Forty-four years ago this month, the Labour Party faced a battle for its soul. The 1981 deputy leadership contest pitted Tony Benn, the prophet of the radical left, against Denis Healey, the warhorse of the old right. Healey won “by an eyebrow” – or 0.8 per cent.
Benn blamed the decision by Neil Kinnock and 30 other Tribune Group MPs to abstain rather than endorse him. Physical as well as rhetorical violence would follow. At that year’s Labour conference in Brighton, Kinnock was assaulted by a young Benn supporter in the lavatory of the Grand Hotel. “I beat the shit out of him,” the future leader later recalled. Benn, for his part, had declared that he had no intention of “going round with a first-aid kit helping people to bind up their self-inflicted wounds”.
The enduring split between the “soft left”, as Kinnock and his supporters became known (to their disdain), and the “hard left” dates from that tumultuous year. “I wish we had a better name for it,” Lisa Nandy once remarked of the soft left. “It sounds a bit like you’ve collapsed into a jellyfish.”
The soft left has long struggled to dispel a reputation for ideological passivity. But its internal influence is not in doubt. It enabled Ed Miliband to defeat David Miliband, played a sometimes-forgotten role in the ascent of Jeremy Corbyn, and delivered Keir Starmer a landslide victory in the 2020 leadership election.
When Starmer entered No 10, he took the soft left with him. Advance predictions that its tribunes would be discarded following the election proved mistaken. But one by one, they have now fallen: Louise Haigh, Anneliese Dodds (Starmer’s first shadow chancellor), and Angela Rayner. Rather like Tony Blair’s cabinet, Starmer’s is moving rightward with age. Only Miliband and Nandy endure as senior soft-left figures.
But for this faction, exile provides opportunities. Should a soft-left candidate make the deputy leadership ballot, they will frame the contest as a referendum on the government (64 per cent of Labour members, according to a poll by Survation, think the party is heading in the wrong direction). “I’ve always believed that soft-left organising is an oxymoron, but hope to be proved wrong,” quips one source.
The deputy contest has coincided with the launch of Mainstream, a new group months in the making that is demanding a “course correction” from the government. Key backers include Andy Burnham; Clive Efford, chair of the Tribune Group of MPs; former New Labour cabinet ministers John Denham and Clare Short; Stewart Wood, a former aide to Miliband and Gordon Brown; Clive Lewis MP; and Geoff Mulgan, who led the No 10 Policy Unit under Blair.
Some in Labour have responded with derision. “There’s a lot of ‘formers’,” one Starmer ally remarks acidly. “They couldn’t organise their way out of a paper bag,” contends a soft-left MP. Others retain an enduring enmity for Compass, one of the forces behind the new group, for its 2011 decision to allow members of rival parties to join.
But Mainstream’s boast that it represents a rare coming together of forces is not without justification. Kinnock, who tells me that the group’s “radical realism” is “exactly the combination that we need”, and Jon Lansman, the former Momentum chair who managed Benn’s 1981 campaign, find themselves united in support.
It was once Starmer – wooing the “Love socialism, hate Brexit” tendency during his leadership campaign – who embodied the soft left’s dreams. But a first year marked by foreign aid cuts, (attempted) welfare cuts, and punitive party management has alienated even natural sympathisers.
As such, the soft left finds itself looking for a new figurehead. Plenty have alighted on Burnham, who has drifted far from his Blairite roots (he began political life as a researcher to Tessa Jowell and was nicknamed “flog ’em and Burnham” for his hardline positions as a Home Office minister) and now champions a “popular left programme”. One MP tells me that Mainstream is “key to organising to get him back in and winning the leadership”.
But Burnham’s potential route back to parliament remains fraught. Even if a fellow Manchester MP, such as his former campaign manager Andrew Gwynne, stood down and triggered a by-election, Burnham’s candidacy would need to be approved by the party’s National Executive Committee, which remains broadly loyal to Starmer. Just one member, Cat Arnold, voted against a deputy leadership timetable denounced as a “stitch-up”.
Partly for this reason, some senior soft-left figures even ponder whether Miliband, who enjoys a +74 approval rating among Labour members, could make a comeback. “It now feels much more likely,” one MP close to the former leader tells me.
Should the soft left fail to identify a candidate, its mainstays fear, the leadership will fall into the lap of Wes Streeting. Here is their logic: as long as Rayner remained the front-runner for the position, Starmer’s right-leaning critics had no incentive to question his future. But with the fall of the “Red Queen”, that obstacle has been removed. A premature debate?
Perhaps, but as they contemplate the aftermath of the potentially cataclysmic May 2026 elections, every wing of Labour is making such calculations. The deputy leadership election – unlike Benn vs Healey – won’t determine the party’s fate. But the contest unfolding in the shadows certainly will.
[See also: Louise Haigh: The fiscal straitjacket facing Labour must be broken]
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This article appears in the 10 Sep 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Fight Back
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