Union members could decide who the next Labour leader is
Lucy Powell became deputy leader of the Labour Party in late October last year. It was the result everyone expected: the contest had not been particularly interesting and its outcome wasn’t either. Except, that is, in one regard. We were told that Powell won with 87,407 votes, that Bridget Phillipson got 73,536, and that just 16.6 per cent of the 970,624 eligible voters voted, and that the eligible voters number was a notable increase on the same number five years previously despite a likely decrease in membership. No further breakdown was released. The subject of interest, then, is not who was elected, but who was the electorate.
The Labour Party’s electorate is composed of members of the party, and affiliates. Who exactly this means and how exactly they vote has been the subject of much change and controversy over the party’s recent history; it’s set by the NEC on an election-by-election basis. Under Ed Miliband’s leadership in 2013, the party brought in a system whereby a person could pay £3 to be a “registered supporter” without being a member, enabling them to vote in the next leadership race. Said race, of course, came after Miliband’s defeat in 2015, and saw Jeremy Corbyn elected leader. When Owen Smith challenged Corbyn for the leadership less than a year later, it was under a different set of rules again: the registered supporters fee was £25; otherwise, you had to have been a member for six months to vote. This stayed in place in 2020, when Keir Starmer romped to victory over his rivals with 250,780 votes. In that contest there were 784,181 eligible voters.
Things, it is generally thought, changed in 2021. Before, trade union members who weren’t Labour members had to register themselves as affiliates. Now, everyone who pays their union’s political levy can vote. We don’t know which unions automatically sent a ballot to all of their political levy payers, Unite didn’t, for example, but we do know enough of them did for it to have had a demonstrable effect on the electorate. The political levy – a fund members can pay into which finances union political activities – became opt-in, rather than opt-out, in the 2018 Trade Union Act. This is something the Employment Rights Bill is set to undo, theoretically further inflating the number of affiliate voters in Labour.
It’s worth noting that Labour also has affiliated groups which aren’t unions – socialist societies like the Fabians, LGBT+ Labour, and others are also linked to the party. Members of these organisations also get a vote in internal elections, but given their smaller sizes (without having run the numbers, I’m confident in saying there are fewer Fabians than there are members of Unite), and greater likelihood of their members already being Labour members (some of these organisations, such as the Labour Women’s Network, actually mandate you to be so as a condition of joining), they play a far smaller role here than the trade unions do.
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The current system was first deployed in the Welsh Labour Party leadership race in early 2024, between Vaughan Gething and Jeremy Miles. After Gething’s resignation a second race was held later that year. No ballots were necessary in that one, Eluned Morgan was the only candidate. Naturally, voting in that contest was limited to the Welsh party. Powell’s election was the first time the system was used across the whole membership.
When it comes to these procedures, the party also appears to be suffering from a degree of institutional memory loss, and from a lack of transparency (even with affiliate unions and NEC members) which has been a hallmark of this Labour Party. Interested parties – even very seriously interested parties such as the above – are only allowed the analysis produced by Charlie Mansell at his Labour dashboard site to go on. It’s excellent but involves the same stabs in the dark that the rest of us are forced to make.
The precise data is somewhere locked away at party HQ, because all of this opens a question that the Labour Party is not keen to answer. How many full members does the Labour Party have? Figures have not been released since the end of 2024. We know that on New Year’s Eve of that year the party had 333,235 members, down from a high of more than half a million under Corbyn.
What the number is now – after a year of government policies like Shabana Mahmood’s jewellery grab, which seemed designed specifically to upset party members – is the subject of much interest. It will certainly be lower: exactly how low is up for debate. It could be that the process of leaving just because you’re unhappy is more administrative hassle than most discontented members are willing to go through with, and it’s a comparatively healthy number. Charlie Mansell estimates 260,000; I’ve heard guesses that start with a 1.
It is in this low-membership context that the affiliate votes take on a new relevancy. The party has not released any breakdown, to the public or, as far as anyone knows, to unions, of how many people voted from each category. That is to say: the union officials I have spoken to do not know how many of their members voted. We can safely assume Labour members voted at higher rates than affiliates (Mansell estimates 45 per cent turnout amongst members and 6 per cent amongst affiliates), but affiliates have a sheer numerical advantage. Generously assuming there are 300,000 members, these people made up around 30 per cent of the electorate in October’s contest; the remaining 70 per cent are affiliates. It seems safe to assume that could be a higher percentage still in a future leadership contest.
This context means that in a very real sense, it is trade union members, and not Labour Party members, who will decide the outcome of the next leadership contest. As one faction’s internal note on the process describes, “it is imperative to maximise political efforts to ensure not only that the big trade unions nominate the most progressive candidate possible but also that the ones that do provide a ballot to all their political levy payers, and aggressively promote their nomination to that electorate”. Delete adjective per political preference of course, but the point is true for all sections of the party. The motivated general secretary of a decently sized union could move votes in a potentially decisive way.
The last union general secretary to really wade into Labour politics was Len McCluskey, boss of Unite between 2010 and 2021, who notably rowed in behind Jeremy Corbyn during his time as Labour leader. His successor Sharon Graham has made it clear she wants little to do with Labour, although removing the administrative barrier Unite members currently face to get a ballot would be an easy step to further influence. The newly elected general secretary of Unison, Andrea Egan, has also made her distaste for the party’s current leadership clear – but has mentioned her admiration for Andy Burnham in interviews. There has been some discussion of what her ascent means with regards to Unison’s two NEC seats: less so, talk of what would happen if she mobilised affiliates to vote in a leadership race.
Having established that union members will play a very large part in electing the next leader, and with the general feeling still that a leadership election later this year is decidedly possible, the question is: How do the union members vote? I speak to one person who credits Phillipson’s unexpectedly strong showing in the deputy race to her union endorsements and the backing of ordinary union members (they reckon she’d have fared worse in a straight vote of members). Most people, however, take the view that union members who haven’t taken the time to become party members are more likely to cut against, rather than in favour of, whoever is perceived as a continuity candidate for the government. It’s also distinctly possible that this perception might lead to a change in the current system of affiliate voting before any coming leadership elections: if that’s the case, the weighting of trade union affiliate votes is likely to be why.
[Further reading: Starmer has failed to stand up for his own principles]
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