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The Guardian
6 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Bluster, bullying, suspensions – this is no way to run the Labour party
This is a sign of weakness, not strength. To suspend four MPs for rebellion suggests a lack of authority and a lack of nerve, not a sense of confidence. Bullying and threats are no way to manage a party, but a signal that Labour has lost control, with its crude methods in cutting winter fuel payments and its attempt to cut disability benefits. As MPs head off for the summer next week, Keir Starmer and the Labour whips hope they will be mulling over their futures, having been warned of the severe penalty for disloyalty. But I doubt that's the message most will absorb. More than 120 MPs signalled their opposition to the proposed welfare cuts, and many more agreed but didn't sign the amendment. Was the solution to sack the lot? Or just the token 'ringleaders'? In fact there were none, just a strong belief among backbenchers of all varieties that not only were the cuts wrong, they were badly done and would be politically damaging, as indeed they were. Those suspended are of the soft left, by no means Corbynites. Rachael Maskell is a bit of a moral grandstander, annoying other MPs by suggesting her conscience is clearer than theirs, but suspensions tend to play to those tendencies (though the four will find that once they are no longer representing Labour, they will lose their voice with broadcasters). A Labour aide boasted gleefully that these 'heads on spikes' were intended as a warning shot to the new intake of MPs not to rebel, but it sounds like petty revenge for their success in forcing the leadership into U-turns. Don't even think of sacking Diane Abbott again: it didn't work out well. She would be away in the Lords now had the party not blundered last time, making her dig in her heels very effectively. Starmer is building quite a record for stamping down on dissent. He is the first prime minister to suspend the whip from MPs in his first month in power. In fact, during that first month, when he punished the seven who voted for an SNP motion to abolish the two-child benefit cap, he suspended more MPs than Tony Blair did during his decade in No 10, despite frequent rebellions. One senior Blair aide said Jeremy Corbyn wasn't expelled even though 'he voted more often against than for the government' (not strictly true, although he did vote against the government more than 400 times). I put that to a senior No 10 source, whose riposte was: 'Well, Blair should have done! It would have saved us a lot of years in opposition.' Unlikely. If not Corbyn, it would have been someone else of his ilk. Parties need discipline. How did Blair maintain it sufficiently, without expulsions? A Blair aide said he paid close attention to his backbenchers, holding a daily morning meeting with the chief whips Hilary Armstrong and Jackie Smith, and weekly meetings with a rotating roster of MPs including regular rebels – even Dennis Skinner – to test the contents of his speeches ahead of time. Aides such as parliamentary private secretaries were delegated to nurture various groups of MPs – the women, the union supporters, the religious, the leftists, those with particular political issues or constituency concerns, those in marginals who kept their ears closest to the ground. If Blair disagreed with them, he said so and explained why. 'Being listened to matters,' said the aide. But the whips weren't supine or toothless. 'They didn't threaten but they could make MPs' lives miserable,' the aide added, with measures such as denying pairing. Things will get worse when MPs return from summer recess, with the autumn budget, the review of services for children with special educational needs and disabilities and a child poverty strategy that needs to rescind the two-child benefit cap, despite 60% of the public in favour of keeping it, including half of Labour voters. There will be many more opportunities for conflict in the party. The problem is profound. This is not about a handful of usual suspects, but a deep unease about the direction of the government, or whether it even has a direction beyond a random collection of policies. Discipline only works if there is a strong story that defines where a government is heading and why. Too many MPs do not believe Starmer's story, especially after the U-turns they forced seemed to send Labour in a better, more coherent direction. Here's an example: it's brilliant that Starmer announced on Thursday that Labour will lower the voting age to 16, but where's the more radical constitutional reform? MPs can get arrogant when they forget they owe everything to the party that selected, financed and organised for them. However talented or beloved they think they are, few manage to buck the trend of national swings. But that also makes them more anxious about the success of the national party. Many know they won't be back after the next election, having won implausible seats by small majorities. The hailstorm of bad economic news in recent days depresses spirits: growth is lower than expected, inflation higher and unemployment up. 'Give me lucky generals,' Napoleon is reputed to have said, but Rachel Reeves so far has not been one of them. Opinion polls are dismal, with Labour overtaken alarmingly by Reform UK. The summer holiday may be approaching, but the party's MPs will go home glum. The way to bring them back in better fettle in September is to sharpen Labour's purpose, build on the best policies of the first year and stop making others that alienate supporters without gaining new ones. Listen to MPs. Remember Aesop's fable of the north wind and the sun competing to make a man remove his cloak. The north wind fails when it blows with all its might because the man wraps his cloak tighter around him, but when the sun shines he takes it off in the heat. Persuasion works better than force. Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
New Statesman
03-07-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
The revenge of Labour's soft left
Photo byThe soft left has always had problems of definition. It's possible to label, not inaccurately, some fairly disparate sets of people and organisations as 'soft left'. You can slice it up, quibble and make arguments (if I had known just how long I'd spend arguing about the nature of the soft left before I came to the UK a decade ago, I'd probably have moved to a different country). Some might go in for a biblically accurate soft left including only those who abstained in the second round of the 1981 deputy leadership race; others might talk about the afterlives of Charter 88, or about Open Labour and the strange position of the soft left under Corbynism. But, as Keir Starmer, learned this week, even without definition, the soft left have the capacity to be a powerful and dangerous force. At the end of the day, the soft left is, broadly, the median position of the Labour Party, particularly that of the membership (there is a reason why 'soft left' cabinet ministers top LabourList's member polls every time). It's the people who aren't Blairites or Corbynites, the big middle. They would like things to be fairer, like public services and public ownership, are pretty socially liberal. But they're realistic about the latent radicalism (or lack thereof) of the British voting public. As a grouping it is large and vague and, suitably, probably its most representative avatar within the parliamentary Labour Party in recent years has been the Tribune group of MPs – which is large and vague and not particularly active. Despite the soft left's centrality within the party, the drama of Labour politics often happens around, rather than through, this middle politics. I think this is in part due to the fact that, as John Denham highlighted in his excellent Renewal article on the nature of the soft left, it's the faction of the party that has never flirted with new or other parties to either the left or right. The soft left isn't flouncing anywhere in a fit of pique. They're just doing, and just want, normal Labourism. Harnessed, however, the power of the middle of the party is formidable indeed. Keir Starmer should know this, because it's basically what he did in his 2020 leadership campaign to great effect. It's also generally thought of as being the Prime Minister's own political home, as a student Trotskyist turned 2015 Andy Burnham voter. Instead of the conscious, positive appeals of that campaign, in the first year of this Labour government the middle of the party has been antagonised into organisation by the leadership. They'll put up with a lot, but when you lose them, you're screwed. This process of antagonisation has come about through policy choices that the base transparently hate, and through a draconian party management stance on Labour's left. (And even parts of the soft left: in 2023 Compass director Neal Lawson's membership was investigated by the leadership over a tweet calling for voters to back Green candidates in local elections.) It's also come from out and out carelessness when it comes to the PLP, who on the whole don't appreciate being treated as mindless lobby fodder you can occasionally threaten if you need to. There's also No 10's habit of briefing overt contempt for unserious 'garden variety liberal left[ies]' – in other words, the most of the Labour Party. As a friend observed to me recently, the general attitude has been: what if you do, actually, catch more flies with vinegar? An antagonisation-to-organisation pipeline was apparent to anyone who made their way to Compass conference at the end of May. Cross-party since 2010, Compass seems to be re-orientating itself towards internal Labour politics; Andy Burnham and Louise Haigh drew large crowds studded with Momentum types, instead of just the anti-monarchist pensioners who make up the organisation's default audience (pointing to a vindication of Alfie Steer's writing on better understanding – and overcoming – the divisions between hard and soft left). This process of soft left coalescing has now born fruit, in the form of an impressively slick rebellion-by-amendment which this week saw the government forced into a dramatic climb down over its welfare bill. The names on the amendment were not particularly surprising for anyone who is studying the party. The socialist campaign group; the pre-Corbyn soft left like Polly Billington; new intake trade unionist MPs like Antonia Bance and Laurence Turner; perennial wildcards like Stella Creasy and Rosena Allin-Khan; a significant portion of the Lisa Nandy for leader campaign (Louise Haigh, Sarah Owen, Vicky Foxcroft), though obviously not Nandy herself. There are also probably some interesting comments to be made about the gender splits going on. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe This amendment also featured quite a lot of new intake MPs who won seats the party had no formal designs on. These people are not dumb and have made the calculation that they probably won't win again and probably won't be promoted. They've realised they might as well be who they are – which is, for most people who came in through less carefully observed selection processes in less winnable seats, people of the broad soft left who do not want their legacy to be making life worse for PIP claimants. Keeping these people on side should have been easy. Do the Labour manifesto, don't say we live on an 'island of strangers'. With a broad soft left newly imbued with a sense of its own agency, party management for the leadership is not liable to get any easier. [See also: It's time for Starmer and Reeves to embrace the soft left] Related
The Guardian
18-03-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Minister defends disability benefit cuts, saying you can't ‘tax and borrow your way out of need to reform state'
Good morning. Nothing is permanent in politics. This year will be the 10th anniversary of Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour leader, in a contest where Liz Kendall, seen as the rightwing, Blairite candidate, came last, on a humiliating 4.5% of the vote. A decade on, Morgan McSweeney, who managed her campaign, is now more or less running the country as the PM's chief of staff, Kendall herself is work and pensions secretary and she is about to announce cuts to disability benefits that may horrify many of the 59.5% who voted for Corbyn in 2015 (some of whom will no longer be party members). Here is our overnight preview story, by Pippa Crerar, Heather Stewart and Jessica Elgot. Yesterday Diane Abbott, the Labour leftwinger, was saying the government should introduce a wealth tax instead and this morning Sharon Graham, the Unite general secretary, is making a similar argument in an article for the Daily Mirror. She says: That is not the sort of society that we want to live in. I can't understand why we're making these types of decisions, whether it's winter fuel cuts or looking at taking Pip away from people with disabilities. Why are we making those decisions prior to us looking at things like a wealth tax, prior to us looking at things like a profits tax? The richest 50 families in Britain are worth £500bn. That's the same as half the wealth of Britain. That's the same as 33 million people in Britain. It is not just the Corbynites who are thinking like this. Last week, in an interview with Matt Forde's Political Party podcast (here, at 57:30m in), while not quite advocating a wealth tax, Alastair Campbell did describe it as a reasonable policy 'hard choice' rather than a wild leftwing fantasy – which is probably how he would have responded to the proposition in his No 10 days. This morning Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, has been giving interviews. Echoing the line used by Downing Street yesterday, he said the changes being announced today weren't just about saving money, but were intended to fix a broken system that can leave sick people trapped on benefits when they would be better off returning to work. Asked why the government wasn't just taxing the rich more, he replied: Well, there are always going to be people who say [find the money] elsewhere. We have a progressive tax system. The top 1% pay about a third of tax. I don't think you can, in the end, tax and borrow your way out of the need to reform the state. The prime minister spoke about reform of the state in a major speech last week. We are reforming the state in more ways than one, and part of an essential reform of the state is to make sure that the welfare state that we believe in as a party is fit for the 21st century. And we cannot sit back and relax as millions, literally millions, of people go on to these benefits with little or no hope of work in the future. (McFadden's figure about the top 1% paying a third of tax is true of the share of income tax they pay, but not the figure for their share of the entire tax burden.) In interviews, McFadden also insisted that the cabinet fully supports the Kendall plans. 'Yes, I believe the cabinet is united behind taking on the issue of the growing benefits bill,' he told Times Radio. Today will be dominated by the publication of the sickness and disability benefits green paper, but we are getting a speech from Kemi Badenoch first. It is another example of how nothing is permanent in politics. Six years ago the Conservative government passed legislation making reducing carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 a legally binding aim. There was a strong, cross-party consensus in favour of the target. Today Badenoch is dismantling that, with a speech saying 'net zero by 2050 is impossible'. Here is the agenda for the day. 9.30am: Keir Starmer chairs cabinet. 10.30am: Kemi Badenoch gives a speech launching the Conservative party's policy renewal programme. 11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing. 11.30am: Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, takes questions in the Commons. Morning: David Lammy, the foreign secretary, meets Kaja Kallas, the EU's foreign affairs chief, in London. After 12.30pm: Liz Kendall, the work and pensions secretary, makes a statement to MPs about the green paper on changes to sickness and disability benefits. If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line or message me on social media. I can't read all the messages BTL, but if you put 'Andrew' in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word. If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary. I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can't promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog. Share
