The left’s plan to retake the Labour Party
Could there be a proudly left-wing Labour prime minister? It’s a prospect that Keir Starmer’s allies are keen to big up in the hope of spooking Labour MPs thinking about a change at the top. A leadership contest, governed by the party’s rule book, would quickly create its own momentum, with nominations thrown open to all of Labour’s 405 MPs and the candidates then presented to the wider membership.
A candidate of the “hard” left – inheriting the tradition of Tony Benn, the Socialist Campaign Group and Jeremy Corbyn – would be ruled out by arithmetic. The SCG has around 30 members in this parliament. The threshold to nominate a candidate, set down in the rule book, is 20 per cent of the PLP. This now translates to 81 MPs (it was 80 until a small group of dissident MPs had the whip restored earlier this month).
The hard left’s problem was clear when nominations for the deputy leadership contest opened in September. Two left candidates, Bell Ribeiro-Addy and Paula Barker, threw their hats in and neither came close to making it onto the ballot.
They have learned from this. Some in the Campaign Group are clear-eyed about what they would have to do to have influence in a future leadership contest. One admitted to me this week that they would probably try to come to an arrangement with more moderate MPs to settle on one candidate, specifically from the Tribune group – the standard bearers of the “soft” Left.
This group, with its long and chequered history in the party, is now reenergised and reorganised following Lucy Powell’s ascension to the deputy leadership (key members of Powell’s campaign are now running the revived Tribune).
The current membership number is in the 70s. The steering committee predict it will soon pass 80 MPs and could go above 100 before long. A leading Tribune MP told the NS: “If we chose to nominate a candidate outright, we could”.
It has been adding MPs to the WhatsApp group, which has grown rapidly in correlation with the chaos of recent weeks. Government chaos has been a recruiting sergeant, I’m told.
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In the short term it will be pushing Lucy Powell’s winning message from the deputy leadership contest – the government is “not Labour enough” and should listen more.
Powell made an income tax intervention this week that was described to me as “a shot across the bows”, to show No 10 that she should be taken seriously as a new force and be included in big decisions.
She got her way at the end of the week when Rachel Reeves canned a trailed plan to raise the basic rate of income tax for the first time in 50 years – there were concerns the PLP wouldn’t swallow it. Once again she understood the mood of the PLP before the leadership did.
Powell is settling into her new role. She has taken a new office in Norman Shaw South, a large building at the back of the parliamentary estate best known for being the base of the Leader of the Opposition. The room is said to be bigger than Angela Rayner’s old one. I’ve heard Powell is having a few teething issues with Labour HQ, with claims they not been particularly forthcoming in providing her with resources to run a full deputy leader’s team.
A source close to Powell said: “Lucy has been in HQ regularly and will continue to work there with the General Secretary and HQ staff teams on her priorities as Deputy Leader. Lucy and the Party face a big task – which they’re all determined to meet – in re-engaging and rebuilding the membership base.”
If there is a leadership contest – a big if – a combination of an emboldened soft left and a more pragmatic hard left increases the possibility of an explicitly left-wing candidate for leader and PM making it onto the ballot paper. All that we know about the composition of the party membership suggests they would do well.
This comes with all the usual caveats. We are talking about the parliamentary Labour Party, an organisation that has not mastered game theory (though MPs have been learning fast since the election how to get their way). We are talking about Members of Parliament, a 0.001 per cent slither of the population historically notable for the power of ego and personal relationships to overturn rational self-interest.
And while the leadership committee of the Tribune group may be able to make recommendations about who to nominate in the event of a leadership contest, it would be foolish to assume that this will be followed to a letter. They cannot be yet viewed as a bloc vote, or a “party within a party” as previous caucuses were under other governments (think of the European Research Group, or ERG, with which Theresa May sometimes had to negotiate as though it were a coalition partner rather than a group of her own MPs). The same applies for the SCG.
And yes, the terminological distinction between “soft” and “hard” left was established by the respective groups’ irreconcilable disagreements over a deputy leadership election – the one between Tony Benn and Denis Healey in 1981.
A Tribune source said there had been no discussions on the question of cooperation yet, but simply observed that a nomination arrangement between the two groups would constitute “quite a force”.
[Further reading: Why is Jeremy Corbyn being attacked for being a “Zionist”?]
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