UK

LABOUR PARTY

A Year of Descent, Part Two

DECEMBER 29, 2024

Mike Phipps concludes his review of 2024.

July

The newly elected government’s honeymoon did not last long, either within the Party or the country. Within three weeks of the general election, seven left wing MPs were suspended from the parliamentary Party after voting against the government on the two-child benefit cap.

John McDonnell MP was joined in the rebellion by Apsana Begum MP, Richard Burgon MP, Ian Byrne MP, Imran Hussain MP, Rebecca Long-Bailey MP and Zarah Sultana MP. 42 other Labour MPs abstained.

 A few days later, Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced she was scrapping the cap on social care charges for older people and making big cuts to infrastructure projects, in an attempt to plug an apparently ‘unforeseen’ £22 bn hole in public spending inherited from the outgoing Conservative government.

But the biggest shock was the end of universal winter fuel payments to pensioners. An estimated 800,000 pensioners on low incomes would now be ineligible for the benefit. Applying for a means-tested benefit on a 50-page form already deters around 30% of pensioners eligible for pension credit from accessing it.

When the measure was forced through Parliament, half a dozen Labour MPs bravely voted against and there were dozens of abstentions. In the autumn, Labour Party Conference would also voice its opposition – all this against a backdrop of an average increase in energy bills by almost £150 after Ofgem raised the price cap by 10%.

August

The month of August saw far right riots sweep the country, the blowback from the long-standing demonisation of migrants by the previous Tory government – and a Labour Opposition that complained it was not being tough enough in dealing with ‘the problem’.

The mobilisation of thousands on the streets against the threat of fascism was not matched by any such response from the political elite. A few months later, seemingly oblivious to the use of reckless rhetoric, Keir Starmer  accused the previous government of running an “open borders” approach to immigration and announced a new crackdown.

September

The Enquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire disaster was finally published. Among the damning findings: the Government was warned 25 years before the disaster struck about the dangers of cladding, which fire tests had proved to be dangerous, but had ignored the risks; the privatisation of the Building Research Establishment, set up 100 years ago to help deliver quality standards for the construction industry,  became exposed to “unscrupulous product manufacturers.”; dangers were deliberately concealed by those who made and sold the cladding; Kensington Council showed “indifference”, with Grenfell’s refit poorly managed by contractors and the Council’s Tenant Management Organisation, leading to a breakdown in trust with residents, and showed a “persistent indifference” to fire safety.

“Grenfell is simply explained: firms chased profits, ministers sat on their hands, innocents paid with their lives,” wrote Peter Apps in the Guardian.

Meanwhile, political sleaze, one of the key factors that damaged the Conservatives, began to hit the new government. After days of criticism, Keir Starmer was forced to announce that he and senior colleagues would stop taking free gifts from wealthy donors.

Less noticed but more serious, was the revelation that Labour had received a £4 million donation from a Cayman Islands-registered hedge fund with shares worth hundreds of millions of pounds in fossil fuels, private health firms, arms manufacturers and asset managers.

October

One hundred days into his premiership, Keir Starmer’s approval ratings were in freefall, down 45 points since the general election, with only 18% of people surveyed approving of his government.

The removal of the independent-minded Sue Gray from the corridors of power by Keir Starmer’s factional staffers was the latest ‘bad look’ for a government trying desperately to control the narrative. John McDonnell MP tweeted: “We’re facing the potential of a war setting the Middle East alight, already thousands are being killed in Lebanon, and what is the focus of the boys around Keir Starmer’s office, carving up Sue Gray and grabbing her job and salary. Words fail me.”

More ‘tough decisions’ – or unnecessary unpopular choices – lay ahead. The government announced that the bus fare cap in England would rise from £2 to £3 at the end of 2024. Labour’s former Director of Policy Andrew Fisher slammed the decision as “Bad for people’s living standards. Bad for local businesses. Bad for the environment. And deeply unpopular too.” 

This was followed by Labour’s supposedly ground-breaking budget. Many at the time saw this as a missed opportunity and the subsequent flat-lining of the economy and absence of growth seemed to bear out this analysis.

November

The international picture too gave scant grounds for optimism in 2024. Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinians was extended into Lebanon and Syria. The late withdrawal of an incoherent President Biden from the US presidential election and the failure of Kamala Harris to offer anything of substance to working class voters permitted the re-election of the extreme right Donald Trump.

As one analyst noted, “Kamala Harris didn’t have to start her campaign by distancing herself from her past support for Medicare for All. She didn’t have to answer the most obvious question of all time (how she would be different from the unpopular incumbent president) by saying that nothing came to mind. She didn’t have to end it by spending weeks bragging about being supported by a universally despised war criminal. [Dick Cheney]. And she didn’t have to hand a staggering victory to Donald Trump.”

The Russian onslaught against Ukraine ground on, with a change at the White House suggesting that the Ukrainians may be placed under increased pressure to make unacceptable concessions to its imperialist neighbour.

Among the slim rays of hope was the overthrow of the murderous Assad regime in Syria. However, the long absence of democratic pluralism in that country together with the agendas of Western powers, not least Turkey, must make one fearful for the future – particularly for the Kurds.

Back in the UK, one of the few half-radical members of the Cabinet, Transport Secretary Louise Haigh, was removed by Starmer’s factional enforcers on the spurious grounds of failing to reveal a minor conviction for fraud – accidentally reporting a mobile phone as stolen after she was  mugged, when it wasn’t – which Starmer knew about when he appointed her to the Shadow Cabinet. Many saw the sacking as a manoeuvre to replace her with someone who would be far more cautious on rail renationalisation.

December

The year ended with another spectacular but unnecessary own goal by the government. Six years after Labour MPs gave a standing ovation to a Waspi women protest in Parliament, Secretary of State Liz Kendall decided to deny compensation to up to 3.8 million women affected by changes in the women’s state pension age. The decision provoked a furious reaction. especially from Labour MPs.

Two days later, the water regulator Ofwat announced it was permitting huge hikes in water bills. Later it emerged that water companies had deliberately diverted funds earmarked for cleaning up environmental damage they had caused towards executive bonuses and shareholders’ dividends.

Conclusion

Entering office, Labour faced a threefold crisis in health, the climate emergency and  the cost of living. It is the latter which concerns most voters and on which the government is failing most miserably.

Small wonder that Labour is plummeting in the polls. Since July, Labour has lost a score of council by-election seats – and in recent weeks, the results have got shockingly worse. “No party has won such a huge parliamentary victory and seen their fortunes reverse as quickly,” noted one observer.

Top insider Simon Fletcher, who worked alongside Ed Miliband, Jermey Corbyn and Keir Starmer, noted on December  20th: “Last night in Dudley, Labour’s vote was down a massive 34.7 per cent in Brockmoor and Pensnett, pushing the party into third place behind a surging Reform – on 30.1 per cent – and the Tories who took the seat from Labour, up seven per cent to 35.4 per cent. And in Swale, Labour was down by over thirty points, smashed into third place behind Reform who took the seat from Labour with 33.9 per cent of the vote.”

Just six months after Labour won a landslide, he concluded, “there is now speculation that Labour’s poor performance may mean that Keir Starmer will not survive as Labour leader and prime minister into the next election.”

ITV pundit Robert Peston agreed: “Senior Labour figures and cabinet members are ‘talking openly’ about the prospect of Starmer not leading them into the next election.”

But the government’s woes are not fundamentally a problem with Keir Starmer’s personality. Owen Jones is completely right when he says that the government’s poor performance is not a personal failing of the Prime Minister so much as the collective bankruptcy of the narrow faction on which Keir Starmer has chosen to base himself.

If voters are dissatisfied with Labour, it’s because it has failed utterly to live up to its promise of change. Its failings on the two-child benefit limit, winter fuel payments and Waspi women are compounded by the absence of any strategy to help the 16m people living in poverty, to tackle corporate profiteering – since the pandemic, electricity and gas supply companies have increased their profit margins by 363% – or to challenge the corporate media discourse that demonises migrants, the disabled and the jobless and blames them for the country’s problems.

“In principle, Labour’s drift to the right can be checked by debate,” says Lord Prem Sikka, “but the leadership is authoritarian and has closed spaces for discussion.” With seven left wing MPs still without the whip, and internal Party bodies firmly under the domination of the leadership, it looks increasingly likely that the Party is losing the opportunity to rescue itself from the disaster it is facing.

Yet there is hope. As we have previously noted, “We can take heart from the fact that the conditions which produced the huge 2017 vote for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour have not gone away – they have intensified. Radical ideas remain popular, precisely because of the magnitude of the crises.” Our task remains building the alliances that can promote and drive forward these ideas across the movement.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/number10gov/54020189017/ Creator: Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing St | Credit: Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing St Copyright: Crown copyright. Licensed under the Open Government Licence Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Deed