The Tribune Group has hit the all-important number. As I understand it, there are now well over 80 Labour MPs aligned with the revived soft left parliamentary caucus. If the party has a leadership election this year, there will be a candidate of the soft left on the ballot paper – though the machinations about who that candidate will be will continue to roll on. Rub the crystal ball and you can see the shape of the contest: a soft left candidate versus a candidate of the party’s right.
But which right? It’s an underexplored question. Factionalism in the Labour party is too often understood as a left vs right phenomenon. Yet the party’s long history and rich tradition of argument means it’s all a bit more complicated than that. The left and right of the party are themselves split into various competing groups.
The split on the party’s right was brought into fresh relief this week by an opinion piece in the pages of the Daily Telegraph. It was written by the Birmingham Edgbaston MP Preet Kaur Gill, a Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Home Office, and announced that she was now an acolyte of the Blue Labour faction. “I am Labour, and I am Blue Labour because I believe politics must once again be rooted in responsibility, contribution and the courage to confront difficult truths,” she wrote.
The Blue Labour group mixes radical economic policy (some Blue Labour MPs label themselves “Bennite”) with social conservatism rooted in the conventions of the Abrahamic religions. The shorthand for its doctrine is the three word slogan “flag, faith and family”.
The article caused a flurry of excitement in Westminster: was this Shabana Mahmood sending out a lieutenant to raise her standard? Could a leadership challenge be imminent? That’s all quite overblown, and it is worth saying that Kaur Gill is a firm Starmerite. It was more interesting for the divisions it exposed on the right of the party, and what that might mean for any leadership election.
Blue Labour manages to excite fury in the PLP for two reasons. On the one hand, many Labour MPs are suspicious that it is just Blue. They suggest the faction wants to reverse progressive victories, stigmatise sexual minorities and even “put women back in the kitchen”, as one backbencher put it to me.
The other critique is that the group is far less distinctive than its supporters imagine. Most Labour MPs are concerned about immigration, want to redistribute wealth and opportunity to left-behind parts of the country and care about family life. Blue Labour, these critics allege, is superfluous. Many of them are on the “old right” of the party, which has been around for a lot longer than Blue Labour (established in 2009).
Bridget Phillipson, a major figure on the party’s old right, summed up her case against Blue Labour way back in 2019 in the pages of the New Statesman. She wrote of her “deep aversion” to social conservatism in the Labour party because of “my suspicion that for people like me it would have been a social, cultural, and economic prison. My grandparents were immigrants. My mother brought me up alone.”
Her fellow travellers on that wing of the party reacted harshly to Kaur Gill’s article. It’s all a bit venomous. One Blue Labour MP, picking up the backlash to the article, parodied their colleagues’ reaction as: “You’re a brown woman, you shouldn’t think that.”
The old right has its roots in British trade unionism. Contrary to the Thatcherite simplification of history, the unions in this country have often been a very conservative force in the Labour movement. Broadly put, this side of the party has advocated a muscular social democracy: strong public services, good jobs flowing from a homegrown defence industry, embracing the flag.
Its tradition is personified by Ernest Bevin, the war-time minister of labour and postwar foreign secretary. Awkwardly, Maurice Glasman, the intellectual guru behind Blue Labour, also claims Bevin for his tradition. An MP of the old right told me this week that Glasman doesn’t understand Bevin and dismissed him as “an intellectual lightweight”. So now the two factions seem to be wrestling over Bevin’s ashes. Yet despite the animosity, Blue Labour and the old right have some common ground and a common animosity toward the third and most famous major faction on the party’s right: the Blairites.
Blairism itself could be summarised as a revisionist offshoot of the old right which adopted late 20th-century liberalism. Blairites have embraced internationalism in the form of enthusiastic engagement with Europe and interventionist wars. They are socially progressive. And they encouraged consumer capitalism. They were much happier than other parts of the party about bringing the private sector into the delivery of public services.
This third force on the party’s right don’t always refer to themselves by that name. Wes Streeting, who has been defined as the leading Blairite in the government, instead prefers to call himself a progressive and a member of the “New Right”. While Streeting and his allies are undoubtedly influenced by Blair’s period in government, they are determined to adapt their politics for the current moment.
One MP on the old right summed up their suspicions of the Blairites: they were the people who thought it was a good idea to withdraw public subsidies to loss-making estate Post Offices back in the Noughties (Blair saw that the internet would replace many of their functions). Such drives for efficiency and modernity were antithetical to the conservatism of other parts of the party. This may seem eccentric, but such disputes are the stuff of Labour history.
There is now a fear among both old right and Blue Labour MPs of a “neo-Blairite restoration”, as it was described to me, with the Health Secretary at its head. Why? The usual cynical reasons – their people will get all the good jobs – are part of the mix. But there are also fears about what the Blairite “market knows best” approach might look like in government. Blue Labour and old right MPs fear that the favoured projects of their factions – Pride In Place and the Industrial Strategy – might be axed under a Blairite leadership. The biggest fear is perhaps over immigration, which Blairites have always been more open to for both political and economic reasons. Blairites are also heavily involved in the party’s debate over Britain’s relationship with Europe. Conversely Blue Labour is now strongly associated with the Home Office under Shabana Mahmood, and her hawkish approach to borders and sovereignty. Any future leadership contest will be a question of policy as much as personnel.
Resentment toward the Blairites has also been building because of an impression that their people are overrepresented in Government. “A lot of the people who have been promoted are associated with Wes and the Blairites. It’s become factional,” one Blue Labour aligned MP remarked. There is reciprocal animosity from the Blairites towards the other groups on the right. One Blairite minister in particular enjoys quipping about how Blue Labour is “two men with a website”.
All three factions have active extra-parliamentary wings which try to develop policy and win internal party elections. Progressive Britain, formerly Progress, has carried the Blairite flame since 2007. Labour First, set up by John Spellar in the 1980s to fight the Militant Tendency, is still the home of the old right. Blue Labour, uniquely among the three, began as an extra-parliamentary brain trust in the dying days of the Brown ministry before building up to its current caucus of MPs (over 20, one senior Blue Labour figure claims).
The future is for sale. But as one source familiar with the thinking in No 10 pointed out, any new leadership would quickly run into the same problems and difficult choices as Keir Starmer. Another caveat to all of this: factionalism is generally not the first motivation of MPs in moments of crisis. At a Westminster Christmas do, a gaggle of depressed backbenchers told me they would sign Wes Streeting’s nomination papers if it meant Labour’s poll rating improved – none shared his politics. So a leadership contest might not fall along neat factional lines.
There is also another danger in thinking through taxonomies of faction: there is a quite a large bit of the PLP which you might call the “soggy middle”. These are Labour people through and through, but ask them about their tradition and they are hard pressed to answer. This is especially the case in this parliament, where a number of MPs are accidental legislators, winning the most unwinnable of seats by a handful of votes and suddenly finding themselves asked whether they’re a Bevin or a Bevan person.
It can take MPs a long time to get to know their seat and that can inform their politics. Dan Carden, the leading Blue Labour MP, started out as a firm Corbynite when he was elected in 2017. Kaur Gill was seen as a basically Blairite figure until her public conversion to the Blue Labour cause this week (if you want some explanation of that, look to her Birmingham Edgbaston seat, which mixes white affluent Tory types with a large Muslim community).
But the fight for the Labour right is on.
[Further reading: Can Labour recover?]
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Subscribe here to commentReading this makes me think of two things.
First, Blair was a master of control to keep the competing elements of Labour from tearing it apart for 13 years and second, Starmer appears remarkably weak in his endeavours to keep it all together.
Having been handed a big majority on a plate, it beggars belief that the Party have made a long series of unforced errors, that have annoyed pretty well all sections of society.
A key factor, perhaps, is charisma. Charisma gives a leader the ability to persuade, motivate and influence those who may not agree.