Factionalism in the Labour party will never die. From John Golding to Luke Akehurst, Vladimir Derer to Jon Lansman, factions and faction fighting will always animate the internal life of the party. These fights are not, however, always close to the surface. In the almost nine years between Corbyn becoming leader and Starmer becoming prime minister, the forever war raged ferociously; most things that happened could be understood as the tectonic motion of factions butting against one another.
We are now in a more stable era. Labour is in government with a big majority; the leadership has a very healthy majority on the ruling national executive committee. There are 404 Labour MPs, more than 200 of them newly elected. Thanks to an intensive (and unmistakeably factional) selection process headed up by Matt Faulding, one-time deputy director of Blairite thinktank Progress, the new parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) is very much signed up to the leadership’s agenda. The left-wing MPs’ caucus, the Socialist Campaign Group (SCG), has never been particularly effective under Starmer, and with key members now out in the cold sans Labour whip following the vote on the two-child benefit cap, the group is a rump, shedding members and toxic to any ministerial ambitions new MPs might have.
In short, the right of the party is about as ascendent as it is possible to be. As for the new MPs, beyond the basics—they were selected to stand by Starmer’s allies, so there are few outspoken left-wingers in the group—it’s quite hard to parse what they actually think. It is not the case, as more cynical observers would have you believe, that their politics start and end with the 2024 Labour manifesto and whatever’s in today’s PLP briefing (although that may be true for some); there are just plenty of reasons for them to act as if this were the case.
These people are ambitious; they did, after all, become MPs. They want to move up the ladder, become PPSes, ministers, secretaries of state; they want their colleagues to like them and the leadership to smile on them and everyone to think they are team players. They are, accordingly, unlikely to be doing anything that could be construed as rocking the boat—the exception of course being the reported plans for a campaign group of the right, which would, according to the Times’s Patrick Maguire, “delight strategists in No 10”.
For those who don’t want to join a campaign group of the right—the large number of MPs whose politics are somewhere in the middle of the party and probably wouldn’t do media to defend the two-child vote—the opportunities for political expression are limited. In this situation, groups that organise within Labour on particular topics—not factional, but sectoral—find themselves with a renewed relevance in this parliament.
Labour, in parliament and in the membership, is not short on such organisations. There’s the Co-operative party, a party-within-a-party whose focus is common ownership, and the gradualist Fabian Society; women’s groups, from the Labour Women’s Network to the Women’s PLP; the trade union group, which claims to be, after the PLP itself, the largest grouping of MPs in the commons; environmental groups, like the Socialist Environment and Resources Association, more commonly known as SERA, or the newer but increasingly active Labour Climate and Environment Forum. For a long time, the spotlight has been on more overtly partisan groups as they battle it out for NEC seats, and these organisations have carried on their business fairly quietly. By and large, these groups have deep roots in the party; through endorsements and networks (and in the case of the unions, significant financial backing) they have power bases of their own, of varying hefts.
With a glut of new and energetic MPs who want to play it safe but still work for causes they care about, Labour’s sectional interest groups have a rare opportunity to be actual sources of discourse and policy initiative within the party, rather than talking shops or silos for benign but toothless internal campaigns. If the new Labour Growth Group is fairly obviously something the leadership is happy about, explicitly tied as it is to manifesto pledges on housebuilding and stuffed with bright young things, these pre-existing groups offer the opportunity to press more generally at the edges of Labour’s commitments—to ask for more, whether that’s on the environment, workers’ rights, or community ownership—without being seen to manoeuvre against the leadership. It remains to be seen what the party’s many internal groupings will make of this unique opportunity, and how willing they will be to set themselves up in any kind of opposition, even that of the critical friend, to their own government. After all, shy bairns get nowt, but the general rule of Starmerite party management is that disloyal bairns get nowter still.
