Why even the ‘soft’ left is under attack, and what we might do about it. 

George Eaton of the New Statesman asked me to write something about the current state of Labour and the future of the ‘soft left’, after I recorded this podcast with Alan Finlayson. The piece I wrote for NS is here.Thanks as ever to George for prompting me to write something (I’m always grateful to the commissioning editors who get me to actually write this stuff down).

Before that article had been published I’d already decided to write a longer version, partly to answer some of the questions I was being asked by various friends that weren’t fully covered in that polemical opinion piece, partly to flesh out the argument a bit. This is that longer version, most of which I wrote before the short version was published, but also incorporating some response to some of the reaction the piece got on Twitter. 

The Revenge of the Right

What is happening to the Labour Party? Every week seems to see a new report of people being prevented from standing as parliamentary candidates, despite backing from unions and local members. High-profile party members from Ken Loach to Neal Lawson have been expelled or threatened with expulsion. Loach, a lifelong stalwart of the Marxist left, has spent many years of his political life outside the Labour mainstream. But Lawson is a former adviser to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, a campaigner for electoral reform and a key figure of the ‘soft left’: that vaguely-defined political tendency that has characterized the mainstream of Labour membership opinion since the 1980s. What is going on here, and is there anything ordinary Labour members can do about it? 

On its face, what is happening is that a small network of members and bureaucrats has taken control of the party, who hold political views well to the right of most Labour members or voters.  In part this is because Starmer has appointed them to key administrative positions, in part it is because they have the backing of major unions, who control most of the positions on Labour’s National Executive Committee. In particular, as long as they have the support of the country’s largest – Unison – they can pretty much get away with anything. 

This right-wing network, represented by two factional organisations – Labour First and Progressive Britain – has also increased its power over the past couple of years by improving its performance in elections to the NEC (running candidates on a joint slate called ‘Labour to Win’), but this only accounts for a small portion of its current influence. Nationally, these organisations have a very small base of support amongst ordinary party and union members, but very strong support among local councillors, party and union officials, and MPs. Right now, their influence derives from their control of a handful of committees at the national level, which have the power to suspend or expel members and to determine the composition of the shortlists from which local parties select parliamentary candidates. 

Why are they doing it?

Factional politics is nothing new in the Labour Party. What is new is the ferocity and complete disregard for democratic process with which the right are currently prosecuting their war, not just on the remnants of the revolutionary left, but on people whose views are clearly aligned with the majority of current members. There are two ways of explaining this behaviour. One is that the right-wing of the party firmly believe that it is only by attacking and politically neutralising the left that they are ever able to win enough votes from the right voters to form governments. The other is that they are doing this to protect their own jobs and political positions, with little regard for any other potential outcomes. 

First, let’s consider the possibility that the Labour right genuinely believe that this is the only way to win an election. This in turn is a view that has two possible bases. One is the recognition that under Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system, the only votes that really matter are those of swing voters in marginal constituencies. According to this view, it is no use Labour piling up votes in its urban strongholds as the party did in 2017; the only way to get a parliamentary majority is to win over Tory voters in the small towns and suburbs. Those voters hold views well to the right of both Labour members and of lifelong Labour voters in the cities or former mill and mining towns. So the only way to win them over is by very visibly taking a position which is well to the right of Labour’s own political mainstream, and by silencing those voices in the party who might represent that mainstream, or even positions to the left of it. 

The other justification for pulling Labour radically rightwards would be one that few on the Labour right would probably make consciously, but which might well inform their thinking implicitly. This would be an argument that is generally Marxist in orientation, albeit pessimistic about the current strength of left-wing forces in Britain. From this perspective, as the experience of the 1980s and 1990s showed, there is simply no way that Labour can form a government if the full force of the capitalist media is ranged against it, and so it must convince some sections of the corporate class that it is on their side. The only way to do that is to make a spectacular show of attacking, expelling and disciplining its own socialist and progressive members.  

Those would be the possible justifications for the right’s current factional rampage, but they are far from convincing even on their own terms. The 2017 election result under Corbyn saw Labour increase its vote share more than at any election since 1945, gain 30 seats, and deprive Theresa May of a majority. Labour members have every reason to suspect that without the politically irresolvable problem of Breixt breaking its own electoral coalition apart, and without many Labour MPs and bureaucrats themselves doing everything they could to undermine Corbyn’s leadership, that success could have been the foundation on which a future election victory was built. Countless opinion polls show that a clear majority of British voters want to see a broadly social-democratic programme implemented, which would be close to the 2017 manifesto and close to the programme that Starmer stood on as a candidate for the Labour leadership. The claims being made by the likes of Rachel Reeves and Wes Streeting – that a Labour government could not ‘afford’ such a programme now – ring hollow after the experience of the pandemic. We have been reminded, just as happened during World War 2, that what the country can ‘afford’ is largely a question of how radical a set of measures the government is willing to take. 

Given all of these factors, a far simpler explanation for the right’s war on Labour’s own members presents itself. The experience of the Corbyn leadership was terrifying for these people not because they knew he would fail, but because, especially after 2017, they were afraid that he might succeed. Across the country, many local councillors and some party officials from this right-wing network began to be replaced by left-wingers, brought into mainstream politics by the hope that Corbyn inspired; many more feared that the same could soon happen to them, especially if the left succeeded in forming a government. If you want to know why so many from the right-wing of the party encouraged a moral panic claiming that Labour was riddled with anti-semites, this is the simplest explanation. Rather than join in good faith with (justified and necessary) efforts to get rid of a small anti-semitic element from the party’s membership, many in this network saw an opportunity to try to purge the people who threatened their jobs and their elected positions. 

This is the key reason why so many on the right of the party would now like to see every member who holds views to the left of, say, Yvette Cooper, eventually removed. The experience of Corbynism showed that even those ‘soft left’ members who had traditionally backed leaders such as Ed Miliband could not be relied upon to support bureaucrats and politicians from Labour’s right, if they became enthused by a left-leaning political project. As long as a situation obtains whereby the party members can elect the leader directly, that leader controls national and local patronage, and the members are more left wing than they are, then adherents to this right-wing network will feel vulnerable and insecure. 

Back to 2010: Driving the Members Out 

This is an absolutely crucial thing to understand about the current situation in the Labour Party. By far the simplest and most logical explanation for the current behaviour of the right is that they actively want large numbers of Labour members to leave the party, as many of them have been doing already for the past three years. Many members have been expelled from Labour during that time, even if few threatened expulsions have provoked such widespread anger as Neal Lawson’s . Many more members have left Labour voluntarily. The behavior of Starmer and his cohorts only really makes sense if we assume that this was its intended outcome. 

Anyone with a shred of commitment to democratic norms, or basic principles of natural justice, will have been shocked by the treatment of Labour members since 2020. Starmer’s behaviour in itself amounts to a grotesque insult to the people who elected him, he having flagrantly broken almost every promise he made during the 2020 leadership election. Many members have been expelled for such absurd ‘crimes’ as having made positive remarks about Green Party politicians on social media, or having attended events organised by groups that have subsequently been declared off-limits by the party,but which were not so proscribed at the time. 

High-quality applicants  to become parliamentary candidates, with strong local support, have been kept off shortlists on the most spurious of grounds: accused of incompetence, or of disloyalty, for such transgressions as attempting to cooperate with other parties to defeat Tories in local government. Given the context I have been describing, it is unsurprising that few take these charges seriously. It is apparent to any observer that the party bureaucracy has been using any excuse it can find, however ridiculous, to block candidates and expel any member they can who has  political views to the left of theirs. 

Of course, the vast majority of Labour members and voters actually hold such views. This is a huge problem for the right-wing clique currently controlling the party. As we have seen, during the Corbyn years, they experienced the terrifying prospect of being replaced in their jobs as party bureaucrats, local councillors or even M.P.s, by people who actually shared the politics of their members and voters. They are determined to ensure that no such threat emerges again. The only way they can achieve such security is effectively to return the party to its condition before Ed Miliband became leader in 2010: much smaller than it is now, with a tiny membership, by historic standards, but one that could be relied upon to be remain compliant, loyal and cooperative with the leadership, however little it offered to them or to the country. 

Realistically, as much as they might like to, this small group of bureaucrats can’t sift through the social media feeds of every single member, looking for evidence of thought-crime. Instead they have been doing everything they can to encourage left-leaning members to leave the party voluntarily, precisely by behaving in this egregiously hostile, unjust and authoritarian manner.  Members feeling so disgusted by the behaviour of the leadership, so sympathetic to the unjust treatment of their victims, that they no longer wish to associate themselves with Labour: this is exactly the response they are looking for. The removal of the Labour whip from Corbyn, the high-profile expulsions, or threatened expulsions, of figures such as Ken Loach – arguably Britain’s greatest living filmmaker –are precisely calculated to ensure that their sympathizers no longer feel at home in the party. 

Having already used these methods to drive around 150,00 members out of the party since 2020, there are still too many lefties in Labour for the liking of this right-wing clique. This is the context for the latest and most high-profile case: the threatened expulsion of Lawson, director of Compass and a party member for 44 years, for the crime of praising a Liberal Democrat councillor’s tweet advocating support for a Green candidate in an Oxford local election. The charge is absurd: it’s clear that Lawson was not advocating a vote against Labour in that election – which would break party rules – but praising a general attitude of co-operation across the Left and Centre-Left.  

But that really isn’t the point. The howls of outrage that have issued from, among others, Guardian leader writers, have been entirely justified and appropriate. But they are exactly the reaction that this gesture is calculated to elicit. The aim of this measure, along with the routine blocking of ‘soft-left’ applicants to become parliamentary candidates, is to persuade members whose politics are close to Lawson’s to follow their Corbynite comrades out of the party. 

Where now for the ‘soft left’?

‘Soft left’ is a term that confuses many, and  means different things to different people. Broadly speaking it refers to a political position that aspires to see governments genuinely shift the balance of wealth and power towards those who currently hold neither, but which is willing to accept modest goals and a pragmatic strategy when political circumstances dictate. If this sounds like the basic common-sense position shared by most Labour members and supporters, that’s because it is. 

Historically the ‘soft left’ has been associated with organisations like the old Tribune newspaper, the Labour Co-ordinating Committee, Compass and Open Labour, while both Neil Kinnock and Ed Miliband are regarded as having represented its politics. During the Corbyn years, the more radical wing of the soft left backed Corbyn and many became members and supporters of Momentum. But whether they back candidates from the left, the right or the dead center of the Labour Party, ‘the soft left’ usually represents the mainstream aspirations of the largest bloc of party members.

Every promise that Starmer has broken since becoming Labour leader was originally aimed at persuading this constituency to vote for him. He would not have won without them, and many of them now feel used, betrayed and angry. His agents in the party bureaucracy know this, which is why they would prefer those members now to leave. 

Starmer’s  position  may seem impregnable for the moment, with a huge poll lead and complete control of the party apparatus. But we live in volatile times, and you never know when a group of MPs with little left to lose might decide they’re sufficiently fed-up to provoke a leadership contest. One more union leader might decide to join Unite’s Sharon Graham in protesting the party’s current direction; the highly-popular Andy Burnham might announce his return to parliament; Angela Rayner might decide that enough is enough, after even her network of supporters and fixers in the North-West was recently carved out of parliamentary selections in Bolton and elsewhere. 

If any of this were to happen soon, the members would probably vote for almost any candidate who promised to put an end to the right-wing reign of terror. They would not be likely to be moved by appeals to Starmer’s ‘electability’: polls show that he is personally unpopular, and everyone can see that the Tories have destroyed their own credibility without any help from him. They also know how close Corbyn came to victory in 2017. Why, under these circumstances, should Labour members put up with the likes of Streeting telling them that they should harbour no hopes for a better future? These are the possible  scenarios that doubtless keep Starmer and his allies awake at night. That is why they would very much prefer that a large portion of the current membership simply cease to be Labour members, and soon. 

When the New Statesman article was published, one of the predictable reactions – especially from Starmerphiles and centrist political scientists – was that my claim that Starmer would lose any hypothetical leadership election was delusional. The same people would have said the same thing about the possibility of Jeremy Corbyn winning in 2015, but then so would I have done, to be fair. It is certainly true that Starmer’s popularity with members has been on the rise, as the political composition of the membership has shifted and as the Labour poll lead has grown and consolidated. In the most recent polling he came ahead of Burnham, as opposed to way behind him in 2021. Based on what we can infer from the numbers of members who have left and joined in the past couple of years, and on the direction of change in NEC election results, there is a very reasonable chance that Starmer would win any contest right now. 

But this is by no means certain. It is very hard to predict what the effect might be of a hostile campaign by leadership rivals: focussing on his systematic breaking of his 2020 pledges, his arrogant dismissal of the 2022 conference vote for Proportional Representation, and his insistent promotion of wildly unpopular figures such as Reeves and Streeting. Above all, it is important to note that the  most recent polling came out before The Guardian  started to report regularly and critically on the suppression of the soft left in the party. This is not insignificant, given that that newspaper is clearly a  key source of political news and opinion for many Labour members. Under these circumstances, I would not feel at all confident that he would win a contest with Burnham or Rayner in which these issues came to the fore. 

But ultimately this is pure speculation, as is any rejection of the hypothesis. What matters is that the fear of such eventualities is one of the key things motivating the behaviour of right-wing bureaucrats, with Starmer’s blessings. And anyone who thinks that those bureaucrats are not afraid of any such thing happening, and would not be prepared to take almost any measures to prevent it, is simply ignoring the hard historical evidence. The Forde Report made very clear what these people think of  the left, and how they operate. 

The Nature of Starmerism

Most of what I’m writing about in this essay has to do with the specific factional politics of the Labour Party, but we can only properly understand what’s happening there by grasping the  broader social nature of Starmerism as a political project. The key thing to understand is that it is fundamentally a project to restore the authority that the professional, technocratic political class lost in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. With some resignation, Alex Williams and I predicted just such a restoration in the conclusion to our book, Hegemony Now, that came out last year. 

Starmer’s insistence just this week that  a Labour government will  ‘reform’ public services, without actually redistributing wealth or power, is precisely a claim to be able to ‘manage’ the crisis without changing anything. This, of course,  is the whole function and ideology of the technocratic political class: to manage society without changing it. By the same token, Starmer’s  attacks on the membership are ultimately an attack on the whole idea of democratic participation as a way of resolving social and political problems: an idea that is ultimately incompatible with technocratic claims to superior managerial competence. 

But as we also point out in Hegemony Now, these claims are clearly hollow. Starmer and his allies do not have any means of both addressing the social crisis and maintaining their technocratic authority, without a huge change of direction away from the neoliberal / austerity trajectory. The big danger is that the logic of this situation will see a Starmer government forced to take much more radical action than they currently promise to, while having to demonstrate their continued loyalty to capital through ever more egregious suppressions of democracy. The path they are currently charting leads, more probably than to any other destination, to a 2028/9 contest between some kind of anti-democratic ‘centrist’ technocracy and an even more authoritarian, violent, National Conservatism. This only makes some kind of democratic fight-back all the more important. 

What Can We Do? Time for the Left to Regroup ?

There are two possible outcomes to this situation. One is that, as the leadership are hoping, tens of thousands of soft-left members tear up their party cards in the coming weeks, as the only way they can think of to express the fact that they share the Guardian’s anger. This is just what many thousands of Corbyn loyalists have already done, with the direct result that the right has increased its representation on the NEC. The other possible outcome is that the progressive majority of Labour members treat this moment as a turning point, and begin to regroup.

 Under the circumstances we now face, the distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ left that has persisted since the 1980s seems increasingly irrelevant and out-of-date. All those in Labour who are committed to any kind of progressive programme are currently under attack. In the face of this challenge, we could choose to slink off into political isolation, or we could start to work together to reclaim our party. 

This would not be an easy task, or one that is likely to be achieved overnight. It would face hostility from the media and fierce resistance from Labour’s militant right wing. It would probably take years to achieve its goals, just as it took years for the left to recover from the splits and defeats of the 1980s. It would require organisation and campaigning within the unions as well as the party, and a complex relationship with activists and movements outside the party and in others. But until some viable alternative to Labour emerges on the political left, it’s hard to see what other strategy could bear fruit in the electoral sphere. 

Of course, the electoral sphere is not the only one that matters, and many activists will rightly be looking for other ways to express their politics in the coming years: from trade-unionism to community organising to direct-action. But all historic experience suggests that if you want to have any chance of a government making progressive reforms, then you have to have at least some people doing the often-frustrating work of making a case for those reforms inside the Labour Party. The potential latent support for some broad project to unite the left of the party is clearly still huge, if groups like Momentum, Compass and Open Labour could collaborate. Personally I’d like to see some new umbrella organisation – ‘Labour Democratic Socialists’? – bringing these tendencies together. In the absence of any such initiative, simply retaining party membership, and voting for the left-wing candidates in NEC elections supported by organisations like Momentum, is probably a more productive way of resisting than simply withdrawing from the party altogether. 

Leaving vs Joining 

Corbynite members often complain that they find attending local party meetings to be depressing and dispiriting, given the bureaucratic dominance of the right. It’s worth remembering that there is no obligation on members to attend such meetings, and that the right are very much hoping that they will leave the party rather than continue to vote against them for NEC positions. It is true that the left bloc is now relatively isolated on the NEC, but this has not always been the case, and will not necessarily be the case forever. The left slate members did better than the right in the 2021 NEC elections, came level with them in 2022, and will only do worse this year if it does because leftists continue to leave the party.

 It is also important to remember that, after the experience of 2015 and 2016, the party bureaucracy is unlikely to allow new members to vote in future leadership elections, but will probably  insist on some kind of minimum membership period before members are allowed to vote. The last thing they want is another influx of leftists joining the party in order to back a radical candidate, as happened during those years. By far the surest way to retain the right to participate in any future elections is simply not to formally leave the party at all. 

Right now, left-wing MPs such as Nadia Whittome, Clive Lewis, Rachel Maskell and John Trickett – even the increasingly isolated Ed Milliband – are in the most difficult position of any person in  the broad left and progressive movement. Every member who leaves the party because of the actions of the right leaves these MPs that bit more isolated, that bit more exposed. If only for the purely symbolic value of lending these comrades our moral support, remaining formal members of the party seems like a much more constructive response than abandoning them.  

Ultimately, to individually resign from an organisation because one side has lost a battle is not a socialist, collectivist response to a political situation. It’s an individualist, negative response which achieves nothing apart from a momentary sense of self-righteousness. A much more constructive response is to join with others who feel the same way.

I can entirely understand why people want to leave Labour and join the Greens, if they live in a place where the Greens are a serious  force in electoral politics. I can also understand why some might want to leave Labour, where they have the opportunity to campaign for independent democratic socialists like Jamie Driscoll, whose exclusion from the shortlist of candidates for his own job, which he has carried out to universal acclaim from across the political spectrum, has been one of the most dramatic and poorly-justified acts of exclusion undertaken by the right-wing bureaucracy. (For the benefit of the members of that bureaucracy: saying that I can understand people’s motivations for such actions is not the same thing as formally endorsing them.)

But for anyone concerned about the current direction of Labour politics, there are organisations which exist and need our support. Momentum may have some problems and weaknesses, but no organisation is perfect, and it continues to campaign for left candidates and policies in the party, with some success. Compass devotes huge amount of energy and imagination to arguing for democratic reform, forward-looking social-democratic policies and strategic pluralism. If you feel that the party is going in the wrong direction, joining one or both of these organisations is a positive way of expressing that.

For now, Labour’s democratic socialists still constitute a majority of its membership. Some of us will no doubt continue to be forcibly ejected. But for most, whether or not we remain a majority is largely up to us. Of course, if we continue to exit the party in droves, we will find ourselves genuinely marginalised soon enough: which is exactly what Starmer and his allies are hoping for.