The Labour left has been unhappy for about as long as Keir Starmer has led the party. The Labour right, by contrast, has mostly been pretty chippy. After the long, difficult war years under Corbyn (and you will find people who describe it in these terms), they were happy to have won: first internally in 2020 and then nationally in 2024.
People from this bit of the party think of themselves as pragmatists; they want to win. At last year’s conference, I watched the then-new general secretary Hollie Ridley talk about winning being “personal to me” in the tradition of those on the right of the party who put victory above policy and term themselves “clause one socialists”. If you believe that, per Herbert Morrison, socialism is what Labour governments do, then you just need to get a Labour government in order to triumph. We reached the end of history as imagined by many in this bit of the world last summer.
But what comes after victory? Is it always good for you? Even when they win, factions don’t necessarily emerge from wilderness years stronger. The singlemindedness required (or believed to be required) for the victory can leave you brittle and unwilling to acknowledge divides among allies. This is the situation the Labour right finds itself in now.
Having fought on the same side in the war against Corbynism, Labour First and Progressive Britain (formerly Progress) set up the umbrella group Labour to Win in 2020 to ensure the broadly construed right won the peace once Starmer took power. The problem, however, is that these groups represent quite profoundly different worldviews. The party’s Labourist old right and the Blairite progressives do not think the same things. Also in the anti-Corbyn mix was Labour Together, closer to the old right and inflected with thinking from Blue Labour.
Labour to Win did, in fact, win, and its internal organising efforts remain impressive. The NEC is leadership-loyal. With some exceptions (the motion on Gaza passed this week, for example), things generally go the way the leadership wants on conference floor and in other internal competitions. But at all levels of the party, the factional differences of opinion are now rising to the surface. While the left and the soft left are more united than they have been at any point since at least I began a decade ago, the right’s disunity is becoming ever more apparent.
This is in partly because it’s just going badly. Were Starmer’s Labour Government basking in warm approval ratings and quietly ticking through its manifesto pledges, there would not be the need for conversations that might turn into arguments. Obviously, that isn’t the case. Alison McGovern’s short-lived deputy leadership campaign was one moment where these tensions broke the surface. The Birkenhead MP and former Progress chair mounted a bid from the party’s liberal right wing, unavoidably raising, as she did so, the suggestion that this wing might not be entirely happy with the current state of play. Notably, she argued that Labour must defend inclusivity, in an intervention widely seen as a critique of Labour’s flat-footed reaction to Reform.
Questions about immigration and integration are at the front of the national debate. This week in Liverpool it was the de facto conversation when talking to MPs and councillors and wonks and hacks. But attitudes on this question even differed between the Blairite business secretary Peter Kyle and the Blue Labour-favoured Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood. Kyle welcomed the “best and brightest” from around the world to come to Britain. Meanwhile, Mahmood emphasised that “contribution is a condition of that welcome”. The policy burden of her speech (and among the policy headlines of the conference wholesale) was changes to ILR rules, meaning it will take longer for people to be able to settle in Britain. These sentiments are theoretically compatible, but a moment’s look at the wider political context (and the traditions of the two politicians) points at a meaningful political difference. Mahmood’s speech, and appointment, has won praise from UnHerd, but the direction it signals is not universally popular, even on the right of the party.
The question, then, is how long can Labour’s progressives stay in alliance, even loosely, with Labour’s conservatives? It seems clear to me that the tensions visible in recent weeks will only deepen as Labour continues to wrestle with how to turn its electoral ship around. Arguably, the anti-Corbyn period of unity was the exception, and we are now returning to normal service. Coalitions fit for the politics of one context do not always work in another.
You still find people who object, wholesale, to the idea that there is a “Labour right”, who take offense at the idea that anyone within Labour could be right-wing, instead of accepting that no matter their politics everyone is to the right of someone and to the left of someone else. The long-term goals of the Labour right seem to be in a state of flux, requiring space to think out difficult questions of allegiance, ideology and priority. Or perhaps opposition to the notional Burnham challenge can keep the band together for the foreseeable.
[Further reading: Starmer has not yet proved he can solve our quicksand politics]
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