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Starmer’s centrist Labour Party may suffer after general election victory [1]

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Date: 2023-07

Despite the underwhelming Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election result, there appears a near consensus that the Labour Party under Keir Starmer is headed for government in next year’s general election, possibly in a hung parliament but more likely with an overall majority.

At the same time, Labour is a troubled party. Its leadership, determined to move the party towards the centre ground, has scrapped its more leftist policies and ousted members, often on contested grounds. Many tens of thousands of others have simply left in disgust.

Taken together, this has resulted in a loss of 168,000 members since 2017, when the membership was at its peak (564,000), having risen rapidly after Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader in September 2015. Today, membership stands at around 395,000. While this has meant a substantial drop in revenue, there has been increased support from some wealthy donors and companies, with £6m raised just last year.

There are widespread, if largely anecdotal, suggestions that many of the former Labour Party members have not joined other parties but are active in non-party community-orientated politics. There are also signs of deep frustration with national party politics, at least across England, partly as a result of Labour’s shift rightwards.

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Of the many indications of these trends, two recent examples stand out. In the north-east, the popular if decidedly leftist politician Jamie Driscoll is the mayor of a local district, North of Tyne, but has not made the shortlist for selection as Labour candidate for a planned larger region, the North-East Mayoral Combined Authority. This has caused widespread anger among party members in the region.

Driscoll has now resigned from Labour and is putting himself forward for election as an independent. Support has been impressive. As he put it earlier this week: “It’ll be tough going, against national parties with slick press offices. But when we launched a crowdfunder for the campaign yesterday, I said if we could raise £25,000 by the end of August, I would run. We’ve raised £75,000 in small donations in just one day. People believe in this campaign.”

The second example was reported in this column two weeks ago, when Corbyn got a huge welcome from a large audience at the Bradford Literature Festival, including a standing ovation. This response – which he gets wherever he goes, though this is rarely reported on – is reminiscent of the huge crowds that gathered to hear him speak during the 2017 election campaign, when Labour unexpectedly achieved lift-off. The wide polling gap at the start of that campaign narrowed sufficiently to deprive Theresa May of her expected landslide victory, instead delivering a hung parliament.

We are in the odd position of a likely Labour victory in next year’s general election, but for a party that simply does not have the enthusiastic support it enjoyed even a few years previously.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/centrist-labour-party-keir-starmer-left-jamie-driscoll-jeremy-corbyn-general-election/

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