, the front bench tells us that deportations to Rwanda won’t work, rather than they are immoral; on the NHS, that inefficiency is a bigger problem than under-funding.

Playing a full part

It’s vital that the left plays its full part in this election. As Kate Dove, Momentum Chair, says: “Let’s get the Tories out. Fourteen years of Conservative austerity have broken Britain: our NHS and public services are starved of funding and on their knees, our privatised water full of sewage, a housing crisis rages on, while the wealthy few laugh their way to the bank.

“Momentum stands with the trade union movement: the first priority is to kick Rishi Sunak out of Downing Street and elect a Labour Government instead to bring our railways back into public ownership and implement a New Deal for Working People. This must be just the first step to the comprehensive social and economic transformation the country is crying out for.

“Our role is clear. In this election Momentum will mobilise to keep out the Tories and elect socialist and trade unionist Labour MPs in their stead, from Zarah Sultana to Ian Lavery, John McDonnell to Apsana Begum. Bring it on.”

Fire Brigades Union leader Matt Wrack agrees: “Fourteen years of Tory rule have left working people poor, angry and desperate for change. We have suffered the worst drop in wages in 200 years. Public services, including the fire service, are in crisis.

“We need strong trade unions to turn things around. The next government under Keir Starmer must scrap the anti-union laws that stop workers standing up for themselves. The Minimum Service Levels Act bans many public sector workers from striking even when they have voted democratically to do so.

“Labour’s New Deal for Working People sets out a plan to scrap this authoritarian law, along with the 2016 Trade Union Act, as well as delivering a package of reforms to boost workers’ rights.  The FBU will fight to get rid of the Tories and to see this package delivered within 100 days of a Labour government.”

The left can approach this election with some confidence. The conditions which produced the huge 2017 vote for a radical Labour manifesto have not gone away – in fact, they have intensified. That’s why such ideas remain popular: the scale of the damage done under the Tories means this is no time for steady managerialism.

Any incoming Labour government will not have much of a honeymoon. It will be faced with hard, real-world policy choices. Our task is to prepare for that debate now and put forward the radical policies that will inevitably be needed to confront the climate and cost of living crises.

In practice, that means highlighting the radical socialist policies which have been adopted by Labour Party conference,  including public ownership; investment in public services, proper financing for local government and a Green New Deal, housing; civil liberties  – and also talking about things the frontbench is retreating from.

We should prioritise working for those candidates committed to a pluralist party and use  the campaign to build a stronger grassroots membership.

To this end, Momentum are inviting activists to sign up for socialist canvasses and help get elected Labour candidates who will stand up for socialist principles.

Imposing candidates on local CLPs

Talking of candidates, Labour has still yet to announce over a hundred of its candidates, some in its safest seats, others in key battlegrounds. While a lack of preparation or the need for due diligence might be plausible reasons for this, there is also a suspicion that the Party has deliberately prevaricated in its selection processes in order to be able to centrally impose candidates in key constituencies at the last minute.

Labour List reported that one of its readers claimed that their Constituency Labour Party had been requesting permission to select a candidate since 2022 but had had “not one single response” from the regional director “nor any contact from anyone in the Labour Party to explain why we now cannot select.”

The same factional prevarication can be detected in the case of Diane Abbott. Abbott’s local Party unanimously reselected her as their Labour candidate prior to her losing the parliamentary whip for over a year for something she wrote but quickly apologised for. Other Labour MPs have been reinstated far more speedily for more significant offences. Labour will decide whether Diane Abbott will stand for the party at the election “within the next few days”, its campaign co-ordinator says.

A Momentum spokesperson said: “Keir Starmer rightly called Diane Abbott a ‘trailblazer’ as Britain’s first black woman MP. He should now reinstate her as a Labour MP and let her run as the Labour candidate in Hackney North and Stoke Newington, as local members voted. Anything less is an insult to Diane, her constituents and all those who have been inspired by her example.”

The Voice newspaper was blunter. “If  Starmer wants Black voter support he should reinstate Diane Abbott,” it headlined. A poll it conducted showed 80% of black voters could ditch Labour over the treatment of Abbott, who faced intolerable abuse in Whatsapp messages circulated by Party staffers a few years ago, on top of the threats and insults the MP routinely gets on social media. “The fate of the long-serving MP, regarded as a champion of the Black community, will signal to voters if they can trust Labour or if their support is being taken for granted,” said the Voice.

You can add your name calling on Keir Starmer to restore the whip to Diane Abbott here.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

Image: https://yorkshirebylines.co.uk/politics/voter-fatigue-do-we-need-fewer-elections/. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported