The right wing of politics had been scattered and the Tories were out on their arses. The Nimbys cowered. The civil service awaited new orders. With no more worlds left to conquer, a Labour cabinet minister announced the new enemy of the people was a Bat Tunnel in Buckinghamshire. The Labour Growth Group was the biggest caucus of MPs in the Parliamentary Labour Party. Labour Yimbys (“Yes in My Back Yard”) held a rally on the first night of party conference.
It wasn’t so long ago, that heady summer. This wasn’t Old or New Labour – this was “Based” Labour. If you’re not familiar with Gen-Z slang, this means a party courageously, coolly focused on addressing hard truths. Based Labour wanted to arrest decline and Make Britain Rich Again by promoting economic growth and building stuff. I knew Tories who voted for their ancestral opponents because they were convinced that only Labour had the guts to take on the vested interests and smash the system. I knew Labourites who were reading Dominic Cummings’s blog to work out how they could smash that system.
They seemed to have all the momentum in the first months of the government. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor kept going on about growth – remember “spades in the ground”? – sometimes to no end at all. They presented a Budget that raised billions in taxes for spending on the NHS and then branded it a “Budget for Growth”, to the bewilderment of many. It was one of the ways this leadership has played both sides against the middle and pleased nobody. “The word ‘growth’ in and of itself, repeated endlessly as it was, did very little to move the things that actually need moving,” says a Based Labour figure. A lot of time was used up and little was achieved. The country was not turned into a building site. At this point in the electoral cycle we can say that, barring a miracle, the New Jerusalem will not be delivered to timetable before the next election.
The blame can be spread around. This week we’ve had another former Spad, fresh from government, denouncing the chronic inability of Whitehall to get anything done, as well as Labour’s lack of preparedness for government. As another Based Labour figure put it to me, despairingly: “Labour has completely lacked a political economy, never developed one in opposition, and there is a growing recognition this is at the route of a lot of the government’s failures.”
Based Labour is now trying to extract itself from the ruins of Starmer 1.0 and start again in the tussle for influence over this directionless Prime Minister, beginning with his Starmer 2.0 update. Ministers are being proffered copies of a new Beveridge Report authored by the Labour Growth Group, which makes what has been described by one figure involved as “a binding political argument that both speaks to the moral task of taking on vested interests and remaking the broken system people see around them”. I’m told that “the growthy or Based Labour tendency is at an inflection point”.
But there’s a reason Based Labour don’t have a big public profile, and that’s that no one ever voted for it. Some Based Labour figures privately say Labour’s light-on-detail manifesto set the party up to do very little in government. With Starmer weakened by the loss of his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney – considered a well-meaning if sometimes misguided ally of the Based cause – they will struggle to keep his attention.
With little guidance from the manifesto, we’re now looking at a return to Basic Labour, guided by the instincts and desires of MPs for the rest of this parliament. Eighteen months on from the election, the largest group in the Parliamentary Labour Party is no longer the Labour Growth Group but the soft-left Tribune Group. The leaflets circulating in Gorton and Denton ahead of the 26 February by-election say “Labour is listening” and promise an end to “hatred and division”. Labour MPs, when asked about the achievements of this government, talk about employment rights and the lifting of the two-child benefit cap, not a load of new towns promised on the never-never, or other Based schemes.
Others blame Peter Mandelson – who can now be freely criticised because of his fall from grace – for pushing the “Ming vase strategy” at the election, as well as the general crushing of rigorous debate in the opposition years. The latest claims about Labour Together (the vehicle credited with much of Starmer’s success) – that it paid for a smear campaign against journalists investigating their funding – have led to further reflections on what could have been done differently. A Based Labour figure, who had been involved in the Labour Together project, put it to me with weary resignation: “The whole thing was so unnecessary. Keir Starmer didn’t need to lie to get elected as leader, he was going to get elected anyway. They didn’t need to run a dirty tricks campaign. They didn’t need to deny or hide the donations. We were given an unprecedented home run, a completely discredited Tory party, but instead of winning honestly with a mandate, we decided to get elected by promising nothing.”
When Margaret Thatcher faced opposition to her radical programme, she knew what papers she could wave in the face of truculent Wets: the manifesto, the “Stepping Stones” report, the Hayek cue cards at the bottom of her handbag. Now, with the future of this Labour government up for grabs, the radicals of Based Labour find themselves pretty empty-handed.
[Further reading: Marco Rubio doesn’t think about Europe at all]
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This article appears in the 18 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Class warrior
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