UK 

A year of descent

HubMP2012

DECEMBER 29, 2024

Labour won the July general election by a landslide, so what was there not to like about 2024? Virtually everything, argues Mike Phipps, in his review of the year. Part One of two.

If the earlier years of Keir Starmer’s leadership had been a time when grassroots Party members felt a growing disenchantment with the direction of Labour, 2024 was the year when that disillusionment became much more widely shared among the general population – with far more dangerous consequences.

January

The year began with a warning from former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell MP. In an article headlined “Starmer must say what he’ll do in power – if he leaves a vacuum, the far right will fill it,” John wrote: “If Labour fails to set out early on a path of radical change to secure the all-round wellbeing and security of our people, then inevitably disillusionment will set in. The risk then is the potential for a significant shift in our politics to the right.”

Today that looks prescient. But the leadership continued its cautious approach – supplemented by further unwelcome moves to the right. In January, the Party ditched its commitment to spend £28bn a year on green investment, dropped its plan to reinstate the cap on bankers’ bonuses and committed to cap corporation tax at 25% for the duration of the next Parliament. Yet that same month, the polling organisation You Gov found that 45% of respondents felt Labour was unclear about what it stood for, with only 28% clear.

February

February brought the fiasco of the Rochdale by-election. For all its talk of tightening selection rules to ensure high-quality candidates, the Labour leadership’s interference in these processes was revealed to be a factional tool to enforce loyalty. Had the Party carried out basic due diligence, it is unlikely that it would have ended up with a candidate who had to be publicly disowned mid-campaign for having said that Israel had deliberately let the October 7th 2023 attacks by Hamas proceed as a pretext to invade Gaza. 

As Labour Hub said at the time, “There is a double standard in operation. Left wingers in the Party have been far more harshly treated for lesser offences. Edmonton MP Kate Osamor remains suspended despite having apologised for linking the Israeli slaughter in Gaza to genocide on Holocaust Memorial Day. Andy MacDonald, MP for Middlesborough, remains suspended after expressing his wish that ‘Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty’.”

Labour’s unprincipled stance on Israeli war crimes, which had already precipitated many high-profile resignations the previous year, continued to haunt the Party. After the Scottish Labour Conference voted unanimously for a ceasefire in Gaza, the leadership finally declared itself to be in favour of one – with conditions. In retrospect, many saw it as a squalid parliamentary manoeuvre to prevent a Scottish National Party motion in favour of a no-strings ceasefire from being debated in the House of Commons. SNP and Tory MPs walked out amid accusations that the Speaker had been improperly leaned on by the Starmer apparatus.

March

The Workers Party’s self-promoting George Galloway comfortably won the Rochdale by-election. Meanwhile pressure began to mount on Labour’s leadership to reinstate Diane Abbott, suspended since the previous year on account of a poorly worder letter she had written to a local paper and later apologised for. The factionalism of the Starmer team meant the issue would drag on right into the summer general election campaign, when overwhelming public support forced Keir Starmer to concede that she would be free to run again as the Labour candidate in Hackney and Stoke Newington.

April

April brought another score of Labour councillor resignations in the northwest, principally over Gaza, and the news that 25,000 members had left the Party in the last two months. Meanwhile, two deselected MPs and four national trade union General Secretaries raised concerns that Labour’s flawed programme for internal online elections, Anonyvoter, may have been used to rig selection contests against the left.

May

May’s local election results were good news for Labour and put the Party on course to win the next general election. An average 9% swing to the Party across the country meant the Tories lost nearly 500 seats.

But beneath the headlines, a more nuanced picture emerged, partially prefiguring what the summer general election would produce. There was an anti-Labour incumbency vote in some areas which saw gains for Greens and Independents.

The elections manifested a significant ‘Gaza effect’ in many areas, which saw Labour lose seats. It was notable that in London, Mayor Sadiq Khan bucked this trend, having taken a much clearer position of opposition to Israel’s bombardment of the Palestinians from the outset.

On May 22nd Prime Minister Sunak called a general election.

June

The first weeks of Labour’s campaign were dominated by the internal damage the Starmer leadership had inflicted on the Party – its refusal to allow Jeremy Corbyn to be Islington North’s Labour candidate and the failed attempt to stop Diane Abbott in Hackney. In even more blatant factional moves, the apparatus blocked – mid-campaign – the sitting Brighton MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Faiza Shaheen, the popular candidate in Chingford, who stood a very good chance of unseating Tory grandee Iain Duncan Smith. He eventually retained his seat courtesy of these shameful manoeuvres.

July

Labour won the general election by a landslide of seats, but with only 35% of the vote on a 60% turnout. The Tories’ collapse was due largely to their incompetence and dishonesty, factors which made Labour’s job much easier. The result was emphatically not an endorsement of Starmerism. In fact, the Party won with fewer votes (9.6 million) than were achieved under Jeremy Corbyn in both 2017 (12.8 million) and 2019 (10.0 million).

Pollster John Curtice went so far as to say: “Actually, but for the rise of the Labour Party in Scotland… we would be reporting that basically Labour’s vote has not changed from what it was in 2019.” 

Low turnout and fragmentation underlined public distrust with the entire political class. That helped Reform UK gain seats, who also benefited from the willingness of other parties to make concession to their repugnant ideas. But Labour’s shift to the right also opened up space to the Party’s left with Jeremy Corbyn and four other Independent MPs elected, alongside four Greens. Additionally, Independents Andrew Feinstein was runner-up in Holborn and St Pancras to Keir Starmer, who was reduced to a minority of the overall vote; and Leanne Mohamad  came within 500 votes of unseating Wes Streeting in Ilford North.

Former top advisor under Ed Miliband, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer, Simon Fletcher hinted at some of the problems Labour would face in government when he wrote: “Rarely has the disparity between the real situation and the programme of the leadership of the Labour party been more apparent.”

The next six months would underline that with a vengeance.

To be continued…

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.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=547638&picture=numbers-2024-new-year-in-3d freddy dendoktoor has released this “Numbers, 2024, New Year, In 3D” image under Public Domain license.  CC0 1.0 Universal CC0 1.0 Deed