April 2, 2024 - 7:00am
At the most recent meeting of Labour’s National Executive Committee, General Secretary David Evans reported that the party has lost 23,000 members since January.
The proximate reason for this mass departure is widely believed to be Labour’s stance on the conflict in Gaza, but it reflects a trend which has been ongoing ever since Keir Starmer became party leader four years ago.
Over the course of Starmer’s leadership, Labour has lost nearly one third of its membership. At the time of his election, Labour had over 530,000 members; it now has under 370,000.
Most of those leaving hailed from the Left of the party, upset over a perceived Rightward trend in Labour’s policy programme. One of those who left in the last month was Guardian columnist Owen Jones. Yet if these former members think that by leaving the party they will advance Left-wing goals or damage Starmer, they are mistaken. Indeed, their departure only pushes Labour further to the Right, and consigns their beliefs to further irrelevancy.
In an immediate sense, resignation does strike a blow against the party leadership. When supporters quit, the party loses vital income from membership subscriptions. Jeremy Corbyn’s Director of Policy Andrew Fisher estimated back in September that declining membership will cost Labour £6 million per year.
Starmer’s Labour Party has been forced to adopt two strategies to compensate for the financial loss. The first is to squeeze remaining members for more cash. I am a party member, and in just the last two weeks I have received five different e-mails from Labour asking me for money with subject lines such as “£21”, “URGENT: More help needed”, and “Why we ask”.
The other strategy is seeking financial support from wealthy individual donors. They aren’t being asked to donate £21: multiply that by 100,000. At least that’s the amount one millionaire, Gary Lubner, has so far given to Labour since Starmer came into office.
If you’ve been involved with Labour for long enough, you will at some point experience frustration, upset, even disgust with the party. Disappointment is a perennial motif in Labour history. As I found in my new book (written with Gavin Hyman and Mark Garnett) on the party’s history in opposition since 1922, members have always accused the previous Labour government of being insufficiently radical. It’s not new to the Starmer era.
It has been the role of the Labour members to keep the leadership honest. As Barbara Castle put it, the membership exists to “keep the flame of socialist idealism alive”, even in the darkest of times. Internal dissent and pressure are a vital part of the political culture of the Labour Party.
When people leave the party because they disagree with the leader of the day or a particular set of policies, their departure inevitably weakens the position of those remaining who agree with them. They wave the white flag of defeat when they should be waving the red flag of socialism.
Ultimately, no one is obliged to be in a political party or pursue political activism. Sometimes people simply move on with their lives. But, if you want to stay involved in politics, the Owen Jones strategy, which will amount to electing a Green MP or two and helping a few Left-wing independents hold their deposit, is not going to have much impact. The history of British politics is littered with the carcasses of ultimately impotent small parties.
With 99% certainty, we will soon have (at least according to the party’s constitution) a democratic socialist majority in Parliament. There aren’t all that many countries where this is the case. As Nye Bevan once said, you might as well try to make something of it.
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SubscribeI think anybody hoping for anything remotely left wing economically from Starmer will be sorely disappointed. It’ll be more neoliberalism mixed in with “progressive” culture war issues
Yes. There will probably be an expansion of welfare, which will be interpreted as left wing, but in reality is an indirect subsidy to corporations and oligarchs.
I’ll live with that provided he doesn’t do anything socialist.
Oh I think the last Labour government was radical – after all, we got.an illegal war, mass immigration and the supreme court/equalities act consigning us to the ongoing death of parliamentary democracy. I have little doubt the incoming Labour Party will live up to that legacy.
You forgot the ban on foxhunting. Now that really was sticking it to the man. And devolution.
There was also the minimum wage, and the Good Friday agreement. They were the last government that actually had plans. No government since, of any stripe, has it seems to me done anything intentionally or had any kind of plan for the nation.
Also true, and worth noting. They may also have been the last government that had a reasonable grip on running day-to-day affairs.
New Labour improved NHS outcomes by a third and reduced child poverty from 23% to 9%, and introduced the minimum wage which this study says played a significant role in raising wages while not reducing employment. Can the Conservatives claim any such record for improving the lives of most people? Has their record been any better on immigration?
There’s always a ‘study’ that contradicts the evidence of any sentient person’s senses, isn’t there? A minimum wage is not much compensation for being driven out of the housing market altogether.
Rather than ridiculing me for being transparent with my sources, why don’t you engage the source itself or produce a study yourself which says the minimum wage was harmful? You also ignore the well-established record of New Labour on the NHS and the reduction of child poverty. Evidence the Conservatives’ better record on serving ordinary people.
Did I say the minimum wage was harmful? Nope. If you can’t address my actual point then don’t respond at all.
You said the study (which I was only using to claim that the minimum wage was a good thing) ‘contradicts the evidence of any sentient person’s senses.’ Does that not suggest you took issue with the study and by implication my claim that the minimum wage was positive?
What he actually said was that the minimum wage was scant consolation for being priced out of housing.
He said both things – he attacked the study claiming minimum wage was beneficial, then he said it was small compensation. I wanted to clarify which position he held, but I think we know now.
“Has their record been any better on immigration?”
The Tories’ failure to control immigration is an ongoing disgrace. Nevertheless I think it was Gordon Brown who signed the Treaty of Lisbon, embedding the principle of free movement between member states and precipitating the onslaught of continuous mass immigration, thereby implementing Labour’s plan to “rub the right’s noses in diversity”.
Free movement of persons within the EU was established under the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht, signed by… John Major. But looking beyond these blame games, what do you propose for the UK going forward? I agree a reduction in immigration could be helpful, but what country has revived itself solely by closing its borders? And with the fertility crisis who do you propose should fill empty posts for key services as the portion of the population born with British citizenship dwindles irreversibly?
Like so many of the things for which Brexiters blamed “Europe”, immigration was something that we did to ourselves and them blamed on Johnnie Foreigner.
As to your list of worthwhile things that Blair-era Labour actually achieved in office, I would also add a huge amount of rebuilding of the schools estate and improvements in early years care (Sure Start). And they oversaw the introduction of the principle that new house building should also contribute towards the delivery of an element of affordable housing. (The air quotes around “affordable” housing only arose when the coalition governmetn replaces Social Rented housing with Affordable Rented housing). And Gordon Brown’s contribution to the stabilisation of the financial markets after the financial crisis was very real indeed (can you imagine what might have happened if any of the current crop of Tories had been at the helm?)
Thank you! I only hope, as the author above does as well, that Starmer’s Labour will at least in some ways achieve some of the more positive change that New Labour did. Not that I think it’s wise to place much hope in parliamentary politics (see communitarian solutions I suggest below).
Blair and co: Brown, Blunkett, Cooper, Purnell, Hutton, Darling, etc were instrumental in creating the brutal welfare policy architecture that turbo-charged by the Colaition/Tories has led to many hundreds, probably many more(coroners reluctant to conform suicides) disabled/sick, those on U/C as a direct consequence of sanctions, benefit cuts, etc. Some legacy
https://deaths bywelfare.org/
link broken
To both of you (UR and GV), I am absolutely no big fan of Starmer or New Labour but I just want to dispel, as hardly anyone on here will, this false equivalence that is being drawn between Starmer (and by implication New Labour, whose leading lights he so admires) and the Conservatives – both are terrible in similar ways, but the former at least has something to point to when it comes to a track record of working for ordinary people.
The Tories and Labour should merge into single party. They’re identical anyway. Just need a name for for amorphous blog.
I assume you meant ‘blob’. Anyway, Amorphous Blob seems a good enough name to me.
The Borg.
From Wikipedia: The Borg have become a symbol in popular culture for any juggernaut against which “resistance is futile”.
They’re not identical – New Labour improved NHS outcomes by a third and reduced child poverty from 23% to 9%, and introduced the minimum wage which this study says played a significant role in raising wages while not reducing employment. Can the Conservatives claim any such record for improving the lives of most people? I understand the differences may not seem big between the parties, but we should not give up on politics over an illusion that there really is no difference; then you’re giving your rulers a free pass. As Peter Hitchens is always saying, ‘there is an inch of difference between the two parties but it is within that inch that we live.’
That is absurd! It is essential to preserve the illusion that voters have a choice!
There is a choice. But you’re right in that we can’t rely on parliamentary politics alone to improve our lot. Civil society needs to work together to take on the coming headwinds of low wages, high rents and living costs. That means organising in the workplace, forming cooperatives and mutual aid societies, writing to our MPs etc.
I’m with you on mutualism – but we shouldn’t forget that the Labour Party abandoned these forms of organisation almost as soon as it was hi-jacked by middle class Fabians and certainly won’t now promote any such alternative to the neo-liberal corporatism that drives it today.
I’m with you on not having much hope for this Labour government, but not with you (as your lack of condemnation of the Conservatives seems to suggest) that they will be just as bad a the Conservatives, given the record of New Labour which I’ll spare you from citing again.
Contemplating the scant promises of our political elite leads to despair but I think we need to remember there our other ways we can wrest back control over our lives from other groups that make them so unnecessarily expensive, restricted and devoid of agency i.e. private landlords, employers, energy companies etc.
That winning back of control could be through joining the homelessness prevention efforts of acorn housing (e.g. protesting illegal evictions), striking for decent pay and conditions (like the Amazon workers in the US so bravely did) or starting an energy cooperative as was done in Bethesda in Wales, a community which now has its own hydroelectricity plant which powers homes and delivers returns to the community, rather than robbing it for the sake of the shareholders of large companies who expect record profits in the midst of a cost of living crisis. These changes may not seem necessary to you, but the way things are going they will be to your descendants.
“….given the record of New Labour which I’ll spare you from citing again“.
New Labour was very successful politically, in that it won a lot of elections.
Your point? Defend the Conservatives’ record on helping ordinary people against Labour’s.
“Writing to our MPs”? That gave me a laugh!
The cynicism of people like you and your complete absence of answers and encouragement for how we can build a fairer, stronger Britain where people feel control over their lives will be the death of democracy.
Has anyone noticed how the policies advocated by middle class socialists invariably result in their enrichment at the expense of the people the Labour Party was traditionally supposed to represent? Funny, that.
Let’s never forget that it was a Labour Chancellor who broke the link between housing costs and interest rate policy, giving us the largest upward transfer of wealth in our history, and then doubled down by pumping £400bn of dodgy credit straight into the market while his cronies imported millions of unskilled people just to ice the cake of artificial demand – boosting rents and squeezing blue collar wages at the same time.
The modern Labour Party is unquestionably the most impressive scam the metropolitan rentier class has ever come up with. Well done.
Deliberate scam or unintended consequences? Or both?
The Iron Law of Government perhaps? The motivating force of the Government is simply survival and reaping the rewards of survival. This may not be the largest motivation, but applied day after day, year after year, the results are larger than mere ideology.
I think it’s built into social democracy (as distinct from genuine democracy). The more that power – and therefore spending power – is concentrated centrally, the more parasites the wielders of that power will attract until, eventually, appeasing the vested interests becomes the sole point of government.
You can see this quite clearly in Brussels. I’ve always found it extraordinary that people are able to believe that the bureaucrats of the Commission are going to put the interests of mere voters ahead of those of the 40,000 (yes, 40,000!) paid lobbyists who are buying them lunch every day in order to persuade them to regulate competition out of the market.
Don’t worry; they can read ‘White Fragility ‘ in bed at night to make themselves feel better about their rising asset values.
Wait, what?
When was there ever a formal link between housing costs and interest rates?
Gordon Brown devolved responsibility for setting interest rates to the BoE and, in doing so, he required that they concern themselves exclusively with inflation. And, granted, the measure of inflation involved probably undercounts the impact of housing costs.
But, prior to that, the Chancellor could set interest rates however he thought fit. No?
So there was no formal link prior, and there remained at least a vestigial link afterwards.
New Labour completely failed on housing but I don’t think this is how or why it happened, is it?
Surely we have moved beyond the era of “Socialist Idealism”?
Maybe you’ve realised that ‘the drugs don’t work ‘ but alas, their attractiveness (especially to younger voters) appears undiminished.
What solutions do you have which will attract younger voters?
Free iPhones.
To what? What are your solutions?
Well, to paraphrase what someone once said on an unrelated topic, if Socialism is the answer, it was a stupid question.
There is a Three Body Problem in C21 Vritish politics. Three once closely inter-connected groups – Party – Parliament – Admimistrative State – have detached from each other under the pressure of the Progressive New Order. At the bottom of the heap are the tiny weedy dwindling party members. They are ignored by the MPs in Parliament who are under zero obligation even to their Manifestos. And towering above even the Executive/Cabinet sits the now permanent unelected ruling Technocracy – the Regulators, BoE, Supreme Judiciary and Civil Service – who are no longer apolitical and serve the ideological agenda and credos of the post 90s Progressive State. If a party or parliamentary majority or PM challenges the Big State, they get nixed by cake & bullying. Thats the chilling reality.
Ah, WM I am glad you dropped by since I have been long trying to understand how you can conceive of the elite (whom you lambast, understandably, in every other comment), without any reference to what Matthew Goodwin (dishonestly I think) refers to as the ‘old elite’ (bankers, landowners, media moguls etc) as if they were on the way out and the ‘wokies’ or the ‘blob’ or whatever are now runnng everything.
So often on this site are ‘NHS Consultants, top civil servants, GPs, council leaders etc’ to quote yourself in another comment, singled out, entirely incorrectly, as ‘our super rich,’ the 1%, when the highest salaries of these people barely scrape the lowest threshhold required to be a member of that group. At the same time, groups whose salaries do comfortably qualify them for the 1% (bankers, media moguls, hedge fund managers (like the £630m Paul Marshall who owns this outlet as well as GB News) company CEOs and (the least deserving of them all if you take work as a measurement of desert) old landowners like the Grosvenor family (value: £9.5bn, land owned: 50% of Mayfair)) get a free pass. After all, they’re only people who make money by owning things, or by liberating capital from labour (read: raising rents, firing people). Nothing to see here.
So while I do sympathise with your above comment about the disinterest of the political elite in serving ordinary people, I’d like to know (if you have time) first what role you think the ‘old elite’ I have mentioned have in influencing people’s lives and secondly what solutions you think this country should pursue moving forward.
As someone who is utterly disillusioned with the current Tory party but has never voted Labour (because of their left wing) l welcome a shift to the right. In fact, l see it as evidence of sanity asserting itself.
They’re still bloody woke.
Unfortunately so are too many in the Tories – hence my disillusionment with them. A pox on both their houses
Agreed.
I always wonder why any corporate entity or individual would donate to a socialist party. I can’t help but think of turkeys voting for Christmas.
A “socialist party”? I thought we were talking about the Labour Party!
A lot of right wing commenters on here sounding very happy with brave Sir Keir. But they won’t be defending him when he starts to feel the heat – far from it – they’ll be chucking more fat on the fire.
So who loves ya, Starmer? He has got a loyal fan club in the media, the civil servants and quangocrats see him as one of their own, and then there are his rich donor friends, but beyond elite circles, out in the wider public, there are very few Keir Starmer true believers. Are there any principles of Starmerism? If there are, no one knows them. And if they did, they probably wouldn’t trust him to stick to them. He’s like a big old beech tree. They have very wide, but very shallow roots, and are prone to get blown over in a storm. Then a rethink might be possible – sometimes you have to fail before a rethink can happen – ask the Tories!
They are leaving because that shift has already happened. Further right than Labour was now? How, exactly? Labour is a party of extremely right-wing people who lack the social connections to make it in the Conservative Party, and whose two defining experiences were being brought up to spit on everyone below them, which was everyone else where they grew up, and discovering in their first 36 hours at university that they were nowhere near the top of the class system, a discovery that embittered them for life.
As someone who left a few months before Owen Jones, I sympathise with the author’s view. But, for the membership to keep the leadership honest, the leadership has to be willing, at least in principle, to play along.
Starmer, however, is utterly without shame in this respect. To recap, he stood for the leadership upon a platform of ten pledges. He has abandoned every single one of them. Every one. These are not the actions of an honest man.
The membership overwhelmingly wants a ceasefire in Gaza. Starmer not only refused to call for one himself, he got up to some exceedingly questionable shennanigans in order to ensure that the SNP was prevented from tabling one on their own opposition day.
there were the irregularities in candidate selection. And now, there’s the anonyvoter business. If the allegations are even half true, there may be prosecutions.
Or, I’ll give you an example from my own CLP. After Corbyn was suspended for a tweet arguing that the extent of anti-semitism in the party had been overstated for political gain (a conclusion that was later endorsed by the party’s own review of the matter), one of our local officials called a motion demanding his reinstatement. It passed. “So what?” you might ask, the leadership can surely shrug off such a flyprick. Nope. The official was summarily suspended himself and gagged to prevent him discussing it. Another official then called another motion noting the total absense of due process and demanding the reinstatement of the first official, only to find himself also suspended. Neither was ever reinstated.
I think people were happy to stay and fight for a better Labour party and hoping something would turn up. But it hasn’t. And now there’s an election in prospect. Those of us who want to campaign against the party – for green or other candidates – need to leave in order to do so. (We can’t all be Alistair Campbell)
The membership overwhelmingly wants a ceasefire in Gaza.
I would have thought this would be obvious, but I think it warrants saying anyway – There is absolutely nothing Starmer can do to bring about a ceasefire in Gaza.
In other words, we have no direct control over events so we shouldn’t bother. Wow that’s the spirit. Where would campaigns like women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, campaigns against child labour, for a right to a weekend and a minium wage have been without people like you laughing from the sidelines? Hats off.
The Labour Party is obsolescent. All its non-ideological objectives have been achieved, and are enshrined in law; all its ideological principles have been utterly discredited. It has neither purpose nor principle. Its continued existence is due to there being no other home for left-of-centre voters, and the dwindling hopes of the Far Left to use it as cover for their ideological ambitions. But no-one of influence has the courage or integrity to ditch the old socialist shibboleths and relaunch the party under a new banner, which is what is urgently needed. A party which has a purpose, evidence based practical policies, rooted in reality, and capable of addressing the problems of today and tomorrow.
I accept what you say, but isn’t the Labour Party effectively “Tory-lite”, as the Left Wingers keep saying?
Umm…Starmer wins with a small majority, he’ll be putty in the hands of his Hard-Left colleagues, and destined to be dethroned within a year, I suspect. Starmer wins with a large majority, and he might (just might) remain more moderate, as he can play Labour party politics with his MPs and manoeuvre more effectively. Or, as I suspect, with a large majority, he can show his true Pabloist underpinnings and we’re all on a jolly ride to a socialist utopia. You know, like all the previous ones that faired so very well.
I realize that Starmer’s no unknown quantity, but I hope most of his fellow UK citizens will give him a chance as PM, as a matter of golden-rule principal so to speak.
That’s what Dave Chappelle said about Trump on SNL: “I’m going to give Trump a chance. And we demand that he give us one too”. He was ripped for that and later took it back–but he shouldn’t have been and should not have done. There is nothing blameworthy about suspending doubt and extending the benefit thereof, at first, allowing for the possibility of pleasant surprise.
And yes, I gave Trump some kind of a chance for some period of time in 2017, especially compared to most of my fellow Californians. Granted, it was a conditional suspension of disbelief.
Those leaving are the entryist who joined for £3 and whose main aim is to control the party, not to effect change. They see themselves as the Kommisars of the coming revolution. Always members of the Nomenklatura, never of the proletariat. All a bunch of performers who think that politics is about them. They’ve been in bed with the most misogynist, homophobic and regressive movement since fascism. If they like to feel good because all they can manage is to come second in Brighton and lead the StWC rallies, so be it.