Assessing a dramatic week in Westminster which has seen the position of the Prime Minister put under huge pressure, Jonathan Rutherford — co-leader of Policy Exchange’s Future of the Left programme — shared his thoughts on what to expect next.
To repeat what the entire political commentariat has stated: the Labour Party is falling apart. The deep political divisions within it disguised by being in government risk being unleashed.
There are two elements to this turmoil that require unpicking if one is to begin to understand what is going on with the party.
The first is the drama in Westminster. This is absorbing all Labour MPs and political journalists. Keir Starmer has become a King Lear figure, digging himself in and refusing to move, despite losing the support of half of the Parliamentary Labour Party, a portion of the Cabinet, 11 trade unions, and a significant part of the party membership. With the wider electorate there is little tolerance for a repeat of the Tory fiascos. Neither party looks a reliable proposition .
So we have reached a stalemate: the Prime Minister faced by this united front, including further characters such as Wes Streeting, who resigned from Cabinet but failed to pre-empt a leadership challenge, and Josh Simons, who has triggered a by-election to give Andy Burnham the chance to return to Parliament .
The by-election is far from a guaranteed win. Reform came second in 2024, just over 5,000 votes behind, but have clearly evolved as a political machine since then. The Greens, too, have grown and, though the constituency is not their traditional battleground, could snatch fatal votes from Labour.
Andy Burnham has undoubtedly reinvented himself well as Mayor of Manchester and is one of the most popular politicians in the country. Indeed, allies point to his huge personal popularity in the area. If Burnham shows himself capable of seeing off a strong Reform challenge, he will surely be crowned the new leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister.
However, he would arrive in Number 10 without any programme of government yet with all of the same problems currently faced by Starmer. It is difficult to see how Burnham—or other candidates—will be able to make tough decisions that the government has been avoiding, while also convincing the parliamentary party of these trade-offs.
The second element of Labour’s chaos is what we are all missing—the forces determining the script of Westminster’s drama. This is the history that has brought Labour to this point and will continue to disrupt the party until we get a political force capable of establishing a new political settlement.
In The Forward March of Labour Halted? in 1978, Eric Hobsbawm issued a warning of the changing nature of the working class. They were becoming more affluent; there was more social mobility; and they had an increasing desire for better jobs, consumer goods, and homes. This would lead to less loyalty to the Labour Party. But no notice was taken by Labour.
On the other hand, Thatcher recognised this trend, and her sale of council houses won over a substantial portion of the working class. From then, the coalition which had supported and underpinned the Labour Party for close to a century started to come apart. Globalisation, the defeat of miners, the breaking apart of organised labour, and the end of British industry and manufacturing, have led Labour to resemble increasingly become the party of the professional managerial class which grew in size and influence in the sixties. New Labour clearly demonstrated this, not least in its senior politicians who were lawyers, journalists, and similar.
From the ‘90s to Starmer, the party has clearly become one of the professional classes. It is more successful in areas of progressive affluence, and its heartlands now lie in big cities, especially London where a large part of the membership is. Labour has lost its support in the Midlands, North, and old industrial regions, which are now increasingly supportive of Reform. The recent local elections throw into doubt Labour’s capacity to be a national political force, not least because of the rise of English, Welsh, and Scottish nationalisms.
Labour now has nothing to hold it together and determine core values. Organised labour used to have a disciplinary function within the party, winning key battles against the more middle-class membership – but no more than Labour’s class alliance is now dominated by the more radical and socially liberal progressive middle classes.
Labour now confronts a world it did not expect to find when it came to power with outdated politics that belong to the old political settlement. It thus cannot resolve the deep structural problems facing the country. What is more, its changing class nature means it has adopted a politics of altruism doing for the less fortunate, and it has no appetite for taking difficult decisions around welfare reform, immigration control, defence spending, and the inconvenient fact of Britain’s debt.
Like the Conservatives, it struggles to rise to the challenge of a post-imperial, post-Brexit country with a failing state and an economy that is riven by rent-seeking. Like the Conservatives, Labour is being torn apart by historical forces it does not appear to understand.
MPs concentrating on the first dramatic element of turmoil should turn their attention to these historical forces and resolve how to confront the structural crises inflicting the country. They might pay heed to what is now an over-quoted phrase by the communist theorist Antonio Gramsci , ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’ . The vital question facing Labour is: what are these forces defending a failed and obsolete status quo? The party might begin with its own part in this reaction and proceed from there.
Jonathan Rutherford is a political adviser, writer and co-leader of the Future of the Left programme at Policy Exchange.
Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante on Unsplash