By Mike Phipps

There seems to be a lot of confusion around on the left at the moment. Most socialists would like an immediate general election, but some are uncertain whether a landslide victory would be a positive thing. Obviously the bigger Keir Starmer’s majority, the less influential the small number of left MPs would be, in terms of parliamentary arithmetic. That’s how things stood under Tony Blair’s huge majorities.

But equally, if Starmer’s majority is very slim, there are likely to be fewer left MPs’ voices being heard and more pressure on him from forces to his right. In any event, we are some way from a general election and Labour’s massive poll lead over the unelectable Liz Truss may diminish as the Tory Party and its media supporters close ranks around Rishi Sunak.

Reasons to be gloomy

Events in recent months have given the left a lot to be gloomy about. The Forde Report was finally published after a two year delay. It found a wealth of evidence of discriminatory behaviours based on religion, race, gender and sexual orientation, which the Report says was “shocking”. I discuss this in detail here.

In case I be accused of being unduly partisan, it’s worth reading an outsider’s view, from Peter Oborne who has no factional axe to grind. His detailed analysis led him to the devastating conclusion that “Corbyn has been the victim of a grotesque miscarriage of justice.” He went on to warn:

“Forde has provided Starmer with an opportunity to put this right. He is unlikely to rise to the challenge because Starmer has fashioned himself as the nemesis of the Labour left and not a statesman who can bring together all factions of his great party.”

This was prescient. Apart from a belated, perfunctory statement of apology, the Labour leadership, aided by an almost total lack of interest in the media, after some initial mis-reporting, has largely ignored the Report.

There are other reasons for the growing sense of injustice felt on the left. Every step forward it makes in terms of winning democratic support in the Party appears to be thwarted by a factional apparatus. Hard-won rule changes that democratise the Party have been overturned by the National Executive Committee, including crucially on the input of local constituency executives in the selection of potential parliamentary candidates.

Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, newly elected to the Party’s NEC, found herself suspended for speaking at an event organised by a proscribed group. Several organisations have been proscribed by the Party in the last year and some members have been penalised for retrospective association with them.

A number of prospective candidates have been removed from consideration by the Party hierarchy. Emma Dent Coad, who had already been an MP from 2017 to 2019 and is Leader of the Labour Group on Kensington and Chelsea Council, was blocked from running for the winnable Kensington seat.

Two days earlier, Maurice Mcleod was similarly barred from being shortlisted for the Camberwell & Peckham seat. Labour List reported: “The exclusion of Mcleod, who is a racial justice campaigner and former editor of The Voice, Britain’s leading Black newspaper, comes amid concern over the number of Black men selected to stand for Labour.”

Many MPs expressed their dismay at the decision and Labour Black Socialists issued a statement noting that, “Maurice’s blocking seems to suggest that having solid support in the community that you wish to represent in Parliament might be a reason not to be selected.” The same might have been said about Emma Dent Coad in Kensington.

A few days ago, Lauren Townsend was blocked from standing for the Milton Keynes seat, allegedly in part for ‘liking’ a tweet from SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon, in which she had simply announced that she had tested negative for Covid.

This follows the blocking earlier this year of Maya Evans, Deputy Leader of Hastings Council, and Stroud Council Leader Doina Cornell from running for their local parliamentary seats.

All of the individuals mentioned were seen as good enough by Labour’s apparatus to be Council candidates and local representatives for the Party. Their exclusion from parliamentary shortlists can therefore be seen as entirely motivated on factional grounds. It also suggests that he Party hierarchy is pretty contemptuous of activists who put in the hard work at local level and build support in the community, who are then pushed aside when seeking to take their campaigning to the next level.

Suspensions, expulsions, manipulation of the candidate selection process all lead many activists to draw the conclusion that the Party leadership is deliberately trying to make the Party an unwelcome environment for the huge number of Jeremy Corbyn supporters who joined after 2015. If so, it’s proved an effective strategy over the last two and a half years, with over 150,000 members leaving.

Even sitting MPs are not immune from the squeeze, with Sam Tarry being deselected in his Ilford South seat after being sacked from Starmer’s shadow ministerial team for supporting striking workers and “making up policy”. Liverpool West Derby MP Ian Byrne is also the subject of a reselection fight, as is Apsana Begum, MP for Poplar and Limehouse.

Her case has raised serious concerns. The Party’s decision to continue the selection trigger process while she was signed off sick from work has led to accusations that the leadership has abandoned its duty of care towards her. Simon Fletcher, who has worked for successive Labour leaders, concluded: “The widely-held view on the left is that, if Begum were not a member of the left-wing Socialist Campaign Group of MPs, the party’s response would have been completely different.”

Starmer’s dilemma

Yet there is not much evidence of a systematic purge of left MPs, with Zarah Sultana and others being safely readopted. And even open seats have seen some successes for the left, with, for example, the selection of Faiza Shaheen in the winnable Essex seat of Chingford. At local government level too, despite many regional variations, there were modest gains for left candidates in many boroughs as a result of May’s Council elections. 

In so-called ‘blue wall’ areas especially, in the Tories’ southern heartlands, left wing candidates have done surprisingly well. Here Labour’s right wing is less entrenched and former Corbyn-supporting members have broken through using new forms of community activism.

Conference watchers will note that at Brighton last year and Liverpool last month, it’s the left that continues to make the running on Party policy. The right of the Party, more interested in factional battles, really have very few ideas and the agenda is being set by the left on a range of policy fronts. Less optimistic voices note that Starmer openly ignores or dismisses Conference resolutions – for example, on public ownership or immigration – that he does not like. His recent speeches suggest a return to the failed policy of supporting government austerity in order to stabilise the public finances.

One thing is clear: if the absence of significant class struggle was one of the factors that ultimately isolated the Corbyn project, the rise of industrial action in recent months may well push Labour towards measures that genuinely tackle the cost of living crisis. That movement will need to be sustained given that, if Labour does win the next general election, it will be in the worst economic conditions the Party has inherited for over half a century.

Labour’s massive poll lead suggests this is a likely scenario. But we could be over two years from an election and a great deal may change. It was only in April of this year that the Independent noted that Labour was “flailing against the calamitous and incompetent Conservatives” with only a narrow poll advantage.

“Labour has proscribed seven groups affiliated with the party’s left and, in the meantime, is expelling members who merely liked or commented on social media posts that bear the groups’ name. It is clear that Starmerism has so far been defined by the eradication of Corbynism, which has had damaging consequences at grassroots level. Constituency Labour parties (CLPs) are feeling the strain of divisive rhetoric coming from the top.”

If Labour’s poll lead shrinks, Starmer will face a dilemma. The strategy so far pursued of driving out the left was premised on the belief in 2020 that Boris Johnson’s 80-seat majority was not likely to be overturned at the next general election. So moving the Party to the centre-right was the first step in a two-term strategy. Now the next general election looks eminently winnable, Starmer will have to calculate how much support and activity he needs from the Party grassroots, many of whom currently feel ignored, manipulated and mistreated.

Withdrawal is not a strategy

Since the Party Conference season ended, an estimated 20,000 new members have joined the Labour Party. Many of these are not committed to any particular faction but are simply repelled by the Tories in office and want a Labour government. They will not be happy with a Labour leadership that continues many of the same policies, and it is important that the left is present in the Party when those conversations take place.

It’s understandable that many members who joined to support Jeremy Corbyn no longer feel welcome in the Party and have dropped out or are looking to other parties to continue their journey. While not criticising individuals who feel they have had enough of Starmer’s Labour, it’s important to say that withdrawal does not constitute a strategy.

Some on the left are in danger of prioritising representation over power. Wouldn’t it be good, they suggest, to have a few independent socialist MPs who can freely speak their mind? Many admire the impact that the one Green MP Caroline Lucas has had at the national level, free of the constraints of oppressive Party whipping which has seen the Socialist Campaign Group behave more cautiously in the last two years. This may look attractive, but it ignores the crucial issue of power.

At local level, the Greens have had a taste of this. Yet, in office, running Brighton Council, they behaved little different from the Lib Dems, with an equal lack of understanding of, or sympathy for, the broader labour movement.  In fact, “Tories on bikes” was one of the more printable epithets used to describe them by angry occupying workers, during the Greens’ 2013 attempt to impose a modernisation scheme on Council refuse workers which could have cost some up to £4,000 in lost pay. GMB workers were again at loggerheads with the Green-led Council in 2021 after it removed free parking subsidies for hospital staff in the middle of the pandemic.

The idea that the left should sacrifice its essential place in the Labour Party in order to have one or two ‘genuinely’ socialist MPs, who will be better at representing the left but further away from power than ever, seems misguided.

Those on the left with a long term view of the Party’s ills can rightly point out the Party was never originally socialist. They bemoan the legacy of Labourism. But the proliferating small left currents outside the Party in recent years, which claim to be the ‘alternative’ to Starmer, are often characterised by their complete lack of connection to the organised labour movement.

Breakaways from Labour have inevitably been dominated by individuals or small cliques. This was the case with Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party and George Galloway’s various electoral vehicles. Worse, the weaknesses, both political and personal, of the individuals who lead them are amplified, precisely because they seek to find a base of support outside the labour movement. This was particularly noticeable with the social conservativism of Galloway’s Batley and Spen campaign, which ramped up its patriarchal rhetoric in an attempt to win a section of the Muslim vote. It can also be seen in the tendencies towards conspiracism in former MP Chris Williamson’s trajectory away from Labour.

These formations invariably fail electorally. Another recent example was Thelma Walker, a long-standing Labour member and MP for Colne Valley from 2017 to 2019, who left the Party and ran for the Northern Independence Party in the Hartlepool by-election in 2021 and got just 250 votes. And when such formations do fail, they are subject to the same sense of demoralisation and blame that Labour members put themselves through at times of defeat, often resulting in further fragmentation.

These experiences should be borne in mind, when some on the fringes of the Party propose Jeremy Corbyn leave and set up a rival organisation. While Corbyn undoubtedly has a following far greater than previous proponents of this strategy, history suggests that the prospects for success of such an initiative would be bleak. It is inconceivable that the kind of coalition Corbyn was able to build around himself inside the Labour Party – including hundreds of thousands of members, a committed, if small, section of the parliamentary Party, the leaderships and activists of major trade unions – could be replicated outside of the Party structures.

Staying in – to do what?

The debate about whether to be in or outside of the Labour Party is a recurring one and too often a substitute for a discussion about what strategy socialists actually need to pursue inside, beyond voting for left candidates wherever possible. ‘Stay and fight’ sounds good, but it needs concretising. In part, it entails using the Party as a mechanism to reach out to voters and build support for socialist ideas among those whose interests those ideas would serve, but who are not yet convinced of their need. But it also involves continuing the effort to make the Labour Party an accessible vehicle for those already engaged in local and sectoral struggles.

There are some reasons to be optimistic. There are significant things being done by Labour in power at local and regional level. James Butler recently highlighted this:

“Labour policy may be in a deep freeze at national level, but some of its new councils have distinctive plans. Wandsworth’s campaign focused heavily on a council housing revolution to counterbalance the luxury glass acreage in the north of the borough. On the diminished Labour left, the Preston Model of insourcing and local regeneration still holds pride of place; adapting municipal socialism of this kind in a prosperous London borough will take ingenuity and careful strategic thought.”

Nonetheless, Councils can adopt a living wage policy and declare themselves Right to Food boroughs. Even where Labour is not in control, local Labour Councillors who join picket lines add legitimacy to a strike in a way an individual would not. They can use their profile to push for action on the cost of living crisis, the climate emergency and much else.

For activists who do not hold public office, there are still many spaces in which to organise: some of the mutual aid groups that sprang up during the pandemic are now reorienting and adding to the growth of social aid groups. The rising cost of living crisis, poverty and other avoidable social problems present a challenge for those who want to do politics differently: “They need to be completely embedded in the community, they must understand needs and have an activist approach to solving problems,” argues Councillor Maya Evans, in a recent article that illustrates in one ward the possibilities of Party activism.

For those focused on activity inside the Party, there is a huge job to be done in organising programmes of education for new members, not only about the history and breadth of the movement, but very practically on how the Party works and how to fight to change it from within; plus, there are opportunities provided by Labour Students and Young Labour which are firmly in the hands of the left.

Officerships in CLPs, such Trade Union Liaison, Political Education, LGBTQ+, Youth and Women’s posts, create a degree of political space to organise radical activities. “People should proceed until apprehended rather than assuming they can’t do anything,” one long-standing activist told me.

Some of this may look a bit business-as-usual compared to the exciting opportunities that opened up in the Corbyn years. But it’s important to recognise that the conditions that produced the Corbyn surge seven years ago have not fundamentally changed: if anything, they have intensified. James Schneider points out:

“The Corbyn project first showed that we weren’t losing because the majority of the population just loved the world as it was; quite the opposite. It’s actually that the common sense in this country has remained broadly progressive, while not having political expression, while its organs were being defeated and crushed. The Jeremy surge has given us new strength and energy that pulls us out from the margins, and out from critique into organizing and proposals. That’s very important. The incline of the left is up, even if the angle may not be very steep. There’s a lot of rebuilding and new work that’s going on.”

Comforting though it may be to think otherwise, it is unlikely after twelve years of Labour in Opposition that the vast majority of people seeking a political alternative will look anywhere other than the Labour Party. And this is especially true of the overwhelming majority of trade unionised workers. The new leadership of Unite the Union may have a less hands-on approach to involvement in the Party’s structures than its predecessors, but it’s not taking its resources and affiliation elsewhere anytime soon. Nor is there any prospect whatsoever of Enough is Enough morphing into an electoral formation.

The right have a strategy: demoralise the left and make them unwelcome in the Party. They can secure the expulsion of a few hundred, but their hope is that thousands will leave of their own accord. It would be entirely counter-productive to help them achieve that aim. The left must have the confidence of its ideas and fight on where it matters most.

To paraphrase Tony Benn, Labour isn’t a socialist party, but it has a lot of socialists in it, more than any other formation. In Jeremy Gilbert’s words: “The Labour Party isn’t the team; it’s the very pitch upon which the game is played… To leave the Party on the basis of the actions of the current leadership is, I believe, insulting to Labour members, including our best MPs, who continue to struggle every day to advocate for and support different positions to those advocated by Evans and Starmer.”

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

Image: Keir Starmer and Lisa Nandy. Author: Rwendland, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.