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Even before Labour took power, since the first whispers that Keir Starmer wasn’t the Corbyn-in-a-tie candidate his leadership bid had promised, the same argument has been going on among Labour members. Should Starmer be trying harder to include the left flank of the movement? Perhaps he should, at the very least, stop trying to expel them.
The same question informs orientation towards the general voter: should apparatchiks worry less about the threat from Reform and more about the threat from the Greens? What the hell was going on with that “island of strangers” speech? Was Shabana Mahmood brought in on a promise of attacking migrants from every direction, or are at least some of her manoeuvres a surprise? Morgan McSweeney’s animus towards the left had an almost mythic quality, the man trying to keep the cave cosy by putting out the fire; how did he come to be so indispensable that it was only after the downfall of his ally Peter Mandelson that anyone wondered what his politics actually were?
All of these questions are ultimately asking the same thing: should Starmer try to save his skin by feinting left or right? As for Labour, why does it look so aimless, how can it convey its mission rather than merely a list of policies, how can it stop backtracking and how did it achieve this deep, cross-spectrum unpopularity? It always arrives at the same dilemma – do you care about values (left) or do you care about victory (right)? Whenever Reform is riding high, the victory camp get more splenetic: are you seriously saying you won’t just knuckle down, support this party, do whatever it takes to defeat the hard right? It’s like being told off by your mum in a supermarket. Have your tantrum, but not here, not now.
This month there’s been a fascinating intervention from not-for-profit research group Persuasion UK, but then I would say that, because it supports my view: Labour should worry far more about leftwing defectors than rightwing ones, because (top lines) there are more of them, they mind more about racist cosplay than the right minds about nationalising utilities, and the rightwing switchers have already left. This work can add psephological novelty to the age-old question, but the whole debate belongs to a time that’s passed.
The Labour party needs to accept that it’s no longer the only game in town. Reform has materially changed politics, but not in the way the government thinks. It hasn’t lifted the lid on a nation that’s been waiting for a bidding war centred on xenophobic malice. Instead, Nigel Farage has energised voters – his own, and the ones who loathe his complacent, by-numbers service of capital interests, his social scapegoating. They will stop at nothing to defeat his candidates and they’ll be flexible. We’ve seen this in two byelections now, Caerphilly and Gorton and Denton, and the beneficiary was different in each (Plaid Cymru in one case, the Greens in the other). It’s not just turnout that’s been galvanised, it’s resolve; nobody goes to the barricades against Matt Goodwin just to vote for someone offering a more grownup answer to his “legitimate concerns”. If Labour even wants to be a part of the opposition to the hard right, it has to actually oppose it; but just as important, it has to stop wasting energy trying to cast itself as its only righteous foe.
It has already lost more than it acknowledges. Some MPs talk about the “Muslim vote” having lost faith in the government since the genocide in Gaza, but do so as a dog-whistle way to somehow delegitimise Muslim voters. Labour needs to try that conversation again, without the “well, Muslims would say that, wouldn’t they?” undertone. Many people, Muslim and not, will never vote Labour again as a result of its logically and morally incomprehensible position that Palestinian statehood should be recognised and yet that protesting against the murder of its citizens is a terrorist offence. You can’t hector those voters back, you can’t vanish them with snide remarks. All you can do is make common cause with the parties they’ve gone to.
Labour politicians paint the Greens as hapless chancers, in the right place at the right time. It works on the sofa of a current affairs show. It does not satisfy or subdue the voters who fundamentally agree with the values of equality, radicalism and love for the planet that the Greens espouse and that most Labour MPs would themselves claim to agree with. Labour still talks about the Liberal Democrats as permanently tainted by their time in the coalition government even while Labour itself toys with language and policies inseparable from David Cameron’s.
Labour is going to need qualities that aren’t in the party’s DNA – humility, agility, self-reflection, compromise. It needs to reopen the conversation that it periodically pretends to have, about electoral reform and proportional representation, and actually mean it. Its base is looking elsewhere; it has to stop treating that as infidelity and using it as a loophole to kick out ideological miscreants and start asking what those other parties are offering that it isn’t.
Starmer himself seems trapped and demoralised, which is understandable – the most unpopular prime minister ever, the man whose ratings have no floor. Yet there is an enormous, intricate, subtle, vertiginous challenge here: to turn a party that can only understand alliance as a blood wedding – any colour so long as it’s red – into one that can sing a rainbow. A pragmatist who isn’t blinded by passion, isn’t troubled by loyal sentiment to an idea or a clique or bored by detail just might meet this moment. Starmer fears nothing more than a bad headline. Once he accepts that the headlines are always going to be bad, he might turn out to be fearless.
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Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
