Many if not most people who become involved in Labour politics start by knocking on doors and encouraging other people to knock on doors. The most frequent contests for Labour’s foot soldiers and the staffers who organise them aren’t parliamentary but local races, in the various forms they take in different bits of the country. It’s still here that a lot of the party’s culture is set.
Following Hollie Ridley’s accession to the position of party general secretary around this time last year, I argued that what we were witnessing was the control of the party by its organiser class. The people who ran Labour’s ground game (and did so, in 2024, very well indeed) were ascendant; there was a lot of myth-making about Morgan McSweeney’s early career in Lambeth, bucking the trend of Labour defeat, and in Barking and Dagenham (where Ridley also cut her teeth), beating back the BNP. This disciplined, ground-focused approach from the top has huge benefits in opposition, and, we are learning, huge downsides in government. Organising and governing are different skills, and you can’t run the British state like a local election campaign.
One of the things about local election campaigns is that they are rarely the cold, clean-cut, left vs right of Barking and Dagenham. Labour frequently finds itself fighting (as in Lambeth) the Lib Dems, or the Greens, or local residents’ groups, or weird coalitions. Talk to a group of Labour activists and you will often find that some of their bitterest words are reserved for the Liberal Democrats or the Greens (particularly, for a variety of reasons, the Lib Dems). In devolution settings, there are different enemies like Plaid Cymru or the SNP (the Scottish Labour party really and truly hates the SNP). Memories are often long, and contests bitter. This attitude is more than just learned behaviour from one too many Lib Dem bar charts: it’s a manifestation of Labour’s concrete interest in maintaining its position as the primary party of the British left, and (to my view, correct) belief that a divided left does not best serve its own interests.
Despite the parties’ often vicious rivalry, the people who actually vote for the Liberal Democrats and Labour have historically been very good at sorting themselves: in the mind of broadly progressive voters there is already something of a progressive alliance. These calculations will only become more important as we enter into a multi-party era, a process that a glance at any polling will tell you is well under way. We have just seen the Greens overtake Labour in a national poll for the first time, standing in second to Reform. Polling like this (with the caveat that it is only polling and the next general election is a long time away) suggests that it’s possible Labour could lose that position as the primary party of the British left. In a climate like this, Peter Mandelson’s “nowhere else to go” comment doesn’t apply to anyone, really. Labour, however, continues to evince an attitude to other parties that is somewhere between condescension or, in discussion of the Greens, a particular kind of naked hostility that suggests many think Polanski’s party is merely an extension of Labour’s factional battles.
This is not the attitude for the current moment, however. Labour needs to see the bigger picture: however deeply felt competition with other parties of the broader not-right might be, the bigger aim is to beat the populist right. For all Bridget Phillipson wrote that as deputy she’d take “be taking the fight to Reform, the Greens, Plaid Cymru and the SNP”, if you’ve seen Reform adviser James Orr drawl that the Alternative for Germany is basically an unfairly maligned group of “egg-head economists”, you will know that none of that list are like the others. The aftermath of the Caerphilly Senedd by-election seems a good time to learn this lesson: that the seat went to Plaid Cymru was a relief and should be treated as a good outcome for everyone who doesn’t want to be ruled by an unholy coalition of pub-bore kleptocrats and Christian nationalists, however painful the Labour vote share might be for the party’s supporters.
This isn’t to suggest that the only contest is with Reform and the Tories, or that Labour council candidates should stand down or soft-pedal in favour of Plaid or anyone else. I’ve often found advocacy for a progressive alliance wrongheaded (these are different parties and they offer different things) and out of touch with the realities of campaigning (given, for example, the Green’s ropey record of local government control, Labour’s harsh comments on their failings are more than justified).
What I do believe Labour should do, however, is show it has an understanding of the world as it is currently operating, in which old party loyalties and voting blocks are crumbling and in which categorisations based on old grudges and a sweeping “Labour vs the rest” mindset need to be put aside. What this moment requires is hard to square with the attitudes of Labour members, staffers and politicians I speak to – attitudes that resonate across the bottom and top of the party.
At a recent event on beating the Greens, the strategist John McTernan argued that Labour’s problems stem from not being able to “answer the question, who are you?” Instead of telling journalists that “not everyone wants to hear we are left wing”, Labour needs a strong offer to people who might choose one of its rivals. Wes Streeting is right to say that there is an anti-Reform majority in the UK. Labour needs to position itself as an attractive place for those sentiments to coalesce. It should, I believe, be able to do so – but the brittle exceptionalism bred by being first-past-the-post’s primary left party is not helping it.
[Further reading: The Labour right is fracturing]
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