You can only put faction ahead of party and country for so long. In the world of ideas, policies and personalities feuding is inevitable. And from its inception, two world views have battled for influence in Labour. On one side those who want capitalism to be actively reshaped or even replaced; on the other those who only see the feasibility of its amelioration.
Between different groups from the Fabians to Tribune, from Bevanites to Gaitskellites, from Jenkinsites to Bennites, there has been a struggle between these two worldviews. The winners of factional struggles have always exerted some degree of bureaucratic control over policy and positions. Favourite sons and sometimes daughters, have been parachuted into seats, placed in the House of Lords, elevated to the Cabinet or Shadow Cabinet, while the conference and the NEC have been manipulated to reflect one side over the other.
Within reason this is healthy. The contestation of ideas and people creates better ideas and people. Balanced factionalism tests people and positions and makes the party stronger. But something unprecedented happened to Labour in 2020. It was hijacked by a tiny clique of people and turned away from its historic mission to create a fairer society, let alone one that is much more equal.
What is different about now is that those who tightly control the party machine do not recognise the validity of other views and work not just to be the dominant voice in Labour, but the only voice. Those who do not share their highly particular and rigid perspective are not viewed as opponents but enemies. In attempting to control Labour they are killing Labour.
So how has a party with fierce rivalries and sometimes bitter competing groups, moved from healthy and nuanced factionalism to hyper-factionalism and even potentially post-factionalism, in which a once diverse and plural party with different wings and different voices becomes a narrow monoculture? This is the story of what’s happened and what it means for both Labour and our democracy.
The crucible is the 2015 Labour leadership election in which Liz Kendall, standard bearer of a very desiccated form of late Blairism, secured a grand total of 4.5 per cent of the membership vote. This stood in some contrast to the 60 per cent enjoyed by the winner, Jeremy Corbyn. The key conclusion drawn by Kendall’s small band of humiliated right-wing faction fighters was that their politics had zero chance of taking an open route to the leadership. For them the clear lesson was that control could only be won cynically through subterfuge. To achieve that in the short term meant masking their project to get it through the majority soft left Labour party membership. In the long term they could only rule by ridding the party of anyone who wasn’t part of their 4.5 per cent.
The “mastermind” of the Kendall campaign, who learned these bitter but important lessons, was Morgan McSweeney.
The second decisive event which accelerated the shift to hyper-factionalism was the 2017 general election, when against the odds Corbyn won 40 per cent of the vote on the kind of mainstream social democratic manifesto unthinkable during the Blair or Brown years.
But for McSweeney and his fellow travellers this result was simply viewed as impossible. In his world-view victory could only be secured by the most cautious compromise with the forces and interests of the establishment. The reality of the highest Labour share of the vote since 1997, and the mobilisation of thousands of young activists, therefore had to be made unreal. Corbynism wasn’t just deemed undesirable but unfeasible. So, the now evidently possible had to be made permanently impossible.
They therefore started airbrushing the result from history and worked to sabotage the chances of it happening again. Peter Mandelson is on record as saying he would work every day to undermine Corbyn, while Tony Blair strongly inferred he would rather see a Conservative government than one led by Corbyn. Behind the scenes, as detailed in Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, party bureaucrats worked to undermine the 2019 election campaign, diverting money from target seats, and funnelling it to their preferred candidates. Corbyn was undermined at every turn by people who now demand unswerving loyalty to their leadership.
To be clear, this is not a defence of the politics of Corbyn. He was – and remains – a politician lacking many of the essential skills of leadership. But the programme on which he stood in 2017 was popular and largely reflected a post-crash reality that capitalism needed to be reined in once more.
And here is the real tragedy of Keir Starmer, the ten pledges that he stood on for the leadership in 2020, in effect “Corbynism without Corbyn”, were exactly the kind of policy ideas the party and the country needed. But the pledges weren’t offered as a genuine attempt to create a mildly social democratic future but instead as a cynical ploy to win the leadership, so that once in office McSweeney and his acolytes could turn against those policies and the people who backed them. Like the American GIs in Vietnam, the justification was that “to save the village you must burn the village”.
Once in office, they secured control of the NEC, replaced the general secretary with one of their own and appointed all their best faction fighters to key jobs in the party and eventually the government. The key move was to ensure their candidates were selected for the 2024 general election. The list is long and dispiriting, but some stand out, such as Luke Akehurst, a McSweeney stormtrooper on the NEC who parachuted himself into the safe seat of Durham; Morgan McSweeney’s wife being found a seat in Scotland; Faiza Shaheen being shamefully turfed out at the last moment in Chingford.
At the same time, as this author found out, activists’ historic social media records were scrutinised on an industrial scale and anyone not in line with them had their membership suspended, a useful tool to take people out when there are key votes or selections going on.
In all this, what mattered more than the action taken against candidates, MPs and activists, was the self-censorship people imposed on themselves for fear of being disciplined. Labour members prize the political and social life the party affords them, whether that’s the PLP or a local party. And they feel a deep loyalty to the party and at least to the office of the leader. Such weakness was exploitable.
The haunting phrase of one anonymous Labour briefer from this small faction over fears Muslim voters were being put off the party by its policy on Gaza in 2023 was of “shaking off the fleas”. That took the othering of members of your own side to an extraordinary new level.
Alongside this endeavour to reshape the party in their image came the ideological and policy transformation of the party, which in part had the same factional purpose in mind. Policy positions were taken not just because they were deemed to be right economically or socially but because they actively alienated much of the membership. From the winter fuel allowance to Gaza, no policy offence was big enough to both symbolise Labour was no longer Corbynite and to encourage members to resign from the party. With alternatives to the left in the shape of Your Party and especially now the Greens, but many just giving up, rumours from within Labour suggest the membership is now as low as 200,000 from a high of over 500,000. If that is the case, then the threat to Labour’s continued survival is now existential.
The Starmer-McSweeney project is profoundly anti-democratic internally and externally. It silences any alternative voices within and applies the same coercive approach to the country, because under our wretched first-past-the-post voting system most of the electorate must resort to the least bad option. Up until now the media showed little interest in what has been an internal party affair, the narrative being the Tories needed replacing and Labour under Starmer was now in safe hands to do so. The self-proclaimed grown-ups were back. But no one really looked under the bonnet to see what was there.
Because this was a project that only knew how to win control of the party and then the state, not how to run a country. People skilled only in the art of party faction fighting had no interest and little ability to think about how to change the economy and the state. Not being the Tories, not being Jeremy Corbyn, them being in total control, that was enough. So, unlike Labour in the run up to 1997, they never did their intellectual homework. There was no deep thinking, no vision and no programmatic policy agenda, not least because that was what Corbyn did and therefore had to be eschewed. But it’s much worse than that. Their success at being faction fighters, the determination to eradicate all their enemies has left the government with none of the bandwidth or the culture to think through how you run a complex economy and society. Not least who you run it with.
Because government today demands not just the skill to navigate complex systems, but the ability to negotiate with others how decisions are made and then implemented. We are witnessing the breakdown of the old state and old delivery mechanisms. Central controls and diktats no longer work. Saying, as the Prime Minister regularly does, that he will simply double down when faced with every setback, or roll his sleeves even further up his arms, is a hopeless response to what is needed. Their increasingly obvious failure to even be competent technocrats is a direct consequence of their hyper- factionalism.
In a recent piece in the New York Times, Ezra Klein made the case for a broad church in the Democrat Party to revive their fortunes, the same applies to Labour. He does so by quoting Bernard Crick from his 1962 classic text In Defence of Politics where Crick argued that, “Politics involves genuine relationships with people who are genuinely other people, not tasks set for our redemption or objects for our philanthropy.” This honouring of difference is not just morally right but instrumentally and intrinsically essential to good progressive governance.
This late-stage crisis of Labour should be seen in the context of not just the long-term crisis of global socialism but more specifically the ameliorative strand of social democracy that, since Tony Crosland’s 1956 Future of Socialism, was based on sharing the proceeds of growth. This later approach fuelled Labour through to the Blair years. But it was also based on the gains made by the post war Labour movement, and the vast array of ideas and countervailing forces in society and the economy that wrestled a better deal out of capitalism. The decline of those countervailing forces, most notably the unions, and then the global crash denied Labour both the proceeds of growth to share and the movement to back it.
Today the only change mechanism the party has is bureaucratic control, and that is breaking down. In the absence of ideas there is only a machine. And where there should be negotiation there is only imposition. To maintain their grip, what starts with deceitful promises to Labour members ends with grannies being dragged into police cells because they dare to oppose a genocide. As their project inevitably crumbles and they look beyond Starmer, the same trick will be turned, to gesture left and red-wash themselves to appeal to a membership that like so much of the country is to the left of them. But for all that Wes Streeting and others praise the victory of Zohran Mamdani, the machine they sit on top of would almost certainly have blocked him from being a candidate in the first place.
It was sheer audacity that, at the height of the Corbyn-Momentum era, a tiny group of people, led by Morgan McSweeney and Steve Reed, now the Housing Secretary, ran a clandestine campaign to secure control of the party and the country via the Orwellian named Labour Together. But today we have an administration revealed as narrow, shallow, brittle and alarmingly defensive. It was always going to unravel. You can only put faction before party and country for so long. Because while you can bureaucratically control a party for a while, you can’t control a country in the same way. The victory of Lucy Powell in the deputy leadership election shows even their control of the machine is now slipping. And the launch of Mainstream (which the author is co-founder of), along with the revival of the Tribune Group of MPs, shows the vast bulk of the membership still want essentially the programme Starmer promised them in 2020, along with a return to internal party pluralism. Meanwhile the shocking by-election result in Caerphilly a few weeks ago shows an electorate willing to back an alternative to Reform, but only if it is deemed progressive.
As things stand, Keir Starmer has the lowest ratings of any prime minister in history and Labour is at its lowest point ever in the polls. Of course, governing is hard, pragmatism should rule and people should be given time and a chance. But there is simply nothing remaining in this project intellectually or culturally to suggest it can reset the party or the government in the ways that are needed. Indeed, quite the reverse. Because of their hyper-factionalism it’s more likely they will pave the way to a Reform government, especially if they leave first-past-the-post in place. The only hope they offer is that other parties are worse than them.
Back at the 2017 general election Wes Streeting, the poster boy for the Morgan Tendency, was felt to be in trouble in his Ilford North seat. Momentum, the fleas on the dog, got wind of his plight and redirected their activists to the seat to help save him, which they did. This is what Labour should be, robust in their differences, but certain that the real enemy is without, not within. Labour is dying because it’s being denied the oxygen of debate and difference. It is time for the party to breathe once more.
[Further reading: It’s time to free Labour from this useless leadership]
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