Highlights from Monday’s Restore Labour Democracy rally.

The clampdown on Labour democracy has gone hand in hand with a range of unpopular and out of touch decision from the government, said Richard Burgon MP, opening Monday’s Restore Labour Democracy  online rally. That’s why a coalition of trade union leaders, including Sharon Graham of Unite and Andrea Egan of Unison have joined MPs in launching a statement calling for the restoration of Party democracy, which members can sign here.

Over four hundred people, from Cornwall to Fife, attended for the rally, which was addressed by Unison General Secretary Andrea Egan. She explained that attacks on Party democracy had serious consequences for the country: political mistakes and moral failure, from the fiasco over winter fuel payments to attacking the rights of migrants and aiding the genocide in Gaza. She said a “deeply toxic, rotten culture was pushing Labour towards the cliff edge” and attacked the decision to bar Andy Burnham from running in the recent Gorton and Denton byelection, with the result that Labour lost the seat. Members should choose their candidates and have a say in the policy process, she said, and MPs like Richard Burgon and John McDonnell should be able to speak out without the threat of being suspended.

Fire Brigades Union General Secretary Steve Wright pointed out that the disastrous appointment of Peter Mandelson was a factionally motivated decision that has cost the Party and country dear. He called on union members to start making demands on their leaderships to put pressure on the government to deliver much-needed change for working people: more public ownership, stronger workers’ rights, an end to wealth inequality and an international agenda based on peace.

Alex Charilaou of Momentum said that if Labour wanted voters to trust it again, the Party had to start by trusting its own members. He pointed out the role Peter Mandelson played in overseeing the longlisting of candidates for Party selections and encouraged socialist members of the Party to stand as Conference delegates and support important rule changes: reducing the threshold of nominations needed for candidates to run for the Party leadership and restoring the power of longlisting parliamentary candidates to local CLPs.

Paul Holden, author of The Fraud, spoke of his nearly four-year investigation into the shadowy Labour Together faction, headed by the now dismissed Morgan McSweeney, which propelled Keir Starmer to power and organised the accompanying war on Jeremy Corbyn supporters. “There was a pretty profound relationship between Morgan McSweeney and Peter Mandelson,” he said. McSweeney and his allies effectively took over the Labour bureaucracy and used this to clamp down on internal democracy. He explained how a small cabal of Party bureaucrats were effectively able to choose around a couple of hundred Labour MPs, many of whom had undeclared donations funnelled into their election campaigns. This takeover has had profound repercussions, in terms of the adoption of unpopular policies, the consequences of which the Party was now reaping in byelection defeats.

Campaign for Labour Party Democracy Chair Rachel Garnham, gave an overview of the battles for Party democracy waged by the campaign over its fifty-year existence. She recalled Nye Bevan’s observation that “the right wing of the Labour party would rather see it fall into perpetual decline than abide by its democratic decisions.” She outlined how the current leadership has sidelined the work of ethnic minority activists, run down the role of Women’s Conference and refused to implement structures for disabled members. She stressed the need for good candidates to be elected to Party bodies at all levels, in particular Gemma Bolton, Yasmine Dar and Minesh Parekh for the National Executive Committee this year.

Brian Leishman MP, newly elected in 2024, talked about the high levels of inequality in Scotland, particularly in life expectancy and what he described as “bordering on Dickensian levels of poverty.” Public services had been hollowed out, with private capital in charge of vital infrastructure, exploiting it for shareholder gain. So why can’t Scottish Labour make any political headway? Brian blamed the refusal of the dominant faction, backed up by the UK leadership, to focus on the central class issues that could win popular support and solve the problems facing Scottish people.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP urged members to stay and fight for socialist policies and Party democracy. “People didn’t vote for managed decline,” she said, “they wanted change.” If we listen to our members and restore internal democracy, she argued, we have a much better chance of winning back the lost support.

NEC member Gemma Bolton said the campaign to restore Party democracy was essential to restoring fairness and inclusivity. She highlighted how the Party was now re-running the elections for Young Labour positions having discovered ‘irregularities’ after some socialist candidates made gains.

Former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell MP underlined the importance of the issue, because the political moment was so dangerous and the current Labour Party was not in a position to be able to defend us from the rise of the far right. The policies he and Jeremy Corbyn MP developed to transfer wealth and power to working people were blocked by the establishment and one of its channels for doing so was funding a project within the Party that would bury such ideas. Instead, the leadership adopted policies that are “just not Labour” and in doing so have created a level of disillusionment that he had not seen in fifty years of Party activity. He pointed out that not only MP candidates were blocked by McSweeney and Mandelson, but also council candidates, leading to byelection losses, with much worse to come in May. The only way to save the Party was to restore its democracy at all levels.

Dr Rathi Guhadasan, Chair of the Socialist Health Association, highlighted the role of huge donations, such as those received by Health Secretary Wes Streeting MP, in influencing policy in a direction that was not in the interests of NHS workers and users.

Ian Byrne MP closed the rally, with a call for an independent investigation into the role of Labour Together and the damage it had wrought in Labour’s heartlands.