Will Corbyn's new hard-left party prove to be Starmer's mission impossible?
For some Starmer aides, the formal split will usefully remind voters that Labour is in the centre ground, despite the damaging headlines about the humiliating climbdown forced by rebels over welfare cuts.
After Corbyn's expulsion by Labour, Starmer won't mind another fight with the hard left. He needs to detach it from the much bigger, soft-left group at Labour's heart; the two groups joined forces to devastating effect in the rebellion against disability benefit cuts.
The unnamed new party has been not confirmed by Corbyn, who seems irritated that Sultana jumped the gun by announcing she had resigned her Labour membership and would co-lead an alliance with Corbyn. It was a messy launch. 'Can a party split before it starts?' one Labour wag asked.
However, Corbyn's new project could prove a headache for Starmer. It could win over 10 per cent of voters, reducing Labour's support by three points, according to More in Common. The new party would be in first place among 18- to 24-year-olds on 32 per cent.
Some of its supporters will have already abandoned Labour and switched to the Greens or Liberal Democrats. But Corbyn could agree an electoral pact with the Greens to ensure they field candidates in different places. Labour will hope the Corbyn party will struggle to get lift off under our first past-the-post system. The left populists are unlikely to supplant Labour in the way Reform UK has overtaken the Conservatives.
But the new party could give Starmer a headache next May by winning Labour seats in local authority elections in places such as London and Birmingham, during what already looks like a difficult set of elections for him. His and the government's unpopularity could see Labour lose control in the Welsh Parliament for the first time and fail to oust the SNP in the Scottish Parliament after the nationalists' 19 years in power.
Worryingly for Starmer, there are mutterings at Westminster that disastrous results could spark a move by his MPs to oust him before the next general election. Traditionally, Labour doesn't depose its leaders like the Tories. But a change of leader can no longer be ruled out after the nightmarish end to Starmer's first year in power.
The Corbyn party could draw money and members away from Labour, including donations from left-wing trade unions. Amid disenchantment with the government, Labour's membership has dropped from 348,000 at last year's election to about 309,000. (Under Corbyn, membership peaked at 460,000 in 2017). Labour HQ was told before the May local elections that grassroots morale was low after the government's decisions on winter fuel payments and welfare.
Although some close Starmer allies will not lose sleep over left-wingers quitting Labour, the party needs all the foot soldiers it can muster.
To make matters worse for Starmer, the soft left is mobilising against his top-down leadership and wants grassroots members given more influence. The Compass think tank is drawing up a 'guiding story' to end 'the sense of drift' under Starmer's ideology-free managerialism. Neal Lawson, its director, warns: 'If Labour doesn't clarify what kind of society it aims to bring about and fails to seriously develop a programme that lights the way to it, the populist right's version of change will prevail.'
Compass's initial ideas, which won't be welcomed by Team Starmer, include wealth taxes, rent controls, price caps and the 'social ownership' of water and buses.
With skilful targeting, the Corbyn party could unseat some Labour MPs at the next general election. Labour insiders are already worried that 'Gaza independents' could win between 20-30 seats, including the health secretary Wes Streeting's in Ilford North. 'Gaza is a real problem for us,' one Labour insider told me.
The five independents who won Labour seats last year campaigned on issues like austerity, as well as the Middle East; such candidates will have more ammunition by the next election.
Although Starmer will be more worried about the threat from Reform, the Corbyn party could result in a prime minister under real pressure on both flanks, as well as from Labour members and his newly-empowered MPs. All while wedded – for now, at least, thanks to the financial markets – to a weeping chancellor, widely seen as the architect of his first-year woes.
Crucially, the existence of the Corbyn party could undermine the PM's plan to urge disaffected left-of-centre voters to hold their nose and stick with Labour to keep Nigel Farage out of Downing Street. Starmer has fought back before when his back was to the wall – but he will need superpowers to wriggle out of this one.
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The Guardian
17 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Rachel Reeves says she cannot rule out autumn tax rises after ‘damaging' week
Rachel Reeves has said it is impossible for her to rule out tax rises in the autumn budget and insisted she never thought about quitting despite a turbulent week for her and the government. In an interview with the Guardian, the chancellor said 'there are costs' to the watering down of the welfare bill and acknowledged it had been a 'damaging' week for Downing Street. The chancellor's tears in the Commons on Wednesday spooked the financial markets and raised questions about her future in the job, but No 10 quickly weighed in behind her, saying she and the prime minister were in lockstep. Reeves said she had never considered resigning her position, despite being the focus of some Labour backbench anger over her handling of the economy, saying: 'I didn't work that hard to then quit.' She said she regretted going into prime minister's questions in tears after a 'tough day in the office' but hoped that people 'could relate' to her distress. 'It was a personal matter but it was in the glare of the camera. And that's unfortunate, but I think people have seen that I'm back in business and back out there,' she said. 'I went to prime minister's questions because I thought that was the right thing to do, because that's where I always am at lunchtime on a Wednesday. You know, in retrospect, I probably wished I hadn't gone in … [on] a tough day in the office. But, you know, it is what it is. But I think most people can relate to that – that they've had tough days.' Her challenging moment in parliament came in the same week that a backbench rebellion forced the government to drop key welfare cuts, which leaves Reeves with a £5bn black hole to fill in the country's finances. 'It's been damaging,' she admitted. 'I'm not going to deny that, but I think where we are now, with a review led by Stephen Timms [a work and pensions minister], who is obviously incredibly respected and has a huge amount of experience, that's the route we're taking now. 'That's the right thing to do. It is important that we listen in government, that we listen to our colleagues and listen to what groups outside are saying as well.' Timms is working with disability groups to reform the personal independent payments (Pip) system, which had been the target of government cuts until the huge backbench rebellion drove the government to drop them. Reeves said the government had learned lessons about bringing MPs and the country along with them in the run-up to what is widely expected to be a difficult budget this autumn ahead. 'As we move into the budget for the autumn, I do want to bring people into those trade-offs,' she said. Asked whether she was prepared to rule out tax rises, she said: 'I'm not going to, because it would be irresponsible for a chancellor to do that. We took the decisions last year to draw a line under unfunded commitments and economic mismanagement. So we'll never have to do something like that again. But there are costs to what happened.' While tax rises could be on the table, Reeves signalled that her fiscal rules would remain and that 'we'll continue to keep that grip on the public finances'. But she stressed the need to accompany this with a strong explanation of how the Treasury's choices fit with Labour values. 'I'm not going to apologise for making sure the numbers add up,' she said. 'But we do need to make sure that we're telling a story, and a Labour story. We did that well in the budget and the spending review, we increased taxes on the wealthiest and businesses. In the budget last year, I made it really clear that priorities in that budget were to protect working people, to invest in the NHS and to start rebuilding Britain.' Some within government and the Labour party have been pushing for either a reconsideration of the fiscal rules or rethinking the remit of the Office for Budget Responsibility, which produces two forecasts and rulings a year on whether the rules have been met. Asked whether she would consider one forecast instead of two, Reeves said: 'We are looking at how the OBR works, but I think it is really important to have those independent economic institutions, because if you start undermining those … and getting rid of the checks and balances on a government, I do think that is risky. But the International Monetary Fund have made some recommendations about how to deliver better fiscal policymaking. And obviously I take those seriously.' The IMF has suggested that while the OBR could still produce two forecasts, it could be possible to only have one annual assessment of whether the chancellor is hitting her fiscal rules. However, government sources suggested that any changes could be more along the lines of more regular exchange of information to reduce last-minute changes like those in the spring statement. Reeves also spoke of her drive to reduce child poverty but she would not be drawn on whether she would lift the two-child benefit cap. Keir Starmer has said the government 'will look at it' but experts have warned it could be more difficult given the hole left by the U-turn on the welfare cuts. The chancellor said she wanted to reduce child poverty but was 'not wedded to any specific policy', adding: 'I think people can see how serious I am about making sure that all good kids get a good start in life by what we did in the spending review just a few weeks ago.'
The Guardian
19 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Who's really to blame for Labour's troubles – Rachel Reeves or the invisible PM?
She is not the first chancellor to cry in public, and may not be the last. But Rachel Reeves is the first whose tears have moved markets. No sooner had the realisation dawned that she was silently weeping – over a personal sorrow she won't be pushed into revealing, she insisted later, not a political one – as she sat beside Keir Starmer at Wednesday's prime minister's questions, than the pound was dropping and the cost of borrowing rising. The bond traders who forced out Liz Truss's hapless chancellor still clearly rate her judgment and want her to stay, even if (perhaps especially if) some Labour MPs don't. Yet it is an extraordinary thing to live with the knowledge that a moment's uncontrolled emotion can drive up the cost of a nation's mortgages, just as a misjudged stroke of the budget pen can destroy lives. The most striking thing about her tears, however, was Starmer's failure to notice. Intent on the Tory benches opposite, the prime minister simply ploughed on, not realising that his closest political ally was dissolving beside him. Though within hours, a clearly mortified Starmer had thrown a metaphorical arm around her, and Reeves herself was back out talking up her beloved fiscal rules as if nothing had happened. But it's the kind of image that sticks: her distress and his oblivion, an unfortunately convenient metaphor for all the times he has seemed oddly detached from his own government. Quite aside from whatever private grief she is now carrying, Reeves has for years been shouldering an exhausting load. From the start, she and Morgan McSweeney, Starmer's chief of staff, did an unusual amount of the heavy lifting on behalf of their oddly apolitical leader – and in government the stakes have only risen. McSweeney, a natural fixer now jammed faintly awkwardly into a strategist's role, was once credited with near-mythical influence over Starmer, but for months is said to have been struggling at times to get the boss's ear. Reeves, meanwhile, has ended up by default running much of the domestic agenda, while Starmer focuses on foreign policy crises and a handful of big issues that passionately exercise him. Since even close aides and ministers complain of never really knowing what he wants, the result is a Treasury-brained government that tends to start with the numbers and work back to what's possible, rather than setting a political goal and figuring out how to reach it. Perhaps that makes sense to the City, but not to Labour MPs frogmarched through a series of politically toxic decisions with no obvious rationale except that the money's got to come from somewhere. To many of them, Starmer appears at best like a kind of political weekend dad: largely absent from everyday life and reluctant to get involved in political battles, but swooping in at the last minute to issue orders. Complaints of Downing Street dysfunction have been a staple under at least the last four prime ministers, but there's a weakness at the core of this No 10 that is putting the rest of government under undue strain, like a runner trying to push on through an injury who ends up pulling every other muscle in the process. On the left, there is growing talk of trying to force a 'reset' in spring, if next year's Scottish and Welsh elections go as badly as they assume: force Reeves out, let radicalism in, fight Reform's emotive rightwing fire with a form of leftwing populism perhaps loosely resembling what the Democrats' Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani are doing in the US. It's exactly what the markets fear, judging by their reaction to Reeves' temporary wobble. But even Labour MPs who'd never go that far are growing restless for change. Just raise taxes, cries this week's New Statesman magazine, echoing a widespread view that the fiscal straitjacket imposed by Reeves is killing the government. I argued for the same thing in the Guardian back in March, and haven't changed my mind. But the political cost of doing so is arguably higher now than it would have been then, when tax rises could plausibly still have been framed as an emergency response to Donald Trump pulling the plug on Europe's defence and forcing Britain to rearm, rather than as an admission that the government can no longer get its spending plans past its own backbenchers. In their understandable frustration, however, some fail to ask why Reeves holds the iron grip she does; why Treasury thinking isn't more often challenged by No 10. If this government's mistakes often have her fingerprints somewhere on them, then so do many of its successes. Last week, I was at a housing conference, surrounded by people still euphoric at getting everything they asked for in last month's spending review: unprecedented billions poured into genuinely affordable and social housing – with emphasis thankfully for once on the social – with a 10-year settlement from the Treasury, creating the long-term certainty they need to make it happen. Angela Rayner fought like a tiger for it, but Reeves made the money happen, and the result will change lives. Children who would have grown up in grim, frightening temporary accommodation will have safe, permanent homes. Vulnerable people will escape the clutches of unscrupulous landlords and first-time buyers will climb ladders otherwise out of reach. It's everything a Labour government exists to do, but as with so many unseen good things happening – on green energy, say, or transport – the money didn't fall from the sky and won't be there in future if an ageing and chronically unfit population carries on consuming welfare spending or health spending (the next big battleground, judging by the detail of Wes Streeting's 10-year plan) at current rates. To a frustrated Treasury, this week's rebellion was evidence that Labour MPs don't live in the real world, where hard choices must be faced for good things to happen. But, to the rebels, it's evidence that the Treasury doesn't live in their real world, where vulnerable people struggle with deep-rooted health problems only aggravated by being pushed into poverty, and the Greens as much as Reform are threatening to eat them for breakfast over it. There is some truth in both arguments. But that's precisely why it is ultimately a prime minister's job, and nobody else's, to draw all the threads of the government together: to balance political yin against economic yang, such that neither dominates or bends the project out of shape. Chancellors come and, eventually, even the best go. But sometimes it's only then that you can really tell whether the problem was ever really the chancellor. Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
BBC News
34 minutes ago
- BBC News
Clifton Down vans 'not acceptable,' says Bristol North West MP
The Bristol MP representing people living around Clifton Down has said the situation with caravans and vehicles in the area is "not acceptable for anyone involved".Darren Jones, Labour MP for Bristol North West, met city council leader Tony Dyer, of the Green Party, at city hall as he called on the local authority to told the BBC the meeting had been "reassuring", but that he felt the current timescales for dealing with the issue "feel a bit slow".The council, which is no overall control, says it has begun meetings with those affected, as it seeks to develop a new policy supporting both people living in vans and the surrounding communities. It says this is "not a process we can rush". In recent months, tensions have been rising on the Downs, where more than 100 vehicles are inhabited."This situation has rumbled on too long, the council should have acted sooner," Jones said. "I've been reassured today that they have a plan in place that's coming forward after the summer and I expect action to be taken quickly after that."One of his requests is for Bristol City Council to collect data from people living in vans on the Downs, in order to better understand their motivations and work out how best to offer campaign group Protect the Downs has repeatedly criticised the local authority for not holding this information. Council sources suggest it can be challenging to monitor, as some of the population is transient while others may be reluctant to engage. Jones is also asking the council to create more appropriate temporary accommodation sites, similar to the modular homes recently created in Fishponds for people who are for People, which runs the scheme, is seeking to expand across the city, and said their units could go from design to completion within a year if they had the necessary Brown, of the social enterprise, said Bristol City Council had been "very supportive" of its work, as it sought to set up small developments with 10-15 units around the city."This could be done all over Bristol. We are looking at what land is available, and what we can do to procure that land. Obviously that is difficult." Increase since pandemic Across the whole of Bristol, the city council estimates there are about 650 lived-in vehicles, up from about 150 before the vast majority of the increase happened during the tenure of Labour mayor Marvin Rees, before he left the post in 2024 and it was whether Labour should take some responsibility for the rise in numbers, Jones pointed to a report published by the city council in February 2024, which made several recommendations."This became a really big issue towards the back-end of the last Labour [mayoral] administration," Jones said. "Action was not taken off the back of that report and that's what we're pushing for."The council says it is taking a "proactive stance on addressing the issues that have been allowed to get progressively worse over the last several years".The issue is due to be discussed at a meeting of Bristol City Council on Tuesday, after more than 4,000 Bristol residents signed a petition calling for the authority to stop people living in and around the area.
