By David Osland

You know things are bad in the Labour Party when even the membership figures activists choose to quote are reduced to a marker of factional alignment.

On the official numbers, the total fell by 91,000 last year. But many leftwingers believe the true tally is at least double that, with a decline of around 200,000 since the Corbyn era.

The response from the top has been not just blithe unconcern but positive glee. That most of the exodus has been from the left has hardly gone unnoticed.

If socialists don’t like the changes that have been made, we are told, the door is open and we can leave. Keir Starmer’s politics don’t owe much to Lenin, but from his point of view, this will be a clear case of better fewer but better.

What I haven’t seen anywhere is a drilldown on the demographics of the departees, and whether women are disproportionately represented among the demoralised.

That thought occurs to me after I realised that three of numerous talented socialist feminists who entered Parliament six years ago have now publicly declared that they have cancelled their direct debits.

Thelma Walker represented Colne Valley and served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell. She quit the party in November 2020, the day after Keir Starmer doubled down on removing the status of Labour MP from Jeremy Corbyn.

No bridges have been left unburnt, and Walker is now a full-on advocate of the formation of a new socialist electoral vehicle, standing against Labour in the Hartlepool by-election.

She has also declared her support for the Northern Independence Party, which never really transcended its origins as a daft internet meme, and the more serious if no more successful People’s Alliance of the Left.

If Laura Pidcock had held North West Durham at the last general election, she would likely have been the left’s candidate of choice in the subsequent leadership contest.

Not that she would have been universally popular; her takes on the gender controversy have attracted accusations of transphobia, including on the Tribune website.

Despite those charges, she did win a seat on the National Executive in November 2020, but stepped down early last year, and ripped up her Labour Party membership a little while after that.

Most of her political energies are now devoted to the People’s Assembly, a campaign that has, to put it politely, been somewhat in abeyance of late.

Now Walker and Pidcock have been joined by Emma Dent Coad, who was wrongly debarred from standing again in Kensington after she was narrowly defeated by the intervention of a former Tory minister who briefly decided he was a Liberal Democrat before returning to a comfortable berth at Goldman Sachs.

Dent Coad this week repurposed a famous Shirley Williams declaration from long ago. “I’m not leaving the Labour Party,” she announced on Twitter and on Labour Hub. “The Party has left me. It is unrecognisable.”

And so it is. To utterly mangle an Oscar Wilde aphorism, for Starmer to lose three politicians of their calibre looks not just like carelessness, but something rather worse.

I’m not going to condemn these women for the decisions they have reached, or even tell them they are necessarily wrong. Activists have to decide for themselves where to direct their activism.

All socialists still in the Labour Party will identify with the frustrations that drove them – and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of others – to come to their conclusions.

Few will honestly be able to say that the thought of joining them has never crossed their minds, especially after reading some particularly egregious reactionary pronouncement from the shadow cabinet.

To compound the negativity, the left’s most vociferous parliamentary standard bearers have been minding their Ps and Qs since a dozen or so adherents of the Socialist Campaign Group complied with the order to remove their signatures from a Stop the War Campaign open letter last February.

The treatment of Jeremy Corbyn, and last weekend Diane Abbott, following her indefensible comments on racism, prove that no one is too big to have the whip withdrawn, which rules out NEC endorsement for future candidacies.

Yet socialist policies remain popular, and the current Labour leadership’s disavowal of them remains a disavowal of the only real answers to Britain’s deep-seated problems.

It’s just that their proponents are right now reduced to the tragic choice between acting as a minority voice of reason within Labour or freedom to speak their minds outside it.

That is not a counsel of cowardice. The choice of hills to die on remains as extensive as the Pennines that take in Walker’s former constituency.

But it is a recognition that the base case scenario in British politics remains a sweeping Labour victory in a general election within little more than a year, with a majority sufficient to make a second term more likely than not.

Those who stay live to fight another day. That opportunity may be as far away as the gap between the eclipse of Bennism and the rise of Corbynism, although the realities of economic crisis or even the brutal workings of contingency may give us those chances in a shorter time frame.

Whether they are back inside the Labour Party or still outside it, I’m sure Walker, Pidcock and Dent Coad will want to be part of that fight.

David Osland is a member of Hackney North & Stoke Newington CLP and a long-time left wing journalist and author. Follow him on Twitter at @David__Osland

Image: Houses of Parliament, London. Source: House of Common, London. Author: Berit from Redhill/Surrey, UK,  licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.