The Labour party should be experiencing its best time in recent politics with victory very much expected at the next election. Yet it’s not all plain sailing at Labour HQ. Not only does the party still lack a convincing agenda, there is disquiet about the nature of the Starmer leadership, in terms of what it believes in, how it does politics inside the party and how it manages dissent.
Discontent has been bubbling away for a while, with the left accusing the leadership of a plan to oust Corbynistas to create a new loyal Labour party. But now the internal fallout has burst into the open with the potential expulsion of Neal Lawson, head of the centre-left Compass pressure group for the past two decades and party member for 44 years. Lawson has been threatened with expulsion for daring to support greater co-operation with the Lib Dems and the Greens.
Discontent has been bubbling away for a while, with the left accusing the leadership of a plan to oust Corbynistas to create a new loyal Labour party.
From its limited policy agenda, the lack of intellectual engagement to shift the political debate, the narrow group of people it talks to and the veil of defensiveness around the leadership, there is a growing anxiety about the party’s leadership. Combine all this with the unforgiving attitude of party discipline to anyone who deviates from the official Starmer orthodoxy and many Labour activists are getting worried.
Fine, the above behaviour could lead to electoral success — but there is no guarantee the success could continue in office if things don’t change. There are lessons to be learned from the past. Some internal critics are eulogising the New Labour era as one of tolerance within the party, but the more accurate story of the Blair period in government was of the rise of its ‘Stabian (Fabian and Stalinist) tendencies’ which equipped it in opposition to be a vote-winning machine, while proving inadequate in office.
And there is a more recent example closer to home that warns of the consequences of poor leadership: the modern-day SNP. When the SNP was on the way up in the Salmond years of 2004 to 2014, people paid less attention to how the party was run. The subsequent Sturgeon era of 2014 to 2023 saw the SNP keep on winning — but as the years passed, problems began to crop up more visibly than before.
After Sturgeon took power, the collective team that had surrounded Salmond reportedly shrunk to a ‘tiny circle’. It was in essence an echo chamber, which appeared to act to prevent dissent — or open discussion. And so the SNP increasingly began to resemble a one-woman band. Sturgeon ran the entire show at Holyrood while her husband Peter Murrell ran the party as chief executive. This was most evident during the Covid pandemic where ‘Sturgeon began to lose it under Covid,’ as one SNP insider told me, ‘and believe she was the nurse for the entire nation.’ Others think warning signs appeared earlier, with her no-contest ‘coronation’ and after thousands of devotees flocked to Glasgow’s OVO Hydro to celebrate her as leader in November 2014.
But more to the point: why and how did the SNP get away with running both its party and government like this for so long? What seemed like never-ending success allowed the leadership to believe in its own genius, to think it had the right to accrue power to itself. The SNP has faced no serious electoral challenge from the Tories or Labour — until now. And the nationalists’ current malaise is a warning to Labour about what happens when the ‘leader knows best’ approach dominates. It corrodes trust, spreads disillusion and demeans language and promises.
‘Labour are of course following into the same lazy trap as the SNP,’ a former Scottish Labour insider remarked. ‘One person, one group, has all the answers and challenge is not only not welcomed, it is punished.’
What’s more, this ex-staffer reckons that the Labour party lacks the political skills of a strong leader like Salmond or Sturgeon to ‘cover up’ what they see as an ‘antiquated system of management’. The silver lining? ‘The failures of [Starmer’s] approach will appear quite quickly as Labour starts to govern.’
At present, there is no positive Labour offer to the country, no compelling Labour story and no compact between the leadership, party members and wider Labour movement. Instead, a brutal internal regime is demanding total and unquestioning loyalty, setting up a climate of fear and intolerance that will not be sustainable in office.
Starmer has been focusing obsessionally on winning in 2024 — but more than this, Labour needs to have a way of doing politics which translates into government. The Scottish National party may be in office but it is drifting without any clear independence strategy, and it is facing a kicking at the next general election. If the Labour party wants to see where the ‘leader can do no wrong’ politics can lead you, it just has to look at the SNP after Sturgeon.
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